Over the years, I’ve witnessed thousands of people train as coaches.

They arrive from almost every imaginable background: leadership, HR, education, healthcare, consulting, the arts, sport and countless other professions. They spend months, sometimes years, learning how to coach well. They develop their listening, their presence, their ability to ask better questions, their understanding of ethics, boundaries and the nature of the coaching relationship.

Then, for those who want to build an independent practice, something rather strange often happens once they qualify.

They hit a brick wall! They lose momentum. They feel lost.

After watching this unfold so many times, I’ve come to the conclusion there are three main challenges, or gaps, that exist in the field.

These are:

• The Knowledge Gap
• The Perception Gap, and
• The Coherence Gap.

The Knowledge Gap

Firstly, the knowledge gap. When a coach qualifies and sets out to build their practice, the clear structures for progression provided by the training school largely disappear.

For most coaches, this comes after a career in which an organisation had provided a structure they could work within. They haven’t needed to create a personal brand or market themselves or figure out how to sell their services. They haven’t needed to learn content marketing or business finance.

But now, the questions come thick and fast. How do I find clients? What should I charge? Do I need a niche? How do I explain what I do? Should I be posting on LinkedIn? How do referrals actually happen? How do I take payment? What should my website say? How do I sell coaching without becoming someone I don’t particularly want to be?

None of these questions has anything to do conducting a good coaching conversation.

And yet, for an independent coach, they will often determine whether any coaching conversations happen at all.

This is one of the recurring problems I’ve observed throughout my coaching career. We have become increasingly sophisticated in how we train people to coach, but no more sophisticated in how we help them build a professional practice around that skill.

I don’t say that as a criticism of coaching schools.

Coaching schools exist primarily to teach coaching, and rightly so. Their responsibility is to develop competent, thoughtful and ethical practitioners. Trying to bolt an entire business education onto a professional coaching qualification would create its own problems.

But it does leave a gap.

Most coaches have not built a business before.

And that gap is larger than it first appears, because the difficulty isn’t only that most coaches haven’t been taught how to build a business.

There is another problem sitting underneath it.

The Perception Gap

For many coaches, some of the behaviours associated with building a successful business can feel uncomfortably at odds with the values and professional identity they have spent years developing.

Imagine someone who has spent their professional life learning to place the other person at the centre of the conversation.

They have learned to listen rather than talk. To remain curious rather than rush to demonstrate expertise. To resist the temptation to make the conversation about themselves. To respect autonomy. To avoid imposing. To create space.

Then they start a business and are told:

You need to stand out.

Become more visible.

Build authority.

Talk about your expertise.

Develop a personal brand.

Tell people why they should choose you.

There is an obvious tension there.

It doesn’t mean those things are genuinely incompatible. But they can certainly feel incompatible.

Humility is a good example. Most coaches I know would regard humility as an important professional quality. Nobody particularly wants to work with a coach who spends the session demonstrating how clever they are.

But humility can become complicated when you have to market yourself.

At some point, a business owner has to be willing to say: I’m good at this. I understand this problem. I have something useful to offer. Here is why my work may be worth your attention.

For someone whose professional identity has been built partly around not making themselves the centre of things, that can feel surprisingly uncomfortable.

The same tension appears around money.

A great many people enter coaching because they genuinely want to help. There is an altruistic impulse behind the work. Coaches care about their clients. They want their work to matter.

Then business introduces an entirely different set of considerations.

• How much should I charge?
• Is this profitable?
• Can I afford to keep doing this?
• Should I increase my fees?
• Is this client taking more time than the contract allows?
• Do I really want to give another free hour?

Those are perfectly legitimate questions for a business owner. In fact, avoiding them eventually creates its own problems.

But I have met many coaches for whom thinking seriously about their own financial interests carries a sense of discomfort. Somewhere underneath it sits the thought that if the work is genuinely about helping people, perhaps money ought not to matter quite so much.

Something similar happens with energy and boundaries.

A coach may naturally want to be generous. They give extra time. They respond to messages between sessions. They discount because somebody seems to need the work. They agree to meetings that are inconvenient. They take on clients they don’t really want because turning someone away feels difficult.

None of these decisions looks particularly serious in isolation.

But collectively, they can produce a business that is financially weak, emotionally draining and increasingly difficult to sustain.

And then there is visibility.

The business world rewards distinction. A coach needs to become known for something, or at least sufficiently recognisable that somebody remembers them when the need arises.

Yet many coaches are deeply uncomfortable with the idea of presenting themselves as somehow different from, or better than, their peers.

There is often an admirable instinct behind that. Coaching is a profession full of thoughtful people who don’t want to overclaim expertise or make inflated promises.

But that instinct can quietly turn into invisibility.

I have seen talented coaches spend months polishing websites nobody visits, endlessly refining positioning statements, rewriting their LinkedIn profiles and waiting for people to discover how good they are.

Meanwhile, someone with half their experience and considerably fewer reservations about talking about themselves builds an audience.

The conclusion can then become: “I’m not very good at marketing.”

Perhaps. But sometimes the problem isn’t really marketing.

Sometimes it is a conflict between the coach someone wants to be and the business owner they believe they are being asked to become.

That’s what I call the perception gap.

And it is important to recognise it because if we treat every business challenge as a knowledge issue, we risk finding the wrong solution.

Someone uncomfortable with visibility doesn’t necessarily need another content strategy.

Someone nervous about charging properly doesn’t necessarily need another pricing model.

Someone avoiding sales conversations doesn’t necessarily need a better discovery-call script.

The practical knowledge may help, but it may not be the thing preventing action.

This is one of the reasons I’ve come to believe that business education for coaches has to be different from generic small-business education.

It has to understand that building a coaching practice is partly commercial, partly strategic, partly practical, and partly psychological.

It also has to challenge a false choice that sits beneath many of these tensions.

Humility does not require invisibility.

Care for others does not require neglect of yourself.

Generosity does not require exhaustion.

Professional integrity does not require commercial naivety.

The objective is not to turn coaches into a different kind of person.

It is to help them build a business in a way that allows their professional values and their commercial needs to coexist.

The Coherence Gap

There is a third challenge, which I call the coherence gap

Because, let’s face it, business information is not difficult to find.

Quite the opposite.

A coach wanting to build a business today has access to an extraordinary amount of advice. There are books on marketing, podcasts about sales, YouTube channels devoted to personal branding, LinkedIn experts explaining content strategy, courses on funnels, newsletters about pricing, webinars on lead generation and communities discussing practically every conceivable aspect of building a business.

There is no shortage of information.

But there is a shortage of coherence.

Part of the problem is that business education has become highly fragmented.

Most experts understandably teach from the territory they know best. The branding expert sees branding as central. The LinkedIn expert sees LinkedIn as central. The sales expert sees the sales conversation as the point where everything is won or lost. The niche specialist tells you to sharpen your positioning. The content marketer tells you to publish more. The networking expert tells you relationships matter more than any of it.

None of them necessarily has to be wrong.

But the coach is left trying to work out how all these pieces fit together.

And, inevitably, many experts are also building businesses of their own. They need a distinctive point of view. They need an area they can become known for. They need to make the case that the problem they solve matters.

Again, there is nothing inherently wrong with that. But it can create an educational landscape in which every piece of advice reflects the expert’s own strategic positioning.

Then there is the fragmentation of the learning itself.

One idea comes from a podcast episode. Another from a LinkedIn post. Another from a YouTube video. Another from a half-completed course. Another from somebody speaking at a conference. Another from a book recommended by a colleague.

The coach gradually accumulates advice, frameworks, tactics and opinions.

But none of it quite fits together.

Without some kind of organising structure, it becomes difficult to know what matters most, what comes first, what belongs together and what is simply irrelevant to the particular business you are trying to build.

This is especially difficult because good business advice is often contextual.

“Build an audience” may be sensible advice for one coach but a complete distraction for another.

“Choose a niche” may create clarity for somebody whose message is hopelessly broad, but become an unnecessary restriction for somebody whose work already spreads through a strong professional network.

A newly qualified coach trying to find their first three clients does not need the same education as an established coach trying to enter corporate markets.

The question is rarely simply, “Is this good advice?”

The better question is, “Is this the right advice for me, at this point, for the kind of practice I am trying to build?”

That is where information and education begin to separate.

Information gives us individual answers.

Education helps us understand the landscape those answers belong to.

And I think that is another reason coaches need something more coherent than an ever-growing collection of business tips, experts, platforms and courses.

They need a way of seeing how the whole thing fits together.

What Better Business Education Looks Like

So what would better business education for coaches actually look like?

I think it begins by taking all three of these gaps seriously.

The knowledge gap means coaches need to learn the practical realities of building a business. Marketing, sales, pricing, finance, positioning, referrals, offers and all the other things that suddenly become important when you are responsible for creating your own work.

The perception gap means that knowledge has to be taught in a way that understands the values, identity and psychology of coaches. It needs to recognise that visibility, money, selling and self-promotion can carry meanings that go far beyond the practical task itself. For many coaches, becoming better at business also means finding a way to reconcile commercial success with the kind of practitioner they want to be.

And the coherence gap means helping coaches see how the pieces fit together. Not simply giving them more tactics, but helping them understand what matters at different stages, how one decision affects another, and which advice is useful for the particular practice they are trying to build.

Put those three things together and business education starts to look quite different.

It becomes less about giving coaches more business information and more about helping them understand what to do, how to make sense of it, and how to do it in a way that fits with who they are.

It combines practical knowledge with an understanding of the person applying it.

And it replaces a fragmented collection of advice with a clearer view of the whole landscape.

That, to me, is the nettle to be grasped.

The coaching profession has become remarkably sophisticated in how it helps people become better coaches.

I think it is time we became equally thoughtful about helping them build the businesses that allow that coaching to happen.