Some lessons learned by Julien Smith in his first 18 months as a coach:
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1) Be really specific in who you serve, and only serve those people:
There are a couple of reasons I’ve landed on first-time venture-backed founders:
- There is an urgency for venture-backed founders, one that I’m both familiar with and can connect with.
- People don’t mind higher coaching costs in venture-backed businesses. People outside of venture are more price sensitive.
2) Impostor syndrome subsides once you start seeing results:
When one of my clients raised $40m over the course of 10 months — I was like, ‘Okay, I think I’m providing value to these people’
3) The internal struggle as a coach doesn’t stop, even after 200 hours.
For example: My client really likes a candidate for an important hire. I have reservations about this candidate. They have more information about this person, but I have more pattern-matching as a CEO — I struggle with how much to push in those scenarios.
4) You’re going to spend a lot of time with these people.
Ideally, you should like/respect them
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I’ll be with Julien next week as he does a live training breaking down how he got his coaching business past the $100,000 mark in a short period of time … we go live Tuesday (August 23rd) at 4 pm Eastern, here’s the link to check it out:
