My Plan Was To Win The Coaching
Business Building Lottery
(3 painful lessons from my ‘not-so’
rags-to-riches story)
By: Karen Pattock

This is part one of a five part series I am writing about the success and failures in my business.

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I kept hearing those ‘overnight’ rags to riches success stories of other coaches and mentors wondering if that would be me?

I had owned and operated seven other successful businesses before so how hard could this online marketing, social media, business building thing be? Ummm…. harder than I thought!

Truth is, I was pretty cocky when I started my Health Coaching business. Even before I graduated from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, I had clients, secured referral partners and was generating income.

The local marketing stuff came naturally to me because of my past marketing experience but I was under the delusion that I would be able to apply those same techniques to market my business online.

I intuitively knew that to scale my business, (which was always my intention), I needed to have an online presence and I was convinced social media would play a huge part in my success.

To say the learning curve was steep would be an understatement. But there was an endless supply of ‘free’ content and advice coming my way, (you know about the endless supply of free info right?), and I consider myself a pretty smart cookie so I had confidence that success was right around the corner.

Needless to say, online marketing wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be and social media for business didn’t seem intuitive to me either.

It was like speaking a foreign language to me. I’d be told things like:

“Just send them the pdf”…. What the heck was a pdf?

“Hyperlink the words ‘click here’ and send them to your opt-in page”… Hyper… what and what’s an opt-in page?

“Start a WordPress blog so you can write weekly blog posts”… What is WordPress and more importantly what the heck is a blog?

Okay, I’m sure you see a pattern forming here. Maybe you can relate or maybe you’re laughing your head off at how inexperienced I was but that’s exactly what was happening at the time.

So as you may have guessed, my story isn’t one of those rags to riches overnight phenomenon stories where you scratch your head wondering why it hasn’t happened to you.

Instead, my story is a journey that is slow and steady with a rocky patch or two along the way. Truth is, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I love trying new things and documenting what works and what doesn’t work.

Looking back on the first couple years of building my online coaching business I now know that I could have gotten to where I am now much quicker had I been armed with a few key pieces of information that changed everything.

What I wish I knew when I got started is that it didn’t need to be nearly as difficult as I made it.

I’ll admit it and raise my hand in confession of being one of those people that fell into the trap of listening to every online marketing guru out there and trying to implement all of the information simultaneously, all while working part-time in my husband’s business and keeping up with my household responsibilities.

Yes, it’s true… I was diagnosed with “Superwoman Syndrome”.

It didn’t take too long for me to know I was in way over my head and something needed to change.

I needed to take a step back to truly reevaluate what it takes to build a successful online business. (At this point I was sure that there was a missing key and I just hadn’t found it yet. Wow! I couldn’t have been more wrong! Wait till you hear what I discovered that was right under my nose the whole time.)

My first step was to pull away from social media.

When I realized my business success didn’t rely on me being up to speed on what every person on the planet was posting on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, I freed up many hours each day that I could focus elsewhere.

(Lesson #1: Social media doesn’t directly put money in my bank account if it isn’t tied to a magic system called a marketing funnel.)

My next step was to look for one or two common threads within all of the ‘free’ online marketing information that I had signed up for over the past 18 months.

 (Lesson #2: Two topics emerged as the most important pieces to building an online coaching business. The first one is consistent list building and the second one is a solid core message.)

The last step I took was to ask for help from my husband.

Something you may not know about me is that I can be quite stubborn at times. Specifically when it comes to situations dealing with my performance. I have never liked asking for help but at this point I was so overwhelmed and frustrated I had no choice.

(Lesson #3: You can’t build a profitable coaching business on your own. You need support from a variety of people and as your business grows so will the amount of support you need.)

Now that I was armed with a brRetreatand new clarity and had set very specific boundaries for myself it was time to get a strategy that was proven to work.

So I made a decision to hire a business coach. I looked at all of the online marketing gurus that had been sending me tons of free information, (remember them?), and I chose one that I was sure had that missing key I so desperately needed to build my six-figure online coaching business.

I narrowed down my choices and hired the mentor of my dreams. She was everything I knew I needed because her business was what I wanted to model in my coaching business.

I bit the bullet, swallowed hard and signed up for her private coaching program that was a $750.00 per month investment. Gulp!

The coolest part about the program is that I was able to attend a weekend retreat in Colorado which was an amazing experience.

Unfortunately my excitement was short-lived because over the next year things took a big turn – and I learned an invaluable lesson that changed me forever, (and cost me thousands of dollars).

What went wrong? Well, I’ll save that story for next time… so stay tuned!

 

Check out the other posts in this series:

Episode 2: What I Wish I Had Known Before I Invested $18,000 In A Business Coach
Episode 3:
When The Universe Comes Knocking You Better Answer The Door
Episode 4: 10 Days and a 5-Figure Launch In The Bank
Episode 5: History Repeats Itself & Practicing What I Preach

 


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