Wendy McCallum (01:37)
Hello, welcome back to The Coaching Edge. I'm your host, Wendy McCallum. I'm so happy to have you here. It is the end of December almost. We are just about to start 2026 and I really wanted to talk about some of the biggest lessons I learned in 2025 in my coaching business. So we're gonna talk about...
what I took some time to try to figure out, okay, what were the big ones and how can I organize this topic in a way that's not going to feel like too overwhelming? And I came up with three and a half big lessons from 2025. So we're going to talk about those. And I think you're going to find that you learn something from each of them, hopefully, but also, my guess is that you have experienced some of this to some degree in your coaching business as well. So I'm going to get there. But before I do that,
this podcast has really picked up some steam, which I'm super excited about. I've been working hard to build this podcast and to get some really great episodes out there that are helpful to coaches in the first five years or so of business, or just coaches really here. in that active business building stage. And it seems like it's starting to catch on, which is so great. But that means that there's a chance that you're a brand new listener. So you are.
somebody who is just for the first time listening to this podcast, or maybe this is one of the first few episodes that you're listening to. And I wanted to say welcome, if that's you. And I'm so glad that you found me. And just to remind you of the fact that there are like 68 or so episodes other than this one in the Coaching Edge vault that you can go and listen to. And there are episodes really now, I think on almost every...
important aspect of building your business, including some really great episodes around building your first freebie or lead magnet and some of the things that you need to be thinking about when it comes to launching a coaching business if you're brand new to all of this. And I also have episodes around sales, which can feel like a really uncomfortable part of ⁓ building a coaching business for many coaches ⁓ and also, you know, the art of discovery calls and those types of things.
please take some time to go back and take a look at what is in the archives. I think you're gonna find there are lots and lots of really value packed episodes there for you. I also wanted to take a quick minute and I appreciate you just sticking with me if you're somebody who's been listening to the Coaching Edge for a long time now and you feel like you know a lot about me. I just wanna let people know just a little bit about who I am and where I am and all of these things. I'm actually not sure I've ever really talked about where I am on this podcast, so I'm gonna do that.
⁓ It might come as surprise to some of you that I am in Far Eastern Canada. So I am a coach who has been working internationally now for, I would say like eight years at least, I've been more international. I work a lot with coaches in the United States, I work a lot with coaches in Europe and I work with Canadian coaches as well. But I'm actually geographically located in a province of Canada called Nova Scotia, which is on the Far East coast in a city called Halifax.
this is where I started my coaching business and I have been here for the last, oh gosh, I've probably lived here now for 17 or 18 years again, but this is actually my hometown. This is where I grew up. I left for a while when I was, just after I graduated from law school, I moved west across to the other side of the country and worked as a litigation lawyer, then eventually partner.
in a law firm in Calgary, Alberta and moved back to Nova Scotia when I decided to leave the practice of law. And so this is where my little coaching business that could started
I am currently sitting at my desk ⁓ very close to the Halifax Harbor. I actually look out over the Atlantic Ocean from my backyard recording this podcast
have two kids. They are now both living independently in university. One of them is a little bit more local. He's about an hour away, my son and my daughter is in Ottawa, which is in central Canada.
⁓ So yeah, that's kind of my story in terms of who I am and where I am. I have had a coaching practice that has changed a lot over the years as yours probably will. I started in food and wellness with ⁓ a very comprehensive certification in natural nutrition. I went back to college for a year pretty much full time to get that certification.
And in those early years published a couple of cookbooks and did a lot of work with family food and helping parents feed their children in a way that felt better to them and also feed themselves better. Eventually that shifted into more of a life coaching based practice
what I realized was that these people were smart and they already sort of knew what they wanted to be doing, but they were just struggling with time management. They were struggling with overwhelm, with stress, with a lot of, you know,
limiting beliefs and things that were keeping them stuck. And so I wanted to start working with people around stress and burnout and overwhelm. And I did that for many years. I eventually got a life coaching training through the Coaches Training Institute, which the Coactive Training Institute as it was called then, which I love and I use all the time in my work. And then eventually I got a special certification around alcohol coaching because I changed my relationship with alcohol and wanted to be able to offer support.
to gray area drinkers who were looking to change their relationship with alcohol, whether that meant drinking less or leaving alcohol behind altogether. And then sort of in between those two certifications, I started having coaches coming to me when I was doing these new trainings who could see that I already had a successful business started asking me how I was doing it and just looking for some support. So I did a lot of one-on-one coaching with coaches.
both coaches who had gone through the Coactive Coaching Institute training program and also coaches who've gone through this latest certification in alcohol that I got through an organization called This Naked Mind, looking for business coaching
at a certain point I realized I just don't have the capacity to keep working one-on-one with these clients around the business coaching stuff, which I love, and also doing the personal coaching business that I had been working so hard to build for so long.
and I needed to shift things around. So ⁓ I do less of the personal coaching now than I did. I focus on the business coaching side of my business, but I also have created group programming, very comprehensive group programming that allows me to build community with coaches, but also support coaches around strategy and just the mechanics of building a successful, sustainable coaching business in a group format.
Okay, let's get into the meat of it. These are
three and a half biggest lessons that 2025 taught me. It was a big year. 2025 was a weird year. It was a big year. I don't know what 2026 is gonna bring, but I feel like I'm ready for it. And in part because of what I learned in 2025.
you know, I guess the first thing I wanna say is be open to the learning. This is going to be an iterative process for you. This building of a business, of a small business. is something that the more open you are to learning, the more...
successful you're going to be because you're going to learn new things all the time. And obviously even 15 plus years into this business, I am still learning and I learned a lot from 2025. So here are the or three and a half things I learned in 2025 that really shaped the way I did business this year and I'm going to carry them forward into 2026.
So the first thing is the importance of staying curious and adaptable when the market shifts, as opposed to panicking. Because 2025 was a big year of shifts, which I talked a lot about in the podcast episodes of 2025. The second thing is learning how to create the structure for yourself to take a very restorative break from your business without any fear or anxiety.
That's been a work in progress for me, but I'm gonna tell you how that went for me this year and what I learned from that. And then the third big lesson was the importance of never really taking your eye off of what I think is your key asset as a small business owner, and that is your funnel. Now, when I'm talking about a funnel, I am not talking about, know, like a magic Russell Brunson type funnel where you have this very structured sales.
you know, thing in place. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about like, think of a funnel, like a funnel that you would use to transfer liquids from a larger jar into a smaller jar. That's what I'm talking about. Visualize that. The top of the funnel is very wide. It's basically the way that you bring people into your world. Okay, we're gonna talk about different types of funnels. But what I learned in 2025 is that it is really incredibly important to continually be focusing on your funnel no matter what is happening outside of that, no matter what is happening in the market.
I had some really good learning from that this year. And then the last like kind of half lesson that's actually I think kind of a big deal lesson was just reminding myself of the importance of feeling like you can change your mind as a business owner and really embracing that. This is one of the key gifts.
of being a small business owner and there are lots of hard things about building your own business and being a solopreneur. But one of the real gifts is you actually get to change your mind. You get to do things differently. You get to try something different if one thing doesn't work or if you suddenly realize, shoot, this thing that I thought was such a great idea actually doesn't serve me. I'm going to talk about how I learned that lesson this year. these are all lessons that are about sustainability, curiosity and
not about perfection.
Nobody is perfect. And even as somebody, again, who's been doing this for a long time now and is doing it really quite successfully, and is quite proud of what they have created, I still would not put myself anywhere near perfect as a small business owner. Okay, so let's talk about the first lesson. When things shift, don't panic, get curious. That's the lesson. So when things shift, don't panic, get curious. This is something that 2025 forced me to do.
10 years ago, I probably would have reacted very differently to it. But all of the learning over the last 15 years or so set me up for a different response to 2025. 2025 is the year of the trust recession. I did talk about this in previous podcast episodes this year a couple of times, because I think it's an important thing for us to really recognize. And that is that people generally are just more skeptical.
less trusting. And again, there are many different reasons why we got there. Partly it is, the flooding of the market with AI generated content and materials so that people don't know whether they're talking to a chatbot or they're talking to a real person. They don't know whether this poster content they're seeing is actually real or somebody has created that digitally using AI. And so there's an erosion of trust that happens as a result of that.
I think also the polarization and the political climate has led to this, the fake news stuff. It's just a bunch of things that have led us to this place. And so people are thinking a lot longer before they purchase. Conversions are slower for the most part. And people, I think, are just have maybe a higher expectation or standard for something that they might purchase online.
So there's been this shift in 2025 and I think all coaches and entrepreneurs felt it. I certainly know that in 2025, this was a constant conversation inside the BBB was just, oh, I'm noticing that things aren't selling the same way they were selling before. This thing that was always like a surefire way for me to get people in didn't work the same way it worked the last couple of times I tried it. So there's definitely been a shift in the market. And I think the instinct is to
do a couple of things. First of all, we often assume it's us. And I can say like with honesty, which is really how I roll if you're new to this podcast, but I definitely had moments of that when the market shifted. Like, wait, what am I doing something different? Am I doing something wrong? Am I somehow, showing up in a way that's not resonating with people or, is there a problem with the way that I'm doing things with me?
and how I'm showing up. the other piece is for people to just go full on panic
this is over, I can't do this. haven't made the
I don't know how I can keep this coaching thing going. I'm gonna have to think about going and getting a job for the man and working for the man again, right? So this kind of drastic response to it. And I think the better move, and this is what I did this year, and this is what I encourage you to do if you're starting to notice this in your own coaching business.
or if maybe you initially panicked or had that thought of, wait, this must be me, there must be something wrong with me, put those aside and get curious. Ask yourself, what is working now? What's not working now? What has changed in terms of my audience and how they're responding? What's changed maybe in terms of their needs or their mindset? How are they feeling in 2025? Because I'm feeling differently in 2025, they're feeling differently probably in 2025 too.
How can I meet them where they are now? What can I do different or try different? Again, I'm reminding you of the beta mindset, which I think is critically important to building a resident sustainable coaching practice. You have got to stay in beta mindset all the time. I'm still there 15 years in. And that is what's working, what's not working, what can I tweak and try differently and what results might that produce? Let me try it and see. And then I'm gonna gather that information and I'm gonna use it to inform
what I do next, right? So staying in bait mindset was critically helpful to me this year.
for example, here are some areas where I had to experiment this year. we're talking about the business coaching side of things, you may or may not know that I do these open houses in the BBB, my business building bootcamp, which is that one year membership program for coaches.
that I was talking about earlier, that I created that has like a community component, but also weekly office hours where I do coaching and strategy in a small group. So we have a couple of different call times a week you could choose from. And then I also do master classes in there where I bring experts in or I coach, ⁓ on a particular topic related to building a coaching business or coaching generally. And then we also have a copy class once a month where I review marketing copy. and there's a huge.
online content library that goes with it. But that program, the way that I used to market it and what was really quite successful ⁓ for a couple of years was running these open houses every couple of months where anybody could come in and join an open house. We talk a little bit about the BBB and what it's all about. I'd answer questions about it, whether it's a good fit for you. And then we would just generally open up into a regularly scheduled office hours call with all my existing BBB members. And it would be an opportunity to kind of watch me coach live.
get a sense of what the group is all about, meet some of the members of the community, see if it's your vibe and maybe a good fit. That was working on its own really well for a couple of years, but something shifted there. And I think the thing that's shifted is what's probably shifted for everybody across the board, which is that I need to build a little more like no before people get into open houses, and I also think that a lot of the people who are coming in through the open houses had a connection with an existing...
coach inside the BBB. So there was a lot of word of mouth happening in the first couple years of this business. and, so I just thought, I've got to do something different here. I think I need to be working harder on warming people up and really getting people to like me and trust me and get a sense of who I am, maybe before they're even going to be willing to come into an open house. So, I started working on creating a really, really robust set of free and low ticket resources for coaches that are really, really helpful. And I now have a
huge collection of those by the way. So if you are somebody who's new to the podcast or maybe you've you know opted into one of my master classes like you know 10 ways to get clients now before you have a big social media or newsletter list or maybe you've done the $17 pricing master class or whatever there are loads of other low ticket and free resources now on my website at wendymichellum.com so I encourage you to go and explore those but that was something I really focused on because I wanted to be
getting in front of you guys as much as I could in as many different ways as I could, offering you some really good value and also demonstrating my knowledge and experience and expertise. So that was one thing I did that was different this year and that was as a result of this sort of beta mindset, curiosity, trying to do and try some different things this year.
The other thing I did that was brand new,
is I thought, well, maybe I need to start doing some live master classes where I invite people outside of the BBB, so coaches that I don't know yet, into these sort of really affordable workshops. And that's where the Coaching Edge Workshop Series was born. And I've now done, by the time this airs, I've done at least two, maybe three of those workshops and had good success with those and learned a lot from doing those.
But that was something that was new. That was my idea of like, how do I get a really intimate but high touch experience for people who are new to my world, who don't know me very well? Maybe they're just listeners to the coaching edge. Maybe they're people who've like opted in to one of my free resources. So they're on my mailing list, but they don't feel like they know me very well yet. How do I get to know them better, the fastest? And so I started experimenting with those small
live workshops, which has been working really well so far. And also the other thing that I did was I really doubled down on this podcast. So for the first two seasons of this podcast, I did bi-monthly episodes, so two months, and now I'm doing weekly and I'm committed to weekly. So we've had weekly now for the last four months. So doubling the content that is going out there with respect to this podcast. And that again, is part of that beta
I wanted to test the podcast idea.
And I did that for the first couple of years, but as I said, it's really starting to catch on. People are really liking it. I'm getting great feedback from it. And the downloads and streams are really steadily increasing on it because people are sharing it with other coach friends and that kind of thing. So that's amazing, right? But I really wanted to use the podcast as another tool in building Like No Trust more effectively and efficiently at a time when we really are in this trust recession. And I was starting to see it impact.
the way my funnel was working. those are really important lessons. It's like that, okay, just because things aren't going the way that they used to go doesn't mean that the thing is broken or I am broken. It just means, okay, maybe something different is required here. Let's stay curious and try to figure out what that might be and experiment and see. And honestly, some of the things that I've tried have worked better than others. And that's just part, that's part and parcel of it.
I also don't want to talk here just about like the half lesson that I sort of mentioned earlier, which is that you get to change your mind because that also connected for me into this whole curiosity piece and the beta mindset, changing your mind. And 2025 provided me a really good reminder of the value of your ability as a small business owner to change your mind anytime you want. There's always a way to do that and do it well.
with your audience, even if it means disappointing somebody short term because you have decided not to offer something that you originally thought you wanted to offer that maybe some people had opted into or were excited about. You can always change your mind. There's always a way to manage that and finesse that. And it's probably going to not only serve you better as a coach if you make the change, but also serve your people better in the long
let's talk about how I learned that lesson.
you know, that curiosity that I was talking about earlier and flexibility, those two things go hand in hand. And part of a true beta mindset is giving yourself permission to change your mind, giving yourself permission to pivot. I had this idea with this Coaching Edge Workshop series that I would set in stone the dates for all of these workshops for the 10 months from September until June. And I would also have the topics nailed down and I would have the descriptions and the...
you know, all the marketing copy and everything. So I would know in advance what workshop was coming up. And I could talk about that on these podcast episodes and, you know, bring more people in as a result of that. And one of the things I was going to do with that structure was offer something called an all access pass, which would allow people to purchase in advance at a very discounted rate access to all of the 10 workshops, including replays when they couldn't come live. I thought this was a great idea.
I did a ton of work around this. had even had some, you'll probably, if you go back and listen to some older episodes in September, you'll hear me talking about the All Access Pass because I promoted it. But what I realized shortly before the first Coaching Edge Workshop actually happened live is that this idea of an All Access Pass and the idea of like knowing what all of these topics were gonna be going forward actually didn't serve me at all. And it didn't serve you guys at all for a couple of reasons. First of all, I want the topics that I
that I talk about in the Coaching Edge workshops to be responsive to what is happening right now. And if I have them all set out and committed, I've committed to all of them in advance, I can't do that. I can't be as responsive. I love creating master classes in response to what I'm hearing in the BBB, what I'm hearing coaches talking about on my social media channels, in response to emails that I get from listeners to the Coaching Edge who say, really want you to talk about this topic.
So for example, one of the things that I'm working on and have actually got something going on is a course, a little mini masterclass, very impactful masterclass. I tested it inside the BBB on AI for coaches. So how to use AI in your business to actually save yourself a ton of time every week. So not necessarily talking about using AI to create copy, although that is one of the things that I talk about in that masterclass, but all the other ways that I use AI
in my case it's ChatGPT, to help me inside my business. That's responsive. A year ago I was sort of resisting that because I have a lot of problems with AI, as I know many of us do. But I realized, no, in order to keep up with things, in order to be a good business coach, I have to understand ChatGPT. I have to figure out how to make it work for me. And so I've been working very hard on that for the last 12 months or so and created a masterclass in response to that, which will probably be offered at some point as a coaching edge live clinic.
I'm just giving this as an example of, you know, the bonus side of being able to change your mind. So what I ended up doing, because I also thought, I don't know if I want to do these every single month. And some of my months are really busy with other things. I already have an open house happening, for example, inside the BBB. That can be a lot for me with it with the various events that I'm putting on inside the BBB for my BBB coaches and an open house.
I just didn't want that. I didn't want the pressure of having to do that every single month. And I didn't want the pressure of having to pre-commit to topics. So I ditched the All Access Pass. You may not have noticed it. I did it very quietly. I removed it from the website. If there was anybody who had purchased the Coaching Edge All Access Pass, I dealt with that and did what I needed to do to make them whole and to get them into the workshops they wanted to be into and all the rest of it.
I stopped promoting it on the podcast. changed, I went in and changed some promos that I had scheduled that included the All Access Pass and I took them out of scheduled episodes of the Coaching Edge podcast. I changed my mind and I felt an immediate weight lift when I did. And that is a sign that it was a good decision. So I'm just saying like you get to do that. And 2025 reminded me of that. I had this really, this, what I thought was like a really awesome plan.
but it was way too structured. I was committing to way too much. It was actually not very beta mindset of me to have all of that mapped out in advance. And I learned the lesson again. It is okay to change your mind. So I wanted to share that. You don't owe anyone permanence. Everything's an experiment in your business. Trying something and realizing it's not the right fit is not failure. It's actually success. And the best...
Businesses are living, flexible organisms and they evolve as you evolve and as you learn. So I wanna just remind you of that. Okay, lesson two, you can actually take like a big chunk of time off of your business if you want. And this is something that I have been working on for years trying to get myself to a place where I get the summer off. And if you're someone who's been in my world for a while,
you've probably seen various iterations of that. So for example, I did not do podcast, Coaching Edge podcast episodes in the summer in order to give myself a break. My BBB coaching community and program that's been going now for over three years has always done, we call BBB light in the summertime where instead of two calls a week, we go down to one optional call a week. So everybody who is coming to a call that week comes to the same call instead of choosing between two calls, because frankly, all of my coaches want to take some time off too.
and that works really well for them and it works really well for me. So I've been like easing myself into this, but what I haven't done is take more than two weeks completely off my business. And I definitely haven't put in place the structure that I put in place this year that allowed me to effectively take almost two months off of my business. I worked for half a day every Tuesday.
And sometimes I would need another half a day during the week, but the maximum I worked a week was one day all summer. And what I've learned from that experiment is that with planning, with structure, with that beta mindset, with testing things summer after summer, you figure out what works for you and you can do it in a way that does not impact your bottom line. It did not affect my annual revenue this year to take almost two months entirely off of my business. Now, there was lots, like I said, lots of stuff that needed to happen to make that work this year.
but my business really is sustainable. And I'm in the business of helping other coaches build businesses like mine that are reliable, sustainable, and that will keep themselves going when you need to take a break, maybe suddenly, or when you plan to take a break, like I did this summer. So it was really great learning this year to realize, this is all working, and I can actually make this work probably year after year. I suspect I'll do the same thing next year. So how did I make it possible?
I front loaded a lot of work. So I pre-recorded a lot of my podcasts in advance. So I had them all scheduled. I pre-wrote newsletters. I pre-wrote social media content. I had all of that organized. I didn't do any major launches in June, even in May. I think my last BBB open house was in May. So I wasn't working actively. now actively, that's a bit of a tricky word there. wasn't putting a lot of, there was a lot of passive.
marketing that was happening as a result of having pre set up some of these things. And so I did have new coaches join the BBB during the summer, but not because I was doing any real active work to do that. And I also didn't have any launches of any of my other coaching courses in the or or programming in the summertime or even in the months right before I took off. And that was just so that I could keep my schedule really open. So I only had I think I had
two one-on-one clients that continued with me through the summer and I was not seeing them every week. So I had a light schedule with them. So that meant that maybe every couple of Tuesdays I had a one-on-one client that I had to see as well as doing the office hours for the PBB. And I also like automated tons of stuff. And I had a little pre-sale that I had structured to run on a fall program. That pre-sale timeframe was the first couple of weeks of June, think, or sorry, July.
And then I didn't really do a lot of active marketing again until the end of August. And most of the summer was really just about nurturing my existing audience, just taking care of you guys who were in my funnel and giving you good podcast episodes every week and good valuable information in the newsletter. So I just let those organic leads happen over the summer. I stayed connected, but not in an active way. So I was actually able to step back and really enjoy my summer this year, which was awesome.
So again, that did not lead to any drop in annual revenue and it did give me a really meaningful break from work and opportunity to recharge personally after what was, had been personally kind of a tough 18 month period for me. So was awesome. That was a great lesson to learn. Rest is strategic. It's not indulgent and you can plan for rest. You can design true time off and you can product your bottom line with that planning.
Okay, the third and last lesson is your funnel is everything. And this man, I talk about funnels all the time inside the BBB and on this podcast. It's not the first time you've heard me talk about a funnel. When in doubt, strengthen your foundations. That is what I learned in 2025. How people find you is so critically important always. It is always important. Your funnel is the thing you should be always keeping your eye on, always nurturing.
Always staying creative around, always staying in beta mindset around. What more can I do to strengthen this foundation? In a perfect world, your funnel exists outside of social media. Why? Because you don't own social media. You don't own your audience, you never will. And it can be taken away from you at any time. You've heard me say this before on the podcast. I've had coaches inside the BBB who've had their account shut down for no reason that they can figure out. We've had...
people who have had massive reach for long periods of time with their posts all of a sudden have the algorithm switch and they can't reach anybody. So social media is for most of us a piece of our business, but it should not be the foundation of your funnel. So when we're talking about your funnel, we're talking about the way people find you, connect with you and become clients, how you nurture people and get them over time to like you more, trust you more so that eventually they are.
If they're the good a good fit for you, they know they're a good fit and they are ready for your paid offers And I think you know in 2025 Because of the shifts in the market because of the trust recession I realized no this is absolutely my funnel is still my most valuable asset and These fundamental things that I've been working on Don't matter Less they actually matter a lot more right now
because these are the things that do help me to build that trust and to maintain my brand, which is somebody that you can rely on to give you straight talk, valuable, meaningful, practical guidance and advice on building your business. what's my funnel? Well, my funnel is this podcast. My top of funnel, if you think of a funnel, again, I talked about that earlier, that like.
actual tool that is a funnel, you the top of it is a lot wider than the bottom. And so at the top, this is where I bring people into my world. And your top of funnel is going to be whatever your low ticket or free events are. So it might be live workshops that you do once a month online. might be, it could be a challenge that you run regularly. It could be a podcast. could be ⁓
⁓ really great lead magnets or freebies that you offer, a mini course, like there are so many different ways to bring people into your world, but your funnel, when it's set up properly, and it does take time, it takes years, it has taken me years to get my funnel set up the way that it is, you know, it will bring people from the top down to, you know, to the middle where they're a little more engaged, it's a little more intimate into eventually a place where they are ready to purchase and join some kind of a paid program.
You want to be thinking about strengthening the top of your funnel always. And that is something that I really like I've said earlier mentioned, doubled down on double the podcast episodes starting in September of 2025. That was a decision I made in the spring of 2025. I thought this is the one thing that's always worked for me. Podcasting has always worked for me. It is obviously still working for me given the response that I'm getting from it.
I need to double down on this because I'm actually in control of this and people are going to keep listening to this podcast, whether they are feeling less trustworthy or not, they're still going to listen to this podcast. So there is great value in focusing in on that. Also, as I said earlier, I really worked on increasing the resources that I have to offer coaches, low ticket and free resources. There are a lot more available for you on the free resources and low ticket offers page on my website at wendymccollin.com.
go grab some of those if you haven't already. I've added new things in there that are really, really valuable. I have tried to come up with something that will answer the sort of top questions that new coaches are asking all the time over and over again. How much should I charge for my services? There's a pricing masterclass that helps you with that. 17 bucks, best 17 bucks you'll ever spend. I actually dropped the price on that in response to.
this thing we're talking about right now, just really trying to focus in on the funnel. It's all about bringing people in and getting to know more coaches, right? Another question people ask all the time is how do I do sales calls without feeling salesy? So there's a discovery call template that is available to you where I take you through like point by point the almost script that I use when I'm meeting clients for the first time, trying to figure out if they're a good fit for me and I'm a good fit for them. And how I deal with the sales piece of it if it turns out they are a good fit for me.
⁓ Another question coaches ask is, what do I need to do to launch a coaching business? I don't know anything about small business. There's a launch checklist there. Coaches get caught up in when they're actively coaching clients in like, how do I know what the right thing is to ask? There's a 90 plus powerful coaching questions document organized by topics that is a free resource that I offer. So again, I'm trying to meet you where you are with the questions that you currently actively have.
That's something we should all be focusing on. What are the questions your clients have? Are you actually actively meeting them out there? What does the top of your funnel look like? Is it rich? Is it deep? Or could it use a little more work, a little more nurturing, a little more tending to? Strengthening your top of funnel should be something that you're thinking about in 2026 for sure, no matter what. Even if you already feel like you have a great funnel, there's always room for more, I think.
And it might not be the top of funnel, it might be the middle of the funnel, it might be your welcome sequence that you need to work on. That's something else that I've spent some time on this year. So once people come into my world, how am I communicating with them and connecting with them? And then also looking at natural next steps. So taking people from a free offer to a low ticket offer to maybe something like a live event. So for me, it might be an open house or it might be one of my workshops. And then eventually into a higher tech.
touch program. So what does that funnel look like for me? So even in uncertain times, your funnel is your safety net. That's what I learned in 2025. That's what I want to communicate with you today. If you take care of your funnel, your funnel is going to take care of you. Okay, so I wanted to share these with you today because I think that 2025 has been kind of a nutty year for a lot of us. And it's a really good time to reflect at the end of 25.
and to ask yourself, okay, what do I want going forward? The next episode of The Coaching Edge is going to be really cool. I'm gonna set up almost like a virtual retreat for you where you're going to actually work through some questions around what you want 2026 to look like in your coaching business. So stay tuned for that episode. But for today, I wanted you to reflect on the lessons. So did you learn any of those lessons that I did this year? Were there other lessons that you learned? And what...
learning from those lessons can you take forward into 2026 to become an even better business owner next year? That's the question. So to bring it all kind of back together, curiosity over panic, always, rest over hustle and planned rest, scheduled rest, structured rest. That's really what works for me. Foundations over like quick fixes, fads, know, getting
going viral on Instagram, like focusing on your foundation, which is your funnel, whatever that looks like in your coaching business. So where could you bring more curiosity, more rest, more self-trust into your business next year? Where is there room for you to do some experimenting? Where have you not yet incorporated the beta mindset where the beta mindset might serve you? These are good takeaway questions from this episode.
And if you're listening to this and you're thinking, OK, I know that I need to do something differently in 2026. I'm ready to throw myself into this business and actually build something that becomes a sustainable, reliable model for me that gives me that flexibility that I crave, but also gives me real pride of ownership in a business. And I know that in order to do that, I'm going to need to invest in myself and get some support. I would love to see you inside the BBB. Come to the next open house. If you're listening to this in December.
There will be one in January. You just go to wendymcallum.com forward slash BBB to find the link to register for the open house. Come live. I want to meet you. I want to talk to you. I want to find out more about your business. Or if you can't attend the open house or you'd rather chat with me sooner, I am always happy to get on a one-on-one call with new coaches just to find out a little bit more about you. It's not a sales call. That's not how I roll. Just, you know, answer your questions, figure out a little bit about where you are in your business so that we can determine together.
what the right next step might be for you, whether that's with me or it's with somebody else. So I would love to meet you and I would love to be involved and support you as you create your aligned, sustainable, reliable, profitable, resonant and fulfilling coaching business in 2026. All right, that's it for me today. Went a little longer than I normally do, but I just wanted to say thank you for another year of listening.
If you have been a follower of the Coaching Edge for a while, I really appreciate Thank you for learning and growing with me. And here's to a really curious, confident,
flexible Have a great rest of your week.
