Getting Started As a Coach

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You're ready. Get started. Go do it.

~Ricki Frankel to me, 2006

My initial exposure to coaching came as a client, when I was in my first leadership role after earning my MBA from Stanford. I went to business school with a vision of helping NGOs and the nonprofit sector use technology more effectively, and although I considered a wide range of options while I pursued my degree during the first Internet bubble, after graduation I found the exact job I had written about in my application essay.

I became the first Executive Director of N-TEN, the Nonprofit Technology Network, and in that capacity I'd been hired by a founding Board of Directors to turn a strategic plan and some startup funding into a self-sustaining organization. Prior to business school I'd spent seven years in a series of roles with increasing responsibility, including serving as the first employee of another nonprofit startup, but this was my most prominent leadership position to date, and I cared deeply about the mission.

I was determined to make N-TEN a success, and I threw myself into the experience with vigor, which resulted in some predictable conflicts. Vince Stehle, a member of my board who became an important mentor, took me aside and said, in effect, "You're a talented guy, but you have some rough edges. I advise you to invest in yourself and get a coach." He made this recommendation in a non-threatening way, but he also helped me realize that I was facing an important opportunity to become a better leader, and I needed to step up to the challenge.

So I went back to Mary Ann Huckabay, one of my best professors at Stanford who also maintained a coaching practice and asked her to take me on as a client. Being coached was a profoundly helpful and rewarding experience, and it not only helped me turn my experience leading N-TEN into a success, but it also planted the seed that flowered several years later in 2006 when I made the decision to take a tremendous leap and launch my own coaching practice. (And Mary Ann is still my coach!)

My practice has evolved considerably in the intervening years, and today my work is focused exclusively on coaching leaders 1:1 in long-term, open-ended engagements. (After many years in a variety of roles at Stanford, including teaching Interpersonal Dynamics, aka "Touchy Feely," these days I only teach The Art of Self-Coaching, a course that I designed and launched in 2015. I consider teaching at the GSB a chance to give back to a community that has given me so much, but it's not a material part of my livelihood.)

I regularly hear from aspiring coaches who want to learn more about how to get started, so I have to assume there's something about the way I conduct my practice that resonates with people. It's not possible to respond personally to all of these requests, but I wanted to be able to provide something of value from the lessons I've learned, and hopefully this post does just that.

1. The "Chief Coaching Officer" and the CEO

As a coach in private practice you have to wear two hats: You're the "Chief Coaching Officer" of a small business, and you're responsible for creating value through the effectiveness of your work with clients. But you're also the CEO of that small business whose only assets are your time and reputation, and you're responsible for managing those assets in such a way that the business achieves its financial goals. 

The problem is that most resources for coaches are aimed at the Chief Coaching Officer, and very few are aimed at the CEO, and those that are often seem quite transactional, lacking the spirit of coaching as a vocation. The vast majority of my work on this site is written for coaching clients, but all of those pieces have relevance for the Chief Coaching Officer as well. This post is written for the CEO--it's focused not on the work of being an excellent coach, but on achieving excellence in managing a coaching practice. (And for additional resources aimed at helping you develop as a coach and as the CEO of your practice, see Appendix 1 below.)

I am absolutely dedicated to delivering excellence as a coach, and I've organized my life around that principle. I show up to every single session prepared to make it a meaningful conversation for my client. But I'm equally dedicated to excellence in managing my practice, and that's been an equally fulfilling part of my journey in this profession. As a novice coach you're undoubtedly investing in resources to improve your coaching skills, as you should--but how are you investing in the management of your practice? How much time and effort are you putting in with your CEO hat on?

2. Findable and Credible

These are the two fundamental qualities you must possess in order to be a coach. When someone is seeking a coach, you must come readily to mind or be easy to discover--you must be findable--and you must appear to them as a trustworthy resource who will be worth their investment of time and money--you must be credible. The key for a novice coach is recognizing that you're already findable and credible to someone.

Consider the communities within which you're both findable and credible today: Alumni networks, professional associations, friends and personal connections. These are the people who would be eager to work with you as a coach if they only knew that you were available. They may not be able or willing to pay much (or anything) for your services, but that's where you can get started. What are these communities for you? How could you let them know that you're launching a practice?

I highly recommend creating a website for your coaching practice rather than relying on LinkedIn or any other social network. This won't necessarily make you more findable--over the years very few clients have found me through my writing, and I make a minimal effort to promote my work. (The primary purpose of my writing here is to create a library of resources for my existing clients, not to attract new clients, and I do announce new posts on Twitter, but I have more fun tweeting about my dog.)

But having a site for your practice not only demonstrates a commitment that will make you more credible, it also allows you to tell your own story and to represent yourself in a way that's aligned with your approach to the work. And it need not be expensive: I spend less than $150 a year to maintain this site. "It shows!" That's fine--it does the job. (For examples of other coaches' websites that I admire, see Appendix 2 below.)

3. The Gold Standard

The absolute best way to be findable and credible--the gold standard--is when a prospective client asks a trusted friend or colleague about coaching, and that person turns out to be one of your current or former clients, and they (of course!) recommend you. There is no better source of referrals, because the prospective client will have more trust in your value, and you will have more trust that they're serious about pursuing coaching. You'll still need to explore what the prospective client is seeking in a coach and whether you'd be a good fit for their needs, but such diligence conversations are always more fruitful when mutual trust is high at the outset.

To state the obvious, it can take years to develop a network of current and former clients that is sufficiently large to generate enough referrals to fill your practice, but I haven't found any useful shortcuts. In my opinion other forms of "marketing" for a coach are unhelpful and may even be counter-productive--note that being findable in some settings may actually make you less credible.

For example, there are many opportunities to obtain greater exposure as a coach, from paid advertising to writing articles for high-traffic sites to events that propose to match coaches with prospective clients. These outlets may make you more findable, but it's essential to also assess their impact on your credibility (bearing in mind that one of your primary assets is your reputation.) Are you more or less credible in the eyes of prospective clients as a result of your participation in any of these activities?

4. The Long-Tail

One way I describe coaching is as a "long-tail" profession. There are vast numbers of people who coach for free (or for minimal fees), finding it a personally fulfilling way to support others. Coaching may be a meaningful part of their identity, but it's not their profession. There are also many people who coach professionally as a part of a portfolio of related work, such as training, facilitation, or consulting. These people may prefer having a variety of responsibilities and enjoy working with groups, or they may find it difficult to fully occupy their time with coaching and augment their practice with other work.

And there's a relatively small number of people who focus exclusively on 1:1 coaching. I've chosen to join this last group, but it took many years to reach that conclusion, to narrow my focus accordingly, and to develop a practice that makes this possible. This was also a decision made with both my CCO and CEO hats on--I believe I do my best work as a 1:1 coach, and I find it particularly rewarding to work with individual clients in long-term engagements, and this commitment has also resulted in the best business model for my practice and the most economical use of my time.

The good news is that you get to choose where you want to be on the curve, because there are no predetermined models for a coaching practice--the challenge is that it may take some time to get where you want to go. Consider how you want coaching to fit into your professional life, and what work you'll have to do to make that possible.

5. Certification and Credentials

There are a number of coaching certification programs, and they all offer three things: Opportunities to develop your skills, membership in a learning community, and a credential that sends a signal to the market. The first two are always valuable, but the value of the third is highly contingent and will depend not only on the market you're seeking to serve, but also on the value of your other credentials.

It's absolutely essential to invest time and energy in your continued training and development as a coach, and prepare for this to be a lifelong process. If certification is a convenient by-product of that process, then by all means take advantage of it, but understand the potential value of certification to you before pursuing it as an end in itself.

Certification offers a form of quality control in systems that oversee a number of coaches, such as large companies that offer coaching to middle managers, or coaching platforms and firms that serve as market makers between coaches and clients (see Appendix 3 below). As a result those systems will often opt for certified coaches. But sophisticated clients such as senior leaders realize that certification may have no bearing on whether or not a particular coach is a good fit for their individual needs. I've never been asked by a CEO or other senior executive if I was certified, only by gatekeepers who vet coaches.

Training programs that offer certification can help you develop your skills and connect with fellow learners, and in some cases obtaining certification will enable you to join a coaching platform or firm and work under their brand, but it won't necessarily be a factor in developing a private coaching practice. When I launched my practice in 2006 I faced a choice--pursue coaching certification or join Stanford's Group Facilitation Training Program. I was accepted into the latter, which afforded me a tremendous number of learning opportunities and, many years later, ultimately allowed me to join the GSB faculty.

My experiences along this path along with my MBA provided me with a set of credentials that have so far rendered certification unnecessary--although note that I've remained diligently committed to a set of practices that allow me to further develop my skills, from my work on this site to my ongoing coaching with Mary Ann. So as a novice coach, consider not only the credentials you possess, but also the extent to which they provide meaningful signals to the markets you seek to serve. Coaching certification may well serve as a useful credential, but not necessarily.

6. No Clear Entry Path

One of the primary challenges faced by all novice coaches is how to enter the field, because there's no clearly defined path. This is one reason why people enroll in coaching training programs and pursue certification, and while there's always value in developing one's skills as a member of learning community, note that training programs and certifying bodies cannot tell you how to build a practice. That's the bad news--you're going to have to make your own path. But the good news is that if you're entrepreneurial, dedicated, and persistent, you get to make your own path.

In my experience coaches come to the profession from three primary sources: Most, like me, are operating leaders whose past experience allows them to empathize with the challenges faced by prospective coaching clients and whose resume and accomplishments provide sufficient credibility. A distinct subset of this group is comprised of very experienced Chief People Officers or VPs of HR who've dealt with a very wide range of issues related to organizational life in their careers. And a relatively small number are clinical psychologists who are applying their training to helping leaders achieve higher performance. I was initially surprised to discover that this last group was so small, but this made sense as I grasped more fully that coaching isn't therapy.

There are no guarantees in this process--no steps you can take that will reliably lead to a successful practice--but there are also no requirements--no educational or professional obligations you must fulfill in order to earn the right to coach. That will be determined by the response of the people to whom you initially make yourself available as a coach, your credibility in that context, and the results your clients derive from their work with you (and what they tell others about that work.) In my case I had 15 years of progressive leadership experience, an MBA from Stanford, and the perspective derived from my time as a coaching client. Here's how those resources allowed me to make my own path.

7. You're Ready. Get Started. Go Do It.

After leaving N-TEN I continued to work in the nonprofit technology world, but I felt a sense of discontent. I had gotten into nonprofits in the first place to help people change their lives for the better, but now I found myself working in increasingly mediated ways. I was helping people...who were helping people...who were helping people--and I felt at a great distance from specific individuals and the actual process of changing lives.

I was volunteering with the leadership team of another organization when I realized that our efforts reminded me of my previous work with Mary Ann. To my surprise, I found that I was coaching them--and I was pretty good at it! I decided to explore whether I could become a coach and how I might go about it, which led to an intensive period of research and networking. Although I'm thankful to so many people for their help in this process, two major breakthroughs stand out.

First, I met Joe Murphy, a coach in San Francisco who was in the process of training a former colleague in his methodology. Joe invited me to join their sessions, and in exchange I documented Joe's lessons and shared them with the group. For the better part of a year I benefited from Joe's teaching, and although I've been blessed with many great mentors in my life, few have come along at such a propitious moment.

The other came near the end of this period in a single conversation. Andrea Corney, a coach I'd met through the GSB alumni network and who'd been tremendously helpful and encouraging had introduced me to Ricki Frankel, another coach who was associated with the GSB. (Andrea and Ricki would later become two of my closest colleagues at Stanford.) I told Ricki about the all the work I'd been doing to determine whether coaching might be a possible path for me, and she said, "You're ready. Get started. Go do it." It was exactly the kick in the ass I needed (which was itself a great lesson in coaching).

I reached out to the communities in which I was already findable and credible, and let people know I was available for coaching. What began as little more than a hobby began to feel more meaningful to me than my current leadership role, although I felt an obligation to fulfill my commitment to the people who'd brought me on board to launch another technology-related nonprofit.

And then I attended a weekend-long T-group to determine whether I wanted to pursue Stanford's facilitator training program, during which I had an epiphany: I wasn't going to be successful at becoming the best coach I could be in my spare time while I also tried to launch this new organization. I had to choose one or the other. So I went home, had a long talk with Amy about it, and decided that I had to give coaching my best shot. I had to push all my chips into the center of the table, quit my job, and launch my practice. It would take some months to execute that plan responsibly, but it remains the best professional decision I've ever made.

I don't know you, so I don't know if you're ready. But if you've read this far, you might be. I'm certainly not advising you to quit your job and launch a coaching practice. But let's assume you've read this far because you're ready for something. So get started. Go do it.

 

An immense number of people have played a role in my growth and development as a coach, and I can't thank them all here, but I do owe particular thanks to the people who were instrumental in the process described above in the years 2005 and 2006:

  • Andrea Corney
  • Barbara Brewer
  • Carole Robin
  • David Bradford
  • Dietmar Brinkmann
  • Erica Kisch
  • Evelyn Williams
  • Joe Murphy
  • Karin Scholz Grace
  • Kevin Martin
  • Lynn Labieniec
  • Mary Ann Huckabay
  • Rebecca Zucker
  • Ricki Frankel
  • Seth Goldstein
  • Scott Bristol
  • Tim Dorman
  • Vince Stehle
  • and, of course, Amy

Dedicated to Erik Bengtsson. We spent HOURS talking about this stuff, and I will always be grateful for that time. Miss you, man.

March 2021.

Appendix 1: For Further Reading

Appendix 2: Coaches' Websites

Here are some colleagues' websites that I think are worth noting:

Appendix 3: Coaching Platforms and Firms

There's a rapidly expanding market for enterprise platforms that offer virtual coaching at a range of prices to organizations and match individual coaches with employees:

There are also a vast number of small coaching firms, although there's nothing equivalent to the large institutions in the law and management consulting that provide clear entry paths to the profession and a path to partnership. Here are a few that I'm familiar with:

As a novice coach, it's unlikely that you'd be able to get started with one of these platforms or firms--they're looking for coaches who've already obtained some experience on their own. But once you've done that, you may be able to associate with one of these groups as a way to accelerate your development and gain even more experience. And as I note above, these groups often do pay attention to certification as a means of quality control.

Photo by tableatny.