The Targetizer

Yes, even our beloved game is being bashed by the economy.

Many soccer schools are down on numbers, many football clinics are showing a rapid decline - it’s frightening to see people panic and get scared.

So what do you do?

Do you run and hide, stick a blanket over your head and hope it all goes away some time soon? Or is it time to stand up and be counted?

Here’s a story that may interest you:

In early Januray this year a subscriber and friend of The Targetizer decided to go out alone. He was constantly getting threratned from his boss that if things didn’t pick up he would be out on his ear.

Now, my friend isn’t some fly-by-night or time filler. He’s an honest hard working guy who always has his family’s best interest at heart.

But his boss’ business was suffering big time and he was getting in the neck constantly.

In December he came to me to ask about coaching in general as he also coaches for his local Junior Football Club where his son plays….

So I offered some advice and he went away. I sensed there was more to what he wanted to say but sometimes you’ve just got to let people work it out in their own heads and let them do the figuring out.

Right enough, he came back a couple of weeks later and asked some general questions about soccer schools and ‘was it easy to set up’ etc. etc.

You know when someone’s got something on their mind so before I answered his question I asked him if ‘running a socer school would be something he would be intersted in?’

He said he’d been thinking about it for some time but:

1. Didn’t know how to start
2. Wasn’t sure he was qualified enough
3. Didn’t know how to promote his idea
4. Wasn’t sure if people would come
5. Pretty scared of starting and failing
6. Needed to be sure because it was a matter of survival

It was obvious that he’d been thinking about this for some time. It was also obvious that he was scared to death of cutting loose from his old job and totally changing his life for something he didn’t know had a future or not. Who wouldn’t be?

Big questions needing some big answers. So I started by…..

So I started by telling him of how I started. No, it wasn’t easy because everyone around me, including my closest family, were telling me that I was mad to give up a good job and start something I had no idea would work or not.

I told him that when even your closest family are saying this to you it makes making sound judgements even harder because of all the raging emotions inside.

Your own thoughts are drowned out by fear of the unknown. You convince yourself its a bad idea because that’s the ‘easy’ option.

And of course your family are going to get upset because it’s change - no-one likes change, but it happens to everyone of us every second of the day.

My advice at this point was to just step away from the emotions for a second and try
to take a look in from the outside. He agreed.

I said: ‘Look at who is giving you the advice, with all due respect, but just look at their history to see if they actually had any expereience in starting and running a soccer school.’

He said ‘none of them have. In fact none of them have ever run their own business.’

‘OK’, I said ‘do you see where I’m coming from?’ ‘Yes’ he said. Good.

I knew first I had to move him away from the highly emotional side of family and friends giving advice and to help him put that advice in perspective.

He understood that and I think that helped alot.

I then asked his motives for wanting to start a soccer school. He replied ‘My job is not as secure as my family thinks. They don’t realise the hassle I’m getting at work. We’re not pulling in the work and my boss is going mad at me for it, threatening to lay me off almost everyday. I’ve had enough. I want to do something for myself.’

I told him he didn’t need any reason to start a soccer school but his reasons were probably shared by thousands of coaches fed up with the grind of the office and the rat race.

I then offered some friendly advice: ‘Instead of going in headfirst and sacking your boss, why don’t you just try it part-time? Just do a summer soccer camp for a few weeks or do it one night a week or on the weekend? I’ll help you with getting in clients and show you exactly how to do that.’

He was hesitant but after a while he agreed.

I said, ‘If things go as you want just ramp up your efforts and THEN sack your boss!’

He laughed. It was nice to see him smiling again.

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If you’d like to know the advice that helped Imtiaz’s friend start and succeed at running his own soccer school and eventually ’sack your boss’ then sign up to be on the Priority List here and get notified of when his new book, ‘How To Make Serious Money from Soccer Coaching‘ is released later this year.

Go Here Now:
http://www.thetargetizer.com/make-money-from-soccer-coaching-list.html

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 at 11:04 am and is filed under Coaches. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.