Marketing yourself as a coach with Kari Ginsburg

Lex: Marketing yourself as a coach is not easy. Coaching is one of those things that's kind of hard to boil down to quippy marketing speak. To talk more about this, I turned to Kari Ginsburg of Uproar Coaching.

Kari is a trauma-informed, professional, certified life and executive coach, and she works with non-traditional leaders to help them spread out, get loud, and bring their full selves to work and life. As you'll see from our conversation, Kari nerds out about supporting people and organizations through change and transformation. It's something she's been doing for years in high profile, high demand work inside the government and with big names in consulting long before she started her own practice. Our conversation covers how Kari shifted into coaching full-time, the creative ways she's packaged her offers, how she overcomes hesitations about coaching and what she does to break free of the marketing mold. I'm Lex Roman. I help creatives make smarter marketing bets, and you're tuned in to the Low Energy Leads Show.

Lex: As you know, I like to start in the early days because we are always on a journey in our business. Can you talk about when you started working for yourself, when was it and what did that look

Kari: I started Upward Coaching in June, 2020. Little did baby entrepreneur Kari know that this 90 day flat in the curve thing was going to extend to two plus years of starting a business and figuring out what it meant to be a small business owner and then operating under a global pandemic. But here we are. We're still here, which is amazing. There's been a lot of lessons along the way. I think it's important to say that I was coaching as a side hustle. I'm a multihyphenate, but I was coaching as a side hustle for many years. And then when COVID arrived and the rest of my extracurricular activities were withdrawn, and I was working for a Fortune 500 corporate consultancy, when those 1416 hour days were the only thing that I had to look forward to, it made me realize that that truly wasn't enough and that I needed the other things in my life to balance out the draw on my energy and the draw and the expertise that that company was taking from me.

So when everything else that I would do was taken away because of Covid, I thought, well, now is the time. Now is the chance to actually slowly formalize the side hustle that I've had. So I got my LLC, I got my operating agreements in order. I did all of the really sexy behind the scenes business stuff to get launched, got my bookkeeping in order, figured out how to do quarterly taxes, and I had this five-year journey ahead of me. So for 2020 to 2025, my plan was to still be working full-time ish for this corporate consultancy and to be coaching as a side hustle. And then at the three year mark to be sort of at 50 50. So to grow my coaching business, reduce my consultant for somebody else, and then sort of those last two and a half, three years really flip the ratio to let my coaching business really be it, and to really, really, really reduce and then eliminate my need for corporate consulting.

June, 2020, I set up my business. I was early days building my client book, figuring out what my brand voice was going to be, really figuring out the type of clients I wanted to work with, establishing myself in some business communities and developing community partnerships and just business friendships with people. And then my team was realigned to a different supervisor who was a bad leader and a bad boss. It made a 16 hour workday even harder to stomach. And I stuck around in that job longer than, I hate to say should because should is such an external thing, but longer than I should have because I was worried about the team that I was leaving behind, but it was just making me miserable. So I said to my partner one day in that fall, I was like, I am really unhappy in my job. And he was like, I know

This is a surprise to nobody. And I said, I really want to quit. And he said, I know. And I said, I really think that uproar can do it. If I have the time and I have the space, I think that I can full speed ahead into this job. And he was like, he swept everything off. I mean, he didn't really figuratively swept everything off the dining room table. We got our laptops, we looked at our home expenses, we looked at the responsibilities that we had within our household and to each other, and he said yes. And the next day I gave two weeks notice and we have never looked back. And so that was a really long and winding way to say how I got started in my business. June, 2020 is the birthday of our coaching, uproar coaching, but that follows when really it went full steam ahead to just small business owner entrepreneurship. And we have, there's been some lessons along the way. There's been some heartache along the way, but I'm very proud to say that we are still here and supporting people. Since June, 2020, I have coached over 270 people.

Lex: Wow. 270.

Kari: I know, right? It's absurd. That's a number. That's a big number.

Lex: It's a really big number. Wow. I don't even think I know 270 people. That's amazing.

Kari: Certainly didn't before, but here we are.

Lex: And to your point about heartache, entrepreneurship is a real rollercoaster. And I think it's one thing that very few people are fully prepared for. We know that it's risky. That's why y'all did your finances before you took wave. Or like, Ooh, it could be risky. There's always the risk of failure. And that risk stays omnipresent, I think, for entrepreneurs throughout their whole career. And I think that rollercoaster, your ability to ride that rollercoaster of emotions is what sets successful. People think, oh, what sets successful entrepreneurs apart is their ability to make money. But I don't think that's what it is. I think it is the ability to ride that rollercoaster because all of us will have good times and bad times. That is true for even the most successful entrepreneurs. And so the ability to self-regulate and to know that you can come back up on the rollercoaster is what separates us out.

Kari: And to welcome the failure and to welcome those pivot moments and adaptability. I mean, that's what keeps it fun. I think that's definitely one of the things that keeps me involved and invested on the business side of what I'm doing because I certainly didn't get into this to make social media posts and do QuickBooks, right? I got into this to support people as they spread out, get loud and be boss bitches.

Lex: Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I was looking at ICF puts out a report on State of the Coaching and ICF is one of your certifications, right?

Kari: It is International Coaching Federation. That's like the mothership of coaches.

Lex: And so I was looking at coaching number of accredited coaches that they have year by year from the year 2000 until now. And I actually expected even more of a surge between 2020 and now than they showed, but it's actually just been steadily rising over the last two decades. And so from your perspective, both because you were coaching before Uproar and with your experience with Uproar, what's changed in the coaching space? What does it look like now compared to even a couple of years ago when you started this business?

Kari: I went through a training certification program and then I participated in a couple of levels of accreditation through ICF because it was important to me to not wing it and to really demonstrate to the people that I'm serving, my commitment to, my professional development as much as I'm committing to supporting their development, whatever that looks like. So I think in the coaching field recently when I started, there wasn't so much emphasis on training. There wasn't so much emphasis on certification. You could be a coach without having ever trained, without having ever certified. But what we're seeing, what happens is sometimes those coaches aren't coaches. Sometimes those coaches really come off as mentors or consultants or advisors where as a coach, they're not a therapist. They're not going to diagnose you or cure you, but they are going to support you and unlocking within yourself how you're going to get to where you're going.

That's the difference between, I think a good coach and then somebody who's coaching because they think that they've got good advice for other people. I think what we're seeing now, you've seen this sort of steadiness in coaching, credentialing and certification. I think the people who were always going to go through coaching program certification programs, those people were never going to change. They're still ready to make that financial and that time investment into themselves and into their businesses. But I think what we're seeing now is more of an increase in people who are specializing in coaching. I am approached probably once a week because somebody is looking for a career coach, but really what they're looking for is somebody do resume overhaul, LinkedIn profile updating. Is that something I could do?

Yes. Is that something you want me to do? No. Let me refer you to these eight other people who can do it better, because they are passionate about that with you. They've got the skills and knowledge and the expertise to bring that to the table for you. So I think that's the thing right now, you can find a coach. You can find the coach who's got the skills, who's got the knowledge, who's got the flare, who's got the connection to you for the thing that you were looking for in yourself as opposed to somebody who's just a generalist. I think that's really how this space has changed.

Lex: Can you share what you do now and who it is for? Tell us about Uproar and what you offer.

Kari: Yeah, absolutely. So Uproar Coaching is the name of my company. It's me and I offer safe spaces to women and fems who consider themselves non-traditional leaders to really amplify and own the things that make them different instead of hiding them to really wave their freak flags proud. And then we celebrate that together. And we do that in four ways. I, I call them my Big four, but there's four types of programs that I offer, and we can talk about those a little bit more. One-on-one coaching. This is a bit more of a traditional coaching structure, but it's anything but traditional. I also offer an on-demand coaching program that offers you all of the good things that you would get from coaching, but without the hassle or the constraints of waiting for an appointment on your calendar. Those are sort of my ongoing support levers. And then I offer some more bite-sized options. One is a five week email-based Productivity without Punishment program called Busy Bitch. And then the other one is a half day sleeves rolled one among Coaching intensive to help you deconstruct, design and disrupt your life or your business. And that is called Make Mayhem.

Lex: I love the way that you structure your offers. We were talking about this before we started recording. I have never seen coaches sort of bundle and package things this way, and I think it's really responsive to the world today and how busy people are as indicated by the label Busy bitch.

Kari: Yeah. Well, I'll say all of these programs came out of conversations that I was having with my clients, with people that I was overhearing their conversations in a bookstore waiting in line with somebody at a coffee bar. I was like, when I first started, I printed off these little postcards about my business with a QR code so people could go and they scan the QR code and they would get 10% off of whatever they bought into. But I hung it up by the coffee weight area at this local coffee shop, and someone was like, oh, that's really colorful. And I was like, oh, thanks. This is my business upward coaching. Do you have a coach? Have you ever had coaching? We talked about, and she was like, I got to tell you, I'm just too busy. I'm a mom, I'm an executive, I have a partner.

We've got animals. I heard this from a couple of different people, and so busy bitch was bored, right? It's like there's this one thing that I want to do that keeps getting backburnered. How can I actually get into it if I don't have the time to sit down and talk with somebody for one more meeting? It's like, well, do you have 10 minutes a week to respond to an email? Yeah, you can do that in a carpool line. You can do that when you're waiting at Trader Joe's. You can do that sitting in rush hour traffic or during your morning commute on a train. You can do that from the sidelines at the soccer field. All of the things that I offer came out of these needs that were expressed to me, that I heard from people who wanted support but wanted it in a different way.

Lex: Yeah, and I think also, maybe one thing that, I don't know how much you think about this or recognize it even, but one of your superpowers here is your experience in corporate work, in government work where you worked with so many of these people and did leadership with them and are so aware of their behaviors, their lifestyles and things like that. This is a big key, I think, to your ability to meet them where they are with these kinds of offers. You want to talk about that? You're nodding.

Kari: Oh yeah. No, I absolutely agree. I mean, my background, I have an undergraduate degree in musical theater, which means that I was a student at the human condition. I mean, that just basically means that I am very curious to the point of being nosy about what makes people tick. So I had a degree in theater. My first job was I was a teacher at a private school. I taught American literature. I ran a forensics club and a theater program. I was a leader in the federal workspace for 13 years supporting like recruiting and staffing, labor and employee relations, human capital, workforce planning and change management, change management's very near and dear to my heart. And then I was a lead people strategist at a Fortune 500 company. So I've sort of run the gamut. And along the way, I've also been board member at nonprofit organizations and I've been members of nonprofit organizations and to just be open to those conversations, to really learn and observe and see what's going on around and get in as many rooms as possible and maintain those relationships, particularly the ones that we're really fulfilling to both of us, I think do really infuse and inform how I go about doing my business and how I can navigate different conversations with people.

I have a little bit of knowledge, but I have a lot of curiosity and it all comes down to just I being human.

Lex: Yeah, being human though, when you say that sounds so easy because technically we are human. What do you think? I mean, there is so much special sauce in uproar and in the way that you deliver your work and work with your clients. And I know this because of even the way that you prompt me for things. When we have conversations, it's so rare that someone holds space that way. And so how would you articulate that special sauce that you bring into your coaching work?

Kari: My values are kindness, empathy, and play. And if I am not sitting comfortably on that stool, then I need to make sure that I'm dialing more into kindness, more into empathy, and more into play. When I work with my clients, we work hard. We are often dabbling in vulnerable areas, and so I invite them to be as honest and open and brave with me, and I promise to make that back. And that means that sometimes there are tears and sometimes there is frustration, but there is also a lot of laughter and adventure and exploration and celebration.

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Lex: How do you recommend, so I become a big believer in coaching you being a big part of that. How do you recommend people go about finding their right match coach?

Kari: I think the first way that you could find a coach is to ask your friends or colleagues if they have a coach or if they know any coaches who they think might be a good fit for you. Because coaching is a very personal experience. It's really important to find the right fit and to be really honest with yourself about what you want to get out of a coaching relationship and what you are expecting at the end of the coaching process. Then Google Stock, actually look at websites, look at social media, see if you can listen to other podcasts or speak engagements or something where they have appeared. You get a sense for how they talk about what they do and how they talk to and with other people. And then I invite you, so many coaches have free or very, very low cost introductory conversations.

Kari: They're usually half hour, 45 minutes. Mine's about 45 minutes. We tend to run 50 or 60 minutes. I mean, we really sort of lean in so you get a feel for what it would be like to be coached, but it's an opportunity for you to get a sense of what coaching would be like to get a feel for what that coach's housekeeping rules are. And then for you to also really ask the coach a lot of questions about themselves, about their education, about their process, about how often they meet with you, how many people are they coaching right now, right? If you've got a coach who is coaching eight hours a day, seven days a week, I'm worried about that coach's ability to be emotionally prepared and regulated for you and to have the mental space to be thinking about you and to be preparing for your coaching conversations when they come in the door. Now, that might work for some people. It does not work for me. So recap, ask your friends, do some searching date around, and then pick the person that just makes you feel hell. Yeah.

Lex: I think coaching, especially when you're leaning into getting your first coach, especially for business owners or people that are making a big life move, it can be a little scary. What are some of the things that you hear like hesitations people have about coaching?

Kari: There's three. There's always three that come up. I'm sure I've heard more, but these are the big three that come up again and again. The first one is money. Is this worth my money? Is this too much money? Am I going to see value from this? Right. That's one question. The second one is time. Do I have time for this? Is this worth my time? I mean, honestly, that's one of the reasons also why I have a variety of programs, because time should never be an objection if you want to improve yourself. And then third is the fear that nothing's going to change. That when you have made the financial commitment, when you have made the time commitment, nothing's going to happen on the other side. That last one is actually less about me as a coach and more about you as an individual because you need to be, if you were interested in coaching, if you were thinking, I might be ready for a coach, if you were thinking, I am ready for a coach, that means that you are ready to actively take part in making a change.

Kari: If you come in and you say, I'm worried that nothing is going to happen, or What do you guarantee me is going to change in my life? I can't guarantee you anything because the work and the honesty and the progress, it's within you. You just need to be willing to go along and accept those moments when it feels hard, and accept those moments when it feels scary, and accept those moments when it doesn't feel like anything's happening, and then celebrate those moments when something does happen. That's what we focus on. That's when we say, hell yeah, that's when we say, this is what it was all for. But if you're coming and thinking that nothing will change, I think maybe you're not ready for a coach. I think sometimes we are less likely to invest in a larger ticket solution to help ourselves because it feels easier to read a book and then figure out how to put it into play. And sometimes you've listened to all of the podcasts, you've read all of the books, you've watched all the TED talks, you've done the therapy, and now you really just need the support to ignite.

Lex: Yeah. Yeah. I had a boss in an agency who said once that his favorite clients were the ones who had been burned before. And it's not an exact parallel to what you're saying, but it's kind of like, I've already tried the do it yourself path. I've already tried me doing this completely solo. It's not enough. I need that support. And so I know that it's time for that support, but I think that is, it takes some maturity, it takes some self-awareness to get to that place, right?

Kari: Yeah. That's one of the first questions that I ask people coming into a coaching engagement is like, have you had coaching before? Because I want to know what sort of expectation or experience and pushing against. And second is like, why is now the time for coaching? What brought you to this moment today? And those are always really fun because people just go, they just start. It's permission to just unleash. And that's really where the deliciousness of what will be the foundation of our coaching experience comes from. It's really quite wonderful.

Lex: And I want to highlight for our listener how helpful the sales questions that you've highlighted, why is this the right time? Some of the things that you brought up earlier in our conversation and what you're pushing against your past experience in this space, it helps also you sell, right? Because it helps them sort of self evaluate whether or not, one, you're the right coach and two sort of come to the conclusions on their own that yes, they are in fact ready for coaching and that they're ready for coaching with you. So it's so brilliant when people think about sales and they're like, oh, I hate sales calls. I hate doing sales. It's like, I think you have such an authentic approach to your clients, both in your marketing and in your sales process, which really is just going back to your being human thing. Kari, can you talk about some of your messaging and how that has evolved over the years?

Kari: It's funny because I did a coaching certification program, a coaching training program in early March, 2020. So right up the world was getting weird when we were in our training class, and there was a woman in the class with me, Shakita, and she's a brilliant coach, she's a relationship coach, she's a brilliant coach. She kept looking at me, she's like, but what's your voice? What is your voice as a coach? And I was like, I don't understand your question. I dunno. And then that summer, not summer, may summer-ish, I was putting together my first website and I was working on my business plan and I knew I was going to be uproar, and I knew that that has a big name and it sounds cous. And I went through a bunch of, I opened have a paper thesaurus on myself, and I opened the thesaurus to look at words and I was like, is it rebel?

I don't know. I mean, it took a minute to sort of fine tune it, but this idea of spreading out, getting loud and being a boss bitch has with me from the start. And that comes from my reaction to an article I read in a Harvard Business Review about women leaving leadership positions within their first three years. And so many of the takeaways from that article were about the fact that in these leadership positions when women were the only seat at the table, they were not given permission to have a voice. So they had to be very quiet that they had to take up as little physically as little room as possible, but then also sort of egotistically as little room as possible and that they had to demure and downplay so that way there wasn't this perceived threat to the males around the table with them.

And I just thought, that is such patriarchal white supremacists bullshit, and women and non-traditional leaders and fems should spread out and they should get loud and they should be boss bitches. And that's sort of where this all came from. So that has been with me from the start, bringing in this sense of offering a safe place for people to be who they are and to celebrate that took longer to articulate into 10 words. I could wax wrap sodic about it for a long time, but it wasn't effective because I didn't trust in myself in the things that I was delivering to be able to say, no, this is what I'm really doing. And it actually took confidence and a dial up of pride to say, this is how I'm supporting people. This is what people are coming to me to talk about. This is how I support people, and just keep it as simplistic as that.

Lex: Yeah. I want to talk really briefly about, I think one of the things that's really interesting about business owners is that in their own business, especially those of us who start our own business that is very identity focused as coaching businesses are, they tend to shove themselves into a marketing box even though their business does not belong in one. And I know that you've been on a journey with that of sort of like, how do I learn from the patterns of what's working in the marketing space? How do I make that my own? Can you talk about some of the marketing practices that you tried on that didn't fit well for you?

Kari: Yeah. So I printed a bunch of flyers and put them up around town, and then there was a global pandemic and nobody went out. So that felt a little bit like a wwo moment. Now, is that something that I could come back to? Absolutely. Now that the world is a little bit more open, everybody is sort of moving around more freely, that is definitely something that I could come back to. However, my ideal client has changed since that initial flyer, and so I would really need to consider where I am putting that up. When I started, everybody said, you're a coach. You have to be on Instagram. Then it was, you're a coach and you have to be on TikTok and you need to post five to six times a week, and you need to be doing reels. And some of the reels need to follow trends, but then we also need to hear you talking, but then it would be really great to see you coaching somebody.

Have you thought about doing lives? And I got to tell you, it killed my soul. Chasing the algorithm was exhausting, and I didn't like the persona of Coach Carey that was developing on Instagram because of that. So I threw up a static nine box, and you can walk through that journey. And what's actually quite beautiful about that is if you are just finding me on Instagram and it's upper coaching, that's where you can see me on Instagram. You start with box one and you walk through the nine boxes and you really get a feel for who I am, what brought me to coaching, who I support, the types of ways that you can work with me. Here's a freeway to get started, and here's where you can find me if you want to continue the conversation. I think that was six, but there's no box anyway. But what's nice is people can sort of join and become part of the glitter bomb community at their own pace. There's no sense of I need to constantly be reintroducing myself to people because the box is there. And if you're really curious, you can walk through it.

Lex: Kari, if you could give one tip to our listener, and especially for the coaches out there, but for all business owners on how to connect with their best clients, what would it be?

Kari: I think that if you need to, I am on a journey to answer this question for myself, which is why I am perhaps stalling a little bit and answering it for other people. But I think that if you were a business owner who rankles at the idea of doing things the tried and true way, be the Kool-Aid man, smash through the wall and do it in a way that feels right to you. L you and I were talking before we started recording today about what is the next iteration for me of finding the person who's ready to say hell yeah. And my little lizard brain has been sort of spinning on this since the start of our conversation, and I think sometimes we look for the crowds of our people where they're in congregation with each other. I know for me, my best bet people are not going to be in those crowds. They're going to be on the sidelines or they're going to be in the corner sort of observing what's happening. So I think if you know who you have been supporting in the past, very clearly, the type of person or the type of business that you want to support, find them in the places that they least expect to be found.

Lex: Love it. Would you like to share anything you're doing lately that our listeners should check out?

Kari: Oh yeah. I'm very excited. I have recently renovated reinvigorated. I don't know what the right R word would be for it. My I want challenge. It helps you cut through your mental clusterfuck and actually get clear on the things that you want for yourself so you can take charge in making it happen for you, and you'll be able to share the link in the show notes. Okay, so click the link below, totally free for you. It's email based. I hope that you'll respond me, I personally will respond back to whatever you send me, and we will have an amazing conversation because I want you to get the things that you want for yourself unabashedly and unapologetically.

Lex: Yes. Go check out the I Want Challenge. Awesome. That is linked in the show notes. And Kari, thank you for being here and sharing your wisdom with us.

Kari: Thank you for this opportunity. This was great.

Lex: Kari's clarity around her ideal client is rare, and you'll see it in the language she uses across her channels to speak directly to her glitter bombs as she calls her clients. It's worth having a look for yourself and considering the specificity with which you talk to your ideal clients, the more specific we are, the more we attract the right fit client, the more we propel away people that aren't so great for our service. Kari does this exceptionally well, speaking directly to her buyer and attracting in the door enthusiastic perspective clients go check out I Want Challenge in the show notes and learn more about her at uproarcoaching.com.

If you're tired of being shoved into a marketing box and you want to find what works for you, you should check out my program Growthtrackers. I go live every Friday on YouTube to show you a sneak peek into how we crack your client finding formula together.

And while you're here, if you can relate to Kari's lack of love for Instagram, you can check out the episode I did on why I deleted Instagram. You don't have to do marketing any one way. There's always an alternate path. And in that episode, I share some of my methods for getting visibility on my business to have nothing to do with social media.

Until next time, keep your energy low until the value will be high.