This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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How can I transition from corporate to career coaching? In today's episode, a listener with over 10 years of experience in corporate leadership is looking to transition into career coaching. So what are the essential steps they need to take to make this career shift a successful one? Welcome back to Side Hustle School. Thanks for tuning in today.
I love hearing your ideas, knowing what you're up to, and especially when it comes to taking a skill, learning to adapt, transform, develop, translate, perhaps deploy all kind of different verbs, but basically taking something that you already know and using it in a slightly different way, to create or to grow that money-making venture, that's what a side hustle is all about. It's not so much learning a ton of new skills, you might have to learn some new skills, but I believe that everyone's an expert at something and everyone has a lot of valuable skills that they have built up over the course of their life, their career, no matter what stage of your career you're in, and those skills can be used in different ways to advance your own interests, as opposed to the interests of corporate or your boss or somebody else, let's say. So how can this listener or anyone with a depth of experience in a particular area transition to a successful coaching business? There are some unique variables in the field of coaching, it's a crowded field and such. So let's find out, let's tackle it, let's try to give this listener something helpful.
Detailed question coming up right after this quick shout out to our sponsor. [Music]
Hello, Chris, it's Jordan from Lincoln, Nebraska. I've been in corporate leadership for over a decade and I'm strongly considering translating that experience into a career coaching side hustle. Could you walk me through the key steps and tools I'll need to transition into this new role successfully? - Jordan, two things are true here.
Number one, your decade of experience in corporate leadership provides a strong foundation and we can definitely build upon that. Number two, the coaching industry is crowded and many well-intentioned coaches struggle to gain traction, okay? So it's really important to understand both these things and to think how can I in fact use my skill, use my skill as a strength, okay? And I think what you wanna do is think long and hard about what your unique selling proposition is going to be. USP, I know it sounds a little bit jargony sometimes, but with your background, what specific problem can you solve that others can't or that will take others a longer time to get to?
Like what is your superpower in that way? Your USP is gonna be crucial for standing out. You wanna be really clear about it. You want to lead with it front and center. It's not something that's kind of secondary or at the bottom of your about page.
It's like, here's my website or here's my pitch, my social media profile, whatever it is. When I look at it, when a prospective client looks at it, let's say, it's really clear who it's for, what it's about, how you're going to help them. That is the most important thing. That's the key step number one. Key step number two, okay, then we gotta start doing some content creation.
We gotta start thinking about networking and referrals. You gotta start thinking about how do I go from idea to offer? I talk a lot about that in the Side Hustle book. Business ideas on their own aren't worth very much. Business offers are what people purchase.
So what is your offer going to be? That's the next thing to think about. Once you've got that unique selling proposition, here's what's key. Here's what I'm going to offer that's different from other people. Then think about, okay, how do I put this in the form of an offer?
And I encourage everyone to think in terms of offers much more than ideas. The specificity is gonna help you. Your success in this field will largely depend on how well you can differentiate yourself from all the different career coaches out there. So that corporate experience, gonna build on it for sure. It is a valuable skill as noted in the introduction, but we need to think about how you're gonna articulate the unique benefits you can provide to your clients.
Always be client focused, always think about their needs and then go from that to what's the one sentence description of how I'm gonna make their life better. That's my take. Jordan, wishing you the best. Listeners wishing you the best, much success. sidehustleschool.com, lots of resources there, show notes for every single episode.
This one is 2,530. You can subscribe for a free five step tutorial. And of course you can subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen, either on the website or on your platform of choice. New episode coming out tomorrow. My name's Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School.
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From the Onward Project.
