How I Secured My First Coaching Clients (with Zero Online Presence)

So, you’ve decided your skills and knowledge are the perfect fit for coaching. What do you do next? Here’s the step-by-step strategy I used.

I was a marketing leader with more than a decade of experience across sports, education, entertainment, and retail. I had grown trusted brands, personal brands and confidently communicated to communities of tens of thousands. Recently appointed President of my MBA Alumni Network, and in the midst of a career pivot, I was most excited about one thing - coaching. 

The idea of working one-on-one with emerging leaders, executives, and entrepreneurs lit me up. The problem was, while I’d advised CEOs, Board Presidents, Executives and mentored teams for years, I’d never officially coached a day in my life. With no social media presence, no website and no audience, I had to build my coaching from scratch. Here’s exactly how I secured my first clients:

1. Start as a student

While I had built my expertise in personal branding over more than a decade, I started with the mindset of a student. I had some niche coaching qualifications, but none of the major ones. With 3 post-tertiary qualifications in marketing and business, I wanted to take a different approach. 

Through self-directed learning, I devoured everything I could on the topic of personal branding. I read all the books I found by thought leaders in the space - some globally renowned figures, others niche names. I developed a robust understanding of the diverse industry perspectives, as I formed my own and began to see my unique value proposition. I binged personal branding podcasts and YouTube channels. Not just the latest episodes, but as much of the archives as I could to understand the history and evolution of personal branding.

I also ‘skill stacked’. I wasn’t just learning about personal branding and coaching, I was also learning about copywriting, blogs and LinkedIn. While I understood much of this from my career, I was consuming content like I had never worked in marketing at all. I haven’t stopped learning since, but it was important to set myself a deadline to actually start. 

2. Design your coaching program

Coaching and consulting in anything can be a very vague experience. You often aren’t quite sure what you’re getting. While I wanted my coaching experience to be a comfortable, creative and constructively challenging space for my clients, I also strived to deliver this in the parameters of a highly structured program. So, I set about distilling 10+ years of marketing experience into a 12-week coaching program. With key priorities for each week, I designed the program to deliver the outcomes I knew were most essential for emerging leaders, executives and entrepreneurs wanting to build their personal brand. 

3. Personally share your project with your network

As I was drafting my coaching program, I also had coffee catch-ups with key people in my network, at all levels, to gather their feedback on my idea. Was personal branding a topic they had thought about before? Did they see any value in it, or potential issues? Could they share their own experiences?

4. Launch a pilot program

Months before I even announced my move into personal branding coaching on social media, I was planning a pilot program. Using my existing network and some of the people I had shared my program with, I launched a pilot program to a targeted group of professionals and entrepreneurs, covering a diverse range of industries. 

I coached for free first. It took commitment to my cause to show up without seeing a cent at meeting after meeting. But I loved every second of it. Looking back, it still makes the most sense to me to work for free before charging clients. Because as much as you’d like to think it is, your pilot is rarely going to be your best work. The point of a pilot program is to create a small-scale trial run before rolling a product or service out more widely. It’s designed to check feasibility, uncover issues and gather feedback without committing full resources.

5. Personalise your program

While I was coaching the clients in my pilot program for free, I was still aiming to deliver a VIP experience. I created a pitch, designed documents on Canva and personalised individual invitations to each prospective participant. So it wasn’t a complete surprise, I first contacted them to let them know that I wanted to share something with them. 

If you need help crafting your own coaching pitch, I highly recommend Donald Miller’s Building a Story Brand framework. It’s seven unforgettable steps that will change the way you communicate for your brand and business. I asked those I’d invited to respond with three words, ‘Yes, I’m ready’ if they were interested. For busy professionals, this made the process irresistibly simple. 

I celebrated every ‘Yes’ as though they were paid clients - because I valued each participant's time so highly. Following this, I sent each one their personalised Agreement Plans. Less formal than a traditional contract, this was designed to set the tone for the program. I was conscious participants didn’t have financial skin in the game, so I wanted them to feel like it was a serious (and exciting) commitment for their professional development. 

While I had cut back on all my expenses and overheads, I splurged on my client’s onboarding packs and I created videos to complement each topic (this was before I had a YouTube Channel and podcast) and I set up a private LinkedIn community for the pilot program. As we wrapped up, I requested testimonials that would then assist my next steps.

6. Reach out to your existing network

After the pilot program, I reached out to a few people in my network with a text. These were mostly friends that I knew would be perfect for the program and offered them, or someone they knew, a special 50% off special offer and more details if they were interested. Some congratulated me, some ignored me. But for some, it came at the perfect time. Their boss had just spoken to them about personal branding, or they knew someone else who needed it. 

7. Create referral offers

Some of my first paid coaching clients came from referrals from the participants I had coached for free, with some executives, having been through the program themselves, putting forward their own staff.

8. SEO your content

While in my student mode, I also learned search engine optimisation. I didn’t rush to launch my website straight away, but worked on it in the background. I also started writing a bank of blogs, well before I posted my first one. So when I finally launched my website, I had a solid and sustainable SEO strategy to quickly rise to the top of Google. This is how the clients who weren’t personal referrals in my existing network found me. If you want to learn more about the details of how I did this, check out my earlier blog: Stand Out for SEO: How I Rank High on Google (and ChatGPT).

Making business personal. From zero to paid clients

Securing my first coaching clients wasn’t about flashy marketing campaigns, big budgets or instant credibility. It was about curiosity, structure and showing up with value before expecting returns. 

By starting as a student, designing a clear program, and running a pilot with heart, I built trust and formed the foundations for more clients to come. The referrals, testimonials and SEO growth followed naturally. Looking back, the most important step wasn’t perfecting my program; it was leaping to begin and following a clear plan. If you’re ready to step into coaching, remember: Your first clients won’t come because you’re the most polished, they’ll come because you’re the most committed to them and your craft.