As important as it is to define your specialty designation and ideal client profile, you must know what is your specialty Niche.
Your specialty Niche is the unique way you are going to help your client. This is what you are best at when you are coaching your clients.
Most of the coaches don’t have figured their Niche out and as mentioned earlier they use the term Life Coach.
The specialty Niche is what makes the difference between the High Paying and Low Paying clients. For example a Lawyer advertising himself as Divorce Lawyer is going to be paid huge sum for his services though he would be doing the same thing that a normal Lawyer might do in the same case.
Few days back, we noticed blisters on my 4 months old daughter’s hands and feet. We got worried. We were recommended by the pediatrician to see a “Pediatric Dermatologist” . We were stunned as we didn’t know that there are pediatric dermatologists also. When we searched on the internet, we were surprised to find that there are only a few of them available in Bangalore and all of them were overbooked ! Skin is skin and a normal dermatologist is going to prescribe the same treatment as the one specializing in Pediatric Dermatology, but the later can demand more fee.
Similarly nowadays we have Pediatric Cardiologists, Pediatric Psychologists and all of them are earning more than their counterparts without Pediatric prefix.
I hope you got the idea. Same is the case with Coaching. The people who have figured out their coaching niche and are advertising the same are able to demand and get more than their other counterparts. Which means that they can work lesser and earn more.
It is in our interest only to define our specialty niche.
How do we define our specialty Niche?
First figure out your ideal client profile. These are the people who you can easily contact and reach to comfortably pitch for your services and there is higher chance of them hiring you and continuing with the assignment.
Now almost everyone in the beginning wants to coach CEO’s and other Executives (Thanks to our role models like Marshall Goldsmith and Tony Robbins).
I agree it is a good idea to coach Executives and earn more money, and would like to add that there are couple of obstacles here:
- Not everyone can get an appointment with CEO
- Even if they get, in most cases the grey haired CEO would figure out the coach’s lack of experience in less than two minutes and what happens next depends upon his mood.
Most of the life coach training institutes advertise that it doesn’t matter if you are an executive or not, and you can still coach executives.
However I believe in integrity and honesty. The issue is not that you are capable of coaching executives, but are the executives ready to be coached by you?
As per a survey by Marshall Goldsmith where his company surveyed many companies to find out their criteria for hiring the executive coaches.
As per the surver results, the most important factor for hiring the executive coaches is the coach’s own prior experience as an Executive (caution: saying that you are CEO of your just launched coaching company won’t help at all) in the industry
As per above survey the second factor for hiring coaches is the Coach’s experience as a Coach.
And one of the least important factors for hiring executive coaches is their coach certification.
Keeping these things in mind, think about people whom you can easily reach and sell your coaching services to, and answer – “how can I help these people through coaching?”. This answer will lead you to your coaching niche.
After this defining your coaching designation is just a cakewalk.
