About Sarah

Family

Sarah is a self-employed coach in her late 40’s who lives in a four-bedroom detached house on a middle-class estate, a few miles from the town centre with her husband John.

They have two children, Chloe (24) who works as a beautician, and Max (22) who has recently finished university and works for a social media marketing agency. 

Both have flown the nest and Sarah now sees this as an opportunity to reawaken her career and fulfil her dreams to build her business.

John an accountant in a large accountancy firm and enjoys an annual income of £50,000.

Goals

Sarah wants to build up her coaching business around their family life and gain some financial independence whilst doing what she enjoys.

History

After leaving school she went to university and has a degree in Art and Fashion. She had a short career in the HR department of a large company before leaving her job to start a family.

As the family were growing up, she went back to work part time, and had several admin and HR related roles in a range of small businesses and the larger corporate environment.

She gained a range of skills and experience, but was a ‘jack of all trades’, rather than a specialist in one particular area.

She has a long-held interest in personal development, and took the plunge a few years ago to study to become an NLP practitioner. This led her to other areas of human development and performance, and she has taken many short courses to build her skills and knowledge in a number of associated areas.

More recently she has decided to become a life and business coach and has invested several thousands of pounds in a 12-month training programme to become a certified coach, which she has now completed.

She is excited about working with her clients and feels she is good at what she does. Unfortunately, she only has a few clients who are many friends and family who don’t pay her very much, if at all, as most of them were case studies whilst she was studying.

Marketing Experience & Activity

Whilst there was a marketing module on her certification course it was pretty ‘light weight’ and she struggles to get new clients from her current marketing activities.

She goes networking regularly but doesn't really know how to present herself when she meets new people and feels frustrated and finds the whole marketing, sales business development process, quite intimidating and overwhelming.

She would much rather her clients came to her, and she didn't have to sell.  She quietly hates the idea of having to sell as it reminds her of ‘Dodgy Dave’ – one of her friend’s dubious ex-husbands who owned a second hand car lot a few years ago.

She's quite active on Facebook and Instagram, and often shares a lot of interesting thoughts and insights and gets plenty of ‘likes’ but this rarely results in any new clients.

She invested quite a lot of money (£1,500) in a website, which she is quite pleased with, but doesn't really know if it brings in any interest.

Sarah doesn't really like marketing her business and much prefers the one-to-one work with her clients, where she would like to charge £100 per hour (which is less that what her tutors told her she was worth on the course).

She is a member of a woman's networking group and knows several other coaches who seem to get varying degrees of success. However, she doesn't think any of them enjoy the level of success she dreams of for herself. Sarah would like to earn £50,000 pounds a year from her business, working with around 10 clients a week on a regular basis.

Future Vision

She also has grand ideas of employing other coaches and building a coaching practice and can see the future potential of where this could lead. She’s discussed this with John who is fully supportive and has offered to use his accountancy and business skill, knowledge, and experience to help her and act as the ‘financial director’ and business adviser when she gets going.

Current Reality

However, at the moment she barely makes enough to pay the bills and is quite disillusioned.

She doesn't know how to take her business forward, or what to try next. She just feels there's so much ‘out there’ she doesn't know where to start. It's all so confusing! What with social media, digital marketing and all the other things she has to do as well - like networking.

She simply doesn't have the time to do everything other ‘marketing experts’ tell her she should be doing, as well as running her business, and working with the new clients she hopes she'll get very soon.

Sarah doesn't have any formal marketing qualifications or training. However, she did a little marketing in her ‘A’ level Business Studies – but that was a long time ago - and the internet wasn’t even around then!

She has gone on a few short courses over the years, and more recently, she attended a couple of free half-day workshops run by the local government enterprise agency.  Whilst they were interesting, she feels they were very ‘light’ in hard content she could actually apply to her business.

Sarah knows that she has to do all her own marketing as she cannot afford to pay somebody else to help her.  However, she is very concerned about spending any money on Facebook ads, or anything else she doesn't really understand, because she fears she might be wasting what precious little money she has available to her.  After all, completing all her training has left a serious dent in their joint savings.

Although John has been fully supportive and never mentions it, she feels deep down that it is her responsibility to replace their savings which originally came from his salary – mainly from his excessive month and year end overtime and annual bonuses which he worked really hard for. 

She secretly harbours a twinge of guilt about spending ‘his’ money on herself and crave a sense and feeling of financial independence so she can contribute to their future adventures and pension provisions.

She feels overwhelmed by the whole process of marketing her fledgling business and sees it as a continual nightmare rather than something she enjoys. Sarah feels particularly exposes in the areas of digital marketing and social media because it’s all new to her, and she struggles to ‘pick it up along the way’.

She is quietly jealous of some of her younger colleagues and competitors who appear to have mastered the art of social media and are always playing with their phones which regularly ping with ‘like’ and ‘share’ notifications.  She really thinks she is missing out on something but doesn’t really know what it is or why it matters.

This often leaves her feeling quite depressed just thinking about it.

If only there was a quick, easy and simple way to market her business that actually produced results.

Sarah believes there has to be a way to make her marketing work for her without spending a fortune or every waking hour trying to market her business and hoping it brings in new clients. She just hasn’t found it yet – but would love to with a passion!

Then, and only then, can she enjoy the rich rewards she craves working one-on-one with her clients as she works towards building her practice.