Building a Coaching Business Aligned with Values and Freedom
Melanie Pritchard is a Life coach, NLP practitioner & wellbeing trainer. She merges corporate & coaching skills to aid purpose-driven individuals & businesses reach their goals.
Key Insights
Your niche is your superpower.
When you try to help everyone, you end up helping no one. Getting clear on who you serve (your ideal client) and what problem you solve for them gives you a massive head start. Specialisation builds trust faster — people want to hire a coach who feels tailor-made for them.
You don’t need a perfect brand to start.
New coaches often obsess over creating the perfect brand and website immediately. While a website (even a super simple one-pager) is very important as it’s your shop window, you can evolve your brand over time. Done is better than perfect early on — because your coaching style and brand will grow with you.
Understand and set up your basic business systems early: this is vital for scaling!
Having basic business structures like a CRM, revenue tracking, and understanding SEO helps grow your. You don't have to become a business operations expert early on, but laying simple foundations can make growing and scaling way less stressful later.
The Interview
How did you become a coach? What was the turning point that made you jump in?
I was a family lawyer, divorce lawyer. I enjoyed it because I was helping people but didn't like the lack of work life balance. And the turning point was I guess sitting in a car park at work and sort of crying on a Sunday for the nth time and thinking this is just too much really. This doesn't make sense.
Helped by the fact that I'd had an entrepreneurial dad who earned more money than lawyers and had way less wrinkles and I sort of thought no thanks! The net benefit isn't really working. There are easier ways to meet your strengths and interests and have a work life balance. That was the turning point.
I realised, rather alarmingly, that I'd been so absorbed by work that I'd become quite disconnected from my feelings and I basically thought I don't want to live like this. This this is not sustainable for me. This isn't healthy. And that's what I see in lots of my legal clients now and high-powered clients.
When you took the leap and started your coaching business, what what surprised you the most from going from obviously employed to solo-ing it?
When I started my coaching business, I wasn’t particularly surprised by the transition because I had planned carefully. I optimized for financial stability by working part-time with universities and coaching companies, which gave me security, growth, variety, autonomy, and freedom — all values that are really important to me.
The biggest surprise was actually my own success. At first, I doubted whether I could even make £300 a month, but over time I grew my confidence, built up my client base, created programs, and eventually became busy enough to leave my part-time roles. One of the most beautiful surprises has been the freedom to design my life how I want and to travel.
In terms of challenges, the hardest part has been having to wear so many different hats — not just being a coach, but also handling sales, marketing, accounting, and business development. Balancing deep, soulful client work with finding time and energy to grow the business — while also making space for my own reflection and well-being — has definitely been one of the biggest challenges.
Something that is challenging for me is keeping track of how many clients I have, what my revenue forecast looks like: so that administrative piece of work that comes with running your own coaching business.
What's been the easiest thing about running your business?
I’d say the writing has been the easiest part for me. I’ve always loved writing; it’s one of my superpowers, and it's been a real confidence boost because I know a lot of people either fear it or struggle with it. That said, I’ve had to nurture the skill — writing for LinkedIn or Instagram is very different from writing English essays.
I’d also say creating videos has come quite naturally. As coaches, you'd expect us to be fairly at ease with ourselves, but for me, it’s also because I’m very aligned with my values. I’m deeply genuine, both as a person and with my clients, and that brings a real sense of ease. Being able to show up fully as myself — even during tough times personally — has been healing and energizing. Even when I’ve been going through heartbreak or feeling low, supporting my clients has still felt meaningful and grounding.
You mentioned that you don’t have a CRM–why?
I’ve just been so busy, and honestly, I’ve been really fortunate. The only marketing I’ve ever really done has been through clients referring their friends and family, or through posting on LinkedIn and people responding to that. Not having a CRM wasn’t intentional—it just kind of happened, and I’ve been lucky that it’s worked well enough without needing a bigger strategy.
That said, I know that in order to scale and run a more efficient business, I need more structure. Having proper systems in place would definitely help reduce some of the anxieties around not knowing exactly how much I’ll earn each month or how many new clients I’ll get.
Also, working alone can sometimes mean you get stuck in your own head. It’s really helpful to have people around you who are strong in the areas that don’t come as naturally. I’m very comfortable with writing LinkedIn posts, but I’m definitely not as strong when it comes to operations—so it’s easy to avoid those parts when they feel less natural.
What do you think are the three top mistakes that you see new coaches making when they start?
One of the biggest mistakes I see new coaches make—and this goes against a lot of advice out there—is rushing to find their niche. I think it’s much better to explore first. If you’re interested in several things, don’t force yourself to niche down too early. Give yourself the freedom to see what energises you and what people respond well to, rather than overthinking and re-intellectualising it.
I think that links into another mistake, which is putting too much pressure on building a perfect brand and website straight away. When I started, I just had a simple blog—it was very different from the website I have now, which I’m really proud of because it truly reflects my spirit and soul. But in the beginning, it was basic, and that’s okay. We’re all works in progress. You need time to build confidence, explore, make mistakes, and let your brand grow and evolve with you. It’s like dating—you don’t need to have it all figured out immediately. Having said that, people who are like, "Oh, website doesn't matter." I disagree. It's the front of house. It really does matter.
And while this isn’t exactly a mistake, looking back, I think it would have been helpful to understand things like SEO and CRM systems from the beginning. Growth and success have come quite naturally over time, it would be quite nice to have some systems and structure um in place at the beginning.
Do you think new coaches would benefit from more training around the business and operational side of running a practice, and why?
I think it would be hugely helpful, because a lot of coaching courses don’t really focus on that side of things. Often, you don’t even know what you need. I only became aware of it because I worked at Seven and did a bit of selling — that’s when I realised things like, "Oh, a CRM system lets you send mass emails without having to write them all out individually." You don’t know what you don’t know.
Part of the challenge is exactly that — not knowing — but also finding the right person you can trust to help you. Like anything, I’ve spoken to marketers and web people, but it takes time to find someone who can simplify the complex and who you really trust. You're one of those people for me—I might not know something, but I trust that you do. And finding someone like that can be quite hard. In the right hands, I could have done a lot of my business building a lot more quickly with the right person.
I think having that kind of support would be really helpful, because most people like a bit of structure. Of course, it depends on the person — I’m quite holistic and led by feelings, and for me it was mainly about gaining experience and getting good at coaching first. So I do think it’s good not to get too obsessed with systems and structures early on. It can feel strange to focus on building a business infrastructure when you’re still developing confidence as a coach, and maybe even feeling a bit like a fraud.
But still, I think it would be really helpful to have those foundations in place from the start — just sitting there ready to support you as you grow.
