Soqratic Sandbox

Blog

  • Sleep Is a Leadership Skill

    Leaders who sleep badly make harsher judgements, read neutral faces as hostile and take more risks with other people's work. None of that feels like tiredness from the inside.

    • Keep the same wake time every day, weekends included.
    • Stop work messages an hour before bed.
    • If you cannot sleep after twenty minutes, get up and read.

  • Content Marketing for Coaches (Video)

    In this recording Daniel walks through a content plan for coaches who have one hour a week to spare: one long piece a month, cut into four short ones.

    The long piece answers the question clients ask most often on discovery calls. Each short piece answers one part of it.

  • Discovery Calls That Convert

    A discovery call is not a free session. Its job is to find out whether you can help and to make it easy for the prospect to say yes or no.

    1. Where are you now?
    2. Where do you want to be in six months?
    3. What has stopped you getting there so far?
    4. What would it be worth to you to solve it?

    Talk about price on the call. Sending a proposal and waiting turns a decision into a negotiation.

  • A Newsletter Your Clients Actually Read

    Send one useful idea per email, at a predictable time, and write it as if to one person. Long digests of links get archived unread.

    • Subject line: the idea itself, not the issue number.
    • Length: under three hundred words.
    • Call to action: one, at the end, and only when you have something to offer.

  • Raising Your Rates Without Losing Clients

    Give existing clients ninety days of notice, keep their current rate until their package renews, and apply the new rate to new clients immediately.

    One client of ours raised her rates by thirty percent this way and lost one client out of fourteen. The client she lost had been asking for discounts for a year.

  • Pricing & Packaging Your Coaching Offers

    Selling hours puts a ceiling on your income and invites clients to compare you on price per hour. Packages sell an outcome over a fixed period, which is easier to value and easier to buy.

    A three-tier structure

    • Starter: a single intensive session with a written plan.
    • Core: twelve weeks of fortnightly sessions plus messaging support.
    • Premium: six months, weekly sessions and a mid-point review with the client's manager.

    Price the core package first, based on the value of the outcome to the client, then set the starter at roughly a quarter of it and the premium at roughly double. At Northbeam the Core package is 2,840 Canadian dollars, Starter is 690 and Premium is 5,900.

    Common mistakes

    Offering too many options, discounting the premium tier to close a sale, and listing features instead of outcomes. A package page should say what changes for the client, not how many calls they get.

  • Imposter Syndrome for New Coaches

    You do not need to be further along than everyone. You need to be one step ahead of the person you are helping, and honest about where you are.

    A reader asked how to stop feeling like a fraud with her first paying clients. The feeling usually means you care about doing the job well. Keep notes on the results your clients get; evidence is the most reliable answer to the voice that says you are not qualified.

  • The Two-Minute Weekly Review

    A weekly review does not need an hour. Two minutes on Friday afternoon is enough to end the week deliberately. We call these questions the Friday Three.

    1. What went well this week?
    2. What did I avoid?
    3. What is the one thing that matters most next week?

    Write the answers somewhere you will see on Monday morning.

  • Resilience After Losing a Big Client

    One of our clients, a solo consultant, lost a retainer that made up forty percent of her income. Her first instinct was to discount everything to fill the gap quickly.

    We worked on separating the facts from the story. The fact was a cash-flow gap of three months. The story was that her business was failing. Once the two were apart, she could plan for the gap instead of reacting to the story.

    She kept her prices, reached out to five past clients and filled most of the gap within ten weeks. The lesson she took away was to never let one client exceed a quarter of revenue again.

  • Building Habits That Stick

    Habits fail when they depend on motivation. They last when they are attached to something you already do and made small enough that skipping them feels silly.

    Anchor, shrink, celebrate

    • Anchor: after I pour my morning coffee, I will…
    • Shrink: write one sentence in my journal, not a page.
    • Celebrate: notice it, even with a quiet yes.

    Grow the habit only after it has run for two weeks without effort. Most people scale up too early and then quit entirely after one bad day.