Elevate Your Value and Visibility by Jointly Offering a Speed Coaching Event

Want to savor food (or fashion) slowly  but  grow your career or business faster? Try a Speed Coaching event. From Hong Kong to Anaheim, this wildly popular format is being adopted to serve diverse crowds quickly.  

They range from those who got pink slips to food and beverage folks, non-profit staffers, journalists, executives, students, government staffers, indie business owners and, well, even coaches. It may be your next business – or way to attract clients.

 • Picture the scene. People “are lined up outside an exhibit hall in a Manhattan hotel. The doors open, and they rush to tables set up around the room. They grab a number for each of the experts they wish to consult.

When it is their turn, they get five minutes to blurt out their questions above the din. A small digital clock on each table tracks the fleeting minutes.” Speed Coaching session times can vary from five to 20 or 30 minutes. Depending on your coach, that will seem too brief or too long, of course. And when time is short coaches can be blunt (I mean direct).

Another format has “you and a group move one at a time through the coaching stations.” 

Some Speed coaching events are free, others include keynoters, workshops and meals for up to $350.

• At the Samuel Adams Brewery in Boston, sixty microentrepreurs “jumped on the opportunity to rotate through 20-minute  discipline specific stations with 26 coaches — many of them Sam Adams employees — to get advice in business consulting, marketing, sales, people management, financing, legal advice and more.”

“Some brought their food, others came with logos and package concepts, yet others had a specific business problem they needed help solving,” said marketing expert, Risa Shermanwho coached on behalf of her client, Sam Adams.  

Here's another approach to speed coaching to respond to a need. Job hunting is dispiriting - often lonely and isolating.That’s why it was so comforting for job seekers to be in a room full of knowledgeable people who were ready to meet with them, one-on-one, to answer their specific questions.

From job hunt web sites to career counseling coaches could personalize their advice to each person’s need. Hundreds of unemployed people flocked to this free speed-coaching event in New York.

My colleague, transitionist coach Terrence Seamon was one of many coaches who volunteered to sit in “twenty minute sessions, to review their job search campaign strategies as well as their resumes, making sure that they are accomplishments-focused.”

The event was the co-created service of The New York Library, Vault and volunteer coaches. In this bad economy what top-of-mind topic most concerns your kind of client?

Recruit a cadre of non-competing and credible experts to coach them in a fast-paced, speed coaching event where participants get hundreds of dollars worth of the specific advice they most seek - and coaches demonstrate their expertise to “pull” prospects towards hiring them.

More than a free for all, “here’s my card” networking event people actually get to meet the individuals they’d most like to know at that time. You, too, could leverage your value with a custom speed coaching event that serves a hot need or avid interest felt by your kind of clients.

Here’s a quick checklist of jumpstart your first popular, speed coaching event:

• What other credible, complementary (non-competing) experts and organizations serve your “mutual market?”

• What preoccupies your clients? • When would it be easiest for them to meet?

• What is a convenient and attractive meeting location for them?

• What if you created a helpful meeting momento – an eBook of three tips from each coach plus their bio and s brief description of all partnering organizations, with links to all resources cited in the eBook?

• How long should your event be? Some are as short as two hours and as long as a day. One-on-one coaching sessions in different events range from five-minutes to 20-minutes. Collectively choose the length that works best for your kind of attendee and speed coaching theme.

• Consider combining 20-minutes “expert roundtable” sessions for five to eight attendees to ask an expert questions – concurrent with the one-on-one speed coaching sessions. Put the coaching sessions on one side of a ballroom or other large meeting place and the roundtables on the other.

• Place large signs behind each coach with their name and/or topic and on roundtables with the table topic. The more partnering coaches and organizations you involve the lower the per-partner cost and the higher the benefit to them for participating – and the higher the number of people you can reach and serve.

Here is one kind of speed coaching event I co-designed with the astute head of the S.F. chapter of Savor the Success, Ayesha Mathews-Wadhwa: http://www.savorthesuccess.com/event/details/164