Career Coaching Secrets

Analiza Wolf: Why "Just Start" is Her Key to Coaching Success

• Davis Nguyen

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Rexhen Doda interviews Analiza Wolf, an executive career coach focusing on women of color in top leadership roles. Annalisa helps clients gain clarity, confidence, and communication tools, drawing on her background as an Air Force Captain and CEO.

Her clients come primarily from referrals and past courses. She maintains her network through a newsletter and LinkedIn. Annalisa aims for greater impact through advising roles and new cohort programs.

She values her virtual assistant and fellow coaches. Her biggest lesson learned was to start imperfectly and avoid self-imposed delays. Annalisa's main challenge is balancing direct coaching with business growth. She advises aspiring coaches to pursue their passion without waiting for "perfect" qualifications.

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Analiza Wolf:

For me, my ideal client tends to be people of color, women at top roles. And the transformation that I tend to achieve with them is, who are you? What are your values, your strengths, your vision? Get clarity on that. And then how can we have the confidence to make that happen? And as well as the concrete tools, how do you communicate? Welcome to Career

Davis Nguyen:

Coaching Secrets, the podcast where we talk with successful career coaches on how they built their success and the hard lessons they learned along the way. My name is Davis Nguyen, and I'm the founder of Purple Circle, where we help career coaches scale their business to seven and eight figures without burning out. Before Purple Circle, I started and scaled several seven- and eight-figure career coaching businesses myself and consulted with two career coaching businesses that are now doing over $100 million each. Whether you're an established coach or just building your practice for the first time, you'll discover the secrets to elevating your coaching business.

Rexhen Doda:

Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Career Coaching Secrets Podcast. Today, my guest is Annalisa Wolf. Annalisa, welcome to the podcast.

Analiza Wolf:

Thanks, Rajen. I'm excited to be here.

Rexhen Doda:

Elisa, tell me a little bit more about what inspired you to become a career coach.

Analiza Wolf:

I feel like I've been the career coach my whole life, beginning when I was a kid in high school and college, asking the people around me what made their heart sing, which is a strange thing for a 12-year-old to ask an adult, but to ask them, do you like your job? What do you like about it? Why don't you like it? What do you wish you had? decided to study or if you could wave a magic wand, what would you be doing? And I was so young asking those questions. I didn't know it was a field of career coaching. So to actually have this as my full time job feels like a dream come true, a dream I didn't know I had even when I was a kid.

Rexhen Doda:

Yeah. And how does a journey look like from the point that you started your coaching business to where you are at today?

Analiza Wolf:

So career coaching or just coaching Supporting leading has been the through line throughout my career. When I graduated from Stanford, I was a leader in the Air Force. I was a captain, went to business school, and I was a leader in corporate world, in marketing, then started schools for young kids. in New York City and then have been doing that for 15 years. And throughout this time, always supporting, coaching the leaders below me, the leadership of the organization. How can we support each other? And how can I ask people, who are you? What are you about? And how can we make that happen for you? My career coaching journey being full-time started when I was the CEO of a nonprofit here in New York City. I wish that I had had a career coach. I wish that I had had a community support me. And when I realized that there are so few people of color, women at these top roles, I realized that coaching is what we need. And to be a coach now, to provide community has actually been a beautiful coming back to myself. What do I wish I had need? Now I get to fill that for others.

Rexhen Doda:

And is there, who do you work with or what is like the ideal client that you work with and the transformation you help them achieve?

Analiza Wolf:

For me, my ideal client tends to be people of color, women at top roles. And the transformation that I tend to achieve with them is Who are you? What are your values, your strengths, your vision? Get clarity on that. And then how can we have the confidence to make that happen? And as well as the concrete tools. How do you communicate with presence? How do you communicate with competence? How do you communicate and get buy-in and then move the organization forward in a really impactful way?

Rexhen Doda:

And where do you find your clients? What is the marketing channel that's working best for you?

Analiza Wolf:

All of my enragement is due to people I know. So because I've worked in the sector for a couple of decades now, I've built really good relationships with people who trust me. People I've coached in the past when I was their boss or their boss's boss. And now they come back to me to say, now that you're an executive coach, let's have a relationship. And in fact, can you coach the other people on my leadership team? Can you help them with a project so that we can really break through for our organization?

Rexhen Doda:

So it's mostly a referral network.

Analiza Wolf:

Mostly referrals. The second way that I've gotten clients is I have had courses. I had a course, for example, for senior leaders who were women and also mothers. How do you balance all of that given big jobs and also your families? So that course, by having that for a few years, it actually gave me clients as well because afterwards they would say, I really like the course and I would like some customized support for myself. So that was a great way to get generation for leads too.

Rexhen Doda:

And did you use like a specific method to market that course or?

Analiza Wolf:

The method that I used was to share with my community, use LinkedIn. It was a lot of people that I knew or had people who referred based on who I knew and they were new people. So a lot of it were close connections, one, two, three degrees out.

Rexhen Doda:

For your own network that you built over the years, do you have a system that you kind of maintain that network, like an email list or like a method that you share what you've been up to so that they know what are these like when you put out a course or something they are being kept up to date

Analiza Wolf:

i have several ways to connect with audiences the first is to my own email i have a listserv that i email every other week and luckily i have a podcast where that's the update i share a woman of color who I'm working with and advice. So I'm not necessarily selling, but I'm providing value to the audience and saying, hey, I'm here and here's an amazing leader you might want to get to know. So that helps to allow me to develop some credibility that I care and I'm not just selling every time I email. So that's the first thing. The second is that I try to share updates on LinkedIn every other week about not just the podcast, but what I'm up to. I recently attended a women of color CEO retreat. And so I'll post about that. I also worked on a talent project. You know, how do we build really amazing cohorts of leaders? And I'll post about that. I'll also talk about conferences or people that I've met with. So it feels like it's an update and celebration. And it keeps me top of mind when people do need a coach. They'll hopefully think of me.

Rexhen Doda:

Thank you for sharing that. Do you have any goals you're working towards for the next one to three years?

Analiza Wolf:

I'm thinking about how to have greater impact. One of the things I do miss as CEO is that when you run an organization, you can really see the impact on your team, on the community you're serving. And I miss having more of a connection that's outside of coaching. So what I'm considering is how do I support and make more explicit to the leader and the coachee. I'd love to support you with projects you're working on and think about maybe there's an advising role where I could get more deeper into the work and allow maybe more impact to happen. The second thing I'm thinking about is continuing to have cohorts of people who get together. We'll be launching a program about presence pitch you know how do you how do you as a woman get in front of your brand and share that with the world so i hope that will allow me one to get new clients and then two perhaps lead to more engagement so those two

Rexhen Doda:

and um in terms of investment um what resource or support has been most valuable for you growing your your coaching business

Analiza Wolf:

For me, I tend to do everything myself. And I luckily have a virtual assistant who helps me with my podcast. And she helps, you know, share some practices with me. I'd never started a podcast before. So that's been a really big help. The second help I've gotten that I've valued is that I've been able to ask questions of fellow coaches, coaches are who are doing things differently, having different client success rates, asking them for their advice and asking them for real examples. What does your contract look like? How are you handling insurance? What kind of credit cards do you use? Those kinds of resources have been really invaluable.

Rexhen Doda:

And what is something that you wish you had known when you first started scaling your coaching business? What is like an unexpected lesson learned from you?

Analiza Wolf:

Well, one of the things I've learned is I love to coach. I mean, I would, it's really fun. It's fulfilling. I, I, so, I mean, I really do get off on people's transformation and organizational impact. So what makes that surprising and sometimes hard is that I will do more hours or spend more time on the business versus, the business instead of working on the business and it's a hard balance because i need to do things differently now now that i'm working to this to this level but i'm still wanting to be working in the business so on the business versus in the business those are things that i need to be more mindful of um especially when i'm so passionate about being in the work

Rexhen Doda:

and is that like uh would you say that that is one of the biggest challenges or there are other challenges that you face while growing your coaching business?

Analiza Wolf:

I'd say that's one of the biggest challenges is that I want to have more strategies that are specific to growth. But when I keep on keeping on with the same strategies, there's not a lot of difference. And in terms of my own satisfaction, I'm really content and happy, but there can be more deliberate growth. So yes, I have found that challenging.

Rexhen Doda:

And are you potentially looking also to grow in terms of revenue? Or is that like when it comes to these strategies, are you looking to grow in terms of revenue or just want to make a bigger impact?

Analiza Wolf:

I mean, I think revenue would be great. And I do think, though, when I consider organizational impact, I mean, that's revenue growth as well, because it's no longer meeting with the leader directly. once every other week or once weekly. It's actually to say, how can I get more into your business, support you for bigger impact? And also that's great for me because I'll build revenue. So I feel like you can do both.

Rexhen Doda:

Yeah, definitely. Is there any aspect of running your coaching business that would figuratively keep you up at night?

Analiza Wolf:

Honestly, because I'm no longer in that top seat and I do draw boundaries with here are the times I work. I don't work weekends or nights. It honestly has felt really refreshing. So I don't have those types of keeping up at nights that I used to have a lot as a leader running my own organization.

Rexhen Doda:

And as a closing question, what advice would you give to other career coaches or executive coaches that are looking to scale their impact?

Analiza Wolf:

For me, it's if you want to be a coach, you don't have to wait. I thought now as a CEO or with all these different titles behind my name, I would be a better coach. But I think I was I could have been a coach much earlier in my career. And I know people who have had more junior roles who've been really successful at coaching. So coaching is your passion. go for it. It is a skill that you can develop over time. You don't need to check certain boxes to be a coach. Know your value add, know who you want to focus on and go after it. That's the advice I would give.

Rexhen Doda:

Thank you so much, Annalisa. And for anyone who wants to find you, they can find you at Annalisa Wolf on LinkedIn. And there's also your website and annalisawolf.com is the same. Annalisa, thank you so much for coming to the podcast. It's been a very nice episode.

Analiza Wolf:

Thank you so much, Rajen.

Davis Nguyen:

That's it for this episode of Career Coaching Secrets. If you enjoyed this conversation, you can subscribe to YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to this episode to catch future episodes. This conversation was brought to you by Purple Circle, where we help career coaches scale their business to seven and eight figures without burning out. To learn more about Purple Circle, our community, and how we can help you grow your business,