In the first two essays in this series, I looked at the problems coaches face when they try to build a business around their coaching.

The first was the broader issue of coaching business education itself. Many coaches leave training with strong practitioner skills but limited preparation for marketing, sales, pricing, finance or the other realities of running an independent practice.

The second looked more closely at what makes the building a coaching business difficult in practice: moving from working inside an existing structure to creating one for yourself, dealing with the personal discomfort that can come with visibility and selling, trying to differentiate in a crowded market, and working out what actually matters amongst an overwhelming number of possible strategies.

There is also the problem of coherence. Coaches can access an enormous amount of information, but it is scattered across different experts, different platforms and different schools of thought. The difficulty is often not finding advice. It is understanding what applies, what matters now and how the different pieces fit together.

Once you see the problem that way, the next question becomes more interesting:

What would a business education environment designed specifically around those realities need to look like?

That is really the question behind The Coaches Business Studio.

We did not begin with a list of features and then try to find reasons for them. The shape of the Studio emerged from the problems we were trying to solve.

One place for the whole business

One of the biggest problems with business education is fragmentation.

A coach might learn about personal branding from one person, social media from another, sales from somebody else, pricing from a podcast, corporate work from a webinar and financial management from a book.

Most of that material may be very good. The difficulty comes when the coach has to work out how all those ideas relate to one another.

A marketing strategy affects what kind of content you create. Your positioning affects how easily people understand that content. Your pricing affects the kind of clients you need and the economics of the practice. Your confidence may affect whether you implement any of it. If you want to work with organisations, sales, proposals, procurement, stakeholder relationships and credibility all become connected.

The business is interconnected, so the education needs to be interconnected too.

That is why we wanted the Studio to cover the whole territory of building a coaching business rather than specialise in one particular part of it.

The intention is that somebody can move from one area to another without having to start again with an entirely new educational worldview every time. The ideas should connect. Faculty members should be aware of one another’s territories. Programmes should point naturally towards other parts of the Studio when the learner’s next question sits somewhere else.

Over time, I want the Studio to feel less like a collection of content and more like a map for your business.

Breadth matters because coaching businesses take different forms

There is also no single coaching-business journey.

One coach may want a modest private practice alongside another career. Somebody else may want to build a full-time executive coaching business. Another may be interested in associate coaching, group programmes, workshops, social impact work or corporate contracts.

Even two coaches with very similar ambitions may be at completely different stages.

One might be trying to get their first three paying clients. Another might already have more work than they can comfortably handle and be thinking about how to redesign the business around the life they want.

That variety means the curriculum needs breadth.

A platform built around a narrow idea of what a successful coaching business looks like would quickly become irrelevant to a large number of coaches. We want the Studio to be useful across different stages, business models and ambitions.

That also means we are wary of presenting one route as though it were the route. There are usually several legitimate ways to build a coaching practice, and the right choice depends on the person, the market, the kind of work they want to do and the life they want the business to support.

The Studio therefore needs to help coaches make better decisions rather than simply prescribe one formula.

Depth matters too

Breadth, though, is only half of it.

There is another limitation in conventional business education that I think is less obvious: some questions are simply too small to be commercially attractive.

If you are an independent expert creating courses, it makes sense to focus on subjects with a large enough audience to justify the effort involved in researching, developing, filming, marketing and selling them.

That naturally favours larger subjects such as marketing, sales, personal branding or pricing.

But coaches often need help with questions that are much more specific.

• How do I approach an associate coaching provider?
• What should go into a corporate coaching proposal?
• How should I price a half-day workshop alongside my one-to-one work?
• What do I do when a corporate buyer asks for something I have never come across before?
• How should I handle a coaching engagement involving several stakeholders?
• What should I do when a former client asks me to coach somebody in their team?

None of those questions would necessarily support a major standalone course.

But if you are dealing with one of them this week, it may be the most useful thing you could learn.

That is why we wanted the Studio to be able to become increasingly granular.

A topic does not need to justify becoming a product in its own right. It only needs to be useful enough to deserve a place in the collection.

Over time, that means areas such as associate coaching, corporate work, marketing, social media, proposals or group work can become much deeper territories. We can keep building classes, resources, essays and answers around the smaller questions that sit inside them.

That is important to me because genuinely useful education often lives in those smaller questions.

Different problems need different forms of learning

Once we accepted that the Studio needed both breadth and depth, another issue became obvious: not everything should be a course.

Sometimes a substantial programme is exactly what somebody needs. If you are rethinking your positioning, building a new practice model or developing your coaching signature, the learning may need to unfold over several modules and involve reflection, exercises and decisions along the way.

But many business problems are much smaller.

If you want to improve your coaching bio, understand how to ask for a referral or work out how to structure a discovery conversation, you probably do not need six modules of education.

Likewise, there are moments when the issue is not knowledge at all.

Someone may already know that they need to contact five people in their network. They just haven’t done it.

In that situation, another lesson might simply give them another opportunity to postpone the action.

That is why the Studio contains different kinds of experiences.

Signature Programmes are there for substantial learning journeys. Masterclasses deal with more focused subjects. Challenges are designed to create movement around a particular outcome. Missions strip things back further and simply invite somebody to complete a piece of meaningful work. Essays allow us to explore ideas that are better suited to reflection than instruction, while resources make practical implementation easier.

The point is not variety for its own sake.

The point is to match the form of learning to the problem.

Learning has to lead somewhere

This was another important design principle.

Online education can become strangely detached from the thing it is supposed to improve.

People can spend hours watching videos, saving resources, making notes and bookmarking courses while the business outside the learning platform remains almost unchanged.

I have no interest in building something that encourages that.

Learning matters because of what it allows somebody to understand, decide or do differently.

Sometimes the result will be practical. Somebody writes a proposal, contacts a former colleague, changes a price, publishes an article or creates an offer.

Sometimes the movement is less visible. They finally understand why a particular strategy has not been working or realise that a problem they thought was about marketing is actually about confidence or positioning.

But there should usually be some movement.

That is why implementation sits throughout the Studio rather than being treated as an optional extra. Challenges, Missions, worksheets, workbooks and practical resources all exist to help close the gap between understanding something and actually using it.

We have to understand the person building the business

There is also a reason the Studio cannot simply teach generic business principles and assume coaches will apply them.

The person building the business matters.

A coach may understand the logic of increasing their visibility and still find being visible deeply uncomfortable. They may understand how pricing works and still struggle to name the fee when another person is sitting in front of them. They may know that following up is sensible and continue worrying that it will make them seem intrusive.

Those things matter because they affect behaviour.

This does not mean turning every business difficulty into a psychological issue. Sometimes a coach needs a better marketing plan because their current marketing plan is weak. Sometimes they need to understand their finances because they have never looked properly at the numbers.

But there are other times when more technical knowledge will not make much difference because the obstacle sits somewhere else.

So the Studio has to hold both.

It needs to teach the mechanics of business while understanding the internal experience of applying them.

That is why questions of confidence, perfectionism, visibility, money, rejection, identity and resilience belong within business education for coaches rather than sitting somewhere outside it.

The faculty exists to organise the knowledge

The faculty model grew out of another design decision.

Most educational businesses begin with the expert. Somebody has knowledge or experience in a particular field, and a programme is built around what that person knows.

Again, there is nothing wrong with that. A lot of wonderful education was created that way.

But it also means the curriculum is shaped by the expertise and interests of the people available to teach it.

We wanted to start somewhere else.

The question for us was: what does a coach need to understand?

From there, we could define the different territories and build a faculty around them.

That is why one faculty member focuses on financial clarity, another on content, another on sales, another on associate coaching, another on corporate work and so on. Each one becomes a consistent educational voice within a particular area, but they are all part of the same wider architecture.

The faculty therefore helps us organise a very broad curriculum without turning it into an anonymous database of content.

It also gives each territory continuity. If you return to financial questions six months after completing a programme, there is still a familiar way of thinking waiting for you.

We wanted it to be affordable enough to stay useful over time

There was another problem we wanted to solve, and it is a very practical one: cost.

If the Studio were built in the conventional way, with a large faculty of human experts creating and delivering specialist content across dozens of areas, it would become extremely expensive very quickly. Either the membership price would have to rise substantially, or we would have to limit the amount and depth of what we produced.

Neither option particularly appealed to me.

One of the things AI changes is the economics of educational production. It allows us to create far more content, across far more specialist areas, without each new class, programme or resource carrying the same production cost that it would under a traditional faculty model.

But that does not mean we simply hand the work over to AI.

The thinking, curriculum design, research, editorial judgement, quality standards and production decisions remain human-led. AI gives us the ability to produce at scale, but the Studio still has to be shaped, challenged and crafted by people.

That combination matters because it allows us to hold two ambitions at the same time: to build something unusually comprehensive and to keep the membership affordable enough that coaches can stay with it as their business develops.

I do not want the Studio to become another expensive course purchase that somebody has to justify every time they have a new problem.

The whole point is that the relationship can continue.

A coach might need help with visibility today, pricing six months from now and corporate work two years later. If access to that support becomes prohibitively expensive, the model stops making sense.

So affordability is not separate from the educational philosophy.

It is part of it.

The aim is to use the economics made possible by AI to create something broader, deeper and more accessible than would otherwise be realistic, while keeping human judgement at the centre of what gets created and why.

Why membership made more sense than selling courses

Once the Studio was designed this way, selling everything separately made less and less sense.

If somebody joins because they think they have a marketing problem and discovers that their real issue is positioning, I do not particularly want to tell them they bought the wrong course and now need to purchase another one.

Likewise, the problem somebody joins with today may have disappeared in six months, only to be replaced by something completely different.

A coach may initially need help finding clients. Later they may need help with pricing. Then proposals. Then group programmes. Then financial planning.

Those questions belong to the same developing business.

A membership therefore fits the educational philosophy much better. One fee gives access to the whole Studio, which means the useful question becomes, “What do I need now?” rather than “Which product should I buy?”

That distinction matters.

And then AI made the model possible

There is one final piece of the architecture that obviously needs mentioning.

Much of what I have described would be extremely difficult to create through a conventional human faculty.

The breadth alone would require a large number of specialists. The depth would make the economics even harder because we would be asking people to create material on subjects with relatively small audiences.

And the more granular the curriculum became, the less commercially sensible many of those individual pieces would be to produce.

AI changed that equation.

It made it possible to imagine a permanent specialist faculty and an educational environment that could keep expanding into smaller and more specific areas without every piece of content having to justify itself as a commercial product.

That deserves a much fuller discussion, which I will come to separately, because there are obvious questions about why we chose AI and what we think it adds to the experience.

But in terms of the design of the Studio, its significance is fairly simple.

It allows us to build around what would be useful to coaches rather than around what would be commercially viable as a standalone course.

The Studio solution responds to the problem

So when you look at the Studio now, I hope its different parts make much more sense when viewed as responses to the problems we were trying to solve.

• Coaches need business knowledge, so the Studio needs breadth.
• Their questions become increasingly specific, so it needs depth.
• Business advice is fragmented, so the curriculum needs coherence.
• Different problems require different forms of support, so not everything should be a course.
• Knowing something does not guarantee action, so implementation has to be built into the experience.
• Business-building is personal as well as practical, so psychology belongs alongside strategy.
• Because a coach’s needs change over time, access to the whole Studio makes more sense than asking people to buy one isolated solution after another.
• And if coaches are going to use the Studio throughout the life of their practice, it needs to be affordable enough for that relationship to continue.

None of those decisions emerged because they sounded good on a feature list.

They emerged because we kept asking the same question:

What would actually make business education more useful for coaches?

The Studio is our attempt to answer it.