It makes sense to set up a coach education business to make money; after all, it’s a business, and the point of running a business is to make money and educate coaches.
The lens is simple enough: Will this make us money and educate coaches?
The alternative is to educate coaches and hope the business makes money.
But there is another way where hope is replaced with practice design using bootstrapping principles, scaling only when successful and deemed necessary. Decisions are taken using the simple prompt; Who is this benefiting?
“Centric” means to be at the centre. When there is nothing else to do but focus on the centre, whatever that may be, then you are “centric”. At the heart of all that matters.
I once ran a boxing event company turning “contenders” into “boxers.” We put the student at the centre of everything we did, and when we did that, it changed what we did. With no clue about boxing, I had no choice but to shift from being an expert, controlling what I thought should happen, to focusing on the experience I wanted to provide, and what could happen.
Recurring certifications make sense when a Coach Education company is run as a business. But when the coach is at the centre of the experience, matching the solution to the problem makes more sense. What matters to the coach, is unlikely to matter to the business, unless it’s designed that way.
Coach-centric coach education will feel chaotic, uncertain, and difficult to manage. After all income streams from certification, events, and resources are a proven business model. But so, are customer-centric businesses like CD Baby created by Derek Sivers and written about in “Anything You Want; 40 Lessons For a New Kind of Entrepreneur.”
Using design principles that create an environment that is agile and responsive to the user experience a coach-centric business is modeling the very behaviour we are teaching.
What does success look like?
Active Users: In a flip of the model used by coach education companies in this model the resources are created collaboratively by the participants themselves, with the educator acting as a facilitator. Any resources created are shared with those who are also actively seeking solutions but would prefer to be told what to do.
Ultimately, success is defined by the degree to which the coaches feel empowered, supported, and able to address their real-world challenges through this collaborative process – not by traditional business metrics.
A thriving community of engaged, “active users” is the primary goal. And if that sounds like a tough business metric, it is. But, that might just be the point.
Watch what people do not what they say.