The tools that saved me five years ago are almost entirely obsolete. That might be the best news I’ve had all year.
Later this week, I’ve been invited to speak with a cohort of coaches who graduated from the Newfield Network last year, and one area of interest is how I launched and run my practice. This is a timely topic for me, as I’ve been reinventing the back office. It’s fascinating to compare my experience from five years ago with what a new coach faces when launching a practice today. And these changes aren’t unique to coaching. There are commonalities for everyone I work with.
Two Kinds of Coaches
I broadly separate coaches into two groups. The first group is coaches who choose coaching as a profession because it’s their passion. They recognize that they love coaching. They love to help people learn and grow. They need to get paid to coach, but that comes second to doing what they love. About 80% of the coaches I’ve met fall into this group.
The second group is drawn to coaching primarily as a business. They focus on building a profitable practice, and the operational side comes naturally to them. In my anecdotal experience, that’s the other 20%.
People in the latter group tend to be good at the operational part of running a coaching business. Their focus on revenue aligns with building a website, selling services, invoicing, etc. At least, that part of solopreneurship isn’t a major barrier to their success.
Those in the former group, on the other hand, usually just want to coach. I know I do. Many loathe the non-coaching aspects of the business. And in many cases, they have no experience in this area. This becomes a huge barrier to their success. Building a website, developing collateral, generating invoices, even tracking their coaching hours drains them.
Launching My Practice
I’m definitely in the first group. I would love to just coach and not worry about the operational aspects of the business. Of course, I don’t have the luxury. I had the advantage of a broad background in software development, sales, and product management, plus a love of productivity, organization, and efficiency. These talents served me well as I built the scaffolding to support my business on the cheap.
I developed a sophisticated CRM system in Microsoft Excel. I knew the fundamentals of managing a pipeline of coaching opportunities and the rigor it takes to follow up. I built checklists and recurring to-dos to make invoicing and publishing my blog easy and repeatable. I built my own website using GoDaddy.
I watched many of my coaching peers struggle with these things. I led a session for my Newfield cohort, which I dubbed “The Organized Coach,” where I walked through all the components of my back office and shared templates so everyone could use them.
I considered turning this into a workshop and a coaching service. I never did. My conscious mind knew this wasn’t the kind of work I wanted to do. My intuition also told me these tools would be short-lived.
If a new coach asked me for advice on how to launch their practice today, I would not even show them this course. It’s almost entirely obsolete.
Launching a Practice Today
One key lesson that has stuck with me since the early days of leadership is playing to our strengths. Design your work so you do more of what you love, and less of what you loathe. Often, when we loathe something, someone else on our team loves doing it. A good leader distributes the work focusing on people’s strengths. In product management, when it was time to analyze the customer satisfaction survey results, I took that on. I loved diving deep into a spreadsheet and finding the patterns. Most of my peers did not enjoy it.
In my coaching, the systems I’ve put in place make the things I loathe more efficient and less painful. But I still loathe them.
Since returning from EDUCAUSE, I’ve had the gift of solitude and more space to engage my wizards and think strategically. My relationship with AI has undergone a paradigm shift as Claude continues to evolve. I’m realizing that most of what I loathe about running a business is routine and monotonous, and Claude can do it more accurately, reliably, and efficiently than I can.
It started innocently enough. I had the idea of putting up a simple website that chronicled where I was traveling next, because my friends keep saying, “I can’t keep track of where you are.” I told Claude I wanted it to build and maintain such a site for me, and asked it to recommend a platform like Squarespace.
To my surprise, Claude told me that if I truly wanted it to handle publishing and maintenance, we could do it for free using GitHub and Cloudflare. About an hour later, Claude built a site that not only listed my upcoming travels but also kept a ledger of where I’ve been, and it walked me through the technical details of publishing it. The Wanderment Tour was born.
The obvious next question was whether Claude could do the same for my company website. Yes. Yes, it can. Claude created two versions for me, one with a fresh look-and-feel that preserves the current content and navigation, and one with a bolder reimagining. I got feedback from several close friends, Claude and I iterated, and we published it last Saturday.
When I refreshed my website in 2023, I did most of it by hand. I waded through WordPress templates trying to find something I liked. I built it by hand. I updated content. I struggled with a clunky UX. I paid an expert to handle some of the technical details. It was time-consuming. It wasn’t much fun. I resented my poor UX skills, but didn’t want to pay thousands of dollars for someone else’s UX expertise.
That process started in April 2023. The new site was finally live in January 2024, after nine months.
For the new website, the process took nine days and cost me nothing more than my $20/month subscription fee.
Publishing my blog has at least 20 steps. I publish to LinkedIn, Substack, and my website. There are formatting glitches on each one. I check for insensitive content. I check that the links work. It’s tedious and time-consuming, but it's important to deliver a professional, polished piece of writing. Last week, I walked Claude through the process and had it do each step. I checked each result and corrected it. Now that’s a skill. When this one goes out, Claude will lead, and I’ll still check each step before we commit. After a few posts like that, Claude will probably handle it all without me needing to review.
Invoicing is next. Claude will generate them, draft emails, and I’ll review them for accuracy and send them myself.
The Role of AI
My advice to anyone is to think critically about where AI makes sense in your life, both professionally and personally. AI will never write my blog posts. That would defeat the purpose. But AI can automate the mechanics of posting and give me feedback if I’ve written something that could land poorly, or warn me if I’m about to post on a major holiday.
AI can be a powerful tool for offloading many tasks you loathe. This shouldn't include authentically human tasks. AI shouldn’t write your term paper for you. AI shouldn't email your friends and family for you, checking a connection box without actually connecting, or do anything that requires genuine human connection. But it can still take on plenty of grunt work.
Putting It Into Practice
Keep a log for the next week. Make a note every time you discover an activity you love, and every time you find one you loathe. At the end of the week, review your notes and see if there’s anything you loathe that could be delegated to AI or to another colleague. If you’re stuck, you could ask AI to weigh in. I didn’t know AI could build and maintain my website until I asked.
Tales of Wanderment
Dolphins, Dogs, Hawks, Herons, Fox, Bunny, and a majestic Turtle.
