Winging it means doing a little of everything without knowing what actually brings clients in. A leadership coach who is just starting out fixes this with a strategy that fits on one page: one person, one problem, one offer, one channel, and one weekly appointment with her own prospecting. Everything else waits until the end of the quarter.
Why you're winging it, and what it costs you
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A leadership coach's strategy is a set of decisions made once, which says who you talk to, what you sell and where enquiries come from. Until those decisions are written down, every week starts from scratch.
Look at what you have done since you launched. You finished your certification. You rewrote your LinkedIn profile. You posted three times, then nothing for a month. You had coffee with two former colleagues. You thought about running a workshop, then hesitated over the price. Every one of those actions is fine. None of them leads to the next.
That is what winging it looks like: not a lack of ideas, but too many directions open at the same time. The cost is double. First, you cannot tell what works, because nothing has lasted long enough to be judged. Second, doubt sets in. The more you doubt, the more you change direction, and the more you change, the less you can judge. Randomness feeds on itself.
The five decisions that fit on one page
A strategy that does not fit on one page is not a strategy, it is a wish list. Here are the five lines to write, in this order.
- One person. Not "managers" or "senior leaders". One precise situation. The team lead who was just promoted and does not dare to give feedback. The one aiming for a director role who stays silent in the leadership meeting. The one coming back from leave and feeling overwhelmed by a team that has changed. Pick the person whose problem you have lived, or whom you have already helped, even for free.
- One problem, in her own words. She does not say "develop my authentic leadership". She says "I can't get people to listen to me", "I take everything on myself", "I want to move up without becoming someone I'm not". Those sentences go in your profile, your messages and your discovery call.
- One offer. A programme over time, not a session. This client pays for herself: she needs a start, an end and a result she can describe to someone else. "In three months you'll run your annual reviews without shaking" sells. "Coaching sessions" does not.
- One channel. Where that person already is, and where you already have contacts. For a leadership coach that is usually LinkedIn and the network of former colleagues. One channel, kept for a full quarter. The test is not which channel you dream about, it is which one already gets you replies.
- One weekly appointment. A slot blocked in your calendar, the same one every week, reserved for prospecting: writing, following up, proposing a call. What has no slot does not exist. If you are still starting alongside a job, two hours on the same evening are enough to begin, as long as they never get skipped.
How to hold your strategy for a quarter without changing it
The trap shows up in week three. No client signed, you decide LinkedIn does not work, you open an account somewhere else. Switching channels every three weeks means restarting the quarter every single time.
A channel takes time to pay back. The first replies come before the first calls, and the first calls come before the first signatures. If you judge your strategy on signatures in month one, you are judging the last step while the first one has barely started.
What you look at each week, in a notebook or a page of your CRM: who replied, to which message, and what they said. What you may adjust along the way: the words. A message that gets no reply gets rewritten. What you leave alone until the end of the quarter: the person, the offer, the channel.
At the end of the quarter you decide with what you wrote down. Conversations but no calls: your messages do not lead to a call proposal, rework how your exchanges end. Calls but no signatures: your offer or your discovery call need work. No replies at all: the person or the channel is the wrong pick. In every case you change one of the five decisions, never all five at once. Otherwise you are back to winging it.
Where to start this week
Take a sheet of paper and write the five lines. If one line stays empty, that is where you are winging it, and it is the only thing to fix right now.
Then block your weekly slot for the next twelve weeks, before you write a single message. Finally, list ten people who match your "one person" line and whom you already know, even loosely. Your first week of prospecting is writing to them, one by one, in her words.
A leadership coach does not need to do more. She needs the same actions repeated long enough to produce enquiries.
If you want to set those five decisions with someone who has already done it for coaches like you, you can book a call.
