Why some coaches still get chosen
Share
If you've been coaching or consulting for a while, you probably know the loop. You deliver. You spend the other half of the week trying to find the next piece of work. Most of what comes in arrives by referral, or because a former client has suddenly remembered you exist. Revenue jumps around month to month. And every time you sit down to think seriously about how to get off the treadmill, you arrive at roughly the same conclusion: that you should probably write a book, or build a framework, or do something more durable that explains your work to people when you're not in the room. Then you don't, because you have no time and no idea where to start, so you go back to delivering.
I keep hearing some version of that from the consultants I talk to.
The strange part is that the underlying need for what they do is, if anything, higher than it was. The companies I see closest are wrestling with reorganisations nobody on the leadership team knows how to land, executives who can't get their teams aligned around a strategy, growth plans that fall apart on first contact with reality. None of that gets solved by a chatbot, or for that matter by faster software. But every prospect now turns up with at least one stakeholder who has already tried to do the job with ChatGPT, every LinkedIn feed is filling up with content that all looks roughly the same, and people seem less willing to pay decent rates for human thinking even though there is more generic advice in the world than there has ever been.
Which is what makes it worth looking at the coaches and consultants who have kept getting chosen for the last twenty years, and are still getting chosen now. They didn't build their reputation through LinkedIn. Most of them did most of the work before LinkedIn was anything more than a digital CV. They built something else, and whatever they built is still doing the work for them.
A few of them are worth being specific about.
Marshall Goldsmith published What Got You Here Won't Get You There in 2007. The book is built around one observation: the behaviours that get executives to the top are often the same ones that stop them moving any further. He has been repeating that idea, in different shapes, for nearly forty years. He doesn't have to chase clients. CEOs read the book and call him.
Michael Bungay Stanier wrote The Coaching Habit in 2016 around seven questions, which is a small enough idea that a busy manager can actually carry it around in their head. The book has sold over a million copies, and most of his pipeline now walks in because of it.
Brené Brown gave a TEDx talk in Houston in 2010 to a few hundred people, on the back of about a decade of academic research into shame and vulnerability. The talk got passed around online, became one of the most-watched TED talks ever, and seeded everything that came after: the books, the Netflix special, the leadership work with Fortune 500 boards. None of that grew out of content marketing. The whole thing started with research, said clearly, in front of the right room.
Simon Sinek's first book came out in 2009. Most people associate him with three concentric circles drawn on a flipchart and the phrase "start with why." That diagram, more than anything else, is what gets him onto stages. It also gets him into corporate boardrooms, because clients can hand the diagram to their leadership team in a way they can't hand around a 90-minute talk.
Patrick Lencioni built The Table Group on the back of a series of business fables, the best-known being The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. He chose fables specifically because executives find them easier to share with their leadership teams than conventional business books. A choice he made twenty-five years ago is still bringing his firm work today.
Bill Campbell never wrote anything himself. He coached Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Sheryl Sandberg, and a long list of others, and refused most public attention. After he died in 2016, three of his closest collaborators wrote Trillion Dollar Coach about what he had actually done. That book is now the closest thing the tech industry has to a coaching manual, and it exists because somebody bothered to put his body of practice into a form that could outlive him. The slightly grim lesson there is that nobody else is likely to do this work for you while you're still around to do it.
What unites those examples isn't really the channel. Books worked for some, a diagram worked for Sinek, Brown more or less rode a TED talk for a decade. The thing that links them is that each of them took the time to turn what they thought into something other people could pick up and carry around without them being in the room. Once that work existed, it kept working. It does the sales call when they're not in the room, and it convinces the CFO who has never met them that the engagement is worth signing off. Most of why this group kept getting chosen before LinkedIn, before AI, and now, comes down to that.
The current market makes the point even sharper. AI hasn't really changed what makes a coach or a consultant trustworthy. The criteria for being hired are mostly what they were ten years ago. What AI has done is widen the gap between producing content and having a recognisable body of work. Most AI-generated material is technically fine and almost completely interchangeable. The thing it cannot really do, at least not yet, is sound like a particular person who has spent a long time thinking about a particular problem and has actually seen it up close.
I'd add one more thing to this, which has more to do with feeling than with strategy. The knowledge that experienced coaches and consultants carry around inside them is a real thing. Twenty years of patterns watched, mistakes made the first time and remembered, leadership teams seen close up enough to know what was actually going on under the org chart. If none of that ever gets out into the world in any form, it disappears with them, which is a small waste in any one consultant's case and quite a large one once you start adding up across a profession. That part of it bothers me as much as the commercial argument does, probably more.
So if there's a single lesson worth pulling out of all of this, it's roughly this. The coaches and consultants who still get chosen in this market are the ones whose thinking lives somewhere outside their own heads, in a form a stranger can actually find. It doesn't have to be a bestseller, or a TED talk, or anything as ambitious as either. It does have to be a real piece of work that does the explaining for you when you're not in the room. That was already true twenty years ago, and I'd argue it has become a lot more urgent in the last two.
A note on what this means in practice. Most experienced coaches and consultants haven't done this work yet, and it's rarely because they couldn't be bothered. The questions involved are overwhelming. How do you start? How do you actually write it? Is it any good? How long would it take? How much would it cost? Where do you even publish it once it's done? The traditional version of the answer is brutal too: a real book typically takes 18 to 24 months, costs the author £20,000 or more once you factor in time off, ghostwriting, editing and design, and very often never gets finished.
That's roughly why I started SPV Creative Press. I capture the thinking through interviews rather than asking consultants to write it themselves, then handle the editing, the structuring, the design and the publishing on their behalf. The whole thing takes about two months, at a fraction of what traditional publishing services charge. I do similar work with elders who want to leave a written record for their families, with young authors (which is actually how SPV started, with a book my daughter wrote when she was seven), and occasionally with whole villages that want to capture their own history before it disappears.
If any of this lands and you'd like to see how it would work for you, you can read more HERE.