McDonald's has their special sauce.
The Colonel uses a special recipe.
Your mother slipped a secret ingredient into her chocolate chip cookies.
What about you? What's the special ingredient that makes your signature coaching program uniquely yours?
Creating a signature coaching program is a lot like baking cookies. You have to know what kind of cookie you're baking, and you have to go to the market to get the right ingredients, measure out the right amounts and then combine them in just the right way if you want the cookies to come out right.
You need flour and eggs and sugar, but you don't necessarily need to grow your own wheat, raise chickens or own a sugar cane farm. You don't even need to come up with an original recipe.
When your mom makes her cookies, she just uses a special technique or a secret ingredient, right?
(I still haven't figured out my mom's trick for making the world's best Toll House cookies; I've followed her recipe to a "T", but mine never taste as good.)
It's the same with your signature coaching process; you don't have to create a process from scratch. You just need some basic ingredients, plus a "twist" to make it yours. Here are the basics:
1. A specific target market. (You wouldn't go to a fish market for cookie ingredients, would you?!)
2. The #1 coachable issue/problem for your target market. (What kind of cookie are you baking?)
3. The solution to the problem. 99.99999% of the time, it’s already been figured out by someone else! (Find a good recipe.)
Here comes the twist:
4. A customized, step-by-step process that facilitates the solution. What makes it ‘yours’? Things like your approach; your knowledge, skills and expertise; your track record with other clients; your materials; your guarantee; your packaging; your quality of service, etc.
One more thing about my mom's cookies: Whenever I begged her to tell me the special ingredient, she always said, "Must be the Love!"
Now that I think about it, maybe that's all it ever is -- the Love.
Happy baking,
Kathy M.
