EP 380 - Coaching Business Not Working? Do This Today To Grow in 2026

MarketingCoaching LifestyleTechnology
Written By Debbie Shadid
 

If your business isn't working and you're thinking, "I've tried everything, nobody's interested, I'm about to give up," this one's for you. It's short, but it might be the most useful ten minutes you spend on your business this week. I'm going to give you three honest things to check today, and I promise one of them will show you exactly what needs to shift.

If you're new to my channel, my name is Debbie Shadid. I'm a Business Growth and Life Coach and the founder of the Business Building Boutique. For over two decades, I've helped women learn how to become coaches, get clients, grow their businesses, and create meaningful income doing work they love, without paid ads and without complicated tech.

Here's the thing. When someone tells me they've tried everything, we almost always find that they haven't, or that something quietly needs to change. Let's find yours.

In this episode, we'll walk through:

  • Step one: study three coaches who are genuinely successful doing what you do, and how to confirm they're actually making sales

  • How to feed those three competitors into ChatGPT or Claude to spot the exact gap in your own marketing

  • Why this is modeling success, never copying, and where that line is

  • Step two: the honest conversation about what marketing you're truly doing, not what you think you're doing

  • Why "I tried Instagram and it didn't work" usually isn't true, and what social media is actually for

  • The minimum five free ways to market your business, done consistently

  • Why a post nobody likes still did its job

  • Step three: the mindset check, and how certainty quietly creates your results

  • The "Certain Way" from The Science of Getting Rich, and the proof already sitting in your own life

  • Why stopping your marketing for even a week breaks your own momentum

Here's what I want you to hold onto. Businesses aren't built on a few posts. They're built on consistent action, day after day, even when you can't see the results yet. Check your competition, check your marketing, check your mindset, and then keep going. Do the work consistently, and you will create the business you want.

Ready for real help getting your business working? Come to one of my upcoming free workshops: https://debbieshadid.com/workshop

Want to talk through what's not working with me directly? Book a call with me here: https://debbieshadid.com/schedule

Connect with me, Debbie Shadid:

Are you a coach, or thinking about becoming one? Book a call with me here: https://debbieshadid.com/schedule

Listen to the Podcast:

If this helped, share it with a coach who's discouraged, and tell me in the comments which of the three you needed to hear.

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TRANSCRIPT

If your business is not working and you're like, "I've tried everything. I'm about to give up. I can't seem to sell anything. Nobody's interested in my coaching," this episode is for you. I'm Debbie Shadid. I help women over fifty build beautiful boutique-style coaching businesses without spending money on paid ads, and without complicated tech. Today, this is gonna be a short one, but a very impactful one. I'm gonna talk to you about doing some research to really figure out what is going on with your business. Number one, I want you to research your competitors. Now, I never advise that, but if you really believe your business is not working, if you are positive, like you've tried everything, and it's just not working, then I want you to go do some homework. I want you to find three people that you believe and that you can find evidence that they are highly successful doing what you do. Go find them, go search them out, go study them, and figure out what are they doing that is creating success that I am not doing? Now, I want you to double-check and make sure these people really are making sales. Because looks are deceiving, and people can talk a big talk and have never worked with anyone. So make sure you do your homework. Once you have those three competitors and you have studied everything you can study about them, all the different platforms their marketing message, everything, I want you to gather up that data, and I want you to go to ChatGPT or Claude, whichever one you use the most. The one AI tool that knows you the best, I want you to put in those three competitors, all their information, and then I want you to ask Claude or ChatGPT to tell you where the gap is. What am I doing different than them? How can they be getting traction and I'm not? That's what I want you to do first. Number two, I want you to have an honest conversation with yourself. Oftentimes, I talk to women, and they're like, "I'm tried everything." And I'm like, "Well, tell me what you're doing." They start telling me what they're doing, and it's not everything. Or they start saying, "Well, I used to be on Instagram, but I'm not anymore because it wasn't working." And it's like, okay, hold on. These are all things that we actually have to honestly assess. We have to figure out, what does that mean? You can't be vague about it. Like, you used to be on Instagram, and how do you know it wasn't working? Because people weren't clicking and going to your calendar from there? Here's what I believe about social media and about many of the places that you think are not working for you. They're just one more place that somebody might see you when they scroll by and they remember you. if you make an impression on them and they don't engage in your post, it doesn't matter. I always say to people who tell me that, like, "Nobody likes my posts," I'm like, "When's the last time you liked and commented on somebody's post?" Yeah, I call people out on it because you're not doing it, so why should you expect people to do it for you? But it doesn't mean that it's not working. It's just one more place somebody sees you, okay? So have an honest conversation. What is the marketing that you are doing? I recommend all free marketing, a minimum of five ways to market your business Five ways to market your business. All right? So check with yourself and be honest about what you're doing. Okay. The third thing I want you to do is I want you to have a conversation with yourself about your own mindset. I want you to check in and see what you are really thinking. Are you doing business all the while thinking, "There's too much competition. This isn't working anyway"? Are you showing up in your content with the idea, you know, that,"Well, okay, here we go again"? Are you showing up thinking like,"Everything I try doesn't work"? All of those things will kill your business. If you think it's not gonna work, I can guarantee you it's not gonna work. You can push your way through and eventually you might get a client, eventually you might be able to get somebody to buy from you, but that is not the way you build a business. There is a book that I am reading in my book club, and it's The Science of Getting Rich, and Wallace Wattles talks about the Certain Way. This is a whole takeaway from this book, the Certain Way. Capital C, Certain Way, capital W. Like, what is the certain way of doing this? And this is all about having certainty, and I'm just gonna challenge you to check in your own life, when did you have certainty and what results did you create? I asked our coaching clients this tonight, and they were like, "Oh, yeah." I'm like, "Yeah, when you decided you were gonna buy a house, you were certain you were gonna do it, and you did it. When you decided you were graduating from college, you were certain you were gonna do it, and you did it. When you decided,'I'm gonna find somebody to get married,' you were certain, and you did it." There's this whole list of things that you were certain about that you did. This same application has to happen for your business. So if you have an honest conversation with yourself and you're like, "You know, that's right, I'm not actually showing up with certainty," you're not gonna get the result you want. Those are the three things that you must look at if your business is not working, and I can guarantee you you're gonna find something in there that proves that you are not working correctly or that something in your business needs to shift. And I'm gonna bet it's the amount of marketing that you're doing, and you're not being consistent. If you stop for a few days or a week, you break your own momentum. You are breaking your own success cycle. So there is no stopping on your marketing. It doesn't matter whether it's working. You keep going, you assess, you improve, you assess, you improve. Okay? Businesses are not built on a few posts. Businesses are built on consistent action day after day, even when you don't see the results. And then what's gonna happen, one day you're gonna be like, "Oh my gosh, you're never gonna believe this. I got a client." And I'm like, "No, I believe it," because if you did the work consistently, you will eventually create the business that you desire. So check out your competition, look and see what the difference is We are never copying the competition, we are modeling after success. Let's be clear about that. Then check to see what you're doing, create a marketing plan that you will follow, and then follow the plan. And then check your mindset. That's it. I'm telling you what, you will shift your business results. All right, you have got this, my friend. I hope to see you very soon. Make sure you sign up for one of our upcoming workshops, debbieshadid.com/workshop, and subscribe so you can learn more about how to build a profitable coaching business you will love. Have a great week. Bye-bye.

Debbie Shadid https://www.DebbieShadid.com
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EP 379 - How She Got Her First Coaching Client in Less Than 6 Months