7 Things I Wish I Knew My First Year As A Coach

Launching a coaching business is hard. In fact, it’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. But if I knew back then what I now know today, my journey would’ve been so much easier. Keep watching and I’ll share seven things I wish I knew my first year as a coach.

Hey, it’s Jason Moss. I’m a multi-six figure business coach, and I’ve helped thousands of coaches around the world launch and grow their businesses. And the tips we’re about to cover in this video are gonna be super helpful for you. If you’re a new coach who is just getting started, I also recommend that you download our free client attraction guide that walks through a four step roadmap you can follow to start attracting coaching clients. You can get this completely free, click the link above or below and you can grab that right now.

So the first thing I wish I knew when I was first starting my coaching business is that you’re not gonna feel a hundred percent clear at first. This is one of the hardest things for new coaches to, to really ground into. I myself am a recovering perfectionist. I am the king of spending lots of time overthinking things and overanalyzing things and trying to get it all right. But when I think back to the early days of my coaching business, when I was first getting started, one of the things I wasted so much time doing was overanalyzing everything and, and, and really trying to like, spend lots of time thinking things through. And I had this idea that if I thought things through enough, I would get to a place where I would feel clear, I would feel clear on what my niche was. I would feel clear on the offer that I was building out, whether or not that was gonna work. I thought if I, I just spent enough time thinking, then I’d get there and then I would feel confident enough to move forward.

The truth is that especially in the early days as a coach, it doesn’t work this way. One of the hardest things is that you’re not gonna feel clear when it comes to taking those next steps. You’re not gonna feel clear about your niche, you’re not gonna feel clear about whether or not your offer is the right one. You’re not gonna feel clear about your messaging. The only way that you get clear is by going out there, putting yourself out into the world and trying things and, and getting feedback from other people who are not, you know, your friends or your mom or yourself, but people who you’re actually interested in helping and serving. One of the best things that you can do when you’re unsure is just go out there and start having conversations with your, you know, people who are in your potential niches and just start to feel things out and see, okay, you know, do, do I have something here? Do I, are people responding?

It’s really hard to do this because it takes vulnerability, it takes you being comfortable in the messiness. One of the ways that we hide in the early days is if something’s not a hundred percent clear. If we’re not totally sure, then we, we can’t put ourselves out there. But the, the most successful coaches that I work with are the ones that are comfortable moving forward in the midst of the discomfort of not having clarity. And that is how you get clarity. It’s by putting yourself out there, trying things, testing things, being unclear, and actually showing up anyways. And this is something, you know, if you can really integrate this piece into your business, you’re gonna move forward so much faster. You’re gonna sidestep so many of the, the countless hours that I certainly spent in my business in the early days trying to get it all right.

The second thing I wish I knew as a new coach is that a lot of the stuff that you’re gonna try is just not gonna work. This is also a really challenging piece of the journey. As a new business owner, we like to get things right. I don’t know about you, but I don’t wanna fail. I don’t wanna put things out in the world that don’t work. But the truth is that as a new business owner, a lot of what you’re doing is you’re testing, you’re trying things, and you’re gonna experiment. And some of those tests are not gonna be successful. If there’s anything that’s changed in my business as I’ve scaled from zero to 10 k months to 30 k months to 60 k months to where I am today, it’s not that I’m any better at figuring out what works and what doesn’t.

It’s more that I just feel more comfortable being out in the world and trying things and testing things and accepting that a certain number of those things are not gonna work. A lot of times people are worried like, what are people gonna think of me? You know, if I put something out and it doesn’t land and I’m afraid of what other people might think. The truth is is the nice thing about a a being a new business owner is nobody’s paying attention to you . Like, we have this idea that everybody’s so, so concerned about like what you’re doing, but the truth is like chances are nobody’s paying attention, which means you actually have the luxury of being able to show up and experiment and try things and not get everything right. Trust me, you know, people are not gonna care. People are way more concerned about what’s going on in their life than what’s going on yours.

So just remember, some of the things you’re gonna try are not gonna work, and this is okay. But really one of the biggest things that changed for me when I really started creating more success in my coaching business was rather than trying to avoid failure, I started asking myself the question, how can I fail faster? Really, failure isn’t actually the problem. The problem is when you spend a lot of time building something or creating something and then you fail and you’ve wasted all that time. And so rather than spending all this time building out new programs or you know, all this time thinking through your niche or all this time, refining your messaging, trying to think it all through, start asking yourself the question, how can I get to failure faster? So rather than you spending three months building an offer, what if you built it in three days and put it down into the world instead? Do you even really need to build an offer before you launch it and sell it? Maybe you can just put together a, like a one page Google doc and go, go out there and start selling it and see if people respond to it. And once people actually buy it, then you can go build the curriculum and build down all the backend and figure out exactly what it’s gonna look like. That way you don’t have to spend three months building something that fails. Instead, you can figure out in three days whether or not something’s gonna work. So this mindset of how can I fail faster is ultimately one of the biggest keys to your success. And if you can embrace failure and be in that mindset of how can I get that clarity and that feedback from putting things out into the world, seeing what lands, seeing what doesn’t, and do that as quickly as possible, that’s ultimately over time, what’s gonna lead you to clarity and to success.

The third thing that I wish I knew as a new coach is how important it is to meet people where they’re at. As coaches, we’re usually a couple steps ahead of our ideal clients. For example, if you are someone who is working with trauma healing and you help people heal through trauma, you know how important that is. You know how life changing that is. You’ve probably done your own inner work when it comes to that, and you’ve seen firsthand what that could do for your life, and you’re probably really excited about sharing that with others. But you have to remember, most people, number one, don’t even know what trauma is. And most people aren’t waking up in the morning saying, you know, what I want more than anything else in the world is, is to heal my trauma.

Most people are saying, I just feel like I, I’m depressed or anxious, or I feel like I’m, I’m walking through the world all the time and I get to get triggered by all these things. And that’s where they are. They’re a couple steps behind where you are. So one of the biggest keys when it comes to marketing successfully as a coach, so we have to step into your ideal client’s shoes. And even though you might be a couple steps ahead of them, you have to kind of have the empathy to be able to step into their world and ask yourself, how did they see their situation right now? And what messages are they going to respond to based on where they’re at right now? One of the biggest mistakes that I made in my coaching business early on is trying to show up in market in a way where I wasn’t actually meeting my people where they are, where I was communicating about, you know, things in a way that was like 3, 4, 5 steps ahead of them. And of course, my messages weren’t landing, my marketing wasn’t connecting.

When I started really stepping into to my ideal client’s world and taking off my own frame of reference and putting on theirs and asking myself, you know, how did they see their world? What challenges do they feel like they have? When I get on the phone with them and have a conversation with them, what do they tell me that they really want? And then being able to frame what I do in a way that meets them where they are, that ultimately is when things really started taking off for me and I became a lot more successful. So just remember when it comes to your marketing, the key is to have empathy, to really step into your ideal client’s world and ultimately to create marketing that meets them where they are, even if that’s a couple steps behind where you are today.

The fourth thing I wish I knew as a new coach is that it takes time for momentum to build. It’s one of the hardest things about, you know, being a coach in the early days, it can feel like you’re just showing up and you’re putting yourself out there and you’re, you’re creating lots of content and you’re doing all the right things, but you’re just getting like crickets and it, it feels like nobody’s paying attention to you. And it can be frustrating and demoralizing and you can feel like giving up and it can be like, ah, this sucks. Things are not working. It’s a frustrating place to be.

The truth is, there’s a period of time when you’re launching your business where that’s going to be the case. And what’s really happening is you’re planning a bunch of seats and every time you show up and create a post, or every time you, you market yourself online, or every time you, you talk about what you do, you’re planting all these little seeds and those seeds take time to materialize.

This is not like a overnight thing. I hear from a lot of coaches who are like, ah, marketing doesn’t work for me. And I’m like, well, how long have you been showing up and marketing yourself? And they’re like, well, I’ve been doing it for like two weeks. I’m like, well, two weeks, of course you’re not gonna have results yet. It’s gonna take time. It’s gonna take months of, of really planting those seeds.

The thing about building a business, and this is what I found, you know, after scaling and and launching multiple different businesses, multiple different niches, is the growth. A business follows an exponential curve. You ever seen an exponential curve at the beginning? It’s like you look at it and you’re like, is anything even moving there? Like it doesn’t even feel like anything’s changing and then like a year or two in suddenly there’s this like hockey stick moment where it’s like, suddenly things are really taking off. Every single business that I’ve started has the growth pattern has, has gone that way. And the, the beginning stage of the journey is the hardest part because it feels like there’s not traction. It feels like there’s not momentum. It feels like you’re doing all these things, but you’re not getting results. So the biggest lesson I’ve learned, and the biggest message that I can share with you as a new coach is keep showing up. The most important thing for you to do at that stage of the journey, and if you’re in this stage, I know it can be a, a frustrating place to be, is continue to do the work. Don’t stop showing up.

The reason why, why, why most coaches fail, the number one reason coaches fail is because they stop showing up. It’s really that simple. If you can keep showing up and keep putting your butt in the seat and creating content, even when it’s challenging and hard, and keep showing up and getting feedback from your audience and keep learning what works and what doesn’t over time you will succeed. You could screw almost everything up and still be successful in the long term if you keep showing up. Keep learning, keep adjusting your approach based on that feedback, but it requires consistency and it requires you pushing through that period where it’s like, Ugh, I feel like nothing’s working. I feel like nobody’s paying attention to me. That’s how it starts with 1, 2, 3 people. Then suddenly you look, you look back like a year down the line, you’re like, holy crap, I have a really successful business. So it takes time for momentum to build, be aware of that, and continue to show up in the midst of that process and don’t give up.

The fifth thing I wish I knew as a new coach is that having the right business model makes all the difference in the world. When I first started coaching back in 2016, I built in online business serving musicians and I was selling low ticket courses, you know, they were like $197 or $297. Later on, I transitioned to selling higher ticket programs. Today I sell programs that are thousands and thousands of dollars. I can tell you firsthand, it’s not actually that much harder to sell something that’s $6,000 than it is to sell something that’s $300. And what I wish I knew in the early days is choosing the right business model, choosing the right price structure, and really building my business intentionally based on the kind of business that I wanted to run is super important.

Personally, what I’ve learned about myself is I don’t like having a business with a massive number of customers. I really like feeling connected to my customers, my clients on a deep level. I like being able to experience their transformations firsthand. And so for me, I’d rather have 200 customers paying me $6,000 than 2000 customers paying me $300. It just makes more sense to me. This is not that one’s wrong and one’s right. It’s more like I would prefer having a business with fewer customers that I’m connected with in a deeper way. You might be the exact opposite. You might say, Hey, I just wanna reach as many people as as possible. I, I, you know, I want to impact thousands of lives and I just wanna have, you know, programs that are really accessible so that people can tap in and, and, and be able to work with me in a way that is really accessible. And that’s cool too. It’s up to you. But the truth is, you know, there are many different ways that your business can look. If there’s one thing I wish I learned in the early days, I don’t think I was open to higher ticket pricing. I had a lot of mindset blocks around, like the idea of selling high ticket. I was like, well, no one’s gonna pay me like $5,000. That sounds crazy.

The truth is it happens all the time now, . And it just took some, some mindset shifts and it was as simple as, as me just starting to raise my prices and creating, you know, better offers and deeper offers and better ways for people to plug in. But for years I had this mindset block and I was spending all this time like selling these low ticket programs and it just was a lot of work. And, and honestly, in many cases I’ve found that it’s much easier to run a business where you have fewer customers and you’re selling higher tickets. So I wish I would’ve been more open to higher ticket pricing and I wish I would’ve spent a little bit more time and been a little bit more intentional about exploring the other models that might work for my business. Not just, you know, being kind of in this box of like, oh, I can only sell like $300 programs. Of course there might be some resistance for you if you’ve never sold a $5,000 coaching package before, it’s normal for, for, for you to feel like, oh, you know, is anyone gonna pay me for that? Like, I don’t believe that that’s possible for me, I felt the same way . And so, you know, a lot of this is just about being surrounded with people who are doing that and who are playing at that level.

A lot of this is just the faith of like, you know, you step into that, you start setting the bar higher and people will come. It happens every time. I’ve worked with a lot of clients on making this shift. The message here for you is if you’re not considering high ticket, I would definitely recommend considering it. I think it’s a better business model for, for a number of different reasons. And also just be open to exploring other ways that your business might look and challenging some of those limiting beliefs that you might have around what’s possible for you as a coach.

The sixth thing I wish I knew as a new coach is that not everybody’s gonna be happy with what you do. This is something that’s been really hard for me as someone who really cares about every client that I work with. I want people to be happy with my programs and to have a good experience, and we do our best to try to make that happen inside my business. And at the same time, it doesn’t always happen and it’s not gonna happen for you even if you do your absolute best. No one taught me how to think about this. When I was in the early days of my business, I remember the first client I had who just, you know, was like, ah, I’m not super happy with how things are going. It like tore my heart out . I was like so upset. And the truth is, it’s still really hard for me when I hear from people who say these things. And also it’s normal.

If you look at any business out there, if you go search reviews online for any business, you’re gonna find negative reviews and you can do the absolute best that you can do to deliver a great experience for people. And there’s still gonna be a small percentage of people who are not gonna be happy. So the first thing is just to normalize that this is gonna happen. And so you have to kind of expect it as just a normal of the journey. And also as you grow and scale your business, the percentage of those people that are unhappy is not gonna change, but the numbers are actually gonna grow because you’re just gonna have more clients that you’re working with. So I, I think the biggest thing I’ve learned is not to personalize it, not to make it about me. To also use that as an opportunity to learn and to take that feedback in and to ask yourself, you know, how can I do better?

Rather than getting defensive or, you know, saying, oh, it’s that person’s fault. There’s really valuable feedback there that you can learn from, that you can take and improve what you do moving forward to make things even better for people. And also to do everything you can to make it right. And sometimes that does mean giving somebody a refund. You know, it’s not the end of the world personally for me. Like, I’m not super stingy when it comes to that stuff. Like I, I want people to walk away. It’s much more important for me to have somebody walking away feeling like, okay, like at least I, I feel like, you know, we were able to kind of work together to come up with a win-win versus somebody walking away being like, ah, this company sucks, or This person sucks, not something you want in your business.

So all this being said, not everybody’s gonna be happy with what you do. You have to expect this as a normal part of running your business. And it’s hard, but you can handle it. And there’s a lot of learning and a lot of growth that comes from navigating those challenges too.

And the last thing I wish I knew as a new coach is not to do it alone. I spent the first three years of my business building things basically on my own. And I had a friend who was also running a business, but other than that, like I didn’t hire mentors. I didn’t really invest in any support. And it took me a couple years to gather up the courage to hire my first business coach. I had a lot of scarcity around money. I had this idea like, the best way to to grow wealth was to just save every penny. So I was like really stingy when it came to making investments. And the truth is, that’s changed a lot for me as I started to see the impact and the power of bringing people around me in my corner who could help me grow. You know, I’ve invested close to a hundred thousand dollars over the past two years and into mentorship and support, and there’s no way I could have scaled to multiple six figures without it. Those mentors have been so invaluable for me to be able to g guide and support me and, and answer questions and just help me expand my perspective as to what’s actually possible in my business. It would’ve taken me 10 times as long to figure that out on my own, and in many cases I probably wouldn’t. So you get to decide as a business owner, like which path you want to be on.

And there’s nothing wrong with doing it alone. There’s plenty of people out there that do it. I certainly did the first few years, but I, I grew a lot more slowly than I’m growing now as a result of, of having more mentorship and support. The other thing that I’ve found that changes is when you invest in mentorship and support, you start putting your money where your mouth is. And when you get on the phone with potential clients and sell them on working with you, there’s a different level of congruence that you can bring to that conversation because you’re also walking the walk. And so when you’re charging somebody $5,000 or whatever it is, and you’re showing up to that conversation, you’re not just saying, oh yeah, this sounds great. You’re also like, I’m putting my money where my mouth is. I’m going out and doing the exact same thing that I’m calling you to that congruence, it changes sales conversations.

It makes what you do so much more impactful and significantly increases the chance that somebody’s actually gonna sign up to work with you. It’s pretty hard to sell some somebody else on something that you wouldn’t actually do yourself. And so one of the first things, you know, I ask coaches who are having trouble getting clients, it’s like, well, you know, have you hired a coach yourself? It was pretty hard to convince somebody else to do that if you haven’t actually made the decision to walk the walk. Of course, I’m a business coach, you can take all this with a grain of salt, however you want to take it. like, obviously I’m biased here, but it’s just the truth. It’s what I follow in my own business, and it’s the same thing that I would recommend to you. I think having that mentorship and support, not doing it alone, bringing people around you who can show you your blind spots and help you grow is one of the fastest paths to success. And so you get to decide, you know, do you want to do it alone or do you want to do it with help? Personally, my vote for you today based on everything I know, is if I went back to my first few years of my coaching journey, I would not be doing it alone.

So hopefully these seven things give you some things to think about as you’re starting launching your coaching business. Just some powerful tips and mindset shifts that will make your journey so much easier.

Now, if you’re looking to dive deeper as a new coach, I also recommend that you download our free Client Attraction guide and click the link above or below to do that. Inside that guide I walk through a a four step process that you can apply right away in your business to start attracting two to four coaching clients per month, even if you’re just getting started.

It’s really valuable stuff and it’s, it’s really gonna clarify the journey for you in terms of what you actually need to have in place in your business to start creating success and, and results. Definitely recommend downloading that it’s completely free. Click the link above or below to get that now.

And before you go, leave a comment below and let me know of all of the things that we talked about in this video, which one of the, the tips or mindset shifts really stood out to you as the thing that you feel like is a real opportunity to shift in in your life as you’re relating to your coaching business today. I’d love to hear your thoughts down below, leave a comment and we’ve got so many awesome videos coming on this channel. So if you like this one, go ahead and subscribe down below and you’ll be notified when we get our next videos out. So much good stuff coming, wishing you so much success. I believe in you, you’ve got something really important and valuable to share with the world. So I hope you keep showing up, doing the work and I have every bit of confidence that you’ll succeed. So until then see you in our next video and take care.