Hello and welcome to the Business of Executive Coaching podcast. I'm your host Ellie Scarf. So here's what I bet you know already.
I bet you know what sort of business you want to build. I bet you know lots of different ways of marketing and marketing strategies, and especially if you listen to this podcast, I bet you know a lot of the things that you should be doing and shouldn't be doing to grow your business. I bet you know a lot of the theory about what to put in place for consistent business growth.
I bet you know you need to post on LinkedIn. I bet you know that you need to do warm outreach. I bet you know a lot and maybe more than you realise about business growth.
And if you don't know those things, I bet you know how you can find them out. You can get a coach, someone like me who's distilled it into just the information you need. You can read books, you can listen to podcasts, you can ask your AI agent.
So probably you don't have that much of an information problem, right? Now that's not exclusively the case because if you're just starting out, you may have things you need to learn. But most people I speak to, even in those early days, the information gathering is the smallest piece of their problem. It's not there.
It's not really the issue that is going to hamper them in their business. Not really. What most coaches actually have is an implementation problem or, if I were to reframe, an implementation opportunity.
And this might be a little confronting for coaches like you and I because what do we do? What do we like to do as coaches when we feel uncomfortable? Well, often we like to go and learn something new. Sometimes not even something relevant. It might be another coaching course or an assessment certification, or we might go down another theoretical rabbit hole.
And don't get me wrong, I love a theoretical rabbit hole more than the average bear, that's for sure. And sometimes we do genuinely have a knowledge gap, right? And we need to learn. That's true.
But my suspicion is that the bigger gap that I see mostly with coaches is not knowledge. It is implementation. So, for example, you know that you need to do outreach.
You probably even know how to do outreach, warm outreach, but actually doing it, that can feel like climbing Mount Everest or, you know, you might know that you need to show up and post three times on LinkedIn, right? You know you need to do it, but you can find any creative reason to avoid it. And when you do get down to it, it takes you hours because you overthink it, you fall into perfectionism, et cetera. So it really just doesn't get done.
And no amount of knowing that you need to do these things and knowing the theory of how to do them well helps you to get into action. And equally, no amount of theory, theoretical knowledge can translate the ideas and concepts that you know into your business with your market, your network, your offers, your life, right? And no amount of knowledge will help you stay on track and solve the right problems.
So, for example, knowledge will tell you, you know, that you need to build a website and how to build it, but it won't tell you not to spend too much time on it because you have no one in your sales pipeline looking at it.
So unfortunately, knowing what you have to do is the easy part. You've got that probably now. The two trickiest parts and the biggest gaps you will face in your business are firstly, adapting all this knowledge to your business, and secondly, actually doing what you need to do.
So what helps? What really helps is firstly, knowing yourself. What do you need in order to put your knowledge into action? Are you a person who just needs a sniff of the goal to make a commitment to yourself and you're off and running?
If so, I'm deeply jealous. Or are you someone a little bit more like me who needs external accountability, who needs support, who needs, you know, tools and strategies to actually get into action around even things that I'm very passionate about? Because in my experience, this implementation gap is best bridged with a few key things.
One is external accountability. Another is systems and rhythms and habits in your workday and your life that make the doing almost inevitable. Another is a supportive community doing this work alongside you.
And that works whether you like the moral support or you like the competitive drive or, you know, whatever it is that you like. And you might need a coach and a mentor who has walked the path and knows the pitfalls along the way. So those are the things that bridge this implementation gap.
So you can absolutely put those in place for yourself. And I encourage you to think about if you are facing this implementation gap, how many of those do you have? Do you have a system for external accountability? Do you have systems and rhythms and habits that mean those things you need to do happen almost on autopilot?
Do you have a supportive community who is doing the work alongside you? And do you have a coach or mentor or trusted person who has walked this path already and knows the pitfalls and is willing to share that insight with you? So of course, these concepts are really baked into the work I do with my group coaching program for executive and leadership coaches and consultants. It's called the Corporate Coach Accelerator.
And while we definitely provide knowledge in our extensive curriculum, I am so focused on this implementation gap. I think it is the most important thing to focus on. And, you know, really, it is why I want to help coaches actually do what we know we need to do.
If you can see this implementation gap in yourself, stay tuned because coming up in a couple of weeks, I am running a three-day live bootcamp to not only share knowledge with you, but mostly to actually do some of these big important strategic items and to get them totally nailed. I'll be back with all those details soon
And if you can't wait, then book a call right now at https://www.elliescarf.com/bookacall, and we can discuss what you need to get into action and whether the accelerator would be a good fit for you.
See you next week.
