Episode 155 | June 3, 2026 | 29:54
A few weeks ago, an email came across my desk from a financial coach who said she’d never struggled this much to make something work. She’d been posting consistently, running webinars (eight of them), building a community, and getting engagement on every post.
However, she had zero coaching clients and six months of runway left, and her friends and family were telling her there wasn’t a market for financial coaching and she should go back to her corporate job. We got on a call, and what came out of that conversation went deeper than tactics. Five principles came out of it, and they’re worth sharing with anyone who feels like they’ve tried everything.
Key Takeaways
| If you can’t name the problem you solve in one sentence, your audience can’t either, and that’s usually why they’re not hiring you. | |
| Visibility without clarity is just noise. You can have engagement, likes, and webinar attendees and still not be known for solving a specific problem people are actively trying to solve. | |
| Marketing is teaching in public about the specific problem you solve. Motivational content is forgettable. Content that connects with your clients positions you as the expert. | |
| Pick one platform and stay long enough for it to compound. Six months minimum. Depth beats breadth, every time. | |
| Clarity comes from commitment, not exploration. Testing ten things for six weeks each is how you stay stuck. | |
| Your best clients already told you what to focus on. Why did they hire you? That’s your roadmap. | |
| Creating content and creating demand are two different jobs. One is making things you think people need. The other is teaching about problems people are already trying to solve. |
On paper, this coach was doing it right. She’d built a solid program back in 2018, stepped away for corporate work, and started coaching full time in 2024.
She was posting consistently, running webinars (eight of them), and building a community. People were engaging with her content. Four of them had even joined her investing community at $27 a month, though all four were people she knew personally. But actual paying coaching clients? Zero. Month after month.
When we got on a call, she had a list of theories about what was wrong. Maybe her niche was too narrow. She was focused on unmarried professional women in tech, women who didn’t have a spouse to share financial decisions with, and she wondered if that was limiting her market.
Maybe her messaging wasn’t landing. She’d invested in brand coaching and social media support, but the conversions weren’t there. Maybe she was on the wrong platform. She’d been trying LinkedIn, Instagram, webinars, a Facebook group, and in-person events, and nothing was producing results. And the big one, the theory she was most afraid was true: maybe there just wasn’t a market for financial coaching and her friends and family were right.
I asked her one question: “What problem do you solve?”
If you’re reading this and you can’t answer that question in one sentence either, you are not alone. Most coaches I sit with can’t. That is the actual starting line.
The silence on the other end of the call wasn’t because she didn’t have an answer. It was because the answer was “everything.” She helped clients with budgeting, investing, retirement planning, paying off debt, building confidence with money. All of it.
She wasn’t solving the wrong problem with her business. She was solving the wrong problem in her business.
That’s when I named what I was hearing for her. There are two problems every coach is solving at any given time. The problem you’re solving IN your business, which for her was, “I don’t have steady lead gen happening.” And the problem you’re solving WITH your business, which is the specific thing people are hiring you to help them with.
She wasn’t solving the wrong problem with her business. She was solving the wrong problem in her business. The problem wasn’t her niche or her messaging or her platform. The problem was that she wasn’t known for solving a specific thing that people actively seek help with. People were seeing her, but they didn’t know what she did, and that’s where we started.
Principle 1: Solve a problem people are already trying to solve
The question to ask isn’t, “What’s my niche?” The better question is, “What problem do I solve that people are already trying to solve?”
There’s a difference between the two. A niche is a demographic while a problem is something specific people are actively seeking help with right now. Something they’re Googling, asking friends about, losing sleep over.
If people aren’t hiring you, it’s usually not because you’re bad at coaching. It’s because they don’t know what specific problem you solve. And if you can’t name it in one sentence, how could they?
“Financial coaching for unmarried professional women” is broad. It’s a demographic, not a problem. So is “financial coaching for couples.” And “retirement planning.” Even “debt payoff” is broad.
What specific problem are those people hiring you to solve? Answer that one first.
And then describe it from the client’s perspective, not yours. “Retirement planning” is your category. “I’ve started saving for retirement but I have no idea if I’m doing enough or how to make sure I’m on track” is what your client is actually thinking. The second one is the problem you can name in your content. The first one is what’s printed on a business card.
Principle 2: Being known vs. being seen
This coach had engagement. Likes, comments, people showing up to her webinars. But engagement doesn’t equal clients, and you can be seen without being known for something specific.
I asked her on the call: If I polled your Instagram followers right now and asked them “what does she do?”, what would they say? She paused, then said, “I don’t know. Maybe financial coaching?” Right. But financial coaching for what? To solve what specific problem?
Visibility without clarity is just noise.
You need to be known for solving a specific problem so clearly that when someone has that problem, they think of you. Not “oh, she posts about money.” Something more like “oh, she helps people who are paid on commission manage irregular income.” That’s the difference between being seen and being known.
This shows up in referral relationships too. The CPAs and advisors who refer clients to me don’t do it because they remember I’m a financial coach. They do it because they remember the specific kinds of problems I solve. When I meet with someone, I tell them a real, specific story about a client I helped, and what kind of problem it was. Over time, that becomes the thing I’m known for. You can’t fake this. The story has to be real, and the problem has to be one you’ve actually solved.
Principle 3: Go deep in one place
She was everywhere. Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook group, webinars, in-person events. And nothing was working.
I told her on the call that she wasn’t going deep anywhere. She was hopping, and when you hop, nothing compounds. Pick one platform. Go all-in. Let it compound for six months before you decide whether it’s working. Not two platforms, not “a little bit of everything.” One. Depth beats breadth every time.
Clarity doesn’t come from exploration. Clarity comes from commitment.
This was the part of the conversation that shifted something for her. You don’t get clear by testing 10 things for six weeks each. You get clear by picking one thing and staying with it long enough to see if it actually works. Six months minimum. If you keep switching, you never reach the point where anything compounds.
This is also a Three-Lens decision, which I covered in episode 154.
- What do you need? What platform fits your energy and how you like to show up?
- What does your client need? Where are they already hanging out?
- What does your business need? What’s sustainable for six months or more?
The answer lives where all three overlap.
Principle 4: Your past clients are your roadmap
She’d signed several clients in 2024, all from her old corporate network. Women who used to work with her. So I asked: Why did they hire you? What problem were they trying to solve?
She paused, then said, “Most of them were getting promotions or new jobs and didn’t know how to handle the raise. Should they save it? Invest it? Pay off debt? They just wanted someone to help them make a plan.”
That’s the answer. That’s the problem. Professional women navigating a salary increase and wanting help making a smart financial plan. Her best clients had already told her what to focus on. She just hadn’t been listening.
Simplicity is what’s sexy. Clarity is what’s sexy.
Go back through emails, DMs, intake forms, the prep work past clients filled out before working with you. The answer is in there. And it’s usually not sexy. It doesn’t sound like anything you’d put on a webinar landing page.
Simplicity is what’s sexy. Clarity is what’s sexy. Your clients have already told you exactly what they struggle with. Don’t over-architect the message.
Principle 5: Create demand, not just content
She’d been creating. Webinars, posts, a community. The question I sat with her on was this: Is anyone looking for what you’re offering?
Creating content is easy, but creating demand is hard. Demand means people are actively searching for the solution you provide. They’re Googling it, asking friends, trying to figure it out on their own. Teaching content puts you in the path of those searches. Motivational content doesn’t.
Are you creating things you think people need, or are you teaching about problems people are already trying to solve?
If it’s the first one, you’re working hard and getting nowhere. If it’s the second one, you’re building demand. And the market isn’t broken. People do hire financial coaches. They hire coaches who solve a specific problem they’re actively trying to solve, not coaches who offer “financial coaching” broadly.
This is the difference between monetizing your content and monetizing your service. If your goal is the first one, you give the algorithm what it wants. If your goal is the second one, you give the client what they want. I have a smaller following than most, and I convert at a higher rate, because I’m not playing the content game. I’m focused on creating demand for the work.
The three questions to sit with this week
If you feel like you’ve tried everything, the first move isn’t another tactic.
Stop being so vague. Stop trying to be everything to everybody on every platform. Stop talking to your clients like they are your peer who wants an educational lecture when all they want is for you to solve a problem. Stop trying to sound smart or sexy — sound like your clients, not me and not your AI. Stop worrying about the algorithm and start worrying about converting demand.
That’s the whole list. And the market isn’t broken. People do hire financial coaches. They hire coaches who solve a specific problem they’re actively trying to solve, not coaches who offer “financial coaching” broadly.
Answer these three questions instead.
- What problem do you solve that people are already trying to solve? Not a problem you think they should care about. A problem they’re actively seeking help with right now.
- Are you known for solving that problem, or are you just visible? Visibility is easy. Being known for something specific is the work.
- Is your content just noise? Motivational content is forgettable. Teaching content that’s pitched at peers instead of clients is boring. Content that connects with your clients is what positions you as the expert.
If you can answer those three clearly, you’re going to be fine. If you can’t, that’s where the work is. Not in another platform, not in a new website, not in more posting. The work is in getting clear on what problem you solve and teaching about it consistently in one place until people know you for it.
What happened with her after the session
After we talked, this coach got clear. The problem she solves is helping professional women navigate salary increases and create a financial plan they feel confident about. Her platform is LinkedIn, because that’s where her people are, and that’s where she’s going all-in. When she wants to share something more personal, she shares on Instagram, but there’s a clear distinction between the two now.
Her content is teaching about golden handcuffs, about making good money but still feeling trapped, about not feeling organized with your money, about turning income into options.
She’s not hopping anymore; she’s committed. Six months from now, I have a feeling she’s going to have a very different story to tell.
Why this matters for your practice
Most coaches who feel stuck skipped the upstream work.
If you’re in a place where you feel like you’ve tried everything, the question to sit with this week isn’t, “What should I do next?” It’s, “What specific problem am I known for solving, and is that problem something the people I want to serve are actively trying to solve?”
The coaches in our community who get unstuck tend to do it the same way: They pick one problem, they commit to one platform, and they teach about that problem consistently for long enough that the right people start to find them. You can make that shift the moment you stop optimizing and start committing.
If you want help with the eight foundational business decisions and putting the Three-Lens Framework to work for you, sign up for The Builder now. It’s free.
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