Can you remember exactly when you qualified as a coach? For me, it was August 2000. Back then, not many people even knew what coaching was. I learned marketing the way you probably did: by needing clients and not having them. I went to the networking breakfasts. I gave the talks. I marketed myself as a general life coach because I didn’t know any better, and it was hard — until I niched down to time management coaching and watched, almost overnight, how much easier marketing becomes when you stand for one thing. That lesson has never left me, and it’s in every site I build.
Around then I got my first web design quote: £2,295 plus VAT for eight pages — plus at least £100 every time I wanted a sentence changed. I walked away. Not because a website wasn’t worth it, but because dependency wasn’t. A quarter of a century later, coaches still tell versions of that story: the site they can’t edit, the domain that turns out not to be in their name, the designer they have to pay to change a comma. I felt that wound before it had a name, and every engagement I take is structured so you never feel it with me.