How I built my coaching business
What if you dream of “one day” building your own business. In this post I share my journey of building my profitable, low-stress coaching business.
How I built my coaching business.
I get this question a lot.
Although this topic falls outside my focus area, in this post, I’ll try to answer this question. If you are here for consulting content, apologies for this deviation.
I will describe how I chose the business idea, how I tested it, how I built and launched my program, and finally, how I market and sell it.
But first, let me remind you what my business is.
I help MBB consultants to achieve high performance and become confident operators.
I specifically focus on coaching experienced hires who joined consulting in their 30s. I believe these consultants need the most help.
How do I know it?
Well, that was my journey when I joined McKinsey at 34. It was extremely difficult, full of sacrifice, struggles, and pain. But at the same time, this experience was highly rewarding and transformational.
Now, I help my clients to minimize the negatives and maximize the positives in this journey.
How’s my business going?
I make more money than I used to make as an AP at McKinsey. I work 20% of the time I used to work before. And I have zero instances of stress.
This is a lifestyle business for me. It doesn’t feel like a job. It feels like a hobby I enjoy doing every day.
I have a lot of free time, and now I can spend it with my family. It’s something I missed out on when I was a consultant working 14-16 hours a day and traveling 200 days a year.
At the time of writing, I have more than 70 MBB consultants in my coaching program. I support them on all consulting-related issues, and often beyond that.
How did it all start?
It all started in 2023 when I didn’t get my partner promotion at McKinsey.
I was doing fairly well as an AP in Manila, the Philippines. I transferred here as part of the McKinsey strategic transfer program.
But as you may recall, at that time, the consulting industry was experiencing a severe crisis. Consultants were fired left, right, and center. The bar for partner promotion was raised dramatically, and apparently, I didn’t meet it.
Not a big deal on its own. But that was the first time I understood that the ratio of pain and gain stopped working for me. I decided that another year or two of AP life didn’t make any sense for me.
I was confident I could make comparable compensation outside of consulting without all the hassle and stress.
To be clear, I thoroughly enjoyed my time at McKinsey. It was an incredible journey full of adventure and excitement. But that was the time to do something else.
That’s when I started to think about what else I could do.
First, it was very clear to me that I no longer wanted to work for another employer. I just couldn’t imagine reporting to someone else again.
That’s how I narrowed my solution space to building my own business.
How did I decide on what to do?
Like a classic McKinsey consultant, I started with an analytical approach.
I created a long list of business ideas. These ideas ranged from simple to even grandiose ones.
But at my age, I also knew myself very well. I knew that the new business couldn’t be just about making money. Otherwise, I would lose motivation and not do it well.
I wanted to find a way to do something I was good at, something I enjoyed, and that could also earn me a good income. Basically, I was looking for my Ikigai, a Japanese concept of discovering one's true purpose.
First, I asked myself: “What do I do best?”
Apparently, the answer was on the surface all that time, for many years.
At McKinsey, my spike was coaching consultants. That was something I really enjoyed doing, and I did it pretty well. And the results were undeniable.
But I wasn’t sure that people were ready to pay good money for that. Good enough money to make it economically sustainable as a full-time business.
So the business model was not clear to me. At the end of this post, I will share some of my thoughts and insights on selecting the right business model for my coaching business.
That’s why, as a risk-averse person, I wanted to fully test this idea before committing to it and leaving my high-paying job.
As a father of four kids, I had to be responsible in my actions. My wife was super worried that I had gone crazy and it was some kind of midlife crisis.
I started my first phase: testing.
Testing
I followed the common advice for startups.
Create a simple landing page and test whether there is any demand for my offering. Fortunately, I used to be a software developer in my past. Setting up a landing page was not difficult.
Then, I wanted to test it with real consultants to see how they would react to my offering. I sent an anonymous email to 10 newly hired consultants at McKinsey.
Two consultants made a payment!
Wow, that was an encouraging start! That gave me some initial confidence that my product might have solid demand.
As the next step, I started writing about my business on Reddit and Substack.
On Reddit, the reaction was almost immediate. A few of my posts have gone viral with hundreds of thousands of views and hundreds of likes. That gave me another data point to feel optimistic.
Reddit was good at the beginning, but then I decided to stop using it. It was so toxic that it made me depressed. Therefore, I decided that posting on Reddit was not worthwhile.
On Substack, the growth was slow but steady. I liked this platform because it allowed me to accumulate the critical mass of content in one place. It has the functionality of a newsletter and a personal blog in one platform.
Then, one Bain partner pledged $100 to support my writing. The pledge is a commitment to pay for the subscription when it becomes available. That was an amazing boost in my confidence.
Here’s the message I received with the pledge.
Payments on my landing page and the pledge on Substack were significant market signals.
I knew a very important marketing truth:
Asking people what they think about the new product is pointless. They can say random things. But people spending real money is an important positive signal.
That’s when I proceeded to my next phase: customer research.
Customer research
Talking to real clients was a critical step.
I didn’t want to waste time building something nobody wanted.
I was afraid of falling into a product-led development approach, where people spend months and months building something customers didn’t want.
I wanted to co-create together with my clients what they actually wanted.
As a first step, I decided to speak with at least 50 MBB consultants to research their challenges and needs.
It was challenging, but it ultimately proved to be the right strategy. My ideas about what I wanted to build radically changed after I spoke with my potential clients.
But how to make 50 MBB consultants speak with me?
I started reaching out to MBB consultants on LinkedIn.
Initially, I felt extremely awkward sending cold messages to people asking to talk to me. And of course, they ignored me.
This was the most difficult period.
Just imagine, it took me 2.5 months to speak with just five consultants. And there was a period of 1.5 months when I didn’t have a single client call. Overall, it took me 5.5 months to talk to 50 consultants.
Three times I wanted to quit. I felt stupid doing this, believing this was a dumb idea. And the whole thing was a big mistake.
Only one idea kept me going.
I imagined telling this exact story many months later. I kid you not, that’s what I was thinking. And I imagined how I would tell about this difficult period and how I persevered, nevertheless.
And that dark period made my story only more interesting. The harder it was, the more interesting the story was.
But then, the inflection point happened.
Suddenly, consultants started reaching out to me themselves. I started receiving lots of positive feedback and comments. People could relate to the stories I was writing. As a result, it became much easier to get people to talk to me. And I learned a lot from these calls.
Number of customer research calls and inflection point.
I love this chart because it shows that things in life can be non-linear, especially in the beginning. And great things can happen if you apply sufficient effort and time.
Later, I realized that when I thought nothing was happening, I was actually building a critical mass of credibility and trust with my potential clients.
Once that period was over, I began receiving a steady stream of requests.
Selling
You know, selling was my biggest fear.
I was dreading the moment when I had to sell to clients. What if they reject me? What if I look stupid? What would they think about me?
But then something unexpected happened.
On my 45th call, I was talking with a BCG consultant. Suddenly, he asked how he could pay me for my coaching support. That was completely unexpected because I was not selling anything. It was just a research call.
I explained to him that I didn’t have my product yet. But he was adamant. He insisted on hiring me as a coach because it was urgent for him. That’s how my first sale happened.
That was a profound insight for me.
Apparently, if you understand your clients’ pain and struggles, and they trust you can help them effectively, people will be willing to pay you without needing to use any pushy sales techniques.
At that moment, my fear of selling disappeared.
I understood that I am helping people in need who face extremely difficult challenges, and nobody can help them better than I can.
Launching
My launch strategy was very simple.
I told my clients that I didn’t have any product yet.
But I shared my plans for how I wanted to build it. And I offered to co-create that product together with them.
Seven people liked my proposition.
They were not buying my product. They were buying my help.
We had weekly calls when I was talking about important concepts. Later, I turned these videos into the first version of my Playbook. Of course, I iterated many times to improve it over time. But as you can see, I started simple.
Also, we tested new practical exercises. I assigned consultants tasks to complete, and they executed them. Then, I provided feedback on their work and suggested ways they can improve their performance.
That’s how I built a series of exercises to test and practice problem-solving and slide-making skills.
I built my program based on the needs of my clients.
The best part is that the business became profitable from day one.
Marketing
How did I find my clients?
My main marketing channel was LinkedIn. It’s easy to find MBB consultants there.
I like the joke that illustrates it:
“How do you know if a person works at an MBB firm? Don’t worry, they will approach you and tell you about that.”
Getting into an MBB is such a big career achievement. It’s only natural that people want to share that with others. And LinkedIn is the best platform for that.
How do I do it?
I write about MBB consultants’ pain points and struggles. I offer potential solutions, best practices, tips, and tricks.
Storytelling is an important part of my marketing approach. Over time, I realized that people relate to the stories much better than to anything else. I often share my own stories or stories of my clients, anonymously, of course.
I had to learn how to write for LinkedIn.
It was not natural for me. It requires a certain way of writing to grab people’s attention and connect with them fairly quickly. In the world of attention deficit, it’s a distinct skill I had to learn.
And here’s the biggest insight I got from writing online:
People don’t care about your solutions until you show them you understand their pain.
I see many people make one common mistake. They pitch their products. They try to impress with credentials. They try to convince through logic. But that doesn’t work very well.
In the world of constant noise, people just don’t see it.
That is why in my post, I make sure I talk about the pain my clients experience. I show them that I know exactly how they feel because I was going through the same experience.
I spell out what they feel. I talk about things many people prefer not to speak about. That’s why so many consultants can relate to my messages.
I also write in a very specific and honest way. This way, I show my clients that I know what I am talking about. I show my deep knowledge and expertise. That’s how I build credibility and trust.
Business model
Choosing the right business model was the hardest problem I had.
For a long time, I couldn’t quite figure out how to make the coaching business economically sustainable.
The numbers simply didn’t add up. I couldn’t find the right combination of things to work well in terms of demand, supply, and pricing.
Here are a few problems I noticed.
Target segment
Why did I choose MBB consultants as target segments?
There are a few reasons for that.
First, relevance. That was my journey and experience, so it was easy to communicate pain and solution to my clients. It makes it super credible and relatable.
Second, it’s a well-defined, distinct segment with clear pains and needs. They have serious challenges that need immediate solutions. As my friend likes to say, it’s a pain-killer problem, not a vitamin one. It must be solved, it’s not a nice-to-have.
Also, these are mature, highly intelligent people. They understand that to get results, they must invest in themselves. And also, they have a higher capacity to pay, which is not a small factor in the business model.
But it was not all sunshine and roses.
Segment viability
MBB consultants are extremely demanding and suspicious. It was a big concern for me. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to build credibility and trust. That’s when I was thinking hard about segment viability overall.
When I looked at the competition, I noticed that my segment of serving active MBB consultants was wide open.
That was encouraging news. That meant no competition for me.
But then I got suspicious. If nobody is working in this segment, maybe it’s not viable. Too small, too difficult to serve? That’s why I spent so much time in the text phase making sure that I was not mistaken.
But now, after many months working in this segment, I realized it’s just too difficult. Many experts choose not to do that.
That was good news for me because it became my strategic moat with higher barriers to entry.
Strategic focus
Another thing I noticed was that other experts were spreading themselves too thin. They would do everything. One person can help with recruiting, performance, finding career exits, and other things. Basically, they were masters of none.
I decided to focus on just one niche segment. I decided to make my extreme focus a strategic advantage.
This enabled me to be the leading expert in this segment, offering the most tangible and practical support. Basically, I don’t have any competition.
Economics
The economics were the biggest problem.
First, I looked at the online courses business model. But very quickly, I realized that it didn’t work well for me. The low-ticket price model was simply not applicable to my small niche segment. I just don’t have enough clients in my segment to make it work.
Second, I looked at a traditional 1-1 coaching paid hourly. This business model has been in existence for centuries in the professional services sector. But that also didn’t work well for me. It was not scaling well. My time would become a bottleneck very quickly.
That’s why I created my own hybrid business model.
In my coaching program, I created a combination of leveraged knowledge and personalized coaching support.
It’s the best of two worlds: online courses and 1-1 coaching. It can be scaled much better, but it also has the personal touch MBB consultants need so much for effective development.
Pricing
And finally, I figured out the pricing question.
I don’t sell my time. I sell transformation for clients. This way, I move away from an hourly pricing model and I can use value-based pricing. And I regularly increase my price because demand is high and capacity is limited.
It all resulted in a high-ticket, low-volume business model. This business model works very well for me to make my work economically sustainable.
Personal risks
And finally, it was a massive change for my family.
My wife was freaking out that I was making a huge mistake. And she had every right to be worried, as a mother of four kids, she was worried about their well-being.
To calm down my wife, we agreed on the following.
If I couldn’t earn the same monthly compensation I used to make at McKinsey, I would return to corporate employment. But if I make that, I will be completely free to do whatever I want with no questions asked.
Now, many months have passed, and my wife is no longer nervous. She understands how my business operates. She has access to all my operational reports. And I am free to do whatever I want without any questions asked. Win-Win.
Closing
I hope this post was helpful for you. I know some of you who are reading might consider doing something similar. You might have some unique expertise you want to monetize. And now is the best time in history to do that. There are so many opportunities, platforms, and tools making it possible to do.
If you are an MBB consultant and want to improve your performance through personalized coaching support:
We will discuss your pain points, challenges, and aspirations. No strings attached, just straight answers to your biggest questions.
If you want to learn more about my coaching program, read this post:
The coaching program for MBB consultants.