Emily Stringer: Hi everyone, welcome to today's webinar, using your executive coach to explore your independent consulting revenue in 2020 and beyond featuring Melisa Liberman. My name is Emily Stringer and I will be your moderator this afternoon. A little background. I work as an ambassador to the MBO Advantage Program and as one of our partners. I've been with MBO partners for just shy of 10 years. Before we get started, a few housekeeping items for the webinar set up, you can see the controls listed here, a few friendly reminders. Please ensure that you are muted at the end of today's presentation. We will host a formal Q&A session. You can submit the questions by using a Q&A box as pictured. We will be emailing a slide deck of the recorded copy of the entire webinar to all registrants within the next week. We want to hear from you during today's presentation. You can interact with us using the Q&A box by participating and poll questions at the end or by visiting us online at www.mbopartners.com or follow us at MBO Partners on Social Media. Here at MBO Partners, we are a contract engagement and compliance specialist and the chosen compliance partner for over a third of the Fortune 100. Our mission is to make it easier for large enterprises and top independent talent to work together for more than 20 years. We've been leading the charge to keep the independent economy moving forward, building a unique, dual-sided ecosystem featuring many of the world's most prominent companies and In-demand professionals and MBO has always committed to advancing the next way of working. And we are far from done. We will continue to drive change on the ground, delivering innovative solutions that enable both organization and talent to thrive in a constantly evolving workplace. Check out our upcoming events at www.mbopartners.com/events. At this time, it is my pleasure to introduce you to today's speaker, Melisa Liberman. Melisa is a prominent career coach specializing in coaching leaders in the technology industry prior to coaching. Melisa spent over 20 years in the corporate world. She started her career at Accenture and then helped build a startup software as a service business into a quarter-billion-dollar company. Melissa's been recognized as a leader in the field of coaching, including winning the Denver Business Journal Outstanding Women in Business Award, and now she's going to share some of her own stories and insights about why and how to work with an executive coach. Coaching can benefit you, Melisa, at this time. I'll turn it over to you.

Melisa Liberman: Thanks, Emily. I look forward to going through this material and to the questions that you all have so we can make this interactive. But today's topic is how and when to use an executive coach so that you can increase your bottom line and manage the stresses of running your own business. So we're how I focused this content for you is whether you're an independent consultant, which I'll call an icy or a business owner, you might be interested in becoming an icy or a business owner or you might have or want a side gig. So the examples that I've used throughout this presentation are really geared toward those types of scenarios. But if you're generally interested in coaching, there's the content will also apply to you. And just think about the examples that I give and translate them to your own life and your own goals that you might be wanting to accomplish. And I think we have a poll over on the right hand side, so if you want to answer those questions, that will help us here, the content as we go through as well. So first, let's talk about just the agenda and the takeaways, so the content of the webinar today, I'm going to focus on the types of executive coaches that you might encounter, the benefits of using an executive coach, what you can expect with a coaching relationship, how to find the coach that's best for you, maximize your investment both time and money that you spend when you hire a coach. And throughout the presentation, I sprinkled some case study examples to give you some tangible scenarios that help you to see how and how the coach, how the different types of coaching could apply to you. Matt, do you want to move to thank you so Emily, thank you for that introduction. I'll just briefly touch on my background again with the point being that I am one of you. I am an independent consultant. I started out my business about eight years ago, almost nine now. I started as a management consultant, which was really the path of least resistance when I left my company that I helped to build. It was really easy to transfer into management consulting, and I did that for quite some time while I built out my executive coaching business in parallel. So I've never looked back. I don't want to go back to corporate and I'll give you a lot of examples of how I've worked with clients, as well as how I've worked with my own coaches over the last eight years to help make this bring this topic to life. So let's just start off with some basics about coaching. I think so many people that do want to go to the next slide. Thank you. So many people think about a coach or an executive coaches just for a sea level. But that's just simply not the case at a very high level. A coach is someone that helps guide their clients to accomplish their goals. And I make it such a broad statement. And we're going to drill into a little bit of detail here in a minute on the next slide. But there's so many different forms and functions that coaching can take. So let's first talk about the coaching approach itself, so there are two different kinds of spectrums that you can look at in this slide, might be cut off just a tiny bit down there at the bottom. But if you think about coaching there, there are two different spectrums that a coach could come in on as you're working with them. And these kind of intersect with each other, which I'll show you here in a minute. But when we look at first of all, are you wanting to get help from someone who's a generalist or a specialist? So a generalist is someone who kind of helps people from a broad perspective, like a business coach, for example, who might help someone create a business from end to end and has experience and insights into the full spectrum of what that looks like, what that goal looks like. And then on the other end of that spectrum is a specialist. So someone who literally has a very, very targeted skill set and helps someone accomplish a very specific goal. And I'll give you examples of this here in a moment. On the other side of the spectrum, you have people who help with the strategies and tactics so coaches can help people understand the five steps to accomplish a certain goal. And that's one end of the spectrum. And the other end of the spectrum are coaches who only deal with mindset and not not any of the how, but really help people figure out where they may be holding themselves back and overcoming those root causes. So I'll give you some examples of what those look like on the next slide here. So if you were to look for a generalist who helps with strategies and tactics, the types of coaches you might find are people like a leadership coach, someone who helps generally with leadership and managing a team, another type of generalist who helps the strategy as a business coach. I touched on this a minute ago and someone could help you from end to end with your business. And they might know a little bit about everything. Right. Everything from sales and marketing and finance all the way to operationalizing and delivering. And there's also generalists that we might hear the word accountability coach. So there is literally just helping to maintain momentum, overcome procrastination and to hold you accountable as you go through whatever your goal might be. So those are some examples of what a generalist from a strategy and tactics perspective looks like, a generalist from a mindset perspective. You might hear the term life coach there, someone who can help you generally with life and your mindset as you're going in and trying to accomplish goals and really seeing what why you might be holding yourself back, what you're doing that you might want to amplify, to increase whatever that goal might be. And then from a specialist perspective, looking at tactics and strategies, the types of coaches you might hear, the labels are like a marketing coach, someone who might teach and even review funnels for you, marketing funnels or a sales coach, someone who teaches and reviews your sales calls and your sales approach very specifically, or even a coach for new executives, a brand new executive. And what challenges they may be facing versus a seasoned executive would have different challenges and goals that they would want to accomplish. So those give you some examples of what that looks like. And then on the mindset side, you might find a life coach for tech entrepreneurs is someone very specialized and specific. Right. So these will give you some examples of the titles of coaches and what kinds of coaches you might look for. And I have the arrow here just because coaches don't fit into one bucket. Generally, there are people on all sides of the spectrum, some who only deal with mindset and not any how to all the way over to people who deal with coaches, who offer strategies and tactics and have no mindset component to their coaching. And then in between, that is a blend of the different types of approaches to it for a coach. And so that's something we'll talk about here in more detail as you're deciding what kind of coach might be a good fit for you. Then think about the coaching methods themselves, the stereotype or the visual you might have in your mind, which is that a lot of coaches look like a one on one coach, someone that an individual works with, either in person or virtually. And those are it is a one on one relationship where it's very personalized to you and your goals and the challenges you might be facing as you work with that coach. There are other types of methods as well that you might consider as you're looking at potentially hiring a coach. There are things like group coaching and what that generally looks like. Ah, is a coach who facilitates a group of people who are all working toward a similar goal and that coach would coach others in the group setting. And so you're not only benefiting from being coached directly, but also by witnessing other people that are working toward a similar goal get coached. And learning from that experience, as well as a master mind is also a group setting. But in that case, you also are interacting with each other as members of the group and giving advice and helping each other in addition to whatever the coaches services may or may be providing. So that's more of a peer type collaboration environment versus a group coaching scenario. Another coaching method that coaches will deliver is more of a course based solution. So if you have a very specific goal in mind, like, for example, our marketing example that I used a moment ago, you might want to put a marketing funnel in place to help scale your business and drive revenue that way. And a coach offers courses that are step by step and then support to go along with them, which could look like a group coaching to go along with that course or even one on one or some combination of both. And then finally, another scenario that most people aren't aware of is more of a hands off approach, like a coach that you can hire where you're really only working with them over email or CELAC or messaging of some sort. I actually had a coach for a while who is an accountability coach who you would email him on Monday and tell him your goal for the week and your plan for the week. And then on Friday you would email him and tell him what you did and didn't do and what you learned from the process. And sometimes you would write back and sometimes you wouldn't. So it's a very, very different form of coaching than what most people think of when they think of coaching. So then now let's talk about the benefits of coaching, as you're looking at whether this might be a good fit for you or not. So the benefits of working with an executive coach, if you think about the types of goals you might want to accomplish, there are things like creating a plan and developing new skills, like the marketing or sales example that we were talking about a little bit ago, or potentially, if you're really strong at delivering but not very good at managing your finances, you can hire a coach that helps teach you the the back inside of your business and how to manage against financial metrics. And you may want to implement certain strategies like the marketing funnel or a sales sales structure. You may want to identify or troubleshoot roadblocks that you've hit or overcome, challenges. You may want to gain clarity and self awareness. And I'll talk about a case study of that example here in a moment. Or you might just want to you're someone who really wants to get the most out of life and maximize your personal and professional goals. So those are some of the types of goals that I see people coming to me with and that I've also members, coaches to help accomplish. And the results that you can see in working with a coach are really the ability to achieve a specific goal, such as increasing your revenue, and accelerating the pace at which you meet those goals. You might be able to figure this out on your own, but it could take you twice as long as if you were working with a coach who's done this before and helped other people do the same thing. And they know the path that you can take and the potential pitfalls that you hit that are commonly hit along the way. Which leads me to the next point, which is a coach can help you reduce and or even avoid costly mistakes in in the goals that you're trying to accomplish, because, again, they've been there and done that before, either themselves or by supporting other clients to achieve a goal that is similar to what you're wanting to achieve. The coaches can also help you advance those goals, your personal goals, alongside your professional goals versus sacrificing one for the other. And I have a case study to talk about that in more detail here in a moment. And then finally, they can help you to fulfill that potential, whatever it may be, both personally and professionally. So it's not just about solving problems or avoiding problems, but it's also really helping you to take things to the next level as a high performer. Next slide, please. Thank you. So let's just take a pause here for a moment and I'll give you a tangible example of two examples, actually, of hiring a coach to gain clarity on your business direction. So I'll give you an example of what to do and then what not to do. I when I first started out and was ready to leave corporate, I hired a coach to help me get some clarity on whether what kind of flavor of management consulting I wanted to do, whether and ultimately if I wanted to try to get back into corporate or really just I felt very confused and not sure what I wanted to do with my life, having been in corporate at that point for about 15 years and really knowing that this was an inflection point in my career. So I hired a coach and I went into that relationship thinking they would just give them a download of all of my skills, all of my thoughts, and they would give me the answer and then I could just execute against it. But that's not really what a productive coach, a productive coaching relationship looks like anyway. Like that coach doesn't and didn't know the answer to my specific challenge. And what I quickly learned is in working with the coach, their role is much more to ask you a lot of questions to help you figure the answer out for yourself versus them giving you the answer and kind of taking that burden off your shoulder. So that's an example of what not to do for my own personal experience. What you can do, which works very effectively, is work with a coach who has a framework. For example, I have a client who came to me and said, you know, I'm not sure I want to start a business and I'm not sure if I want to leave corporate to start the business kind of hard stop or if I want to execute them in parallel or if I want to hold off on this business school for a while and continue pursuing my corporate direction. And so he came to me with kind of that confusion in mind. And we helped him walk through my seven step process of how to figure this out on his own game, the clarity. And when he came in, he thought the answer was definitely going to be to build them in parallel, what kind of 50 50 or 60 40? And what it turned out to be is 90, 10. He wanted to realize he still had some things left to accomplish in his personal career. And so he went all in on that. And he's been promoted a couple of times since then. And he just kind of kept some very basic things going on on his side business for a while. And so it ended up that he got clarity in a much different direction than many what he expected for him to be. So hopefully that gives you a couple of examples of how coaching could work effectively and not. So let's talk about whether or not it's a good time to hire a coach or why you would want to hire a coach and what some of those considerations would be. So first of all, let's talk about what to expect from a coach, so typically I'll start off with coaches are not people who do the work for you, giving my example that I just gave you, thinking that a coach would just give me the answer and I could go handle that. Those are consultants. Consultants will do the work for you. They'll create your marketing funnel, for example. But a coach is more of someone who guides you to do the work that you're in to accomplish the goal that you've set for. And what to expect in the way that looks is, first of all, one of the common questions I get is how long does coaching last? And it varies quite significantly depending on your goal and what the coach has found works best for their clients. It could be something as simple as one call, which, to be honest with you, I think it's fairly rare to get any type of result in one call, but it can happen all the way up to one year or multiple years. I've talked to people who have the same coach for 10 years, for example, so the duration will vary widely. The engagement model that you use also varies widely. So it could be very structured like a weekly call or it could be very much on demand. Like your book you couldn't use. You figure out what your next step is, you go do it and then you book your next call later and maybe get some support over email in between. The approach can be very, very wide as well as it has. Some coaches have a very set curriculum and process. This is what we do one week to week three and others. It's very fully customized where you're literally coming to every call with a new topic and driving the coaching from that perspective. And some coaches will have a course that gives you additional resources. Like we talked about earlier, they may review your work product. So there's some other things that are kind of add ons that you may also want to consider as well when you're thinking about hiring a coach. So we can go to the next slide. I want to touch briefly on what a coach is, and so I've already given you some examples of this, but the first thing to know is that a coach is not an indicator that something is wrong. So, for example, if your company approaches you and says we would we want to enroll you in this coaching program or hire a coach for you, which happens quite frequently now where a company provides coaches for their employees, it's not an indicator that something wrong or you're missing something or you need to fix something. It's an additional resource to help you achieve your goals faster and again with someone who's been there and done that, most most likely, it's also not someone just for the top elite or the sea level. I mean, a lot of coaching communities and there are coaches that range from helping teenagers to overcome social anxiety all the way up to coaches who help people who have retired, who who coaches, who have retired, who are not coaches, employees who have retired and don't want to take on their next career, whatever that might look like in their 70s. Right. To such a wide range. And the other thing to look at is that coaches are not a friend, a mentor, a new boss is giving you direction. They should be there. Who is someone who's challenging you, who's asking you the hard questions that your friends and family might not be able to do or you don't want to hear those questions from them. Next slide, thank you. So a quick case study in this example is hiring a coach that can help you balance your personal and professional life. So this is a personal example for me, where I've hired a coach who is a coach who focuses on helping entrepreneurs with balance. I'm a type A. I love working. I get a lot of satisfaction out of working, but it also leads to burnout quite frequently and other other unwanted side effects. Right. And so I have a personal coach right now who helps me with balancing that personal and professional life. I hired her because I thought she could help me with productivity and scheduling and getting a better job, which is balancing from a scheduling perspective. And what it's turned into, though, is that she's helped me a lot with kind of the underlying root causes of why I overwork and work through those types of things and not just the surface level scheduling. So that's been a great benefit as it is an example of what a coach could help you with. Why you may need a coach, so Bill Gates, if you there's a TED talk out there, he talks about everyone needs a coach. He talks about having a coach for his bridge game. But it's not just for sports, right? It's for people who want to achieve goals in their personal and professional lives to move past potentially an upper limit where you might have hit a hit, hit a wall. You've got one or two really strong customers, but you want to take your company to the next level, for example, start scaling. It may be a situation like we talked about in one of the prior case studies where you're looking for clarity and direction. You may want to accelerate your results or achievement by working on things like scaling or filling in a missing skill that you might not have as a business owner, for example, you may have hit an obstacle like you lost the customer and kind of taken a self confidence hit as a result of that. That's another great use of a coach to help you overcome those kinds of obstacles. Or like I was just sharing with you my example of avoiding doing really well professionally, but maybe having some personal negative impact like stress or losing balance. And coaches can help you with that. So those are some examples of why you may need a coach to help you with your personal and professional goals. Another example, a coach can help you take you, you and your business to the next level. So I recently had someone come to me and said, you know, I'm ready. I'm moving out of corporate life. I've started my business. I have the LLC, all the structure in place, but I just don't know what to do next. What is that end to end process? And so we work together. I helped her to understand what all of that end to end processes and how to sequence it and what to look out for and what obstacles that she'll most likely hit. But as we also dug into this, we realized that it isn't just about, again, that is how to what are the steps? She really had a lot of her self identity wrapped around the title that she had in her corporate career and the level of responsibility and the size of her team and the results that she was delivering. And when she moved into becoming her own independent business owner, all of that went away. And so she was left with this blank slate from a self identity perspective. And so we did a lot of work on what  rebuilding that self identity looks like, how to overcome self doubts and really help her to implement that along with the step by step of creating a business. So how to find the coach a coach that's the best fit for you and this is a pretty it's pretty straightforward and simple, but but just to give you the behind the scenes of how the process generally works, and again, you may be assigned a coach from your company as a benefit from them, but in the case where you're looking to hire a private coach, the first thing you'll want to do is get some clarity on the goals that you want to accomplish in working with a coach. And then you'll find a coach to interview a great source of finding coaches to interview our referrals. On LinkedIn, you can search for coaches in LinkedIn or even submit a request in LinkedIn to a tool called Pro Finder. Or you can find coaches on webinars like I'm doing right now as a coach, where you can get a flavor of their style and their perspective as you think about what might be a good fit for you after you identify a coach or two to interview, then you would schedule a consultation. So a lot of coaches offer free consultations that you might see labeled strategy call or discovery call, something like that. And sometimes they'll make you fill out an application before the call. Sometimes they won't. Sometimes they'll want to do a consultation just over email. Sometimes, you know, they may be so straightforward that it doesn't really require a consultation. So there's a lot of variety here. But in the case where you're looking to hire someone, especially working one on one, this consultation is a common offering. And then you'll meet with that person, go through the consultation and then ultimately make a decision. What's the rapport? How do you deal with that coach? And is it that coach offering a good solution to what you think your challenges are? A lot of time coaches will say, yes, I agree that I hear your goal and I agree and hear you that you are having this obstacle and that obstacle toward reaching it on your own right now. But I would also offer you that this other thing could be a challenge for you as well and help you to really see things in a bigger picture as to why you might not be accomplishing your goals quite yet or what might slow you down and going forward. So let's talk a little bit, so one of the questions that I get frequently is I'll just do it on my own or why not do it on my own? And so some things to think about as you're if you might have this thought going on in your mind, is this idea that I should be able to do it on my own? Should you have already known how to run a business from all of the back inside and the and the revenue, all of the finances all the way through the sales and marketing and delivering to the customer and potentially managing other employees or subcontractors like. Should you really know all of that? Just, you know, based on whatever your prior experience has been or do you have some skill gaps that you know that aren't personally lacking, but it's more of just being able to fill in that skill gap with someone who has the expertise. And is the return on investment, both financially and emotionally and time wise, worth accelerating the pace? Another question to ask yourself, another question or another thought. I hear people saying I'm not at the right level yet to hire a coach. So, again, what is the right level? What is the picture that you have in your mind about what a coach does or why a coach would benefit people that are at another level but not you? And another question you can ask yourself is, does it make sense to experiment on your own and try to figure it out on your own and the months and years that that could possibly take? Or does it make more sense with what your goal is to hire someone that's walked that path before and again can help you reach the goal faster and with fewer mistakes along the way? Another thing that I hear people say is I already have a mentor. I don't really need a coach. And a couple of questions that I ask them in response to that is first of all, is that person truly neutral? Some people say to me, my spouse is amazing at this, whatever my goal is, and they can help me all along the way. And certainly many of our spouses have a lot to offer, but they also have some skin in the game. Right. Even if they're even if it's not intentional, some of the choices that you may be making or decisions you may be making could impact them. And so it ends up skewing their input that they give you not not even intentionally sometimes. The other thing is I hear people say, oh, I already have a mentor. Are they someone that's consistently available to you? Are they someone that can work with you every week, for example, to maintain the momentum toward your goal? Are they someone you can reach out to when you've hit a roadblock and be 100 percent honest with them about your insecurities or where you feel like you're having fear about reaching this goal? Most of the time, mentors aren't that readily available or or you're willing to be that vulnerable with. And then finally, would you benefit from another perspective, someone who doesn't know you at all and can offer you and ask you questions that aren't based on their own perceptions of you and your past in the way that they know you? So another quick case study, hiring a coach to transform from employee mindset to the mindset of a business owner. So I had a client come to me and was ready to take that leap from corporate into owning their own business and really was not sure exactly how to go about that and what all of the steps it would entail. And so as we started working through it, similar to that last case study I shared with you, again, she was wanting to step by step. Right. But as we dug further into it, we realized that she was actually looking for a new boss. She wanted a coach to tell her exactly what to do and how to do it, kind of similar to when I hired my first coach. But we realized as a business owner, we don't have a boss. That's partially why we own our own business. Right. And so we were able to dig in not only into this step by step of what she thought she wanted in hiring a coach, but also into that mindset underneath the covers and why she felt like she couldn't be the one driving the strategy on her own and why she felt like she needed someone in the certainty that she got from having someone who she saw as above her or more experienced than her giving her the marching orders and her executing against those. So it was just a gap, a simple gap between being an employee and being a business owner. And so we worked together to fill that gap so that she was able to be a really strong business owner and entrepreneur in her own right. So another common question that I get is how much does it cost? And I know that this slide is a little bit not not doesn't give you a very definitive answer. Right. But there is a huge range in how much a coach costs. So what I see on the lower end of coaching is somewhere between one hundred and maybe one hundred and fifty dollars per call. It is a general ballpark of that kind of entry level of coaching, sometimes even less than that. And then all the way up to one point five million dollars a year, which last I heard is what Tony Robbins is charging for people to work with him directly, which is not every week either, maybe for three or four times a year. So this is a huge range. And so the goal when you're looking at coaching is is there a return on my investment? Is the return on my investment. So that's easy to answer when you're looking at a business coach and you can help figure out is this new marketing process or sales process? What is the ROI attached to that? Other times it's a little bit less tangible, right? Like what is the value of me personally finding balance in my life and not not going over way over to the other edge of working all the time at the sacrifice of my personal life and putting some return on investment? around that when I'm deciding how much to pay my coach, for example, when I hired a coach to help me with that problem. So this is going to take a little bit of research because there is such a range and all sorts of different models that you might see. A few things to consider that a coach might not be for you, and I touched on some of these on the prior slide, but number one, if you're wanting someone to do the work for you, you should not hire a coach. For the most part. You would be hiring a consultant, someone to outsource your work to a virtual assistant or a consultant or something like that if you want someone to tell you exactly what to do. So as I've described to you, again, you're not wanting to repeat or recreate a boss, right. Or someone that you're dependent on or in. And you're really looking for them to tell you every next step right here. When you hire a coach, the goal should be to find someone who can not only give you a framework that you can follow, but at the same time help you build the skill set and the mindset behind what you. What's important for you to continue with that journey yourself, whether you're repeating what you've learned or potentially taking that to the next level? Also, it's probably not a good time to hire a coach if you aren't ready to prioritize the time, not only for the calls with the coach or the interaction with the coach, but also the work in between calls if you're at a place where you're not ready to be challenged. Believe me, I've been there in the past where I would get very defensive if anyone ever challenged me or you don't want to be open and vulnerable, you may want to work on that or hire a coach that can specifically help you in those areas before you start looking to hire a coach for other types of goals, because a good coach will challenge you to offer you different perspectives and really relies on you being open and vulnerable and telling them exactly what you're thinking and feeling so that they can help help guide you and ask you really high quality questions. So let's talk a little bit about what it looks like to maximize your investment after you've hired a coach. In order to maximize the benefit of using a coach, again, from my own experience working with coaches as well as the clients that I see have the most success or no one really being clear on the results that you want to achieve, what does success look like at the end of the coaching relationship, from your perspective? And again, that might even just be getting clear on whatever it is that the topic that you're wanting to be coached on? Right. Or it could be a very tangible, measurable set of results. The next thing that I find that the people that get the most out of coaching are those that have come in and decided that they're working with the coach, they hired the coach and they're going to get exactly what they came for and not questioning and allowing that kind of thought process in. Well, maybe I should have worked with this other coach or maybe I could do this on my own. Or maybe the grass is greener on some other course or something like that. Once you've decided that you're and I have hired a coach, go all in, decide that this is the solution for you. And when those doubts start creeping in, which they invariably do as a human right, just knowing that I'm not entertaining all of these alternatives right now, I've made the decision and I'm sticking by it. The other thing that's very useful is evaluating and taking checkpoints along the way and even scheduling those in advance. Sometimes I see where and it's happened to me, too. I've hired a coach for six months and it ends up flying by. I don't even realize it. Oh, wow. Looking back, I should have had some checkpoints along the way to just see my progress toward the goal that I wanted to in the time frame that we've specified, owning your results. A lot of this kind of goes into victim mentality and entitlement. Also, all three of these bundled together of really relying on the coach to help guide you along the way, not the coach's job to get you the results if you're looking to improve your sales close rate, for example, if the coach is not the one on the call selling and either landing that new client or not, the coach is the one guiding you and helping you to see where what you're doing is working for you and what where you might not want to adjust and helping with the process. But at the end of the day, if you take ownership of your results and don't put those on to the coach, you're going to get so much more out of this relationship. And believe me, I've been in these areas, though, as a client, as well as seeing other clients do this and knowing that if you're able to approach the coaching relationship in this area, you're going to get a lot faster, a lot of bigger results faster. And then finally being really open and vulnerable with your coach, you're hiding things from your coach. You're not going to get the most out of your relationship, including getting coached on the coaching. So if you say to your coach, look, I'm feeling like this isn't going well, you're not helping me the way that I thought you should after you've kind of owned those results. Right. And figuring out where is the gap really being open and vulnerable to bring that to the coach and know that they should be able to help you from a neutral perspective and not take it personally or make it mean something about themselves. Another quick case study on scaling your business, so another example from my own personal use of coaches is I've gone to coaches before and hired them and realized that they were much more on the mindset side. I wanted to scale my business and then that coach, the first coach I hired in this regard, was much more about a hundred percent mindset and zero percent strategy. And that's just not the way that my brain works. So I really struggled with how do you fully use mindset in order to accomplish the goals that I was wanting to accomplish without some of the how attached to it. For some people, that's a perfect fit. For me, it wasn't exactly a perfect fit. So then I went to the second type of coaching and it was on the other end of that spectrum I showed you earlier and I hired a coach who gave me all of the strategies, but she didn't really have any of the mindset background to help me understand where implementing I could be much more effective in implementing the strategies if I were able to recognize some of those self limiting beliefs that were underlying the process. And so then I went on to a third coach, which I am working with, have been working with for over a year now, who is a combination of both. So for me, that sweet spot is kind of in the middle of the spectrum mindset and strategy. How to do so hopefully I'll share with you that example just to know as you're thinking about hiring a coach and what kinds of questions to ask and what would best fit your personality and style. So in summary, we've covered how and when you can use a coach to increase your bottom line and to manage kind of the personal impacts of running a business, the stress and overwhelm and all of the things burnout that come with running a business oftentimes. But at a high level, a coach can help you achieve your goals faster and break through those upper limits. They can find a coach that fits your goals and your style. Like the example I just shared with you. It may take some trial and error and don't hire a coach. If you want someone to do the work for you or you feel like you are really looking for someone to give you all of the answers and be open to different solutions than what you might think you need, I shared with you some case studies where clients and even myself have gone to a coaching relationship thinking the answer was A and it turned out to be A plus B, right. So be open to those different solutions that a coach could offer you. And then once you hire a coach, really decide and go all in and not not question whether or not this was a good idea or a good decision and make those delaying those results as the impact of you kind of re deciding over and over again. And then finally owning your own results, thinking about the coaching relationship in a way of, I know I'm going to get the results out of this relationship and work with the coach. And what does that look like? How do I need to show up? What can I say to the coach to help them really understand where I'm coming from and not hold back? Because I feel like it's something that might not be comfortable or the coach might take it personally and really being open and vulnerable as in that relationship, to get the most out of it for yourself. So in closing, I want to offer you a five step roadmap to help you benefit and maximize from the relationship with your coach. So I've created a PDF just just for this specific webinar where you can download the PDF and it gives you five specific steps for you to not only figure out how to hire the coach, but then also how to set the expectations with the coach and level set with them at the beginning of your relationship, how to best take those checkpoints along the way and then ultimately how to wrap up with the coach and make it productive so that you continue to experience benefits and not kind of stop where that relationships end. So the link here to download that PDF for free is on the screen. And then I think we'll send it out also in the email that when the recap goes out as well. So hopefully you'll get a great benefit from that and maximize the benefit of a coach if you decide to hire one. So I think we're open to questions now.

[00:45:24] Emily Stringer Great, Melisa, thank you so much for the wonderful presentation. I think for any of us who have considered hiring a coach in the past, this might be enough to push us over the edge and the leap. So we really appreciate you joining us. We will jump to our Q&A session in just a moment. But first, we want to make sure that we get everyone the information that they came here for. So we are going to put a couple of polls up on the screen and Matt you're welcome to watch those. So first and foremost, would you like to connect further with Melissa or discuss a coaching session with our yes or no, you request information from Melissa we will be sure that we get that to you within the coming days here. And Melissa will be in contact with you at that point. And in a moment, we're going to jump to the next poll here. Are you interested in learning more about MBO's premier program MBO advantage of which Melissa's probably a member of this program is for the elite independent talent who would like some strategy and direction from MBO angle and positioning themselves to work with the large enterprises that we have relationships with. So if you would like information, please let us know. And either myself or another member of the team will be in touch with you or let us know that you don't. And finally, we'll jump to our last poll. Are you interested in learning more about MBO's Marketplace? The marketplace is a platform we have where our clients can push projects they would like to build with our independent contractors. We have several different clients who are fairly active on the platform and that list is growing by the week. So if you would like an invitation, we would be more than happy to send that to you. Take 10 minutes, set up a profile, see the search and get the results direct to your inbox. So while we wrap up our polls, Melisa, I will go ahead and jump to the Q&A session. We had a couple of great questions that came in during the presentation. So first and foremost, I think we have some aspiring executive coaches or current executive coaches who have been on the line. So why don't you share with us for those who are considering becoming an executive coach, what are the most important certifications or credentials to obtain?

 Melisa Liberman: That's such a great question. It's kind of like the answer to how much does it cost? One hundred and fifty dollars or one point five million. I'll just share my personal journey. I built for my own focus as a coach. I help tech leaders with their career goals. And so for me personally, I felt that in order to coach someone with integrity, that is my background. I've had a successful career and want to help others accomplish that same set of goals, whatever those might look like. On top of that, for me, I wanted to combine some mindset elements into my coaching. I didn't want it to just be a how to kind of step by step process. So I got a life coaching certification as well. So it's really as you're looking to become an executive coach, thinking about what are your powers, what is your background and how could that help other people, whether it's your corporate career or some other form of experience that you've developed and then figure out where you're where if you've got skill gaps, if any, and how to fill those in. There's so many different types of coaching schools and curriculum out there that help you with anything from more tactical, step by step leading people through coaching all the way to very general mindset type coaching like the school that I went to. So I would just take that personal assessment and figure out which direction you want to go. And the last thing is that if you haven't been a coach before, one thing that really benefits me when it benefited me as I went through this journey is I just started coaching people before I went through certification and before I spent a lot of time developing my specialty. I was at that probably at that hundred dollars, one hundred and fifty dollar level at that time and just coaching people and figuring out what I liked and what I didn't like and what I was good at and where maybe my strengths didn't lie and use that to test out the process before I go in deep for a certification.

Emily Stringer: I think that's wonderful advice, Melisa, very valuable for those who are considering moving in the right direction. Next up, could you explain the difference between life, career, and personal coaches?

Melisa Liberman: Yes, again, a lot such a variety, right. And they blend in together a lot. So a life coach specifically could help you with things like there are life coaches out there that help with relationships. I have friends of every type of coaching. So there are relationship coaches, there are marriage coaches, there are coaches that focus kind of on the personal side, more for your personal goals, the weight loss coaches would be another example of that. And then on the career coaching side or more professional coaching side, those are coaches that are the labels you might hear our business coaches or like I was describing to marketing coaches or sales coaches or career development coaches. I do some job search coaching, helping people get promotions, promotion coaches, new manager coaches. So there are different types of coaches that are very clearly on the personal side, very clearly on the professional side. And then there's a blend in between. So life coaches, for example, can very much be the blend in between where you can hire a general life coach and go to them every week with a different topic right where it might be this week, conflict with your spouse. And next week, it's a conflict with or a challenge that you're having at work. And they help you to see where you are, where you could be holding your own self back, where you're potentially giving up power or not maintaining boundaries and kind of help you with general life approaches to tackle any challenge that you might be facing or goals that you might want to achieve.

Emily Stringer: That's wonderful to know. It is such a variety, isn't it Melisa?

Melisa Liberman: It is, which is great. So many different ways to accomplish different goals and styles that you could work with.

Emily Stringer: Yes. Variety is the spice of life. Yeah, great. So another question that came in. What has been your greatest accomplishment or success story?

Melisa Liberman: And so with a client specifically, I assume that's the question, not mine personally. With the clients, I absolutely love working with my clients. I work with people one on one because I want to have that really deep relationship with them and to see them come in at the beginning of wherever they're at. Right. So, for example, I had a client who really wanted to leave corporate, wanted to pursue her own business, but just was filled with so many doubts and concerns about the level of uncertainty related to it. Her own ability to sell. She knew she could deliver after she made the sale. But all of that upfront work just felt really overwhelming to her and to see where she was at the beginning of our journey and then help her walk through every step of the process to get her business up and running and ultimately to have landed within that in that first year, to have exceeded her revenue goals and to know that she was on the path to where she wanted to be and that she didn't have to constantly question whether she would go back to corporate or not. Those types of stories are what makes me happy about being a coach and why I'm so passionate about it and know that this is what I love doing, where I want to be.

Emily Stringer: That's wonderful. So we will wrap up with two questions that go hand in hand here that came in during the presentation. I know you mentioned LinkedIn for this, but on one side, how do you market your coaching skills to the right audience? And on the other, what is the best way to find a coach? You can offer some insight there.

Melisa Liberman: Yeah, absolutely. Great question. So you can literally go in. So I'll answer the second one first. You can go into LinkedIn and you can type in coach. You can type in the type of coach you're looking for, like a career coach, for example. And then people that have that job title will come up and you can look at their profiles and figure out which you might be interested in talking more to. I get a lot of inquiries that way. I also have a tool within LinkedIn called Pro Finder, where you can go in and put in different criteria that you're looking for when you're hiring a coach. And then coaches like myself get emails or opportunities available to them that they can respond to. So those are a couple of specific ways to use LinkedIn. As you're looking for a coach, you might also want to follow coaches and kind of see what they're posting and what style they have before you decide if you want to book a consultation with them. And then on the flipside of that, if you are a coach and want to use LinkedIn to find your clients, the first question to ask is, is my target audience on LinkedIn? For me as a career coach, that's where all my people live. And so I use LinkedIn almost exclusively to end referrals, to find new clients. But so the first question is, is LinkedIn a good tool for where your people are? Others might be on Instagram or Facebook or other tools like that. So that's the first question to ask yourself. And then if the answer is yes to that's a great way to use LinkedIn is to, number one, make sure your profile very clearly articulates what you do as a coach and what benefits you provide. You can look at my profile, which is optimized that way as an example, and then from there posting content and connecting with people and really showing what your philosophy is as a coach for the niche that you support and become showing and demonstrating your leadership in whatever your topic is. So those are some examples of how to use LinkedIn to find coaches as well as to find clients. If you are a coach,

Emily Stringer: Melissa, I think that's wonderful advice. But leadership is where it's at for attracting your clients. So with that said, it is two fifty eight. So our time together is coming to a close. You are more than welcome to reach out to Melissa. She is melisa@melisa.liberman.com. And she would be more than happy to help you if you would like to schedule a session within the next week here we will be getting an email copy of the presentation to all participants and registrants. And we will also be in touch with any follow up information that you're connected with. Thank you so much for joining us. And Melisa, thank you for the wonderful presentation. And we look forward to seeing everyone online soon.

Melisa Liberman: Thank you.