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What if You Could Teach Only Your Favorite Students? – Postac Guest Post

By Karen Kelsky | September 22, 2020

By Jennie Nash

Jennie Nash is the founder and CEO of Author Accelerator, a company on a mission to raise the bar on book coaching. 

Learn more about becoming a coach at bookcoaches.com/theprofessorisin and join Jennie and me for an informational webinar on October 6 at 6pm Pacific (9pm Eastern.)  Sign up HERE. The event will be recorded so sign up even if you can’t make the date and time.

~~~~

Teachers, like parents, aren’t supposed to have favorites.

But how can you ignore a student who is eager to learn, eager to listen, ready to work hard, and happy go the extra mile to improve themselves? Mentoring a student like that is one of the great joys of teaching. We want to have an impact, and when that impact is clear and visible, we feel a deep and abiding sense of satisfaction.

I’m a book coach, which means that I work with writers all the way through the entire process of writing a book. I offer editorial feedback, emotional support, and project management to my clients so that they can write a book that closely matches their vision. It’s teaching a specific skill (writing a book), but it’s also guiding a career, cheering on the individual, and helping them achieve a specific market-based outcome (writing a book that strangers want to read.)

Any Writer I Could Get

At the beginning of my book coaching career, like most self-employed people, I took every client I could get. If someone was willing to pay me for my services, I would serve them. I was excited to be making my fledgling venture work. 

Soon, however, I began to resent the clients who missed deadlines because their mother-in-law was coming to visit or their dog needed to go to the vet. I have nothing against dogs and mothers-in-law, but I do have a problem with people who don’t value my time or their commitments.

I also have trouble with people who rush through the work so fast that they are simply pushing it back on me; who make the same mistakes over and over and over again because they are just trying to get the book done and not get it done well; who don’t seem to really want to do the thing they have signed up to do.

I began to pay attention to the connection between the clients I most enjoyed working with and inco,e. One year, I made a grid, and ranked my clients according to who I liked the best. It felt like heresy to admit that there was, in fact, a ranking – but as soon as I admitted it and put it on paper, it was an enormous relief – and a giant surprise. 

I was making far more money from the clients I liked than those I didn’t. Close to 80% of my income was coming from the clients I liked, and all the angst I was experiencing was coming from the other 20 % of my clients.

It was that old 80-20 rule we know about from business and finance – the idea that 80% of the outcome is the result of 20% of the input. 

Prioritizing to Those I Like Best

I decided to start saying no to the clients I thought would fall into the 20%. 

I wrote manifesto about who I would not serve. I then designed an intake process that helped me identify red flag clients – the kind who asked a hundred questions before we even start working together; who indicated they want some sort of ironclad guarantee – of time, of money, of impact; who are more interested in what they were going to get than in what they are going to learn.

I made some changes to my offerings and to my website so that it would scare away the people who were not the kinds of people I wanted to serve and attract those who were:

  • I increased my fees. A lot. I wanted to work with people who were ready to invest in themselves and charging more meant I would attract people who were serious about the work. 
  • I wrote a statement about there being no guarantees. Publishing is a fickle business, where luck and timing play a big role. I wanted to work with people who understood this truth.
  • I talked about my coaching philosophy – how I am very tough about the writing and very compassionate about the writer. This would deter anyone who wanted a coach to go easy on their pages because they had already spent three years on them. You can’t get to excellent if you go easy.
  • I developed a policy around cancellations and said they would only be tolerated in a true emergency. I wanted to work with people who honored my time and talent – and theirs.

In The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Marie Kondo speaks of only keeping the objects in your life that bring you joy. I applied this process to my book coaching business so that I would only keep the clients who brought me joy.

Trusting Myself and Trusting the Process

Once I made these changes, it became surprisingly easy to recognize my ideal clients and to recognize those who were going to be a problem. The trick then was to turn the problematic clients down. These were people willing to pay me good money, and I had to learn to trust that other people who wanted to pay me good money and who were also a good fit for me were just around the corner.

Like everything difficult, this probably sounds really easy. It was not so easy in practice. I would slip up all the time and find myself working with someone who did not bring me joy – and who had shown me the red flags early in the process.

The challenge became acting on my instincts. I know when someone is right and when they are wrong. I do not doubt my discernment. What I doubt is my right to say no. This is what that sounds like inside my mind:

  • What if I turn this money away and the economy collapses in three months and this is the last client I will ever get?
  • It’s a PANDEMIC for crying out loud. Take everything you can get!
  • What if I literally never get an ideal client again? 
  • Who are you to get to be so picky?

These questions are all about what I have learned is called an “upper limit problem.” Gay Hendricks speaks about this in his book, The Big Leap. An upper limit problem is a situation where you have placed an arbitrary limit on what you can achieve. It’s self-limiting. It’s putting up mental roadblocks to your own success.

I started to recognize how I was getting in my own way. I started saying no and also believing that my ideal clients will show up. 

Busting Through the Upper Limit 

Saying yes to the writers whom I can best serve and saying no to those I can’t has turned out to be an excellent business strategy. Since implementing these checks and balances on my book coaching business, I have doubled my income.

It has been so successful, that I now teach this strategy to the students in my Business of Book Coaching masterclass. I insist that they define who they most want to serve and why, and that they write a manifesto for who they will not serve. I insist that they think about how much they want to be earning – not how much they think they can get away with earning, but how much they would earn in a perfect world. We work backwards from the fantasy to the steps they need to take to get there – including trusting their decisions and their instincts.

A business in which people you love to serve pay you money you feel good about earning? It sounds a bit like Field of Dreams – “if you build it, they will come,” and I suppose it is. But whether you are running a tutoring business or a college application essay coaching business or a book coaching business, it’s also a proven solid business strategy.

Filed Under: Goodbye Ivory Towers, Post-Ac Free-Lancing and Small Business, Post-Ac Job Search, Quitting--An Excellent Option, Strategizing Your Success in Academia

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