How to Choose Coach Collaborations That Actually Bring You Clients
Not every collaboration is a good business opportunity.
Podcast interviews, summits, workshops, stages, and joint events can put you in front of new potential clients—but only if the collaboration actually has an audience, a marketing plan, and people involved who are willing to put real effort into making it work.
Before you say yes, qualify the opportunity. Find out who is organizing it, how they plan to get people there, what they expect from you, and whether the audience is actually a fit for your coaching business.
Because “high tides raise all ships” may be true, but in business, somebody has to create the tide.
Listen to the Episode
About This Episode
If you’re a coach who gets invited to podcasts, summits, workshops, networking collaborations, or joint events and you’re wondering which opportunities are actually worth your time, this episode is for you.
Especially when you’re newer in business, getting invited to participate in something can feel exciting. Someone wants you on their podcast? Yes! Someone wants you on their stage? What an honor!
But an invitation doesn’t automatically make something a good business opportunity.
In this episode, I’m talking about how to evaluate collaborations before you commit your time and energy. We’ll look at what to ask summit organizers, how to research podcast opportunities, why “everyone will promote it to their list” is not actually a marketing plan, and why the effort of the people you collaborate with matters.
The big takeaway is simple: value your time enough to qualify the opportunity.
Collaboration can absolutely help grow your coaching business. But you want to collaborate with people who are creating the tide with you—not people hoping your effort will carry the whole thing.
What You’ll Learn
How to decide whether a coaching collaboration is worth your time
What to ask before agreeing to speak at a summit or event
How to evaluate a podcast before agreeing to be a guest
Why audience size isn’t the only thing that matters
How to tell whether someone is a “tide raiser” or hoping you’ll do the heavy lifting
Questions This Episode Answers
How do I know if a coaching collaboration is worth it?
Start by deciding what would make the opportunity valuable to you.
Sometimes the value is simply practice. If you’ve never been interviewed on a podcast or spoken on a stage, getting experience might be enough reason to say yes.
But as you begin valuing your time differently, you’ll want to qualify opportunities more carefully.
Look at the person or organization inviting you. How established is the event, podcast, or platform? Who is the audience? Is that audience relevant to your coaching business? What kind of effort is being put into promotion?
You’re not being difficult by asking those questions. You’re evaluating where you put your business-building time and energy.
What should I ask before agreeing to speak at an online summit?
One of my favorite questions is:
What’s your marketing plan?
Pay attention to how specific the answer is.
If the entire plan is, “Every speaker will promote the summit to their list,” that’s not much of a marketing plan.
Ask what the organizer is doing to market the event. What promotional assets will speakers receive? How will those assets be used? How are attendees being attracted beyond the speakers’ existing audiences?
You can also ask how many summits they’ve organized before and learn about the other speakers and panelists.
A well-run summit can be a fantastic collaboration. But good events don’t happen simply because a bunch of people agreed to participate. Someone is putting strategy and effort behind them.
Should I say yes when someone invites me to be a podcast guest?
Not automatically.
Before saying yes, do a little research. Listen to a couple of episodes. Look at where the podcast is distributed and how actively it’s being promoted. You can also use tools such as Listen Notes to get additional information about the show.
Then decide what the opportunity is worth to you.
Maybe it puts you in front of an audience that is a great match for your coaching business. Maybe the host is someone you genuinely want to build a relationship with.
Or maybe it’s simply useful practice.
That can still be valuable. Just know why you’re saying yes so you can decide how much time and energy the opportunity deserves.
Do collaborations actually help coaches get clients?
They can—but collaboration itself isn’t a client-getting strategy.
The right collaboration gives you access to people who may not already know you. A podcast, summit, stage, or workshop can essentially become an opportunity to demonstrate what you do to a new audience.
But that only works if there’s an audience there to hear you.
That’s why you want to look beyond the excitement of being invited and evaluate the actual opportunity. Is the organizer promoting it? Are the other people involved committed? Is the audience relevant?
Exposure is useful when you’re being exposed to the right people.
What does “high tides raise all ships” mean in business collaborations?
The idea is that when something grows, everyone involved benefits.
And I believe that can absolutely happen in business.
But here’s the missing piece: we create the tide.
Business growth doesn’t happen because the moon pulled the water in. It happens because people bring effort, strategy, skill, consistency, and ethics to what they’re building.
So when you collaborate with someone, evaluate what they’re bringing to the tide.
If you’re putting serious effort into growing your business, you don’t have a responsibility to use your momentum to pull along someone who is dabbling in theirs.
Look for collaborators who are willing to raise the tide with you.
What Endotype Changes About This
Your Endotype can influence how you naturally evaluate opportunities, relationships, and business decisions.
The important piece here isn’t that every coach should use one rigid formula for deciding which collaborations to accept. It’s understanding yourself well enough to recognize what makes an opportunity worthwhile for you.
The goal isn’t to say yes to everything or become suspicious of every invitation. It’s to make business decisions from a place of knowing your value, your priorities, and how you naturally build your business.
What Might Be Getting in the Way
Sometimes the biggest thing getting in the way of qualifying a collaboration is simply being excited that someone asked.
When you’re newer in business, being invited onto a podcast or stage can feel like validation. You may say yes before asking whether the opportunity actually makes sense.
There’s nothing wrong with taking an opportunity because you want practice. Practice has value.
The shift happens when you start recognizing that your time also has value.
You can appreciate an invitation and still ask questions. You can be excited and still do your research. And you can decide an opportunity isn’t right for you without deciding that the person offering it has done anything wrong.
Your Next Action Step
Create a five-question collaboration checklist and save it somewhere you can easily find the next time someone asks you to collaborate.
Start with:
Who is the audience?
What is the marketing plan?
What is the organizer personally doing to promote this?
What will be expected from me?
What do I specifically want to gain from participating?
This should take less than 30 minutes, costs nothing, and gives you a way to evaluate opportunities before automatically saying yes.
Want Help Taking the Next Step?
If you’re struggling to know which opportunities actually make sense for your coaching business, private business development with me can help you make clearer decisions about where to put your time, energy, and effort.
And if you want to better understand how you naturally make decisions and build your business, take the Endotype Formula Quiz.
About Laura Hulleman
Laura Hulleman is the founder and creator of the Endotype Formula and host of Getting Coaches Paid. She helps coaches understand themselves, their clients, and the way they naturally build their businesses so they can create an income and impact they are proud of.
Episode Transcript
Today we’re going to talk about collaborations.
Collaborations are something that are frequently offered to coaches. “Hey, let’s collaborate. I’d love to collaborate with you.”
Quite frankly, because you’re in a networking group, right? You’re in networking or a virtual meeting. I find these requests to, like, “Let’s collaborate on something”…
I find them annoying. [Laughs]
Let’s just call it what it is.
I find them annoying because what happens to me a lot of times is it’s somebody who’s in an adjacent industry who wants access to my coaches—and that’s part of what collaborating is about. They want access to you guys who are listening to the podcast.
But they’ll say, “Oh, I think we could totally collaborate on some stuff.”
Okay. We schedule a time. They show up, and I’m like, “Okay, tell me what you were thinking.”
“Well, I don’t know. I mean, it’s just like my clients and your clients are so similar that I think we could…”
Could what?
Could do what?
For a long time, especially when I was first starting my coaching business and first starting to work with coaches, I said yes to a lot of collaboration opportunities.
And they will continue to come your way.
People will ask you to guest on their podcasts. People will ask you to participate in summits, or you’ll be in groups where you apply to participate in summits. Sharing a stage with people. Doing a workshop with another person.
Collaborations and the opportunity to collaborate are available to you in a lot of different ways.
When does it work for you, though? When should you say yes? How do we know whether it’s a good collaboration or not?
Okay, that’s what we’re going to discuss today, as well as the theory behind “high tides raise all ships,” because that’s what’s ultimately behind this idea of collaboration.
High tides raise all ships.
We’ve heard this. Maybe you haven’t. Maybe you’re too young to know what that means, right?
But when something is going right, it raises everybody up.
So let’s get together, and we’ll do a big summit, and we’ll raise everybody up.
Will it?
I have been on summits that are run wonderfully. Very well prepared, very well marketed by the summit organizer, priced right, sales and specials offered, ways to get people to the summit available, as well as well-curated speakers and panelists.
They don’t just have a list and have agreed to the collaboration. They’re good at what they do. There’s a quality.
When we have quality speakers and we have a quality organizer, then the summit likely will be of better quality.
That’s a crazy idea. I know, friends. That’s crazy.
But when you’re first starting out, that statement might seem super obvious. How do we find out if it’s quality?
The same is true for podcasts or stages or anything like that.
Well, you put yourself in the position to understand that you’re valuable.
If you don’t feel like you’re valuable and somebody says, “Hey, would you like to be on my podcast?”
You’re like, “Yes!”
“Would you like to be on my stage?”
“Oh, what an honor. Yes!”
And maybe the practice of being on a podcast or being on a stage is enough to make that a valuable experience.
But as you start valuing your time, you’re going to start wanting to qualify the stages, podcasts, and summits.
How long have they been doing this? How many summits has this person run before?
Here’s a great question I love to ask:
“What’s your marketing plan?”
And if it’s super vague, they don’t have one.
When the marketing plan is, “Well, everybody that comes and speaks at the summit is going to promote to their list.”
That’s absolutely true.
But that is not a marketing plan.
How are we going to promote to our lists? What is the summit organizer going to give to us to promote to our list?
What kind of assets? What kind of materials? What is going to be available for sharing?
What are they personally doing—the summit organizer?
Because normally the summit organizer is the person who’s making the money from the summit, and everybody else is getting exposure to new people, exposure to new clients.
It’s kind of like a free workshop, right?
You just show up, you do your thing, and maybe you walk away with some clients.
But only if there are people there.
The same is true with a podcast.
At this point in my world and in my life, I go and I look at their podcast score over on a little platform called Listen Notes.
Or you could probably even do this with ChatGPT.
Here’s the podcast. Here’s the person. How popular is this podcast? What’s their regular listenership? Please look for all the places it shows up—YouTube, Podbean, Apple, Spotify.
And probably these days, ChatGPT and AI can do a pretty good job of gleaning that information and letting you know.
Know that if you haven’t hosted a podcast before, having an audience—a regular audience—of about a hundred people is a pretty decent podcast.
Having a regular listening audience… I’m in the top 50% of all podcasts. They probably have less than 20 people listening each week.
There are a lot of podcasts, not a lot of good promotion, because people, again, think that simply by having a podcast, that is the promotion for their business.
No, no, no.
Now you’ve just given yourself another thing to promote.
But find out. Listen to a couple of episodes. Really discern whether or not this is going to be a good use of your time or if it’s just practice.
And if it’s practice, how much energy do you want to throw at it?
The idea behind this “high tides raise all ships”—that’s absolutely true.
But when it comes to running a small business, we create the tide.
Right?
Out there in the ocean, that just happens because of the moon. High tide. Woo!
But in business, growth and expansion happen because of our efforts, strategies, smartness.
If you are collaborating with people, you want to evaluate their efforts, strategies, ethics.
There are a lot of business owners out there that are kind of…
Well, let’s just call it again what it is.
They’re like dabblers.
They dabble in life coaching, or they dabble in this business or that business.
I’ve been a dabbler at different times in my life.
When I had a couple of babies at home and I was part of a network marketing company, did I put my full, wholehearted effort into it?
Absolutely not.
I dabbled in it.
Did my results show that? For sure.
But did I show up at all the trainings and want to look really good and want to collaborate with people?
Absolutely.
But when they were collaborating with me, they were collaborating with a dabbler.
And those events didn’t go great because I wasn’t raising the tide.
If you’re a person who is a tide raiser—as in, you’re focused on your business, you’re growing it, you’re putting the effort in—that’s awesome.
And a lot of other people are going to want to collaborate with you because what they’re hoping to do is connect their dabbling to your strength, and you can pull them up.
But it’s not your job.
That is not your responsibility.
If you have a friend and you want to help them grow something, absolutely.
But it’s not your responsibility.
So high tides raise all ships, but we create the tides.
When you choose to collaborate with somebody, evaluate whether or not they are a tide raiser or kind of floating on the lazy river of business.
