Today I’m excited to talk to Lindsay Doztlaf about how to build a coaching reputation. She is the owner and founder of the Coaching Masters mastermind, the host of the podcast, Mastering Coaching, which is how I found her, and she is a coach of coaches. She helps all different kinds of coaches become amazing with those extra little skills that you need to learn along the way.
Lindsay is here to discuss everything from how she built her personal brand, how she thinks about getting out there, and how she found her first few clients, as well as her thoughts on building your reputation, identity, and your message.
HOW LINDSAY BUILT HER REPUTATION
Brandon Birkmeyer: I think it’s easy once you’ve helped a ton of people and the momentum is already there. However, for people that are still building and getting started, dipping their toe in, and trying different things out, I’d actually like to hear your story of when you were finding your first customers.
What was that process like, and what were some of the things that you encountered along the way?
Lindsay Dotzlaf: I listened to a few of your episodes before we hopped on, just to be sure I knew what I was getting myself into. I resonated so much with what you said, and it was exactly how I built my business. I went out into the world and just told people I was a life coach. I truly just got comfortable saying the words.
STEP INTO YOUR IDENTITY
It’s like the very first step for me was identifying as a life coach and just being able to tell people that that’s what I did, not in a way that I was trying to sell them on, like, “You need to hire me,” but just really going out into the world and saying it.
I went to networking events just to practice saying, “I’m a life coach, and here’s how I help.” I would practice saying it in a hundred different ways and I just would keep making connections.
I remember doing this exercise at one point when I made my first a hundred thousand dollars, I think I just hit a hundred thousand dollars in a calendar year.
I was so excited and I did this exercise where I went back and thought about my first, (I don’t even remember how many) 10 or 20 clients, something like that. I wrote out where I met them because at the time I was really convinced that now that I was making a little bit of money, all of a sudden everything had to change. I needed the best website, all the technical things that I didn’t have.
YOUR REPUTATION GROWS WHEREVER YOU MEET PEOPLE
My coach said, “Hold on. Just because you’ve made money doesn’t mean everything has to change. Let’s revisit where did you meet? Where have you met the people?”
It turns out, where did I meet them? TaeKwonDo, my neighbor, my daughter’s friend’s mom. People I met in my life, no one that I purposefully went somewhere to find a person who wanted to hire me, but just truly being me and being out in the world, living my life, and telling people, “This is what I do.”
RELATED: Build your personal brand with the Content Marketing Starter Guide.
REPUTATION THROUGH RELATIONSHIPS
Brandon Birkmeyer: That makes a lot of sense to me. I wonder if you could even give us some examples if you could remember, of real places that you went. You said networking events, but what were these events like?
What were some of them you had on your list? Are we talking chamber of commerce and networking meetings? Where are we talking about here?
Lindsay Dotzlaf: I made rules for myself because at first I just thought I’m willing to try anything, just go to all of the places, and so I did. It was a lot. I don’t want to say I went to too many, but it was just too many. I had little kids at the time. It was a lot, and so I started making rules like if I don’t like something, I’m never going back.
This is not a knock on this at all, I know people who have so much success with it, but I, for example, went to a BNI, that type of networking that you pay for. I was like, that’s not my thing, I don’t like it, and don’t like to have to bring referrals to other people. That just wasn’t for me.
I went to some that would be really heavy, like a big room full of men all in the tech industry, and I realized, okay, this is not my thing. I’ve just started crossing them off until I made rules.
GO WHERE YOUR INTERESTS TAKE YOU
If there’s wine, I’m definitely going. This might be important to note, I didn’t look specifically for entrepreneur groups or marketing groups, things like that. I was just going to meet other business people to talk about my business.
I would look up things that I was actually interested in. Those are the connections I want to make. At the time those are the people who would have been my clients, normal people, not necessarily entrepreneurs.
I also said yes when my friends invited me to all the places, even places that maybe I wouldn’t have said yes to before, like a network marketing meeting, or things where I thought, yes, is there wine? I’ll be there.
RELATIONSHIPS EQUAL REPUTATION WHICH EQUALS SUCCESS
Brandon Birkmeyer: I love that. That to me is actually reputation building. Yeah, it’s networking, I get that, but it’s the relationships. That’s the part of branding that we don’t get to talk about a lot, the relationship side.
I want to talk to you now about branding stuff. How would you define branding in the coaching space? What is important for success?
Lindsay Dotzlaf: When you reached out to me, my first thought about branding (which is so funny, because that’s not actually what I consider to be branding,) was logos and colors and websites and all of that, your Instagram grid or whatever.
To me, those are all the things that just aren’t important about branding. The things that are, especially when it comes to the online space, is really just showing people who you are. It’s me being willing to be on here and say “Listen, if there’s wine, I’m coming.” That’s branding.
That’s me saying, “This is who I am. Some people are going to say, “I did not like that. Wine? No good.” That’s okay. They don’t have to work with me.
CREATING A GREAT REPUTATION
Brandon Birkmeyer: You’ve been growing, you’re in your business now, you’re helping people out. What are some core lessons that we can give our audience here?
For the people who are maybe starting or they’re just past starting, and they’re thinking, “I want to build my coaching business,” what are some core lessons that they can implement right now to help them move along the way towards success?
Lindsay Dotzlaf: I’m going to say this because it’s what I do. I think a lot of coaches get lost. I see this happen where a lot of coaches get lost in the business aspect of it. How do I market? You have to do these things because people need to know what you’re about.
However, you start thinking that there’s a “right way” and that you need to learn the “right way” to market yourself, the “right way” to build a website that you’re totally going to want to redo in a year anyway, the right way to all of the business pieces.
What I teach is, “But don’t forget to also be a really good coach” because that helps with all of it. If you know, “My clients get results. I am really good at what I do,” it’s going to affect everything.
It affects your marketing. It affects the way you talk about what you do when you go to the networking events or the parties at your friend’s house or wherever you’re going. That’s probably the thing that I would say.
DON’T FORGET TO TAKE ACTION
On the other side of that is don’t let yourself get lost in that. If you are a person who loves to learn and really loves to be a good student, (which I can identify with) you have to be careful to not think, “Okay, I need to get this certification and then I need to do this other certification and now I’m going to do Lindsay’s thing.”
You keep doing the thing to make sure you’re a good coach before you even coach anyone, but you kind of have to learn to do them both at the same time. Maybe go back and forth on which one you’re focusing on more at the moment, but really learn to combine them, because if you don’t have any clients, you can’t practice all of the things that you’re learning.
CONNECT WITH LINDSAY
MORE ADVICE AND INTERVIEWS
Free Guide: Convert 1 Hour into 1 Month of Content
If you’d like more content about how to build your personal brand, check out my free Content Marketing Starter Guide.
And here are some more of my most popular thought leader interviews!
- What Business to Start with John Lee Dumas
- Personal Branding Masterclass with Chris Ducker
- Built to Serve with Evan Carmichael
Don’t want to miss the next thought leader interview? Subscribe to the free B-team Insider Newsletter! And don’t forget to leave a rating and review on iTunes.
Talk soon!