Marketing for Coaches: Yes, You Are Magical and You Still Need to Market

I once stood up in a mastermind and announced to the room:

“I am magical. Clients are finding me easily.”

I meant it.

My business was going beautifully. Clients were getting great results, telling other people about me, and those people were becoming clients too.

One person told two people, and those people told other people.

My garden was blooming.

For the previous two years, I had been part of a community led by a woman with a large audience. She believed in the work I was doing and began referring women to me.

She even gave me a name.

“The Millionaire Maker.”

I loved it.

She would introduce me as the Millionaire Maker. Women would come to me, experience incredible results, tell other women about me, and more clients would follow.

I was riding a beautiful wave.

Clients were flowing. Referrals were flowing. My confidence was flowing.

I would show up, do the work I loved, help my clients create extraordinary changes in their lives and businesses, and somehow the next client would appear.

It felt effortless.

As my coach talked about the things we could be doing to market our businesses, I remember thinking to myself, I don’t need to do all of these things. Clients find me.

For a few years, the evidence around me supported that belief.

So, quietly, I made a decision.

I stopped marketing my business.

I stopped consistently sharing what I was doing. I stopped talking about the results my clients were creating. I stopped tending the soil that had created all of that beautiful growth in the first place.

I simply enjoyed the flowers.

Until fewer of them appeared.

Eventually, the referrals slowed to a trickle, until they finally stopped altogether.

Facing the Fear: Marketing Isn’t Your Enemy

As the referrals disappeared, I felt the fear rising.

Around that time, an email arrived from a marketing company.

The message was essentially this: if you have built your coaching business on referrals, you don’t have a predictable business. Without a repeatable system for attracting clients, your business is vulnerable.

It landed at precisely the right moment.

Or perhaps the wrong one.

Oh my gosh. They’re right.

I knew a great deal about business. I have a business degree. I had studied marketing at university. I had successfully built a coaching practice. My clients were creating incredible results and raving about the exponential increases they were experiencing in revenue.

In that moment, all of that knowledge seemed to disappear into the background.

I pulled out my credit card and hired the company.

I spent a significant amount of money and placed my faith in their system.

They’ll do the marketing. I can do the coaching.

That sounded wonderful to me.

I have always loved the work I do with clients. Give me a human being who wants to unlock more of her potential, and I am completely at home.

If someone had offered to take sales and marketing away from me, I would happily have handed them over and returned to coaching, teaching, learning and serving.

So I put all my eggs into this new basket.

For six months, I trusted the system.

One client came through during that period, which essentially covered what I had invested.

Another woman I met through that outreach stayed connected with me. At the time, she had been very clear:

“Suzanne, I don’t need your services, but I’m happy to chat.”

So we chatted and stayed connected.

Later, my first co-authored book, The Millionaire Codes, came out. She attended the book launch, read more of my story and got to know me differently.

Eventually, she asked:

“Suzanne, do you work with clients like me?”

“Yes, I do.”

She became a client. We worked together for a year, and she created wonderful results.

Something about that experience stayed with me.

The system may have introduced us.

The relationship mattered.

My story mattered.

My willingness to say, “Yes, I can help you,” mattered.

I mattered.

The Story Growing Beneath the Surface

Over time, I began to recognize a pattern that had been growing quietly beneath the surface of my business.

I had spent years telling myself:

I suck at marketing.

I don’t know how to market.

Marketing isn’t my thing.

Those thoughts had very deep roots.

As a little girl, I absorbed messages about being seen and heard. I learned about staying small, being good and keeping quiet.

Later, experiences in my first marriage reinforced my desire to stay safely behind the scenes.

Service felt comfortable, while visibility felt very different.

So I found ways to serve without being too visible.

Years earlier, when I ran a networking organization for female entrepreneurs called Pinkpreneurs, I could happily put on pink, talk about Pinkpreneurs and promote the community.

Pink became a wonderful place to stand, and it also gave me somewhere to hide.

I could promote Pinkpreneurs without fully promoting Suzanne.

I could talk about everyone else without saying clearly:

“This is who I am. This is what I do. This is how I can help you.”

The pattern changed shape over the years.

First, I hid behind a brand.

Then I hid behind referrals.

Then I hid behind a marketing company.

Each version allowed me to stay close to the work I loved while keeping myself a little farther away from the light.

A flower will naturally grow toward the light.

Somewhere along the way, I had learned to grow around it.

How Visibility Helps Your Coaching Business Bloom

Several years ago, I did some personal work around visibility with another NLP coach.

Something began to shift.

Later, I found myself sitting in a marketing coaching group, learning specific marketing methods.

I remember listening and suddenly thinking:

Huh. I know this.

I realized I knew far more about marketing than I had been allowing myself to acknowledge.

I had studied it. I had practised it. I had built businesses.

I knew how to connect with people. I knew how to communicate. I knew how to listen. I knew how to help someone understand what was possible.

I could do this.

Marketing began to feel simpler, and visibility began to feel more natural.

I started showing up differently.

Then one day, I received evidence that something inside me really had changed.

Saying Yes to Marketing for Coaches

I was at a networking meeting when a woman approached me.

“I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about working with you.”

There had been a time when I would have delayed, suggested we talk another day, or second-guessed whether she really needed me.

This time, I looked at her and calmly said:

“Great. Let’s figure out how that can work.”

That was it.

We connected. We met. We talked.

I told her my price, which was significantly higher than I had charged in the past.

It felt easy.

She became a client and created a great result.

I remember how beautiful that experience felt.

The tension had softened. The second-guessing had quieted.

I trusted myself.

Yes, I can help you.

Yes, we can work together.

Yes, this is my price.

I could simply be myself, connect with her, and allow the conversation to unfold.

Your Work Deserves the Opportunity to Be Found

Perhaps you recognize some part of yourself in my story.

Maybe you love doing the work and would happily give the marketing to someone else.

Maybe clients have always arrived through referrals, so actively talking about what you do feels unnecessary.

Maybe you have quietly decided you have enough.

Maybe you have a beautiful business growing in your garden, while some of its most extraordinary flowers remain tucked behind the leaves.

There is someone out there who needs your particular brand of help.

She may need your service, your product, your expertise, your perspective, your creativity or your way of seeing a problem she has been unable to solve alone.

Visibility gives her an opportunity to find you.

When you reconnect with who you really are, something beautiful can happen.

You begin making choices that feel more natural.

You share your work.

You speak about the results you create.

You allow people to see what is growing in your garden.

You make the invitation.

The right people have an opportunity to step closer.

As you give yourself permission to take up more space, you create room to blossom.

You become more visible.

You become more available to the people you are here to serve.

You allow your business to grow alongside you.

I think back sometimes to that woman standing so confidently in the mastermind announcing:

“I am magical.”

I smile when I think of her.

I still agree with her.

I would simply walk over, put my arm around her and add:

“Yes, Suzanne, you are magical and you still need to market. You can be both.”