Mistakes of a Rookie Coach
My Horror Story to Help You Avoid Attracting Nightmare Clients
Hey Coaches and Business Owners,
I love my clients but not all are created equal. I made a few mistakes early on and worked with some bad apples. Let me warn you what kind of animal clients are roaming in the wild.
This is a story about one of my worst clients.
Let’s call him Bob.
Bob hired me as his business coach. He wanted help with his newly minted online business, especially on Linkedin to attract more clients. Although I was hired as his business coach, I ended up doing much more: I redid his Linkedin profile, wrote his copy, gave him free templates, scripts, and training, and even created brand graphics for him (what was I thinking?). Plus I did it all for a discount since at the time, I thought I should charge less to help more people. Generally, he seemed pleased until the end of each month, where he always would start acting negative and complaining that he wasn’t seeing more results to get paying clients.
My reaction was to scramble to help him even more. After all, the reputation of a coach is based on results, so I only want success stories. I couldn’t let Bob down!
The fact was that he wasn’t actually doing much work himself. In between our sessions and all the assets I developed for him free of charge, he was lazy. He was also flaky and would try to extend or pause services, which really set back any progress we’d make with his brand. How could he get new clients without consistency?
But the thing that finally pushed me to end our contract was this: After all I’d done for him, he never paid me on time. Month after month, he would ignore his invoice and when I’d mention it, he would say he would pay…but then didn’t for over a week overdue, despite me having already given him a below-market coaching rate!
This really stressed me out, especially when I thought he’d realize how much money I’d saved him by doing assets and copy for him, as well as giving him way more support than per contract. The last thing any business owner wants to do is to chase open invoices.
