Book Review: Four Steps To Building A Profitable Coaching Practice

Author: Deborah Brown-Volkman
Publisher: iUniverse
Year Published: 2003
Rating:
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Four Steps may be targeting the coaching industry, but the lessons provided will help virtually any service-based business grow their firm.

This concise, 134pg workbook crams a lot of content into a readable and easy to digest manner. The bulk of the book is comprised of four main steps and a bonus fifth step on working with the press. There are also sections on the importance of marketing and the foundations for becoming a profitable coach.

Brown-Volkman starts with a bunch of quotes from coaches that stress the importance of being clear, consistent, and authentic in your marketing. As coach Andrea Feinberg says

So many coaches associate marketing with snake oil when, in fact, it’s simply the way you present your services to your target audience as either the solution to a problem or a significant opportunity. That’s all. Marketing ties all the pieces together into a cohesive and consistent fashion, including interaction with your clients and prospects, the look of your promotional literature and packaging your fees, policies, choices of venues, affiliations and alliances. Ironically, it’s the perception of marketing that stands in the way, not the art itself.

According to Brown-Volkman, there are four main steps to marketing your practice:

1) Decide who you want to coach
2) Create a program your target audience will pay for
3) Create a marketing strategy
4) Learn how to sell

What’s great about this book is that it’s very hands on. Each module has a reading component followed by exercises to complete. You can tell she’s a coach because the book is very ‘how-to’ driven.

The meat of the book is in the chapter on creating a marketing strategy. Here, Brown-Volkman outlines three main ways to market your business: writing, speaking, and networking. Basically, your goal is to demonstrate your expertise in a way that can help others. Marketing is not simply about ‘getting your name out’ but getting yourself and your knowledge in front of people. Each person will have their own preferences on which method they feel most comfortable with, but the point is to pick one track and get started. You can always add more components later, but if you start with too many options, there’s a good chance that you’ll wind up overwhelmed.

For each track, she provides activities you can do to get started. For instance, if you choose writing, she gives you an overview of what’s involved in creating a website and e-newsletter and writing articles, e-books, and e-courses. For each of these subsections, she outlines the estimated timeframe and cost as well as the pros and cons of each method.

That said, this is a marketing strategy, not a how-to guide to implement tactics, so the focus is on what each can do for you and how you might get started with each. Every section is accompanied by lots of questions and exercises to get you into the marketing mindset and get started quickly.

The drawback is that you’re pretty much on your own when it comes to implementing all of these tactics. Each subsection is only a couple of pages, which isn’t a lot of room for hand-holding. The good news is that she does provide a rather extensive reference section in the back of the book with links to helpful websites and email addresses for those that want more information.

The book is also focused extensively on which tactics you should use, rather than creating a cohesive marketing plan that addresses things like your goals and objectives, your competition, your market, sales, follow up, and how to measure your efforts. Yes, she does have brief sections on choosing a niche market and sales, but they are only a few pages and hardly comprehensive.

Overall, this is a good introduction to marketing any type of service-based business where the focus is on demonstrating expertise and building rapport. Brown-Volkman keeps a positive, motivational attitude throughout. It’s a great book for anyone who wants to understand what their options are and is in the marketing planning mode.

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