How I get coaching clients (and what I stopped doing)

Last March I had one of those weeks. Two clients wrapped their engagements within days of each other, a third paused to deal with a family situation, and suddenly my calendar had gaps I could feel in my chest. Not financially, not yet. But that particular quiet where you open your schedule on a Monday morning and there's too much white space, and you start doing math you don't want to be doing.

So I did what I always do when I'm anxious about the pipeline. I opened LinkedIn, stared at the compose box for eleven minutes, wrote half a post that sounded like a brochure, deleted it, and went for a walk.

Here's what I've figured out about getting coaching clients after nine years of doing this, including the stuff I wasted time and money on, and where AI actually helps without making you feel like you've become a marketing person.

Where clients actually come from

I went back through my records last year. Every client I'd signed in the previous three years, where they came from, how the first conversation started. The breakdown was almost embarrassing in its simplicity.

About 60% were referrals. A former client mentioned me to a colleague. An HR leader I'd worked with moved companies and brought me in. Someone I coached three years ago sent a friend.

Around 30% came from LinkedIn. Not from a viral post. From conversations. Someone read something I wrote, sent a DM, we talked, it turned into a discovery call.

The remaining 10% came from talks or panels. A leadership offsite where I facilitated a session. A conference panel on executive transitions. Someone in the audience reached out afterward.

That's it. That's the whole funnel.

I've tried other things. I once paid $2,400 for a lead generation service that promised "qualified coaching leads delivered to your inbox." What I got was a spreadsheet of HR directors who hadn't asked to be contacted, and three months of cold email threads where I could feel the other person's discomfort through the screen. Zero clients. A lot of apologetic conversations. I still cringe a little thinking about it.

The lesson wasn't that marketing doesn't work. It's that for a solo coach doing deep one-to-one work, the only things that consistently produce clients are relationships, visibility, and the occasional moment where you say something that makes a stranger think: I need to talk to that person.

The referral problem nobody talks about

Referrals are the most powerful source of clients I have, and for most of my career I had zero system around them. They just happened. Or they didn't.

The uncomfortable truth is that most of my best former clients would happily refer people to me. They just don't think about it. Not because they don't value the work. Because they're busy running teams and organizations and they aren't sitting around wondering who needs coaching. You have to create a small, natural opening.

Here's what I do now. When an engagement ends, I wait about two weeks. Long enough that the person has settled back into their normal rhythm. Not so long that the work has faded. Then I send one email.

The referral note (full text):

That's it. I don't follow up on the referral ask. I don't put it in a sequence. I send it once, and then I go back to being a person who stays in touch because I care, not because I'm working an angle.

About one in four of those emails produces a referral within six months. Some produce two or three over time. The math adds up fast when you're sending these consistently after every engagement.

LinkedIn, but not the way you think

I resisted LinkedIn for years. Everything about it felt performative. The humble-brag posts. The "I fired my worst client and here's what happened" stories that read like they were engineered in a lab to get engagement. The coaches posting about coaching in a way that only other coaches read. An echo chamber with a character count.

But I kept noticing that the 30% of clients who came from LinkedIn weren't responding to that kind of content. They were responding to moments. Small, specific observations from real coaching work that made them stop scrolling because they recognized something true.

The post that got me my best client last year was three paragraphs about the moment a leader realizes their team has stopped telling them the truth. No tips. No framework. Just a description of what that feels like from the outside, and one question at the end. A CHRO read it, sent me a message, and two weeks later I was coaching her CEO.

Here's my current system. I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Each post starts from something real, a moment from a session (completely anonymized), an observation from a walk, a pattern I keep seeing across clients. I open a doc, write the raw thought in two or three sentences, and then run it through Margaret to shape it into something publishable.

The LinkedIn post prompt I use with Margaret:

The first draft from Margaret is usually 70% there. I read it, fix anything that sounds too clean or generic, add back the rough edges, and post. The whole process for three posts takes about 90 minutes a week.

It used to take six hours. And I hated every minute of it, which meant I'd skip weeks, which meant I'd disappear from the platform entirely, which meant the pipeline dried up, which meant I'd have one of those white-space weeks and feel the panic again.

Ninety minutes I can sustain. Six hours I couldn't. That's the only insight that matters.

One thing I'll say plainly: the content that gets clients is not the content that gets the most likes. My posts that get engagement from other coaches (the ones about coaching itself, about the craft, about the profession) generate comments and reshares and exactly zero clients. The posts that generate clients are the ones about leadership. About what it feels like to be a new VP who's suddenly in rooms where they don't know the rules. About the gap between being a great individual contributor and being someone who can build a team. Those posts get fewer likes and more DMs. The DMs are what matter.

Staying warm without being weird

Here's the thing that changed the most when I started using AI for the business side of my practice. It wasn't content creation. It was follow-up.

I am terrible at staying in touch. Not because I don't care. Because every time I thought about reaching out to a former client or a warm contact, I'd get stuck on what to say, and "just checking in" felt hollow, and I'd tell myself I'd do it tomorrow, and tomorrow would become three months.

Now I keep a simple doc. Thirty-seven people, as of this morning. Former clients, HR leaders I've met, peers who send referrals, a few people I've spoken alongside at events. Just names and a few notes about what's going on in their world.

Every week, I pick three names. I pull up their notes and ask Margaret to draft a short, personal note. Not a sales email. Not a newsletter. Just a genuine, human "thinking of you" message that references something specific.

The key is specificity. "Hey, how's it going?" is noise. "I saw that your company just announced the acquisition. Thinking of you, that's a lot of integration work. Hope you're holding up." That's a real note from a real person.

I do this on Wednesday mornings, usually around 6 AM, third cup of green tea, before anyone's asking me anything. It takes about fifteen minutes. Margaret drafts, I edit (sometimes heavily, sometimes barely), and I send from my actual email. Not a platform. Not a CRM. Gmail.

Three notes a week means I touch my entire warm list roughly every three months. That's enough. People remember you when you remember them. And when they need a coach, or know someone who does, you're the name that surfaces.

Speaking and getting in the room

The 10% of clients that come from talks and panels might be the highest-quality clients I get. By the time someone reaches out after hearing you speak, they've already decided you're credible. The discovery call is almost a formality.

The problem is that most coaches wait to be invited. I did this for years. Sat around hoping someone would ask me to speak at their leadership offsite. It happened occasionally, but not reliably.

What I do now is simple and slightly uncomfortable. I pitch. Two or three times a month, I reach out to someone organizing a leadership event, an HR conference, a company's internal development series. I keep it short: here's who I am, here's what I talk about, here's why it's relevant to your audience. I attach a one-page overview, not a 30-slide deck.

Most of them go nowhere. Some turn into conversations. A few turn into stages. And one or two a year turn into clients who already trust me before we've had a single session.

I use Margaret to draft the initial pitch emails, which cuts the friction significantly. The part that matters, the part I always write myself, is the single paragraph about why this particular topic matters to this particular audience. That's where the coaching brain earns its keep.

If you're going to try one new visibility tactic this quarter, pitch three speaking opportunities. Not webinars you host yourself (those are content marketing, and that's a different thing). Rooms where someone else has gathered an audience and you get to be useful in front of them.

The thing I actually changed

The real shift wasn't adding AI to my marketing. It was admitting that the business side of coaching is part of the work, not a distraction from it.

For years I treated client acquisition like something that happened to me. Clients appeared, or they didn't. I'd have a full roster and feel like I'd figured it out, and then I'd have a quiet month and feel like a fraud. The inconsistency wasn't a marketing problem. It was an avoidance problem. I didn't want to be someone who "did marketing" because that felt like it cheapened the coaching.

What I've landed on, and I'm still refining this, is about three hours a week. Ninety minutes on LinkedIn content. Fifteen minutes on warm-list notes. An hour scattered across the week on referral follow-ups, speaking pitches, and the occasional discovery call. I book those calls through Calendly, which sounds like a small thing but removing the back-and-forth scheduling emails eliminated one more friction point that gave me an excuse to procrastinate.

For coaches who've built even a small email list (even 50 or 100 people), I'd say Kit (what used to be ConvertKit) is the simplest way to stay in touch at a slightly larger scale. I don't run a newsletter myself, not consistently enough to recommend it with a straight face, but colleagues who do swear by it.

Three hours a week. That leaves the other forty-something hours for the actual work. For sitting across from someone who just got feedback that rattled them. For holding the silence at minute 35 when the real thing finally surfaces.

What I'm still figuring out

I was on my walk yesterday, the usual loop through the park, and I was thinking about that week last March when the calendar went quiet. What I realize now is that the panic wasn't really about money. It was about relevance. When the calendar empties out, the story I tell myself isn't "I need more revenue." It's "maybe I'm not as good as I thought."

No system fixes that. Margaret can't draft a note that makes that feeling go away.

But a steady, sustainable system means the quiet weeks are just weeks. Not crises. Not identity spirals. Just the normal rhythm of a practice where people come and go because that's what healthy coaching looks like. Your clients are supposed to leave. And then, if you've done even a halfway decent job of staying visible and staying connected, new ones show up.

The question I keep sitting with is this: what would your practice feel like if you trusted that the next client was already on their way?