As I prepared to complete my ICF certification for my ACC, I was concurrently working on setting up my coaching practice. I have an MBA, but I can testify that this part of my journey has been a whole new level of education.

If you are a coach or planning to become one, you will more than likely have some degree of an online presence. Depending on whom you ask, some say it is an absolute necessity. (This article was written prior to the pandemic – so circumstances have definitely changed!) Either way, one has to make that decision for themselves. Having come from Higher Education, I was accustomed to having systems in place which helped me perform my duties in the various positions I held over the years. I realized that I am the institution. This is the story of how I learned from a very valuable mistake: Websites, sales funnels, etc. are not my coaching business – I am.

As I began the training part of my journey, I was grateful for the section of the curriculum that guided us to set up our businesses. Well, most of it. It definitely gave us the foundation, the “this is how things work when you have it set up.” The terrifying (or exciting, depending on my mindset at the time) was that it was up to me to discover the “it” for myself. I learned a lot in this part of my journey.

After using as much of the Microsoft Office Suite that I could, I discovered that it was not enough. I needed a central place to operate my practice. So I began to network with coaches who were a few steps ahead of me. One word of caution: be careful when you ask people how they do “it.” I lost count of how many spam emails I have received explaining how if I just invest X amount of dollars (usually a few hundred dollars, if not thousands), they would set everything up for me. No such thing, in my experience.