My Business Mentor, Donald Miller, Wrote a New Book (& I'm in It)

Whenever Donald Miller publishes a new book, I pre-order my copy and eagerly crack it open the day it arrives. I was startled this time around when, just 9 pages into Coach Builder: How to Turn Your Expertise into a Profitable Coaching Career, I saw my name. I'd had no idea he was writing about me!

Donald Miller is a bestselling author of business books like Building a StoryBrand and Marketing Made Simple, both of which really helped me grow my business. I just love learning from him because he helps you reframe how you've been thinking about things like sales and marketing.

Over the last year, I've also been getting to garden with Donald, his wife Betsy, and their sweet little daughter in their beautiful formal potager here in Nashville.

I wanted to share a little more about Donald's new book and show you sneak peeks of the parts where I'm mentioned.

Coach Builder Is an Actionable Playbook for Building a Coaching Business

Donald Miller has been consulting and coaching other business leaders for more than 20 years. Coach Builder is his playbook for building a successful consulting career, after helping hundreds of other coaches start and grow their own businesses. The book walks you through how to:

• Develop a product menu to sell to clients
• Generate and manage a potential client list
• Create a compelling website to attract ideal clients
• Write and automate sales emails
• Create a marketing funnel
• Set business goals and achieve them
• Build or join a community to help you grow
• Navigate client/coach relationships

This book is basically an essential guidebook for anyone who wants to make money doing something they love, and I really wish I'd had it 8 years ago when I started out as a garden coach.

When I first started my garden consulting business, I struggled to define my job title for accountants and county clerks. There was never a "garden consulting" option on dropdown menus. So I got real excited when I saw the words "gardening consultant" in the author's note of this book. Not even page 1, and Donald Miller was already mentioning us!

He writes, "The examples in this book are mostly related to business coaching but the steps to build a coaching business will work for a business coach, a life coach, a financial advisor, a gardening consultant, a parenting coach, a real estate agent, or in any other field of interest."

I felt a little emotional thinking about how there are more and more opportunities for people to turn their passion into a career coaching others. That's just what I did 8 years ago.

Chapter One of Coach Builder

I'm first mentioned in Chapter One, "Step One: Create a Menu of Products You Can Sell to Clients." As Donald knows, I stumbled upon many of the products I ended up offering through my business by happenstance, and it took me years to develop a polished product suite.

"My friend Nicole Burke started a garden in her backyard," he writes. "Even though she had no experience as a gardener, she became so obsessed with the garden that she began talking to friends about how much lettuce her simple kitchen garden was producing and, of course, her friends had questions."

Like many other gardeners, as soon as I began feeling like I knew what I was doing, I started giving away my advice for free. "That is until she got a tuition bill for one of her kids' schools."

"Nicole realized she was going to have to get a job. Instead of getting a job, though, she decided to keep consulting with friends and created a product, a $25-per-hour consulting fee to help people build a kitchen garden."

I charged just $25 an hour because I didn't value my time, and I would never have believed for a second that people would pay much more than that for advice from little ol' me.

"As you can imagine, her consulting became popular but it wasn't paying enough to cover her bills. She realized pretty quickly that she needed to charge more. She raised her price to $100 per hour and added beds she built herself from wood she bought at Home Depot. Her clients couldn't get enough. She added trellises and arches to her menu of products and her clients bought them up."

Once my business grew, I had beginner gardeners from all over the country asking if I could come help them start a garden. I also had tons of experienced gardeners saying things like, "Man, you have my dream job. I sure wish I could do what you're doing for a living." I realized that my business was limited to just me, but there was a huge need for what I was doing outside of my city. So I created a certification program called the Gardenary Consultant Certification to coach passionate gardeners how to start their own garden businesses like mine. That way, beginner gardeners could find someone I trained who lives in their area.

"Today, Nicole runs a seven-figure garden consulting business called Gardenary and is aiming to have her own television show. She's written two books about starting a kitchen garden and she's constantly being featured in the media. She started as a hobbyist and has now been transformed into a true expert, a coach, and thought leader in her space."

"How did it all start for Nicole? It started with a passion that turned into a menu of products. Then she had the guts to charge for those products. That is how your coaching business will start, too."

Chapter Two of Coach Builder

I'm mentioned again in "Step Two: Create and Manage a Potential Client List." He writes, "When Nicole Burke started offering gardening advice, she showed up at her first client's house with a basket full of lettuce from her garden. The client happened to have four friends over and those friends became her very next clients."

I told this story on his podcast, Business Made Simple, last year—how I felt like an idiot knocking on the front door of a beautiful home in an affluent neighborhood, holding a huge basket of homegrown lettuce. Jenny was nice enough to introduce me to her friends, and then they all asked me for my card, which I had just had printed.

What's incredible is that even though I had never met Jenny and her friends before that day, I ended up being able to trace every single dollar my company grossed in its first year back to that moment on Jenny's doorstep.

The way that my clients branched out from each other became so integral to growing my business that I teach it inside the Gardenary Consultant Certification.

Grab Your Copy of Coach Builder if You Want to Turn Your Passion into a Career

It's incredibly flattering to be given as an example of what to do when you're building a consulting business from the ground up, especially considering I had to figure most of these things out as I went along. The going would have been so much smoother if I'd had a copy of Coach Builder back when I was starting out.

I'm so excited that Donald Miller is paving the way for more people like me to turn their passion into a profitable career, a way to get paid doing something they love. Coach Builder gives practical advice for how to overcome so many obstacles they might face, like charging for your services after giving away your advice for free previously, defining your services, sending those first emails, and so much more.

Here's to more books helping people with knowledge and dedication become entrepreneurs (and here's to more books recognizing the growing industry of garden consulting!). Check out Coach Builder if you're interested in becoming a coach or if you have your own small business.