Hi Patti, thanks for bringing this over!  We will see where it goes from here.  

Hi Patti and Ann. Thanks for guiding me here. 

A back channel discussion leads me to ask if there is anyone in SCP who runs training courses at the MCC certification level?

So, I'm following up on Dick's latest email.

As president of SCP, I asked for 3 years for someone to create a 3-year pro-forma business plan with both financials and marketing information. NO ONE would do it. Dick has great ideas, but I have no idea how much money that would generate and how we'd keep bringing enough revenues to be self-sustaining. None of us would coach a CEO who didn't have one (I hope). A basic financial forecast would include:

1. Revenues needed to get started.

2. How much it would cost to run, and how much we'd need to get to break-even, and how long that would take.

3. Ongoing costs, and growth models (e.g., after the first traunch of trainees, what is our ongoing revenue stream?)

A marketing plan would tell how we are going to convince people that ours is a better model. "Trust me, I'm a psychologist" doesn't work if you haven't been in the field for 20 years.

ICF is a business, within the training industry. If we are to do this, we need to approach it as a business. Anything else is, in my view, doomed to failure (or at best, limping along with little impact).

Bill B

Bill, couldn't agree more.  ICF, BetterUp, etc,. and others are businesses, irrespective of "nonprofit" status.  They have paid staff whose full-time job has been to develop a product (it IS a product), sales and marketing strategy, operational plan, secure financing, etc.  The reason no one has stepped up to do this within SCP is that no one has been willing to give up their day job to build and execute a cogent plan.  It isn't that we don't know the target market.  It isn't that we have analysis paralysis and our heads up our butts (although sometimes that is true).  It's that none of us can say, "Who IS this organization that is going to create some certification?  Is it a business?  Who is part of it?  Who is out?" We cannot get people to volunteer for even the smallest of SCP jobs; how can we count on them to be part of delivering something on behalf of some group of amorphous coaches?  Who would we ask for financing?  What would we call ourselves to ask for that financing? How would we appoint leadership roles?  

Whenever I hear these kinds of complaints that people haven't done enough, I think about my mother, who used to always say, "Somebody needs to ______!" (do the dishes, take out the trash, fill in the blank).  And we would say, "I'm not 'somebody.'" None of us want to be somebody because we simply cannot wrap ourselves around who and how.  Blame SCP, APA?  How is APA going to develop this business?  How is SCP? 

In addition to the litany of healthcare-related industries that have tried to protect themselves and lost to market forces, other examples are the livery industry, disrupted by Uber.  NYC taxi drivers sued and lost to protect against Uber.  The hotel industry, disrupted by Airbnb.  What has kept hotels alive isn't some big amorphous industry group that has said, "We own this market."  It's that the Ritz is still the Ritz and everyone knows it.  Marriott made that happen, not the industry group in which it sits.   IMHO, the only way we "win" at coaching is to create bespoke, superior solutions and deliver great service.