60 - Why I Chose to Coach Coaches Instead of Becoming One

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Digital Rapport® Podcast, where you discover how to connect, influence and inspire in the digital age. Welcome to the Digital Rapport Podcast, I'm Jatinder Palaha and on today's episode I'm just going to share with you the story of how I got into the whole kind of coaching space and how I decided to basically serve that industry.

[00:00:27] So when I was at university, I did my placement year at Tetley Tea and I had a phenomenal time, they were so great, I really enjoyed it. That when I finished uni, I went back to them for about three months roughly. And when I went back to them, I was looking obviously for new jobs and I managed to get a interview with Sun Microsystems. Sun Microsystems at the time was a Fortune 500 company, I think it was 162 or something like that at the time, something like that.

[00:00:56] But anyway, I went to them, had an interview with them, got on really well, managed to get a place with them and hence started doing really well. I started to basically just explore different things and one of my interests was the passion for personal development. And I had been involved in personal development for a long time. When I was at university, I did information systems. But for my dissertation, I basically created a emotional intelligence psychometric test. So that was quite interesting.

[00:01:25] That's what first got me involved in personal development about how the human brain works, the way it functions, why we do what we do, things like that. So that fascinated me. And I just carried on with that kind of experience, that learning, that enjoyment, that passion of personal development. I was doing a lot of reading around that, started to study things like NLP, hypnosis, life coaching, all that kind of stuff, just because I was fascinated with the way the human mind works.

[00:01:51] So as I got more and more involved in this, one of my friends started to take note. And we got together on a screening for The Secret. It had just, I think it had just come out around that time. And one of my friends had basically put it together and all of the crew at the time got together and basically went down there. When the actual screening had finished, I had a conversation with my friend and he was just asking me out of curiosity. He said, oh, Jatinder, so I see you're interested in coaching.

[00:02:20] Is that something you're thinking about doing? I said, you know what? I'm not too sure. I like the idea of it. I like it. It's something I'm exploring. It's a possibility. Something new on my list. I wouldn't mind exploring it. And then he says something which basically broke my heart when I heard it. He said, Jatinda, do you know that most coaches are broke? I was like, well, what do you mean most coaches are broke? These people are amazing at what they do. How can that be the case? And he said, you're right.

[00:02:48] They're absolutely amazing at what they do. But what they don't know how to do is market themselves in such a way that they can actually make a profitable business out of it. I'm just sitting there standing, actually. I was having this conversation and I'm just shocked, surprised, thinking, OK, what does this mean now? So he basically just turned around and said to me, Jatinda, if you are thinking about doing that or getting into that space, just know how to make money from it. That was playing on my mind. I said, OK, that makes sense. I will look into that.

[00:03:18] And it was good advice from him because he was a genuine guy, cared about what I was up to. And he said, if you are going to get into this space, just make sure you know how to package yourself properly, basically. That's what he was saying at the time. I didn't know at the time. That's what he meant. But fast forward a couple of weeks, maybe. I'm not sure. Maybe it was a couple of weeks later. This whole thing was playing in my mind because I was learning new things, attending courses, personal development ones, thinking about coaching. Shall I go into it? Shall I not go into it? I really enjoy this.

[00:03:47] I don't enjoy this. All that kind of stuff. And I ended up at a workshop where a speaker from the States was called over, a lady called Janet Schwitzer. Janet Schwitzer, she's the marketing brains behind people like Zig Ziglar, Jim Rowan, Liz Brown, Jack Cranfield. And in one of his famous books, she was part of that project and basically really excelled at it. So she's very good at positioning people, creating expert empires and things like that. And I was at this workshop. It was a two-day workshop and I'm sitting there.

[00:04:17] I'm really fascinated by what she was showing. And she was sharing about how experts can basically package their skills and knowledge and create information products and sell them online. And that just blew me away. I thought, wow, if you can extract that information from people, if you can package their skills, you put it into an online type of format. At the time, e-books was a big thing. Courses is still quite a big thing.

[00:04:44] And package that knowledge, put it online, make that product once, sell it over and over again. Now you've got something that you can leverage and scale. So she started to talk about information products, squeeze pages, sales pages, funnel systems, follow-up messages and sequences and all this kind of stuff. Right. And as I'm sitting there. I thought, right, I can see. I can see how I can bring my passion for personal development, my passion for technology and merge the two things together, serve that industry.

[00:05:14] So that's when I decided. I said, you know what? I'm going to work with subject matter experts, coaches, consultants and authors. I'm going to basically help them position themselves and get online. So I was thinking, I want to become the biggest provider of web services for this industry. As a youngster at the time, that's what my goal was. That's what I put out there. And it was clear that the intensity behind it was really clear. I could see it happening. And I was just blown away by her teaching.

[00:05:39] So she's like someone I consider to be one of my first mentors who coached me into this understanding. Okay. So about maybe a couple of weeks later, it was really interesting. Another friend of mine told me that I'm going to go to a meeting to meet some business coach. And what was funny was her mom had organized this. I didn't know who this person was. She said, oh, there's this guy. He's a business mentor. He's a coach. You've got to make sure you meet him.

[00:06:09] I've organized the meeting. Be there at this particular time. I'm thinking, what? You've just organized a meeting without me? They would tell me like what's going on here. So I thought, you know what? Okay, let's do that. You know, what's the worst can happen? And she told me the gentleman's name. I go online, try to do some research on him. I couldn't find anything on there. Couldn't find anything online. What I did find was a website with a small picture in the middle of just him and it's just his name. And I'm thinking, okay, this is interesting.

[00:06:39] He's supposed to be this big coach or someone and I don't find anything online about him. Anyway, I show up at the meeting and she introduces me to this gentleman. And the first thing I said to him, he just came out. The first thing I said to him was, run your website. It's rubbish. And he just looked at me and started creasing up and said, I think you and me need to have a conversation. So we're there. We're having a conversation. We're sharing what, you know, the friend of mine wanted you to do. And then afterwards he said, let's meet up as well.

[00:07:07] So I think about a week later, I went down to central London, meet him, met up with him. We sat down, we had a coffee and we started talking about what he was trying to do. And this guy had lots of content already created, author of several books. He actually created one of the first ever NLP business books and it was called Talk and Grow Rich. We've heard of Think and Grow Rich, but this was called Talk and Grow Rich. And it was like, I think it was something like this late 70s, 80s that he had actually bought this book out there.

[00:07:37] And when I met the gentleman, he was close to 60 years old. I thought, okay, great. You've already got the content. You've already got information products. Talks, let's set up funnels. Let's get this going. So I started to work on his projects and we looked at one of his projects or which product can we give out for free as a lead magnet. A lead magnet is something that you can basically give to people for free in exchange for their name and email. So you can do follow-up marketing and things like that afterwards.

[00:08:06] So he had a great book and we basically set that up, put it out there and set that up as the kind of lead page. And we would do whatever we could at the time to just drive traffic to that webpage just to collect email addresses. And we did lots of things. It was the early days, learning all about this, reaching out to people on LinkedIn, putting the messages up there, all that kind of stuff. And it just started to grow that mailing list.

[00:08:34] And we grew the mailing list really big and then we started to do joint ventures where we would partner up with other people and say, okay, we'll mail out to our list your products or services and you do the same for us. And basically that mailing list just grew. We just grew it so big that we got it to a stage where we were marketing to those people on that list. We got it to a stage where we were doing events every month in Central London on a boat, boardroom type of setup.

[00:09:00] We would have about 20 people, 30 people sometimes just attending the events, did the workshops. He would turn up, deliver, do his bit. We would do the marketing behind it, capture all the testimonials, all that kind of stuff and started to put it together. And that was like the starting point of all of the stuff that I used to do and learn a lot through that experience. So overall, I've got experience in this space. Literally, as soon as I came out of university, I was in the IT space, worked in the corporate space.

[00:09:29] And then when I was in the corporate space, set up my own business and started to work with local businesses and things like that until I came across Janet Schwitzer. And that's when I niched it to say, I'm going to work with coaching for sort of authors. One, because it was a personal interest. I'd studied the materials as well, go to coaching places, connect to the coaches, learn from some of the best people around the world. And I started to serve that industry.

[00:09:55] So I bought those two passions of personal development and business together, IT, technology. So I bought that together and started to serve the industry. So I did that for many years with a gentleman called Ron Holland and no longer with us, but he was one of the first mentors that guided me through that process that we did a lot of work together. And, you know, we were working through that, building it, growing it, got it to a stage where we were doing really well.

[00:10:22] Got some office spaces in a place to hang a lane and started to do workshops within the premises there. He would then have high ticket coaching that he would offer to them. And we would just grow. We just started to build on top of that, like the internet marketing side of things, YouTube, social media was newish around then. So we're doing stuff on social media. And this was without any adverts, really.

[00:10:48] We just started to do mainly JVs, organic marketing, because it was big back then. And just through that whole process, I just started to then start to attract the right type of people, the people who were subject matter experts and coaches and consultants, newbies, existing people who already had big businesses. And basically started to help them to streamline the whole processes from literally from brand creation all the way to offline workshops and seminars. I just got really good at it.

[00:11:17] So over the years, just being fortunate to hang out with people in the personal development space. So that network of people in personal development is quite big. We could reach out to quite a lot of well-known names in the UK that work around, whether it's mindset coaching, whether it's business coaching, personal development, yoga, hypnosis, coaching, all sorts of different types of modalities that people help and serve others with.

[00:11:45] Because it was interesting, because when I was at the Janet Schwitzer workshop, it was one of those moments where I just thought, I can be a catalyst for these people. I can help them because they were really good at what they do. Absolutely amazing. But what would happen is the technology would create the overwhelm for them. They wouldn't know what to do, how to get set up online. And that's where we would come in and basically say, you know what, you just focus on your core skill.

[00:12:12] Let us take care of the technology and the marketing and everything behind that. And that's how we managed to help and support them. It became the strategic tech team. You know, just literally drop us into your team and we just take care of the tech and you just create content. We take care of the tech. And that became a good relationship with a lot of people that we worked with. So the whole kind of email marketing system stuff was quite new back then as well. There weren't big names. They just started to emerge. They just started to come out at the time.

[00:12:39] So initially, when we were doing this, we didn't know what was out there in the market. So we actually created an autoresponder ourselves. It was simple. When the names and emails were put into the database, it was literally that. It just gets put into a database. And then we would manually create an email to send out to those people. And looking back, I'm thinking, had we just carried on with that? We could have probably had one of the earliest kind of autoresponder systems. Possibly. I don't know. But we did it.

[00:13:08] We then came across a few platforms that were doing it. There was something called Infusionsoft. And that was one of the earlier platforms that allowed you to do email marketing. There was a few others as well. And I don't know where they are now. But basically, we used to use lots of different systems to put everything together. WordPress from here. Email marketing system here. Payment system here. This plugin for that. Plugin for this. And it would work.

[00:13:36] But the challenge was that if something broke, you wouldn't always know straight away. So you'd have to check everything. So imagine doing this for multiple different clients. So as the business grew, as our reach grew, we were setting up systems, implementing them for different clients and customers. And it just got to a stage where it just started to get eventually really messy. It's not like that now. Fortunate.

[00:14:02] We're now in a position where we have an all-in-one platform and system that allows you to do pretty much all of the things that are required from quizzes, sales pages, squeeze pages, the delivery of those to text messages, to scheduling systems, email marketing. Using QR codes, all sorts of stuff. There's a whole bunch of things that can be done from one platform because it's just so much easier to do. So having one platform means it's a lot easier because there's less moving parts.

[00:14:31] And because there are less moving parts, it means it's easier for coaches, coaches to basically scale online. So I just wanted to share that kind of story about how I actually got started and started serving this industry. It was an epiphany moment at an event. I'm so glad that happened. And it's fascinating when you can actually create some sort of clarity within your mind. That quote from Napoleon Hill comes to mind, whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.

[00:15:01] So the idea has to be conceived. But as soon as you believe it, that means it's possible for you to do. And I think that's what happened with myself because I was sitting at that workshop and I was at a crossroad thinking, do I want to go into coaching? Do I want to do this? Is this where am I going with this? And all of a sudden it just dropped. I thought I could stay in this space. I could serve this industry. I could bring my passion for personal development, my passion for technology, bring it together, serve the industry.

[00:15:28] And that is how I basically merged two industries together in order to help and support those subject matter experts. It's so much more deeper into how all of that unfolded. But I just wanted to give you a quick synopsis just so you get an idea of how that came about. If you've got any questions, feel free to reach out. If you're stuck with anything in regards to technology in terms of how to actually get yourself out there, just reach out.

[00:15:54] Because with over 20 years of experience in this space, about to have something that can help and support you. If not, we'll know someone that can actually help you and be happy to refer you along to someone that can help you if we can't. Right. So on that note, just wanted to say thank you and I'll see you on the next one. Thank you for listening to the Digital Rapport podcast.

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