Build a Coaching Business
How to Turn Your Expertise Into a Practice That Actually Pays — Without the Guru TheaterBy Joanne WhitloW
Length8h 25m
About this audiobook
Build a coaching business that earns real income: the referral-based practice-building guide for mid-career professionals,
executive coaches, and consultants who want paying clients — not just a polished brand.
After nineteen months as a certified coach, Mara had a logo, a podcast, an Instagram following, and a free PDF on the five pillars of
authentic living. What she did not have was clients. This book is about the gap between that story and a practice that bills two to four
hundred thousand dollars a year — and how to close it without guru theater, content funnels, or the seven-figure-empire myth.
Joanne Whitlow spent twenty-three years as VP of HR at a mid-sized manufacturing company before building an executive coaching
practice that now runs thirty client hours a week at rates between twelve hundred and three thousand dollars a month per
engagement. In Build a Coaching Business, she reveals why most new coaches spend eighty percent of their time on visibility work
aimed at other coaches rather than buyers — and lays out the direct-outreach, referral-cultivation, and niche-positioning system that
actually fills a practice. From picking a niche you can get paid for (Chapter 2) to running discovery calls that close without flinching on
the fee (Chapter 6) to the "small artifact" technique that turns every session into a referral seed (Chapter 4), every chapter is grounded
in nine years of watching what works and what quietly bleeds new coaches of their savings and confidence.
Inside this coaching business book:
The 80/18/2/0 diagnosis — why most new coaches accidentally build a hobby in business clothes, and the specific hour-tracking
exercise that reveals the structural problem before it costs another year
The niche that actually pays — a three-input process (former career, who you enjoy, who can afford you) that produces a dinner
party-test niche statement in plain English, not coaching jargon
First three clients without a funnel — the exact fifteen-minute outreach call script Diane used to land three paying clients at
close to full fee inside ninety days, with zero social media
Pricing without apologizing — the band-by-band fee structure for executive coaching practices, plus the specific wobble
behaviors that kill a price after you name it and how to eliminate them
The discovery call that closes — seven repeatable moves, including when to sit through the silence after naming the fee and why
giving a free sample coaching session almost never converts
The engagement that earns the renewal — how a written contract, a recurring goal check-in, honest pushback, and one small
artifact per session produce referrals without a single pitch
Building a referral system — why the real practice looks suspiciously quiet online, and how to cultivate three or four referral
partners who send a steady stream of qualified buyers
Whether you are a corporate professional in your forties considering coaching as your next chapter, a certified coach already
discouraged by eighteen months of low revenue, or a therapist adding a coaching arm to an existing practice, this book gives you the
structural diagnosis and the practical operating model — not a motivational promise. The path to a practice that pays you what your
prior career paid you runs through specific conversations with specific people, not through audience size. This guide shows you
exactly which conversations to have, in what order, and what to say.
For readers of Michael Bungay Stanier's The Coaching Habit and Michael Port's Book Yourself Solid.
Audiobook details
GenreBusiness and Economics
Length8 hrs 25 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Build a Coaching Business
2Introduction
3Chapter 1 — The Coaching Business Most People Build (and Why It Doesn’t Pay)
4Chapter 2 — Picking the Niche You Can Actually Get Paid For
5Chapter 3 — Your First Three Coaching Clients
Show all chaptersShow less
6Chapter 4 — The Coaching Conversation That Earns the Next Engagement
7Chapter 5 — Pricing Coaching Engagements Without Apologizing
8Chapter 6 — The Discovery Call That Earns the First Engagement
9Chapter 7 — Writing Coaching Proposals That Get Signed
10Chapter 8 — The Coaching Agreement That Prevents the Painful Conversation
11Chapter 9 — Running a Productive Coaching Session
12Chapter 10 — The Tools You Don’t Need (and the Three You Do)
13Chapter 11 — Group Coaching: When and How to Add It
14Chapter 12 — The Coaching Mastermind: A Different Beast
15Chapter 13 — Building a Referral System That Doesn’t Feel Pushy
16Chapter 14 — Marketing Your Practice Without the Guru Theater
17Chapter 15 — Showing Up Online Without Becoming a Content Creator
18Chapter 16 — The Year of Six Figures: Hitting the First Real Milestone
19Chapter 17 — Difficult Clients and How to Re-Contract Cleanly
20Chapter 18 — When to Fire a Coaching Client
21Chapter 19 — Subcontracting and Building Other Coaches Into Your Practice
22Chapter 20 — Productizing the Practice: Courses, Books, Memberships
23Chapter 21 — The Burnout Risk Specific to Coaches (and How to Avoid It)
24Chapter 22 — The Long Practice: Coaching Across a Career
25Conclusion
26About the Author
27Appendix A — Frequently Asked Questions From My Mastermind
28Appendix B — Extended Case Studies
29Appendix C — The Standard Engagement Agreement, Discussed Clause by Clause
30Appendix D — A Year of Marketing Hours, Hour by Hour
31Appendix E — A Final Word on Voice
32Appendix F — A Twelve-Month Plan for the First Year of Practice
33Appendix G — Three Worksheets for Niche Development
34Appendix H — Twenty Common Client Situations and How They Tend to Unfold
35Appendix I — On Money and What It Means in a Coaching Practice
36Appendix J — Notes From Years of Coaching, in No Particular Order
37Appendix K — Letters to Coaches at Specific Moments
38Appendix L — A Glossary of Terms, Defined the Way I Actually Use Them
39Appendix M — A Last Note on Reading This Book Twice
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