Clarify your top practice-building priorities and next steps with a structured planner built for coaches managing competing demands.
Where is your business energy going right now versus where you want it to go? This planner surfaces the gap.
A coach six months into practice is working with corporate clients, small business owners, and career changers simultaneously. Revenue is inconsistent and every marketing message they write feels like a compromise.
Frame this as a focus diagnostic, not a branding exercise. 'Before we talk about marketing, let's map what the business actually is right now versus what you want it to be.' Expect the coach to resist naming who they don't want to serve - that exclusion feels risky when the pipeline is thin. Name that tension upfront: 'Narrowing your focus won't cost you clients. Scattered focus will.'
Watch the 'Who is the intended customer' section. If the coach writes multiple distinct groups in one answer, they haven't decided yet. Three sentence fragments describing different personas is a different signal than one crisp sentence - the first is avoidance; the second is a decision. Also notice if the 'Why do you offer this' section references the coach's credentials rather than client outcomes.
Read all five answers back aloud to the coach as if you are a potential client encountering their business for the first time. Then ask: 'Does that person know whether this is for them?' The gap between what the coach intended to communicate and what actually landed is usually visible within thirty seconds of that reading. Move to the answer they found hardest to write last.
If the coach is running multiple distinct client types because they genuinely cannot afford to narrow, explore the financial picture before pushing specificity. Severity: low. This is a business strategy conversation, not a coaching problem, but the underlying anxiety about scarcity may need to be named before the worksheet can do its work.
A coach with ten years in HR business partnering has recently gone independent. They are struggling to articulate why a VP of Operations should hire them when there are coaches with more directly 'coaching' credentials.
Introduce as a positioning tool, not a self-reflection exercise. 'What this produces is a set of answers you can test in a discovery call - not the final pitch, but the raw material.' The coach may be tempted to write what sounds most professional rather than what is actually true. Watch for answers that echo their old corporate role rather than their current work.
The 'Why does it offer this' question is the one most likely to produce a genuine differentiator - or expose the absence of one. If the answer is 'because I have X years of experience' or 'because I understand organizations from the inside,' the coach is still thinking like an employee. Look for whether the answer names a client outcome. Also watch whether 'What is the end result for the customer' and 'Why does it offer this' say the same thing in slightly different words - that redundancy is a sign the coach hasn't yet separated their purpose from their value.
Start with the 'end result for the customer' answer. Read it back and ask: 'Is this the result you can actually produce in a three-month engagement, or is it what you wish you could deliver?' Specificity stress-test. Then move to the 'who is the intended customer' answer and ask the coach to name three people in their network who match that description and haven't yet heard this framing.
If the coach is implicitly marketing to their former employer or former colleagues as their primary client base, that's a dependency risk worth naming. Severity: low. Not a coaching issue but a business sustainability one - coach may need a referral to a business advisor if the revenue plan relies on insider relationships that won't scale.
A coach who has been in practice for three years receives most clients through referrals, where people describe her as a 'leadership coach.' Her website describes her as a 'life and business coach.' She is unsure which to lean into and has avoided updating the site for two years.
Use this as a reconciliation exercise: 'Let's find out what your business actually is, based on the work you do, rather than what the website says it is.' Some coaches have let the mismatch persist because resolving it feels like publicly admitting the old framing was wrong. Name that: 'The goal here isn't to fix past mistakes. It's to get the five answers aligned so the next decision you make about your practice comes from a clear center.'
Watch for the coach writing the answers they think align with the referral version rather than the website version, or vice versa. What you want are answers that match what happens in the actual room. If the coach is writing answers that feel like they are about someone else's practice, name it: 'Is this what you do, or what you think you should be doing?'
After all five answers are written, ask the coach to compare them against their website copy - not to critique the site, but to identify the specific gap between the written answers and the live page. The sharpest answer on the worksheet is usually the one the website most needs. End with: 'Which of these five answers, if it appeared on your homepage, would most change who reaches out?'
If the website-versus-referrals gap has persisted for more than 18 months, explore whether the ambiguity is serving a function - some coaches use vague positioning as protection against rejection from a specific niche. Severity: low. Coaching appropriate. Surface the function before recommending the correction.
A coach who has never articulated what their practice actually stands for
Coach BusinessCoach uses frameworks implicitly but has never articulated them clearly enough to explain to a client or sponsor
Coach BusinessA coach whose client experience is inconsistent from one engagement to the next
Step 1 of 6 in A coach is scattered across too many priorities and needs a structured way to identify their highest-leverage focus areas
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