Rating: 
Summary: Marketing your coaching
Review: Fairley & Stout will not teach you how to go about becoming an accredited coach or how to develop the sorts of skills from which you hope to earn a living: these you will have to learn elsewhere. However, once you feel confident enough to set up your own business, this book will become an invaluable source of ideas and information. Fairley & Stout focus on that one strategic dimension which many small businesses skimp upon ... Marketing!
If you are setting up your own business, you will need to demonstrate your competence in your chosen profession - you will need to offer quality goods and services. But building a better mousetrap is never enough. To succeed in business, you have to sell, sell, sell. This may be an alien concept for anyone coming to coaching from, say, counselling, social work, or psychology. Nevertheless, marketing may be the lynchpin in your success or failure.
Fairley & Stout offer an excellent introduction to the arts and science (or is it witchcraft) of marketing. They focus on the specific challenge and tasks of marketing a professional coaching business - the lessons could equally apply to anyone setting up in private practice as a therapist or counsellor - making a primary distinction between personal coaching and executive coaching. They do tend to concentrate on executive coaching - where there is potentially more money - but the lessons are well delivered and highly relevant.
The authors take you, step by step, through the challenges of marketing your business. Note the emphasis on `challenge' - no one in coaching talks of problems! They offer stimulating and coherent advice, page after page.
Well-written, highly accessible, the information is presented in logical fashion, but never as a blueprint. Working in an arena where you will be required to motivate and inspire, Fairley & Stout do an excellent job of emphasising that coaching is a creative business. They offer sound starter advice ... leaving you the scope to hone your skills by creating and re-creating different and better means of overcoming the challenges you will face. Creatively stimulating, this book should tickle your imagination and motivate you to want to succeed.
Of course, the major lesson delivered by the book is that it will be hard work. The authors are realists. You will have to be proactive, you will have to go out there and sell yourself and your services, but they do provide you with a first-class starting block. Excellent book, posing the challenge to go out there and translate theory into experience and knowledge.
Rating: 
Summary: The Ultimate How to in Starting to Coach
Review: Fairley and Stout have gone through the nuts and bolts of starting a coaching business down to how to do and not do your business cards. They tell you what to buy on a small, medium or large start-up budgets.
They also tell you how to get clients and give many ideas and examples. You can very much see Chris Stout's MBA/business experience in this book.
There may come a time when someone writes a better "how to" manual, but when they do they will really have to step up and compare themselves to this book to see if their book rates consideration.
Rating:
Summary: The Ultimate How to in Starting to Coach
Review: Fairley and Stout have gone through the nuts and bolts of starting a coaching business down to how to do and not do your business cards. They tell you what to buy on a small, medium or large start-up budgets.
They also tell you how to get clients and give many ideas and examples. You can very much see Chris Stout's MBA/business experience in this book.
There may come a time when someone writes a better "how to" manual, but when they do they will really have to step up and compare themselves to this book to see if their book rates consideration.
Rating:
Summary: A must read for anyone serious about coaching professionally
Review: From all the books that I've read about coaching, Fairley and Stout's summarizes tons of information is useful way. This is a useful, concrete, and inspiring book. Definitely a must for anybody thinking about doing coaching as a professional.
The book combines many things new business owners in ANY service market must think of, like what legal structure to use, how to determine what the best use of funds are, tips on websites and resources that will save the reader a LOT of time, etc, with details inherent to the field and includes several useful interviews with real professional coaches and gets rights into the details of how to make it happen.
The book also highlights beautifully what coaching is and is not, and will help clarify how coaching works for people coming to coaching from other services professions like consulting and therapy.
If you are considering a career in coaching this book will open your eyes to myths and realities in this exciting field.
Rating:
Summary: This Is an Outstanding Practice Building Book for Coaches
Review: Getting Started in Personal and Executive Coaching provides the specific, on-target advice that a warm, wise mentor would provide to those who wish to build or grow a thriving coaching practice. Based on interviews with 300 top coaches throughout the U.S. and the author's own experience of what really works in marketing coaching, this is a guide that every coach should have on their bookshelf. Well written and packed with specific insights on every page, this book will undoubtedly become a classic for the business side of the emerging field of professional coaching. Even more, the authors provide free practice building coaching to the readers who wish to follow up with person-to-person contact! Excellent!
Rating:
Summary: An Insiders Guide on Creating a Successful Coaching Practice
Review: I saw this book at the recent ICF conference in Denver but waited to buy it. I should have bought it then because I haven't been able to put it down since I recieved it! I am so impressed with the authors grasp of the field of coaching and their ability to clearly articulate how to create a successful coaching practice.Unlike a lot of the other books I've bought, this one really distinguishes itself by basing its marketing recommendations on actual research. The authors conducted a national survey of 300 coaches to find out what financially successful coaches do that financially unsuccessful coaches don't do--the findings are AMAZING! I've been coaching professionally for almost 3 years now. I really wish this book was around when I started because it would have kept me from making a lot of the costly mistakes I did. I also wish my coach training program had included this book in its curriculum because they were quite weak in the area of practice building. However, that's not to say that the book is only for new coaches because I was able to immediately identify over 2 dozen marketing strategies I could start using in my practice. They are now part of my 2004 business plan (which is one of the things this book showed me how to create). The other thing I found to be really helpful were the interviews with the top coaches in the field: Sandy Vilas of CoachU, Mike Jay of B/Coach, Pat Williams of Institute of Life Coach Training, Wendy Johnson of the Worldwide Assoc of Business Coaches, and many others. I give this book my highest recommendation! If you're struggling with how to create a successful coaching practice there is simply no better book available anywhere.
Rating:
Summary: What a business-saver
Review: I was only in the very early stages of setting up my coaching practice and I had completely lost the plot - I had no idea who I was going to coach or what I was going to coach them on, and I didn't know what to do next. Then I remembered this book sitting on my shelf and it has been a life-saver!
I have worked religiously through it and it has really helped me to focus on my services, and my target market. I now have some brochures, a detailed business and marketing plan and I am just looking at revamping my website to fit in with my new direction and to sell my benefits better!
I now have no excuse when I lose momentum, I just need to open my marketing plan and it tells me what to do next!
I would definitely recommend this book to anyone starting a coaching practice who hasn't set up a business before.
Rating: 
Summary: Personal or Business Coaching- Not about Executives
Review: If you are interested in possibly starting a coaching business but are not a professional executive coach, this book may be helpful for you. Most of the emphasis is on what you want verses what your clients may need from you. Although the title is about personal and "Executive Coaching", everything inside the book is about "Business Coaching" and is referred to as such. When it comes to executive coaching, you can't start such a practice just because it interests you and you have some basic skills dealing with people and know something about business. Executive coaching requires significant background in organizational management and leadership, organization development, psychology, and high-level skills in coaching and consulting at the executive level.
For more information about professional standards for executive coaching I recommend downloading the free Handbook of Executive Coaching at the website: www.executivecoachingforum.com
You will also find all free information and tools for the executive coach, executive, and HR professionals.
Rating:
Summary: Personal or Business Coaching- Not about Executives
Review: If you are interested in possibly starting a coaching business but are not a professional executive coach, this book may be helpful for you. Most of the emphasis is on what you want verses what your clients may need from you. Although the title is about personal and "Executive Coaching", everything inside the book is about "Business Coaching" and is referred to as such. When it comes to executive coaching, you can't start such a practice just because it interests you and you have some basic skills dealing with people and know something about business. Executive coaching requires significant background in organizational management and leadership, organization development, psychology, and high-level skills in coaching and consulting at the executive level.
For more information about professional standards for executive coaching I recommend downloading the free Handbook of Executive Coaching at the website: www.executivecoachingforum.com
You will also find all free information and tools for the executive coach, executive, and HR professionals.
Rating:
Summary: The ultimate guidebook for those interested in coaching
Review: So you want to start a new business enterprise as a personal or executive coach? Reading a copy of "Getting Started in Personal and Executive Coaching" is the place you will want to start. This is not just another book on the joys of coaching, but has real life information that you should know before making the commitment. The authors have provided some cold, hard facts about executive coaching including how long it typically takes to get started, how much the average person earns after one year in the business, typical problems getting clients and referrals and what to do about it. The book is a business analysis of the industry from beginning to end. It includes such important information as what you need to know to get started, what you need to know to succeed, how to market, how to segment your market, how to target that segment, financing your business, Internet marketing, using E-zines, and using web sites. Fairly and Stout even include seven secrets of highly successful coaches. This is a complete road map of what to realistically expect, how to get to your goal, and all the steps along the way. If you are interested in becoming a personal or executive coach it is a highly recommended book and the best I've come across to date.
|
