24-06-2025
Beyond Coaching Capability: Grow, Position, Succeed
Coaching managers and project sponsors through change, delivery, and operational demands | EMCC Senior Practitioner |
Starting out in coaching can feel both exciting and uncertain. Whether you've made the move from a full-time role, shifted gradually from another profession or retrained after a career break, you probably feel you have something solid to offer clients: a mix of life experience, professional knowledge and formal learning.
However, once you're in it, the question often changes. It's no longer just, "What can I offer?" but, "How do I help others see the value in it?"
Over the years, through my own practice, leading a coaching platform and working with other coaches, I've noticed a pattern. Most of us move through three big shifts: building capability, learning how to communicate it clearly, and then thinking like a business owner. I've come to think of this as the capability, marketability and entrepreneurship journey. Each stage takes something different from us, and it rarely happens all at once.
Capability: More Than A Qualification
Most coaches leave their training feeling capable. The tools are fresh in your mind, your confidence is building and you're ready to support others. But what shapes your coaching most isn't always the certification; it's what happens next.
Over time, capability becomes something deeper. You begin to adapt your approach based on the client in front of you. Frameworks become quieter, instincts more active. You reflect more. You listen differently.
In conversations with coaches across the platform and in my own practice, I've seen how this evolution becomes a defining shift. What starts as learned technique matures into lived understanding, and often, that's when a coach really starts to feel at home in their work.
The Second Transition: From Capability To Marketability
As capability develops, a second transition tends to follow: turning it into marketability.
For example, many assume that offering a wide range of services will attract more clients. After all, the broader the offering, the more people you can serve. But extensive research into brand positioning and market behavior suggests otherwise. While some clients appreciate breadth, most respond to clarity.
Al Ries and Jack Trout captured this decades ago in their seminal 2001 book, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind. In markets with abundant choice, professionals promoting too many services risk being overlooked. Buyers need to quickly understand what a provider specializes in and why they're the right choice.
That principle still holds true today. Hinge Marketing's 2023 study (download required) of 1,200 plus firms found that high-growth businesses prioritize specialization and brand differentiation as core strategies.
For coaches, this transition often involves choosing a primary specialism: a focus area that reflects your strengths, market demand and personal interest. That doesn't mean abandoning other skills; it means shaping a clear starting point clients can relate to and remember.
Some coaches refer to this as "the feather in your cap." Other capabilities can complement it, but they should support rather than compete with the main message. When multiple specialisms are given equal weight, clients may struggle to see what sets you apart.
This shift in positioning doesn't always come easily. For many, it involves experimentation, reflection and feedback. But in the early stages of growing a practice, clarity tends to be more valuable than completeness. A refined offer makes it easier for the right people to find you and see why you're right for them.
The Third Transition: Embracing An Entrepreneurial Mindset
Even with strong capability and clarity, building a practice requires one more shift: thinking like an entrepreneur. This transition can be especially challenging for coaches coming from employed roles or technical backgrounds. It's one thing to deliver value in a session, and quite another to create the structures that sustain a business.
That means asking different questions: Who is your offer for? How will they find you? Why you? Why now? These answers don't come from coaching techniques alone. They require attention to market signals, pricing, visibility, leveraging platforms and relationship building.
Rita McGrath and Ian MacMillan, in their 2000 book The Entrepreneurial Mindset, emphasize the need to continuously identify opportunity and stay adaptable. For coaches, this might mean entering new markets or testing new ways to reach clients. And Edward Hess, in his 2020 book Hyper-Learning, adds that personal growth and innovation are tightly linked in today's fast-moving environments. Coaching businesses are no exception.
This third transition doesn't require reinvention, but it does ask coaches to shape, test and evolve their practice. That mindset, more than any fixed strategy, tends to separate those who sustain their practice from those who struggle to grow it.
A Perspective That Changes The Question
One idea that helped me reframe this shift came from a past reflection. Most coaches wouldn't expect to mentor a head of state or a global CEO; however, many would feel confident coaching someone in that position. After all, effective coaching isn't about knowing the client's professional domain.
Technically, this is true, but from an entrepreneurial perspective, a more useful question emerges: Why would that client choose me?
This shifts the lens: not just capability, but relevance; not just confidence, but positioning. It asks what truly sets one coach apart, not in terms of competence, but in how they connect with a client's needs and world.
It's a valuable exercise: Imagine the person you most want to work with, and ask honestly: What would make them choose you over someone else? The answer often lies not in your qualifications, but in your proposition, your message and your visibility.
That's the heart of the Capability–Marketability–Entrepreneurship journey. It's not just about being able to coach; it's about being chosen. That's a different kind of growth.
These shifts don't always happen in order; some are quick, while others take more time; but those who grow lasting practices tend to face all three. They stay open, sharpen their message and build in ways that support both their clients and themselves.
If you're standing at a turning point, it's worth asking: Where are you in this journey? And what might it look like to lean into the next step?
Forbes Coaches Council is an invitation-only community for leading business and career coaches. Do I qualify?
