Background: 

The client had a varied career in corporate life and self-employment across a number of different countries and cultures and as a result of her experience, she wished to set up a Coaching practice specialising in a very specific form of coaching aimed at helping people deal with differences in culture.  Despite having considerable personal experience of living and working with the differing attitudes, values and thinking in different environments, she was struggling to get her own business established in a new environment.

Our objective: 

Our objective was to explore the type of services she was offering, identify any new areas she wanted to get into and to define her marketing messages so that she could launch her services in a new market.

What we did:

We started by establishing what her goals were for the business and what the work meant to her personally.   We identified some mental blocks she had with regard to promoting herself and marketing her coaching services so initially we worked on shifting her mindset to develop a new attitude to marketing her business.

After some reflection and adjustment, we tested a couple of ideas on how she might market her business and discovered the client had so many techniques and so much content that it was difficult to summarise coherently. As she continued to think about it and started to work with clients, she realised that she needed to change the specifics of how she was approaching the business - instead of having the very narrow focus of "cultural awareness" she needed to include it as one essential element of a "Leadership" programme.  Having led teams in large corporations and run her own business, she understood exactly what was required of leadership development and typically where organisations fall down in helping develop talent.  Focusing on the types of clients she really wanted to work with, she constructed programmes aimed at developing the leadership talent and skills of staff in the hi-tech industries.

The outcomes: 

The client really explored and developed the ideas and content supporting her Coaching practice, making it more effective for her clients and a better fit with her own skills, interests and abilities.  She continues to use our Coaching to help her maintain focus and keep setting and striving for new milestones.

The benefit: 

As we worked together and as she worked with her customers, the client's confidence in her business proposition grew, assuring her of both the need for her skills and her ability to deliver tools and techniques that would be of significantly more benefit to her clients. Realising she needed to shift from the very narrow focus to a much broader and more comprehensive approach to helping her clients opened up her creativity, giving her new ideas and strategies for how she was best able to help her clients and also market her Coaching services.