Coaching Firm Development
Professional coaching is a profession with widespread allure. It offers the potential of working with ambitious individuals, creating a positive collaboration, delivering transformative results – and not so incidentally generating a significant income. Many organizations have embraced the power of coaching, realizing it can be the most effective tool to take leaders to the next level of performance and impact. That is the promise of coaching.
The reality of the profession is that many find creating a successful coaching enterprise challenging. The same companies that value coaching have become far more rigorous in vetting and selecting coaches, and holding their engagements accountable to clear-cut ROI. In addition to to shifting organizational standards there is rapidly growing competition as the industry matures.
The successful coach in the decades ahead will not only be talented in connecting with and delivering value to individuals, but also highly strategic in designing, promoting and adapting the business model. These are the capabilities that Frank helps ambitious professional coaches develop. Frank draws on his proven practices in professional service entrepreneurship. He adapts them to the unique and evolving dynamics of the coaching world.
I. Transitioning to Coaching
Frank helps those targeting the coaching profession transition smoothly and effectively. Frank understands the multiple career paths that may precede a coaching career, including therapist, HR leader, academic or business executive. He knows how to navigate these unique transition challenges and prepare to capitalize on the full potential of previous roles. His process begins with a rigorous Professional Coaching Readiness Assessment. He works with clients to identify potential gaps in coaching skills, service business acumen, and support systems, and implement a plan to close any gaps quickly and definitively.
II. Coaching Practice Design and Launch
Frank works with committed professional coaches to strategically design and creatively launch the new coaching practice. The centerpiece is development and implementation of a comprehensive Coaching Practice Business Plan. This is not an academic or one-size-fits-all exercise. The plan is flexible, aspirational and pragmatic. The process of developing this plan, as much as the document itself, creates the clarity required to avoid pitfalls and build momentum out of the gate.
The Coaching Practice Business Plan begins with clarification of the professional service brand, including coaching category, target market, and core value proposition. It includes empowering expressions of the practice’s mission and vision. The emphasis is on business development pragmatics, with particular attention to marketing strategy, organizational targeting, and competitive positioning.
The new practice is designed to capitalize on coaching market trends while ensuring the right measure of service differentiation and nichecraft. The plan includes the Coaching Service Strategic Roadmap, which sets clear milestones for 90 days, year one, and 18 months, as well as stretch goals for future expansion.
III. Coaching Firm Optimization
Frank applies his proprietary professional service development process to help build the coaching firm at all stages of development. The Coaching Firm Optimization Process strengthens the firm on the five dimensions that are critical to success in a competitive and rapidly changing environment.
Dimension 1: Core Competency Optimization
Frank helps the sole practitioner or firm members strengthen the foundational knowledge, skills and formal processes in the Six Core Roles of the professional coach. To create competitive advantage, these competencies should be drawn not only from ICF and other standards of the coaching industry but also from the wider terrain of leadership development, advisory firm client dynamics, and organizational effectiveness. Frank helps coaches and their firms continuously raise their game and become thought leaders in the coaching movement.
Dimension 2: Service Optimization
Frank works with the coach or firm leaders to ensure that the professional services offered are closely matched to firm capabilities and market opportunities – both immediate and emerging. Some services may be expanded, others merged, and entirely new ones developed from the ground up. Services are also optimized to ensure that the return on investment (ROI) of coaching engagements is unmistakable: not only substantial but also framed in the terms and measures that resonate with the C-suite of client organizations. These processes enable the services to become a key source of differentiation for the coaching firm.
Dimension 3: Brand Communication Optimization
Coaching is an emerging profession. Consequently there is a high premium on core brand communications that effectively capture the coaching firm’s value, processes, and differentiation. Frank helps refine content so that it capitalizes on the needs and mindset of the target client base, while authentically projecting what makes the practice unique. He helps the coaching firm craft a website that functions as a true centerpiece of brand messaging. He ensures the complete set of communication works – from service name and tagline, to social media descriptions, to spoken summaries – are all integrated and collectively build momentum.
Dimension 4: Marketing Strategy Optimization
Hope, it is said, is not a strategy. Like all service firms, the professional coaching firm must approach marketing with a carefully developed plan – followed by the acumen and drive to implement it. Frank guides the firm to make optimal use of multiple marketing channels: traditional marketing tools (such as advertising, sales, and publicity), professional network development, modern methods of social media marketing, and leveraging of works of thought leadership – from white papers to books, from podcasts to keynote addresses.
Dimension 5: Coaching Team Optimization
Frank helps the firm attract and develop associates who can advance the long-term mission and systematically build the business. Frank’s services include essential HR strategy, from initial competency modeling and recruitment strategy through programs for hiring and onboarding. For expanding coaching enterprises he offers team training in business development dynamics and consulting on leadership pipeline development.
