Leila Ansart is the founder and CEO of Leadership Impact Strategies, a talent development consulting firm located in Florida. She’s an alumni of the Center for Executive Coaching. Leila has a unique path into executive coaching and has learned to capitalize on that uniqueness to help her firm stand out in the marketplace. Her firm works primarily with mid-market organizations in a number of industries. As a fun fact, Lela recently discovered something that brings her joy, which is singing.
Recently, our own Michael Neuendorff had the opportunity to talk with Leila about her career and her personalized approach to leadership coaching.
__________________________
Michael Neuendorff: What caused you to shift from running a consulting firm to executive coaching back in the mid 2010s?
Leila Ansart: Back then I was doing social media strategy consulting for small businesses and I really loved the work. It was self-taught. I intentionally built that business when my kids were young. I started it during their nap times and built it up to a point where I had a couple of part-timers working with me and I was about to sign a national account. But when we moved from the Philadelphia area to Florida, I realized I was burned out on the topic of social media strategy. So, I used the opportunity that presented itself from moving to a new part of the country to start over and go back to the drawing board to decide what I wanted to do next.
MN: So, then you started your executive coaching practice. When I look at your website, I see the solid team of coaches and advisors that you’ve assembled. What’s your strategy behind pulling this kind of team together?
LA: When I first started executive coaching, I didn’t even have a certification. I was doing some coaching work and I quickly realized I needed more tools in my toolbox. That led me to the Center for Executive Coaching. After completing that program and then going out and marketing myself in the workplace, I realized that there’s only so much I could accomplish coaching one-on-one, although I loved the one-on-one work.
I’ve always had an entrepreneurial outlook and viewed situations in terms of how I can make a bigger impact. I’m very highly motivated to make an impact and I think that puts me in a good position.
So, I thought: “How can I make a bigger impact for my clients? How can I do more work, create more programs and effect more change in today’s workplaces?” That would require that I move outside of just my own abilities to deliver those services.
So, my strategy in putting this team together was to assemble wonderful, highly practiced and trained individuals in many different fields. This broad scope enabled us to bring many different services to clients, making a larger impact for larger change. It’s really motivating on both sides.
MN: That makes a lot of sense because you clearly have a marketing mindset. How has that mindset helped you grow your business?
LA: I think when you’re a marketer, which is the world I came from, you are always looking to iterate and find ways to improve. You have to look at your process in terms of “What can I learn this time and how can I get better?” I don’t want to just put my name out there, build a website, do some posts on my favorite social media channels, and then hope the business comes in. I want to stand out.
I’ve tried several different approaches to that and I’ll be honest and tell you that not all of them have been successful. In fact, some of them have been what I call “beautiful failures.” They took time, effort and money and they didn’t work out. But, at the end of the day, if I’m able to come away from that and determine what I learned and how I can apply that to my next marketing effort, that makes it worthwhile.
The other piece is not just mindset, but recognizing that if you want to sign-up decision makers as clients, you have to be where the decision makers are. I didn’t come into this after a 20 – 30 year journey in the corporate world like many executive coaches do. I didn’t have certain advantages that many coaches have. I had to find a way to blaze my own path.
So, some of my marketing efforts have been around: “How can I do something a little different, a little bit fresh, coming from a little different perspective, that enables me to become a known entity to the right audience?”
MN: Can you give us one example of how you’ve done your marketing a little bit differently than other coaches?
LA: Yes. I was trying to find a way to gain entrance with some of the decision makers that were on my prospect list, and I came up with an angle. I was searching for a way to have a conversation with people who don’t know me from Adam. The podcast I launched was an attempt to do that. I was able to make several contacts that have slowly been building in terms of future opportunities. I didn’t close any new business directly from the podcast, but it gave me exposure and I think it opened up my eyes to even more opportunities.
Another thing that I think I’m doing well sometimes, and still learning about at other times, is the idea of speaking to the “right level” of a problem. When you get into environments such as LinkedIn, which is my primary marketing channel, you see a lot of coaches talking about similar topics. And you may think to yourself: “How am I going to be different? How am I going to take a fresh approach?”
Are you talking about what everybody’s been talking about for the last two to three to five years in your space? Or, are you trying to address the issues that are timely, that are urgent, that are important, and that are expensive to the decision makers you’re targeting?
There’s another thing I’ve learned through mentors: be crystal clear on what you’re talking about. You want the decision makers you’re targeting to read your posts and think: “Oh, that’s something that’s bubbled up to the top of my priority list. This is an urgent issue for me right now. Let me read this as opposed to someone else’s post who’s talking generically about something.” I mean, these are all sorts of topics that are top of mind, but you’ve got to find that “urgent, important, or expensive” angle to get attention.
MN: I really like that example a lot, Leila. That definitely stands out as being a different approach. What advice would you give to coaches in private practice, the external coaches, who don’t have the marketing savvy that you might have?
LA: Well, there’s always two routes: do it yourself or hire someone to do it. If you have the experience but you don’t have the sort of the natural inclination or the natural gifts for marketing, I would work with someone who can help to pull that out of you. For example, you can hire ghost writers. There’s a million marketing people right now targeting coaches like us through LinkedIn. But be careful and use your smarts when it comes to weeding through all the people reaching out to you for work.
Try to find individuals who are gifted at pulling your expertise out of you. Talk with them about your past experiences when you were in management or when you led organizations through turbulent times. Have them help you distill some lessons that you learned along the way that apply to “urgent, important, or expensive.”
The other practical thing is: use the recorder app on your phone. Pretend somebody’s interviewing you on a topic that you’re the most confident about and hit record. Ask yourself a question, and then just speak into your phone. This way you get practice getting your knowledge out of your head through words, and then you can transcribe that and come up with a short LinkedIn post or a blog post or something of that nature. So, you can kind of bootstrap DIY in different ways.
Of course, you could also invest a little bit of money into hiring someone to work with you. But you should avoid spending thousands of dollars on a marketing company right in the beginning, right when you get your credential or you’re just building your business. You might make an exception to that if you have a crystal clear direction for yourself, a niche, a particular market that you’re going after.
There’s definitely a learning curve to becoming a coach who’s external to an organization and building their own practice. So, I would say do some of these things, but there’s no need for a huge outlay of money right at the beginning.
MN: That seems like good advice. One of the advice points that I’ve given to some newer coaches who may not necessarily have the marketing mindset but may have some expertise and knowledge in certain areas is to get out there and speak and do some presentations to audiences. You speak to a number of audiences. Can you describe a little bit as to how speaking has helped your practice?
LA: Sure. I’ve learned some lessons around that, let me tell you. The first one is: you absolutely have to speak to get better at speaking. It’s not just about the words coming out of your mouth, you’ve got to find a way to connect with different kinds of thinkers, different kinds of audiences. So doing some volunteer speaking is a wonderful way to build that skill. And you can do that easily through business associations, both entrepreneur associations like BNI and many smaller, locally-based networking groups. And don’t forget industry associations, ATD, SHRM, and others too. 
But I’ll warn you, while speaking means more exposure, that exposure alone won’t pay the bills. So, while you may start with volunteer speaking engagements, at some point you’re going to need to start charging. Depending on your skill level and your content quality, you may start by charging $150 or $500 or $1,000, or whatever you feel is fair. And then start to slowly work your way up as you get more and more experience.
One of the things I’ve started doing, which has helped me project value to an event planner, is to ask them what kind of process they have in place for marketing this event outside their organization. I’ve found that most of the time, like 70% of the time, they don’t have any marketing plan. They do next to nothing. But by asking that question, it gets them thinking.
Sometimes, when I volunteer, I ask them to send me a speaking agreement in writing stating that they will promote the event where I’m speaking in their external social media channels, blog posts, press releases or other outlets. Then at least I’m getting some payback in the form of visibility and clicks to my website or to my social media. So that’s always something you can ask for and get creative with as well.
MN: Another great tip. If you don’t ask them to promote you, they just might not have a plan.
LA: Remember that most of those meeting planners are volunteering for their association or their group, and meeting planning is just one of many things they’re responsible for. They are, for the most part, never trained on how to really value a speaker’s time. So you can help them to understand that and help all the other speakers coming after you by educating the planners in that area.
MN: Completely agree on that. What are your thoughts about having a niche? That’s a topic a lot of newer coaches really struggle with.
LA: I think the ideal answer is to have a niche because you can go deeper in terms of visibility in a niche market than in multiple markets. That being said, you can’t control where your business comes from. My company does more than coaching. We do employee training, leadership development, and some consulting in the talent development and talent planning space. So, my intention has always been to have a niche.
After graduating with my coaching credential I had a couple of industries in mind. What I found was having a niche helped me to focus my marketing efforts. It focused on the conversations I was having on social media and in blog posts. And I think that was very helpful for me. I actually ended up getting referrals from other clients who were outside of my targeted industries. So our firm right now is in probably 12 different industries based on some originally sourced business and some referral business.
So, I will say, take a look at your own background, take a look at where your network is or activate your own network. I would say that’s really the easiest thing to do in terms of getting started and let that be your niche and see where it goes from there. If the universe sends you gifts from out in left field, take them.
MN: So, when people are starting out, sometimes it turns out to be more difficult than we anticipated to establish our coaching practice. I certainly went through that when I started my business during the 2008 mother of all recessions. And it was very difficult at that time trying to sell coaching services. How do you keep yourself energized and motivated?
LA: First of all, there is no perfection or perfect time. I like to say that because I definitely deal with that voice in my head that wants everything to be perfect. But there’s no perfection. When you ask me about how I keep motivated, I must admit that it’s been mountains and valleys for me, just like it is for everyone else. In terms of trying to stay on the upward slope of the mountain, it goes without saying that first of all you’ve got to take care of yourself. I don’t need to spend a lot of time on this because, as coaches, we already understand this. But sometimes we forget to put our own knowledge and advice into practice. So, are you sleeping well? Are you drinking enough water? Are you eating well? Are you doing something for fun outside of work? All those things end up impacting your work and your motivation for work.
But outside of those general guidelines, I have found that for me, spending time where my natural gifts take me gives me the most motivation. I’m a big believer in the Predictive Index where you can see what you naturally do well. And your creativity in that space tends to create more creativity and more motivation. So for me, that’s the bigger-picture thinking. That’s thinking about what could be innovated, what could I turn on its head and change, and what’s my sweet spot when it comes to how I market myself.
But then, I also sometimes have to get down in the ditch, and I’ve got to get in the weeds, and I’ve got to do the somewhat mind-numbing stuff that we all have to do to run our businesses. And while I can do that, if I have to do a lot of that day after day, it completely zaps my motivation. If you’re well-funded, you can engage a team to handle your day-to-day operations. If you’re bootstrapping your business, do this on a smaller scale. But try to offload those tasks that are not confidential and sensitive to running your business to others if they tend to drag you down into the weeds. However if you’re a “weeds person,” use those resources to work with someone to help you think big and plan and do the other side. For me, I was successful finding some offshore virtual assistants in the last few years.
MN: That’s great. I know many coaches would like to hire an inexpensive and reliable virtual assistant. Where have you successfully found one?
LA: The website is onlinejobs.ph and it’s for hiring virtual assistants based in the Philippines. They are wonderful, wonderful people. I mean, they’re just so wanting to do good work for you. Because of the exchange rate, you’re able to pay them very well by their standards while it’s still less than you’d pay someone doing similar work here in the United States. So it’s a win-win both ways. I’ve had great success with their VAs. My most favorite one has given me her creativity and flexibility for growing an organization. And for some of that nitty gritty stuff, I’ve been able to offload as little as five to ten hours a week, but that’s helped me a lot. So, you don’t have to make a large investment to unburden yourself of some of those dull repetitive tasks. For me that freedom has been one of the biggest things to help me stay motivated.
MN: You and I are similar in that we both love to think of new ideas and the Big Picture. One of my frustrations is tenacity for finishing things. I have people on my team who are really good at finishing things, and sometimes they’re too good because I become the bottleneck. This sort of circles back to self-awareness. The more you know yourself, the more you can work in your “zone of genius.” What you want to be aware of is that just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean It brings you joy and fulfillment. So one must be self-aware of what actually fills your bucket instead of depletes you by the end of the day.
Do you have any other success tips that you’d like to share with newer coaches?
LA: Sure. One of the best things I did coming out of my CEC training was connecting with coaches I had built rapport with, and we started a weekly accountability group. Some of those individuals I still meet with years later on a weekly basis and we’ve become very good friends. We’re obviously very tight in terms of our business growth and it’s been just great to know others who have the same background in terms of training. It’s good to have the same foundation you’re both building from, and to see how everyone is implementing different things based on what’s striking the chord for them. And also, to have people to discuss things with, to coach each other on, and to cheer each other on when you have success, is an edifying thing.
I can’t tell you how many times we’ve done ZOOM meetings where one of us was crying and the other person was encouraging and said: “You know, this is going to pass, it’s okay, for either personal or professional reasons.”
And you know, if you’re going to work for yourself, it can be very lonely. So starting out by creating a community for yourself with some dependable cadence to your meetings is really important, at least it was to me.
MN: One of our cohorts that I took through training a few years back still meet regularly to this day where they share work opportunities with each other. They brainstorm with each other and give critical feedback that has proven to be very valuable. It’s very affirming for me to hear you emphasize the importance of networking with colleagues on an ongoing basis.
LA: I’m sure I got that idea from someone, maybe it was from you, Michael.
MN: Perhaps it was. Being a person of action, I feel like you don’t just take your ideas and then say: “Maybe someday in the future I might work on it.” You’ve worked on some pretty big projects and taken a lot of action throughout the years you’ve been running your practice. Can you just talk about taking action and how important that’s been?
LA: Yeah, thank you for bringing that out. I recently got to that self-awareness at a deeper level. With many of the individuals I spoke to coming out of the program, there always was a certain amount of self-doubt or fear about something not working out. I remember seeing trends in the marketplace and reading articles that I felt completely missed an important point or angle. And yet, out of fear, I didn’t put my voice out there and didn’t contribute.
And then someone else did and got a huge positive response. So by not taking action I’ve seen how it worked against me. I ‘ve definitely dealt with some inner demons as well, the ones telling you: “Is it going to be good enough? Is it going to be clear enough? Is it going to provide any value? Is someone going to say you’re not this enough or that enough.” We all have those voices, I like to call them the gremlins in our head.
But the thing that helps me is thinking: is this really going to be that big of a deal a year from now? Hopefully this will be one of five things that I took action on. And maybe it will be the one that worked, and maybe it will be one that didn’t work. But that’s life.” I don’t want to be sitting here wondering if I’m going to take action.
And then the other thing is, 80% of the time, 80% is good enough. And that’s in direct contrast to the perfectionist voice in my head. So my own tool is to say: “You know, only about 20% of the time does it really need to be as perfect as the standard I have in my head, which then causes the fear and the inaction. Eighty percent of the time is good enough. And if it’s not good enough at that 80%, then maybe it’s not the right fit for me at that time. And I put that in context when you’re out there marketing yourself. Obviously, if a client engaged you for a particular engagement or a project, you do need to deliver everything you promised.
But in terms of marketing and how fear can get in your way to not take action, just remember that if something doesn’t work or if it didn’t get you to the right people, there’s always something to learn from that experience and to make it better the next time. So either way, hit or miss, there’s the opportunity to keep stepping forward instead of being stuck in indecision.
MN: I used to talk about the 80-20 principle and now I’m going to talk about the 80-80 principle I learned from Leila Ansart in my interview with her! This has been a really fulfilling interview and as rewarding as I thought it would be. I really appreciate you giving of yourself and sharing your background and experience and knowledge with newer coaches who are reading this.
LA: Absolutely. It’s my pleasure. Thanks for inviting me, Michael.
You can view the video version of this interview by clicking this link.
Take a look at our other Conversations with Coaches here, and view the full YouTube playlist here.
Here are more coaching interviews by Bay Area Executive Coach:
