Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Santana Inniss. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Santana thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear the backstory of how you established your own practice.

Becoming a coach was one of the best decisions of my life, but it was also one of the hardest. My career before coaching was in digital strategy and marketing communications, and after over a decade of climbing the ladder, I hit a wall. As I recovered from burnout, I knew that I wanted to bring the aspects I loved the most from my first career into my second, but things had to be very different.

What I loved most about my time as a leader was managing people and coaching them toward their goals. So, coaching was a natural transition. One of the things I liked the least was the day-to-day operations. I still have a visceral reaction when I recall submitting time cards in my agency days. That made the transition to coaching harder than it had to be.

While everyone seems to be a coach nowadays, what they don’t tell you about becoming a coach is that the industry is still in an early growth stage. In theory, that’s great: huge potential to find your niche and earn a great income through helping people. In practice, though, it has big downsides. There are very few places where you can be hired into a traditional full-time role as a coach. You can work as a coach on a well-being app for a few companies, but the pay is abysmal, and work isn’t guaranteed. There are scams and get-rich-quick schemes galore.

That means that for the vast majority of people, deciding to become a coach is also deciding to become an entrepreneur. This is such a big challenge that most coaches do not remain in the industry beyond the first year.

The key challenge in my early days as a coach entrepreneur in private practice was adapting my mindset. I’m a great coach, and I love nothing more than to be in a session and sense the moment of shift for a client. I wanted to spend all my time coaching and talking about coaching. But the reality is the majority of your time as an entrepreneur isn’t spent on the *doing.*

I had to shift my mindset to make space for a challenge I naively didn’t anticipate. But naiveté isn’t something to be ashamed of– it’s the genesis for many great things in the world. Be prepared to shift, identify A LOT of your shortcomings, and find the right support and delegation to grow your practice.

Santana, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I launched my bespoke coaching company, Flo Foundations, after facing a profound misalignment burnout in my career as a digital strategy leader. Flo Foundations offers alignment coaching for driven professional women facing a similar crossroads to the one I faced. I did everything “right” in my career: I climbed the ladder, got the titles, and earned well over six figures. But when I got to the top, reporting directly to a CEO or managing teams of people, I didn’t like what I saw or how I felt. I felt a fatigue no amount of sleep could cure me of. Not that it mattered because I hadn’t slept well in years. I thought about work, and every moment I was awake, I dreamt about work. And as a woman of color, I faced a lot of the ISMs that led to a death by a thousand cuts.

After a toxic work environment led to misalignment burnout, part of my recovery was facing the disillusionment and crisis created by reaching the promised land of career success without any of the actual promises. I had to face who I was without the titles, what kind of impact I wanted to have in the world, how to let go of a path I’d clung to for so long, and what I actually needed to be well while working. When I had all those answers, I had to make sure that all my actions aligned with my vision and that all my actions marched me toward it.

That’s what Flo Foundations and alignment coaching is all about. It’s about the millions of women waking up to the failed corporate promise of pay-your-dues, then your life will be grand. It’s about grieving that broken promise and moving forward with a deep, compassionate understanding of what you need and where you want to go for the rest of your life. I’m honored every day to walk alongside my clients on this path of self-rediscovery.

After finding my own relative success as a coach, I realized that so many of the coaches I had completed my schooling with were struggling to transition to entrepreneurship. So, I started going back to my digital strategy roots a bit by offering low-cost digital strategy consulting for new coaches. A portion of my work is now focused on giving back to the coaching community in this way, and I get to help inspired people reach their target clients better online. I consult coaches on setting up a website, a CRM, email marketing, and social media presence, and even offer workshops for new coaches on how to be successful on LinkedIn.

Whether I’m working with my coaching clients, who tend to be driven, professional women (tech, agency, and consulting primarily), or consulting new coaches on setting up their online business– it’s all aligned with the vision and impact I want to have in the world.

Other than training/knowledge, what do you think is most helpful for succeeding in your field?

Other than coaching education or direct experience to grow in the art of coaching, success requires coaches to think of themselves as entrepreneurs first and coaches second. This is counterintuitive, I think, for many coaches because it goes against the primary motivation most coaches have for going into the industry. Many coaches enter the industry wanting to make a difference first and money second. I started that way, too. And you know what, I couldn’t make ends meet.

Shifting the mindset toward entrepreneurship first builds the foundation that you need to build a sustainable coaching practice. You need an audience; you need a program people want to buy, and you need to communicate what you offer and how you can help people. Without those things, you can be the best coach in the world and not make a single dollar.

So, breaking free from the mindset that entrepreneurship = greed is important. Entrepreneurship = sustainability.

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

I learned pretty early on that clients want to work with coaches they believe have already walked the path they want to set out on. When I show up online my full, sassy, opinionated, compassionate, open-hearted self, strangers reach out to me. They resonate with my story, or they share how they are going through something and considering a coach.

My strategy of showing up authentically on the channels where my prospective clients are has been most effective. And with that, the unstrategy of simply showing up in service. I don’t like the hard sell, so I don’t do it. I offer what I offer, my DMs are open, I have freebies people can take and never speak to me. All of that service has led to a growing clientele. Growing clientele begets growing clientele through referrals and collaboration. But that starts with consistently showing up online in places where your prospects are, being authentic and open to a service-first mindset.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.flofoundations.com
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/santanainniss/
• Other: https://www.flofoundations.com/blog