I listened to a conversation between Donald Miller and Mike Michalowicz on coaching as a business. Mike has been a successful coach himself for years and now trains and certifies other coaches in his methodologies. He’s worth listening to.
Here are the things from their conversation that stuck with me.
Why people hire coaches. Mike says specialization. People hire a coach because that coach has gone deep on a specific problem or industry. The generalist coach competes with everyone. The specialist owns a lane.
Give experience, not advice. Mike argues against giving direct advice. Instead, share what you’ve actually been through. Tell the story of how you handled it. Let the client draw their own conclusion and apply it to their situation. The relationship becomes collaborative instead of prescriptive. Clients work harder on the things they figured out themselves.
Find your purpose by looking backward. Mike pushes coaches to reflect on the hard parts of their own lives. The challenging chapters. The losses. The places they got stuck and figured out how to move through. That’s usually where their best coaching work lives. When the coach is doing work that connects to their own story, the work gets better.
A menu of products. Don’t sell one thing. Build a small menu of coaching products that map to different needs inside your niche. It makes it easier for clients to find the entry point that fits where they are.
Get a CRM early. Even when you’re small, you need a system for tracking clients and conversations. As the business scales, the early discipline pays back. The owners who skip this end up rebuilding their pipeline from memory every quarter.
Look at your own life for the opening. The best coaching opportunities sit at the intersection of (a) a problem you’ve solved or watched someone close to you solve, and (b) a place where most people have less confidence than they should. Your job is to bridge the gap from insecurity to capability for those people. Your own experience is the starting material.
The bigger frame I take from the conversation is this: coaching is leverage on someone else’s life and business. When you bring lived experience, deep specialization, and a clear sense of what you’re for, you can do work that genuinely changes things for clients.
If you want to watch the whole interview, the video is below.
About the Author
Ron Tester is a physical therapist with thirty years in the field. He built, grew, and operated a multidisciplinary home health company employing PTs, OTs, and SLPs through a successful exit. He now coaches outpatient PT, OT, and SLP clinic owners on operating at the owner level. Certified Executive Coach and Book Yourself® Solid Coach. Learn more at https://rontestercoaching.com/about.