Business coach for coaches: how to check one first

A business coach for coaches helps you with the business side of coaching: finding clients, pricing, your offer and how you talk about it. A good one asks questions that make you see your business differently, and has sold something like what you sell. Before you pay anyone, check they've done it themselves, that they ask more than they tell, and that they can show you evidence you could check.

You'll also see them called a coach for coaches, a business mentor or a business strategist (that's the name they give themselves). The title tells you very little. What they actually do with you on a call tells you nearly everything, so that's what I'm going to go through.

What does a business coach for coaches actually do?

They help with the part of the job nobody trained you for. You trained to coach people. Nobody trained you to find them, price the work, write a homepage or have a sales conversation without feeling a bit grubby.

So a business coach for coaches would usually work with you on things like:

• who you're for, and how you say it in one line
• what you sell, how long it runs and what it costs
• where your clients are going to come from, week to week
• how you talk to somebody who might buy

That's the theory anyway. In practice it depends hugely on who you pick, because there's no agreed standard for what one should do, and anybody can call themselves one.

Is it coaching or teaching?

This is the bit I feel strongly about, so bear with me.

For me a coach is somebody who listens to their client, understands them, and asks a series of questions to help them discover things for themselves. A teacher presents information and helps the person understand it. Both are useful, and teaching is a wonderful skill.

But the coaching world mixes them up all the time. A lot of people calling themselves business coaches are really business teachers. They've got a course, a framework, a set of slides and a weekly group call where they go through module four. In my opinion it would be more honest if they called it what it is, and you'd know what you were paying for.

And there's another problem beyond that. Even with the title business teacher, a good chunk of them aren't in a position to teach, because they haven't done it. I've been approached by people who want to be business coaches. I ask them what businesses they've owned and what success they've had, and the answer is they haven't owned any and haven't had any success yet, but they'd like to be a business coach.

Now if we're talking pure coaching, where the coach doesn't need experience in your field because their questions do the work, then sure, that's plausible. But that's not usually what's being sold. What's being sold is "I'll show you how to get clients", and you can't really show somebody a road you've never walked down yourself.

Why you're looking in the first place

You've probably already tried the free stuff. You've watched the videos, posted more, changed your website, maybe bought a course or two. And you're still checking the calendar on a Monday morning hoping something's been booked.

That's not because you're bad at this. Coaches get told a lot of things about getting clients, and plenty of it is written to grab your attention with very little evidence behind it. When we scored 10,954 live coaching websites out of 10, the average came back at 3.7, and only 13 scored strong. That's a whole market of capable people being given the same advice and getting the same result. You can see where the marks go on the average coaching website if you want the detail.

So it's not your fault. But you're the one who has to pick who helps you next, and that's where people lose money.

How do you check a business coach before you pay?

Three checks, and none of them need any special knowledge.

1. Have they sold what you sell?

Not "have they got clients". Have they sold something like your thing, to people like your buyers, at something like your price?

Selling a £3,000 coaching programme to a stranger is a different skill from selling a £27 ebook to an email list, and different again from being handed work by an old employer. So ask them straight. What have you sold, who to, and how did those people find you? A good one will tell you happily. Somebody who goes vague or changes the subject has told you something too.

2. Will they ask the right questions?

Book a call and pay attention to the questions, not the pitch.

I can't stand scripted coaches asking "what's your biggest challenge?" or "what keeps you up at 3am?". When I hear that, I make an exit. Those questions are on every sales training sheet going, and they tell you the person is following a process rather than thinking about you.

A good business coach asks questions that make you stop. You should come off the call thinking "I didn't think of that question". When I sold high-value work, the thing that lost me sales was giving advice in the call. The questions should feel like advice without being advice. If the person spends the call telling you what you're doing wrong and how their programme fixes it, that's a pitch, and you can treat it like one.

3. Can they show you evidence?

Evidence means something you could check that isn't just their opinion of themselves. Named clients you could look up, homepages before and after, a result with a number and a timescale, or a past client you can actually talk to.

Be wary of screenshots of income with no context, and testimonials that say "life-changing" without saying what changed. About two thirds of coaching websites show no proof at all, so you're not asking for anything unusual. You're asking them to do the very thing they'll probably be telling you to do.

What it looks like done well (a made-up example)

Rachel is made up. She's a career coach who's been going for 18 months. She gets five or six paying clients a year, nearly all from old colleagues, and she wants more than that.

She talks to two business coaches.

The first one opens with "so what's your biggest challenge right now?", then spends 40 minutes on a five-step client attraction method and offers a 12-week group programme with a bonus module. When Rachel asks what businesses they've run, it turns out the only one is this one, which teaches coaches how to get clients.

The second one asks where her clients came from and what the old colleagues said when they got in touch. Then they ask, "if one of them had found you on Google instead, what would they have typed?" Rachel doesn't know. That question alone is worth the call. They mention her homepage would struggle with the five-second test that 86% of coaching websites fail, and leave it there rather than selling her a fix. They tell her they ran a coaching practice for eight years before doing this, show her two clients' homepages before and after, and offer to put her in touch with one of them. Their price is on their website.

Rachel picks the second one, and she can tell you exactly why. That's what you're after. Not a gut feeling after a slick call, but reasons you could write down.

My own regret about going it alone

When I started out on my own, I thought my experience and my degree were enough. I'd sold all sorts by then: nightclub leaflets, recruitment, cars, double glazing, event tickets. I knew how to talk to people, so I thought I'd be fine.

What I didn't have was anybody asking me the right questions. I was stuck inside my own head, making decisions on my own, and there was nobody saying "hang on, why are you doing it that way?"

Looking back, I should have put paid help on a credit card. I reckon it would have saved me a year. Now I'm not telling you to go into debt, and this isn't financial advice, whether you can afford it is your call. But I'd be lying if I said going it alone was the clever, thrifty choice. It was the slow one.

Do you actually need one?

Not necessarily. Some coaches get going fine on their own, especially if they've got a network who already trust them. If your diary is filling from people you know, you might do better making that more reliable first, and how to get coaching referrals without begging covers that.

You might need one if you've been at it a year or more, you've tried the free advice, and you can't tell which of your problems is the real one. That's where good questions earn their money.

Before you talk to anybody, work out where you stand. How to get coaching clients sets out the three jobs in the order they happen, and you can score your homepage against the 10,954 for free. Then you'll go into any call knowing what you want help with, and you'll spot pretty quickly whether the person in front of you can help with it or not. The decision's yours after that.

Questions coaches ask about this

The figures here come from our own corpus of 10,954 scored coaching websites and 918 mapped coaching markets. How we built and scored it.

Read next

• The average coaching website scores 3.7 out of 10
• The five second test 86% of coaching websites fail
• Coaching referral program: get referrals without begging