Kevin Stafford 0:00
Hello, everyone and welcome to another episode of the conversations with coaches podcast. I’m your host, Kevin, and today I have with me from the jungles of Costa Rica. Rachel, she is to she right? That’s correct. Yeah. Rachel is a go to market coach and consultant with seven years as a top performer in b2b sales at companies like metadata, Hootsuite and Vinyard. Outside of this work, she helps early stage founders, Master b2b sales and SAS sales reps to sell with integrity. Based now in Costa Rica, she’s committed to living a life aligned with the values of freedom and sovereignty. Get to know you a little bit first few minutes before I hit record, Rachel, I’m stoked to have you on the podium so that we finally got to connect.
Rachel Shi 0:42
Amazing, ya know, so excited to be here, Kevin, looking forward to sharing my story.
Kevin Stafford 0:46
Cool. Well, let’s, let’s get to that sharing. Let’s start at the beginning your your superhero origin story as a coach in particular not you have to go all the way back to the beginning. But when When did you either realize or maybe have someone help you to realize that you were a coach, were on the way to becoming a coach wanted to be a coach, and move into that business? What, what’s your origin story there? How did you get that spark? And that start?
Rachel Shi 1:10
Right? Yeah. And I think it’s funny, Kevin, because I think almost the word coaches, so I mean, it’s used in so many different capacities these days, right, it’s very trendy, almost, to be a coach and think with the rise of things like social media, it just makes it easier for people to build out a coaching business these days. And, yeah, it’s almost like it seems almost saturated, you know, from a sense, but, you know, I think just to kind of distill it down to its basic principles, the way that I see, you know, the definition of a coach is someone who helps bring out the best in others, right. So if we kind of just bring it back to so that concept, I think I’ve always been someone who sort of plays that role, not only in work, but in my friends lives, you know, my family life. And that’s something that, you know, has, then, by extension, just become something that, you know, I’ve applied professionally as well. So, origin stories, I’ve always been in the sales space. So I’ve been in b2b sales, as mentioned, for the last seven years or so, working with a lot of Toronto tech startups scaleups. But it wasn’t until I joined a tech incubator, entrepreneur fest, where I got the opportunity to build my own tech startup, and be around other founders, people who are like me, who are entrepreneurial, who are ambitious, where I really got the chance to sort of, sort of bring this coaching business to life and really just happened really, naturally. And organically, I was surrounded by a lot of techy people, people with a product background, people who didn’t come from sales, who were asking me for advice around basic sales process one on one. And through that, I started to gain a bit of a clientele, right. And so once you sort of gain that reputation, then you know, word of mouth tends to spread pretty quickly add more people like friends of friends that are such come to me for help in that area. So that’s really how I started to build that practice out. And now I still do it alongside my day job, which is still being in sales, I find it important to still be applying these skills myself in a real world scenario as I coach my clients. But that’s a little bit as to how I got started.
Kevin Stafford 3:22
Yes, it’s a number of number of coaches I talk to, they like to get to keep that that parallel aspect where they they still work very prominently, where they came from, whether it’s sales, or HR, or some corporate environment, or an entrepreneurial startup of their own, that they still love to be a part of. And then they love having their coaching run in parallel, because they they sort of work together and feed each other and educate each other and open up new avenues, avenues with each other. And I like that you have that maintain, though, sometimes it’s tempting to want to jump all the way into one or the other, or there’s some coaches that got out of a position that they were in, because they were they know they liked it, but they didn’t love it. And then they jumped into coaching. And then some and I’m very I admire this very much, because I find it very, not difficult but challenging to do and to do well, you seem to have achieved is to be able to run those in parallel and have them feed each other and work with each other almost, like braided together. It’s very, very strong.
Rachel Shi 4:12
Yeah. Know, I mean, it definitely feeds into each other, right, because I’m surrounded by sales reps every day, you know, my network is all salespeople. You know, I’ve sold to salespeople, you know, work with so many so it’s kind of a natural fit there. And yeah, from a coaching perspective, in terms of like the, the founders, right and part of communities that are, you know, came as an extension from when at that time that I was in the incubator and was part of the entrepreneur first kind of network. So through that those connections happened very organically and is now kind of part of my life.
Kevin Stafford 4:49
Funny how that happens. You kind of look up and all of a sudden that thing that you were like this might be a good idea I should try this and you look up and wow, this is braided and woven throughout my everyday life in a way that feels so satisfying and you It’s not done. That’s that’s kind of I think that’s always kind of the cool part when you realize that you’ve sort of your both arrived and begun. At the same time, we’re like, oh, oh, this is where I was going, this is what I was looking for. And then you’re looking at it, and you’re like, Okay, that’s where I’m going. Now. I love the way that as a coach, and I can already tell you’re like this, but many coaches are like this, your desire to share that, to help enable people to have that same feeling where it’s just like, maybe you feel stuck, maybe you just have somewhere you want to go, and you’re not quite sure how to get there, wanting to be the person that shares from their life lessons and from their journey. This is how I did it, and then translate that into this is how I think, in fact, this is how I know you can do it. Let’s do this together. And that’s I love that desire to give back and how that just infuses everything a good coach does. So no question there. I’m just basically complimenting you, I guess.
Rachel Shi 5:49
Yeah, no, no, it’s, uh, it’s funny that you say that, because I do have people who asked me, you know, how do I get into coaching? How do I get into consulting? And my advice to them is always that, you know, do it for free first, right? Like, is that something that you’re naturally inclined to do that you enjoy and just give freely and people come to gravitate you, to you? Because you’re known as somebody who likes to help others get unstuck and reach their goals? If so, then you’ve kind of built almost that moat around you, then then it’s starting to, you know, then the conversation becomes how do I monetize this? How do I kind of build this into something a little bit more sort of formalized? So, ya know, it’s interesting, because again, kind of goes into sort of that synergistic kind of complement between the two.
Kevin Stafford 6:35
Yeah, a word that I, I love and don’t love at the same time, because I find it so useful, especially when I’m talking to coaches synergy. And just it really is a matter of blending is finding the disparate or connected aspects of your personal and professional life, your character, who you want to be in the world, how you want to express it, and finding ways to weave them together and have them interact synergistically. And so every time I say the word, like a little part of me cringes, but it’s so perfectly encapsulates this journey. I just got to use it. Like I love it. Let’s talk a little bit about just the nuts and bolts of your coaching practice today. Obviously, you’ve just moved to Costa Rica. And so you’re largely remote year, we’ve had an had a number of near misses getting on this podcast, very busy, very successful right now. So talk about if you if you don’t mind a little bit about who you coach and how you coach them these days, what you specialize in what you focus on, whether it’s like one to one or maybe even like, virtual or in presence keynote speaking, I don’t know, if you’ve written a book or are planning on writing a book. I always I always feel like I have to ask just in case, because it’s always seems like it’s around the horizon for a lot of coaches. So yeah, who do you coach? And how do you coach them today?
Rachel Shi 7:42
Right? Yeah, so I think that falls into two main buckets. first bucket is the founder one, right, so people who are, you know, early stage founders, maybe seed stage series, A, maybe they don’t come from a sales background, and just need some help kind of getting off the ground there and building that skill set in themselves. So that, you know, they can succeed in their own business, and then maybe potentially hire other salespeople, for their company. So that’s one profile that I work with. The second profile is sales reps. So people who are like me, like who I was, you know, three, four or five years ago, maybe they’re struggling with a part of the sales process, whether it’s, you know, social selling, whether it’s, you know, negotiation, prospecting, etc. You know, I help those folks as well. And it’s kind of more of a reprogram programmatic approach. Right? So with both kind of sets of people, it’s usually maybe a three to six month long program, you know, depends on kind of the length of time that they need that help for if we go through whether it’s a more of a problem centric aspect, you know, whether it’s like, you know, I really want to develop this skill set, or, you know, is it a matter of, you know, I really need to play some more customers. And I just need someone to bounce ideas off and more of that advisory capacity, sort of on the the foundry side. So that’s sort of those main two buckets, usually working in a one on one capacity right now, again, because I’m trying to balance everything with my day job. But at the same time, I am thinking about, you know, ways to make it more scalable. So thinking about sort of building up courses, building out kind of digital products, to kind of support those efforts is something that I’m also working on right now.
Kevin Stafford 9:20
It’s always one of the big challenges of a coaching business, whether you’re, whether you’re, you know, part time fully invested, or full time, 6070 hours, like plus just go and go balls to the wall, so to speak. It’s always a challenge to find that, that bridge from the magic and the potency of the one to one, because you’ve so much good work gets done there. And there’s so much of the coaching experience of being coached. It’s about reading and reacting to people in the moment and seeing how they respond to certain things that you say or don’t say your questions you ask or don’t ask, and to scale that into something that can both help more people and also grow your business because it’s not just it’s not just scaling your business. It’s scaling your reach scaling your effect. It’s scaling your ability to serve, which I think is something that I love about coaches as well. It seems like I talk a lot about what I love about coaches kind of great that I host this podcast, I guess, that desire to find a way to do that without compromising the potency and the power of the one to one coaching. And yet courses are a great way to do that. Obviously, small group coaching, it can be difficult sometimes to get something like a mastermind, or a small group going because you’ve got people you have to get them. I mean, coordinating schedules, especially of executive sales executives, you know, can be like herding cats, but there’s a good, there’s a good groundswell of appreciation for the value of something like that. So it’s not just that there’s money to be invested in that there’s a willingness and an ability to see the value of getting into small group masterminds to help your own business to help your own abilities to grow. And then of course, of course, it’s love them, love them, love them get on video, talk to people have people in the audience do q&a Is all sorts of stuff like that. It’s so valuable, it’s so tremendous. It just gives people a taste of what it could be like to be coached one to one, that’s what a lot of coaches do, they’ll keep the one to one, because it’s still like, it’s like kind of like how you have your quote unquote, day job and your coaching experience, and how they feed each other. It’s I feel like it’s the same way with different aspects of coaching and how you approach it and how you grow it.
Rachel Shi 11:13
Right? Yeah, no, I mean, there’s definitely kind of like the lead funnel aspect to it. If you want to think about that way too, right? If you release a free book, or you release a sort of free course, and you know, use that to just attract more people and see who is in alignment with the way that you do things. And if they’re interested, obviously, being able to sort of take that next step. Yeah, I mean, I still have to say, I’m still early in my journey, right. So still working, you know, on those scalable aspects of the business. But I mean, for now, the the one to one is very fulfilling. And I mean, it’s something that I’m really strong at. So working well, so far.
Kevin Stafford 11:48
I’m feeling slightly greedy. I want to keep you guys really fun to talk to you. Like I just love being able to like crack into the insights. And the stage your business is that it’s such an exciting stage for me to just like, be able to witness because it’s just like, it’s succeeding and growing and excelling and accelerating. And also going through some changes. And some more since I’m like, I could talk to you just about your business all day. But I should let you go and give you a chance to tell the audience two things. Well, one question two parts, where can they find out more about you just gather information, learn more about what you do, how you do it? And also where can they best connect with you? Do you have any social media that you’d like to guide people towards? Do you have anywhere on or like a website, they’d like to guide people towards any groups? you’d like them to join courses you’d like them to sign up for right now?
Rachel Shi 12:32
No, I wish TBD on that one. But short term, like one answer is my LinkedIn. I think that’s the best way for folks to reach me. So just search Rachel she I connect with most folks on there, message me on there. I do have a website to Rachel chu.com. I’m sure you’ll link all the details below. But yeah, LinkedIn is probably the best way.
Kevin Stafford 12:52
That seems to be the answer. Most of the time these days, LinkedIn is such a, it’s become such a strong, at least in the context of social media, a really strong relationship platform, it’s still got, you know, it’s got it has all the trappings and some of the failings and pitfalls of the social media in general. But I’m finding the depth of relationships I’m able to build, they’re really unlike anywhere else on the internet, especially, and not just professionally but also kind of personally like I’ve I’ve developed through my professional connections, some genuine friendships with coaches and other people in business. And it’s like, I feel like I’m extolling the virtues of LinkedIn more and more, which is not something I ever thought I would do. But man is a great place to get to know people in a way that’s meaningful and the way that matters.
Rachel Shi 13:28
You present Yeah, and the more you sort of put yourself out there on it, too. If you’re creating content and sort of sharing your thoughts and what you’re learning and what you’re building on there. Again, you kind of attract your tribe. I think that’s kind of the the the biggest differentiator and the value out of something like LinkedIn versus kind of just taking the more passive approach and consuming if you sort of flip that consumed to create ratio like magic things happen.
Kevin Stafford 13:53
Who just thought vulnerability availability leads to attraction? No, I can’t be a coaching concept candidates. Thank you so much for being here and chatting with me today. I had a really good time. And again, I might like try to sneaky get you back on for a part two, and we can talk more nuts and bolts stuff. Maybe we’ll have you back when you’re when you’re about to launch a course or two or whatever, whatever’s coming next for you. And yeah, I will be following your journey closely on LinkedIn.
Rachel Shi 14:18
Absolutely. Thanks so much, Kevin for having me. Appreciate it.
Kevin Stafford 14:22
And to the audience. Do yourself a favor find out more about Rachel she is fantastic chat with get to know her. If her coaching might be something for you do not hesitate to reach out and she’s on LinkedIn all over reader posts. I don’t know if you do any video posts yet, but I’m sure you will. At some point, actually, you do. I have seen a few years I was like wait a minute. So yeah, check her out. Find out more connect with her and we’ll talk to you again soon.
