Customer Reviews

Four Steps To Building A Profitable Coaching Practice: A Complete Marketing Resource Guide for Coaches

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Coaching is a peculiarly difficult service to market! You're marketing yourself, and all sorts of emotions get in the way of direct action -"I musn't boast", "I can't promote myself","Am I good enough", "I don't want to be seen as pushy" are examples I've heard. Questions of self-worth abound. Many coaches need major coaching in this area! In fact, if you don't market your coaching services regularly and aggressively, you'll sooner or later stop coaching! This book meets that need head-on, with sections on Deciding Who You Want To Coach, Creating a Program Your Target Audience Will Pay For, Creating a Marketing Strategy, and Learning How To Sell. In addition, the largest chapter, Creating a Marketing Strategy, lays out all the marketing options, and, coachlike, offers assignments to the reader to get him/her moving. I found the section on Working With The Press particularly interesting, and challenging. That alone is worth the price of the book. I run a coaching chapter in New York City, and I've invited the author to come and present her book to our membership. If you're a coach, or planning to be one, I highly recommend this book. It is a marketing seminar all by itself. It gives a very clear, well-organized and concise outline of the steps you can take to make coaching a delight - not only because of what you can contribute to others, but also because you can make a very nice living doing so!

*****
This book, though short, is succinct and very useful, very rich in content---a great guide for coaches who are wanting to begin marketing their practices. Marketing information is hard to organize, because as a coach, you really just want to know what you need to know to make your practice successful, and not a lot more than that. If you agree with me, this is the book for you.

There are lots of resources for coaches who want to delve deeper into any particular type of marketing---for example, running teleclasses---but enough basic information so that you can get started, along with time estimates, cost estimates, and estimates as to how long you would have to do any particular activity before it becomes profitable.

I really appreciated the Resource section in the back of the book covering Internet sites for sources from everything from headsets for the telephone, to e-book resources, to credit card merchants and alternatives like PayPal, etc. The Resource section is for the most part specific just to coaching, and the more general resources are useful, too, unlike some appendices.

There are assignments throughout the book for those people who enjoy exercises to assist you in actually DOING the things you need to do to market your practice. The assignments seemed good, but am using the book as a sourcebook to help me to brainstorm, so I just read over them for ideas. I cannot imagine anyone going through and doing these exercises, though, and by the end of the book NOT having a thriving practice.

This is definitely the best book I have ever read on marketing for coaches! I can't imagine how it could have been written any better or how it could have been any more helpful unless the author did the marketing FOR me :)
*****

I found Deborah's book to be straightforward, precise and probably the most useful of anything I have read for creating and marketing my coaching practice... and all in one resource! She breaks down each of four steps clearly and concisely for even the most beginner coach. An excellent and exciting resource for any coach at most any level.

I love this book. It is written by a coach for someone who wants to create their own coaching business or improve their business plan for their existing coaching business. I just finished this book a few minutes ago, and I still can't believe what a wonderful book it is. I'm a SCORE counselor, one type of business coach, and I regularly counsel wanta-be entrepreneurs and small business owners on how to prepare business plans or modify existing plans. If a client came to me and wanted to start a coaching practice, then I would be giving the client the ISBN for this book right up front.

The author has her own successful coaching business. And this book includes her story about building her coaching business. She tells us what didn't work for her and what has worked for her. She gives us all kinds of insight into what to think about and do when starting your own coaching business.

Interestingly, she has a program she sells through her coaching business that goes something like this:

1. Describe what you want
2. Explore your options
3. Create your game plan
4. Implement your plan
5. Reach your goal

This program she sells is generic. It is the same program I use when I counsel people at SCORE as to how to start a business. I have my clients: (1) Describe the business they want to create, (2) Do market research, (3) Prepare their 25-35 page business plan, (4) Implement their plan, and (5) Meet their revenue targets timely.

This book tells the reader to do the above five things to start and run a coaching business. And then there is the wonderful list of resources at the end of the book on marketing, Web sites, newsletters, articles, ebooks, public speaking, networking, etc.

About the only thing missing seemed to be a discussion on Choice of Legal Entity. Should the coach form a Limited Liability Company (LLC) or a C Corporation?

If you run a coaching business or want to start one, then I highly recommend this book to you to help you in your work. I also think you will benefit greatly by reading the two following books as supplements to this book: Plug Your Book! (ISBN: 0977240614), by Steve Weber, and Aiming at Amazon (ISBN: 093849743X), by Aaron Shepard. 5 stars!

This book has accomplished the twin goals of "taking action": It's comprehensive in the variety of ways a coach can advance their practice. And yet, it breaks down each choice in easily doable steps; taking away the mystique or intimidating notions a new coach may have about what they must do to build their business.

Additionally, it's packed from top to bottom with terrific resources for writing, web development, program/seminar development, and much more!

It's one terrific resource for the back pocket of any ambitious coach!

If you like to get information that is concise and to the point, you have found.
In a friendly style, this book offers instruction that is helpful to both new and experienced coaches. It provides proven approaches to developing a coaching practice that are unavailable elsewhere.
This work will push and pull you at once towards reaching your goals rapidly.

Unfortunately, this is the first book I've actually returned to Amazon. The information is fine if you've never owned or managed a business before and have no idea what you're doing. But with all due respect to the author, this is kindergarten level material. I've already been in business for a number of years and found nothing helpful.

If you're just getting started or re-entering the business world after a prolonged time off, go ahead and get the book. If you already have a business, you don't need this book--and probably could have written it yourself.

I have not completed the book yet, but from the 1/3 of it I"ve read, it is the kind of beginners book I was looking for. It is very basic. There have been some editing weaknesses I have noticed but that is more a function of the publisher than the author.

One of the hardest challenges that many new and even experienced life coaches face is marketing. In Four Steps to Building a Profitable Coaching Practice, Deborah Brown-Volkman's goal is to show these coaches how to build a practice by following the steps she details in her book. As a beginning coach myself, I definitely knew it'd be a good idea to read her book.

This book delivers a lot of good marketing ideas and more importantly coaching assignments that can really help a coach both define and begin to promote his/her practice. I've incrementally been doing the exercises and found all of them useful in defining and enhancing my practice. Also I really appreciate that the approximate time and cost is listed to give the coach an idea of what costs are involved.

What I've really found useful is that the book breaks everything down into a step by step approach. This is especially important when you first start a practice, because it can be overwhelming to contemplate how you are going to get your business off the ground. With this book, it makes it much easier to take off and grow your business.

One thing I did find odd is that while the author did focus on a variety of ways to promote she left out things like promoting via flyers and where it would be a good idea to do so. Still this is one book I think every life coach should consider buying. I know I'll be using it for a long time to come in growing my own business.

This book was a great read and outlined step by step what you would need to do to get a coaching practice off the ground. The resources that are listed in this book are invaluable. It is awesome to have everything you need at your fingertips. I have already browsed various web-sites as a result of this book and it has saved me time of browsing the internet aimlessly. The book also points out the pros and cons regarding accepting different payment methods and once again it links you to where you can do further research. I love that the author breaks down the cost and projected start time for each project. I love this book!