Career Coaching Secrets

Limor Bergman Gross: Unlocking Leadership Potential for Mid-Career Women

• Davis Nguyen

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Host Rexhen Doda interviews Limor Bergman Gross, an Executive Coach and Leadership Mentor. Limor shares her journey from an engineering background to empowering women in tech leadership, focusing on mid-career women feeling stuck.

Limor's marketing centers on LinkedIn, leveraging her podcast to build connections and trust. She stresses that outreach is essential, not just content creation, for growth.

Future plans include launching her "Strategic Influence and Executive Presence Accelerator" and continued expansion. She advises coaches to invest in community, learn continuously, and embrace sales/marketing.

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Limor Bergman Gross:

How do you create connection with someone you don't know? A podcast is one way. I'm not saying it's the only way, but it's one way for people to get to know about you and to connect with you. So for me, it serves multi-purposes. First of all, I greatly enjoy it. I do it, first of all, because I love it. I enjoy it. Secondly, I meet women all around the world. I don't do that intentionally or I'm going to get a client. But every woman I meet is an opportunity, right? Because she is someone who knows people and we talk and we meet and we form. I believe every conversation opens opportunity. And people who listen to the podcast, they get to know me and my guests. So it builds opportunity. Trust.

Davis Nguyen:

welcome to career 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 win and i'm the founder of purple circle where we help career coaches scale their business to hundred thousand dollar years hundred thousand dollar months and even hundred thousand dollar weeks before purple circle i've grown several seven and eight figure career coaching business myself and have been a consultant at two career coaching businesses that are doing over a hundred million dollars each whether you're an established coach or building your practice for the first time You'll discover the secrets to elevating your coaching business.

Limor Bergman Gross:

Hi, Regine. Thank you for having me and thank you for this incredible introduction.

Rexhen Doda:

Limer, tell me a little bit more about what inspired you to become an executive coach and leadership mentor.

Limor Bergman Gross:

Yeah. So, I mean, it was a multi-year process. I would say that, you know, you already mentioned that I grew my career from an engineer to an engineering leader and I moved countries and it wasn't easy. And throughout my career, I was the only woman or one of very few women and I noticed that the more I grew in my career, less women were around me and also less role models. Like I couldn't point the finger a lot of times on, hey, I want to become this woman. Most of the leaders were men. And I had a growing passion as I had more responsibilities and more influence to help other women. So I did that as part of my career. I tried to hire more women. I tried to give women the chance, you know, to support them and help them. And I also started mentoring outside of work, like for free. just helping engineering managers. And I noticed that I really love it, I really enjoy it. And I was also heavily involved within the company, right? Not just in my team, but there's something called ERG, like employee resource group. So I was involved in the company Women ERG. And eventually, you know, it all led to me thinking, hey, this is something I'm so passionate about. So why not just focus on that? That's kind of, you know, how it led me to what I'm doing today.

Rexhen Doda:

And how does your journey look like from the moment you started your coaching business to where you are at today? So from the point that basically this became a business to where you are at today?

Limor Bergman Gross:

Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, it's a journey. First, I'll say it's still a journey. I don't think it will ever end. When I started, as I said, like I knew that I wanted to help women, but I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do. It wasn't super clear to me. Experimented with different things. I started consulting first. I continued like supporting women. And eventually I took this as like, I want to become a coach. So I did actually a coaching. training, a rigorous training and certification process. And I'm certified by the ICF and also heavily involved with the local ICF chapter on the vice president there. So along the way, as I started my coaching certification, I had to coach a lot of women in order to be certified. And it helped me kind of, you know, figure out who do I want to serve and what problems are they facing? So at first I didn't know. Right. And you probably know that from all the coaches you speak with. I mean, every coach serve different client base and a lot of times you know coaches say hey i can help everyone but i actually believe that you need to niche down and figure out who exactly are you helping and where are they at right now so saying i'm helping women in tech is great but i found that it's not good enough and the only way for me to find that was through experimenting through coaching. For example, I found out that women who have no clue what they want, absolutely no clue, like they're saying, oh, I don't know, I'm not happy. I could help them, but I felt like that's not where I truly shine. Like, for example, career changers or people that are kind of looking, what do they want to do? I found out also like job searching. Yeah, I can help women search jobs, but that's not where my passion is. And eventually it led me to figure out that I really want to help those women that are in mid-careers, especially in leadership positions, and they feel stuck. They feel like, oh, my career is not moving because this is like, I don't know if you heard the term, the broken rung, but there is a term like that, that basically women are stuck in middle levels. So eventually, long story short, through experimenting, I found who I really want to serve and that helped me with my marketing messages, with who I reach out to, with what programs do I build, what offers do I create. So I tailor that to the specific women that I want to serve and help.

Rexhen Doda:

So generally right now you're working with women in their mid-career journey in leadership roles specifically. Where do you find your clients? So what marketing channel works best for you right now?

Limor Bergman Gross:

Yeah, and I think this is a great question and a great pain point to probably almost every coach you will talk to. The challenge is that as a coach, and especially someone who transitions from corporate to a business, it's really difficult to find clients, meaning now I have to start kind of selling myself, right? So my main marketing challenge is LinkedIn, actually. That's where I live and breathe. So I'm mainly there. And there are several things that I do. It's content, but content is not in I have my podcast, which is a great way for me, first of all, to meet incredible women. And the more people I realize also, the more people you meet, the better you are, right? As a business owner, the more your network is bigger, the bigger your network, the more opportunities you have. So I constantly kind of, you know, it's on LinkedIn. content podcast reaching out and putting myself out there in relevant avenues like going to conferences or you know places where my clients potentially are at or maybe people who can connect me to my clients it took me some time to realize that and i'm very introverted people may not notice that but i am very introverted in nature it makes me super uncomfortable to like go to conferences or to start reaching out to people and just but i found that this is essential to grow my business i have to kind of constantly put myself out there, reach out to people, not to hard sell them, but to learn more about them, to meet, to connect. And that's kind of the gist of it, I think.

Rexhen Doda:

You mentioned the podcast as well, which we also mentioned at the beginning. I wanted to ask you, is that there's also another strategy for you potentially creating more leads? And are the guests also potential leads?

Limor Bergman Gross:

Not necessarily, but I would say coaching in general. Let's generalize first. I truly believe that people do business with other people. And especially in coaching, it's very personal, right? I mean, you have to create a connection with someone. How do you create connection with someone you don't know? A podcast is one way. I'm not saying it's the only way, but it's one way for people to get to know about you and to connect with you. So for me, it serves multi-purposes. First of all, I greatly enjoy it. I do it, first of all, because I love it. I enjoy it. Secondly, I meet women all around the world, everywhere. Like last week, my episode, I publish an episode on a weekly basis. My last week guest is from Australia. Like I talk with women all around the world. Now, I don't do that intentionally or I'm going to get a client, but every woman I meet is an opportunity, right? Because she is someone who knows people and we talk and we meet and we form, after an episode, we form some kind of a connection, right? Because we talked, we get to know each other. So I believe every conversation opens opportunity and people who listen to the podcast, they get to know me and my guests. So it builds trust and the part is like it endless kind of flow. of content and ideas.

Rexhen Doda:

Exactly. Yeah. So the way that I see it is it serves two purposes. So first of all, you connect with your guest and then the guest could also be a potential person you work with in the future. But through that conversation, through posting the podcast, other people that know the guest or know you, so your audience or the guest's audience could also be people you work, you potentially work with. So that is a very good method of actually having people get to know you and increasing your lead generation as well. I wanted to ask you, are there any goals you're working towards in the next one to three years?

Limor Bergman Gross:

Yeah. So first of all, I have, as you mentioned, like the accelerator that I'm launching. I actually just announced it today. So kudos to you for being kind of off top of it. So I'm launching the strategic influence and executive presence accelerator. The first cohort is going to be in September. I know it's a while, but I need some time to prepare for that. And this is a combination. It's the first time I'm doing that. It's a combination between group coaching and one-to-one because I've coached hundreds of women and I found that one-on-one is great and group is great. And I figured why not do both because women need to connect with other women and form some kind of network. So that's one thing that I'm working on. The first cohort is going to be in September and hopefully not the last. So I hope that the next cohorts are going to be even more powerful and I can bring other people, not just me, like other coaches, other women, and we create something big out of that because I want to outreach to more and more women and help them.

Rexhen Doda:

And yeah, I think that's a great way and great program and hopefully the launch goes well. Are there, for anyone who's thinking about investing in their coaching business, in your experience, what resources or support has been most valuable for you in growing your coaching business?

Limor Bergman Gross:

Several things. First of all, I think, first of all, as a coach, mindset is continuous learning. Learning all the time and being part of different communities. So first of all, as I mentioned, I'm the vice president of the ICF. I volunteer my time to support the ICF and other coaches in our community. While doing that, I learn a ton. So be part of some communities, right? Meet other coaches. Just today, we have this kind of learning community of several coaches in our chapter that we meet monthly and we learn from each other. And today we did a practice kind of coaching. We coached and other people kind of gave us feedback. So first of all, invest in your community and in your The second thing I would say is that as a business owner, you have to wear multiple hats unless you outsource it. So you have to be a marketing person. You have to be a salesperson, right? So this is a big part of what I do today. I personally really love it. I learned that I love all aspects of marketing. But if you don't, then you need to find someone who will do that for you because a business cannot grow without sales and marketing. So you have to really figure out what's your strategy there and You need to figure out what is your strategy for growth? What do you want to grow? Where do you want to grow? That can change over time, but you need to kind of constantly ask yourself, as you ask me, where do you want to be in one to three years? And based on that, build a long-term strategy.

Rexhen Doda:

Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. Is there something that when you started your coaching business that you wish you had known first when you first started scaling, like an unexpected lesson learned?

Limor Bergman Gross:

Wow, that's a big question. I think that I wish I knew. I mean, it was five years ago when I actually made a transition that just posting content alone is not going to grow my business. I think that I was hoping that I will not have to get out of my comfort zone and start reaching out to people and selling, eventually selling myself. And along the way, I found out that that's not going to work. You cannot just constantly post content and expect people to find you, contact you and buy from you. It can happen. But in most cases, you need a combination of content. but also an outreach. And if I knew that sooner, I would have done that sooner.

Rexhen Doda:

Yeah. So it goes back to marketing, right?

Limor Bergman Gross:

Yeah.

Rexhen Doda:

So further on your journey, you basically learned what marketing strategy worked best for you and is basically a combination of outreach and content, which I totally agree to because content might even be, because it's organic, could be to some extent not very predictable, while as if you are outreaching, you have control of how many people you outreach and might also have some control over of the results as well over time like your outreach gets better your connection requests start to increase and yeah over time you can optimize that process and I totally agree when it comes to having multiple strategies even if it's the same marketing channels in this case both of them in LinkedIn but you can think differently of how you generate the leads so yeah and we also like we had another episode a few days ago where one career coach was doing lead generation ads within LinkedIn, which I think you'll find it valuable when that episode is out. That is another method within LinkedIn to generate leads, which is quite valuable. So yeah.

Limor Bergman Gross:

I would love to hear that. Yeah. Always, as I said, I'm always interested in learning.

Rexhen Doda:

Yeah, all of us are. So in terms of challenges, what is something, what are some of the biggest, I'm guessing there is lead generation, but what are some of the biggest challenges you faced in scaling your coaching business or that you're still facing today? I

Limor Bergman Gross:

think it's multiple things. First of all, I would say that the biggest challenge is predictability. Because when you coach people and you work on a one-to-one, it fluctuates. Sometimes you have, I can have like times I barely, you know, have time to breathe and then times that it's slowed down. And my goal is to create some level of predictability. I don't expect it to be like a paycheck, right? That I know that I get X amount every month. month, but I do want to have some predictability. And I learned that if you want predictability, you need to think about how do I create predictability. So for example, the accelerator I'm launching is a way to create, I mean, I'm not launching it just for that. I actually think it's going to be a valuable program. But if you sell something that is like, okay, I'm selling something that has a beginning date and end date, X amount of people, you create some kind of predictability. So if you have this and another product and another other product eventually. I think this is the biggest challenge out of the normal things like of creating leads, generating leads. I think every coach has this challenge of generating leads, unless they are in a phase where I know a few coaches, you know, they're doing that for, I don't know, 20 plus years. They don't have a problem of leads because they are well known and they basically have referrals. They don't need to worry about it, but they worked a lot of years in order to get there.

Rexhen Doda:

Yeah. The challenge remains basically being able to have predictable stream of leads and predictable revenue in this case. Yeah, I do. Yeah, that is the case with most coaches in the stage where the lead gen is not consistent yet. Even in Purple Circle, this is one of the things that we cover as well, that in order to get to that $1 million in profit, you would need to have a consistent stream of leads, a consistent stream of sales and also consistent results. So the bottlenecks move from one to the other. So once you have leads coming in consistently, then the problem becomes the sales. How many of those are you selling? Once you fix sales, then you're getting a lot of people into your program. Then it is a matter of quality. Can you deliver the same high quality coaching to a thousand people versus a hundred people that we were doing initially? So that's another challenge. It comes down to maybe hiring another coach or so there's a few there's a few bottlenecks that go one after the other once you fix lead generation as well so yeah i do think that a lot of coaches are facing that issue and even my research that was something that came out as one of the main bottlenecks which is like lead generation another question i want to ask you is how do you currently handle the balance between delivering great client results and managing business growth on the other side so working on your business so kind of like to grow your brand versus actually doing the coaching

Limor Bergman Gross:

yeah that's a great question i think it varies it's not static like for example i'll give you an example last year i was working towards my um so i told you like i got the certification and i was working towards my uh pcc certification it's an icf like in the icfdf levels so i was called i was focusing a lot of coaching i actually coached in less than a year i did something around 500 hours like i coached a ton because my goal for that year was to get the experience and the level of a professional coach. After I've done that, then the goal did not become like the quantity, but actually the focus, right? As I told you, the more I coached, the more I learned what is my niche, where do I want to focus? So now my focus is a lot about building my business, about, you know, as you said, like creating the systems in place to get leads to reach out while I still I still coach, but actually my strategy now is different. I want to coach less people but create a greater impact, if that makes sense.

Rexhen Doda:

Makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And is there like any aspect of running your coaching business right now that would figuratively keep you up at night? Any worries?

Limor Bergman Gross:

Keep me up at night.

Rexhen Doda:

It's a strong statement, isn't it?

Limor Bergman Gross:

Yeah. I don't know. I mean, again, it comes and goes. I mean, obviously I want a sustainable business. So it comes and goes sometimes like, oh my God, what am I doing? Am I going to be able to make it or not? But in general, I mean, I think that when I get the right support system and I have consistent, you know, effort towards my goals, I know that I'll get there eventually.

Rexhen Doda:

Yeah, totally. And a lot of coaches have gotten there. like have proof of that as well. So it's more about consistently trying and improving on your business. So is there any final advice you'd like to give to other career coaches who are going to be watching this podcast episode?

Limor Bergman Gross:

For sure. So first of all, I mean, I would say to all career coaches, ask yourself, why are you doing that? Why? Because the thing is, it's not always easy to be in that business. And there are so many coaches, right? And when you ask yourself the why, it serves several purposes. Why am I doing that? So I will be motivated, right? I have a mission. I want to help women. I know the why. I have a strong why. That is beyond just I want to make money as a coach. And the second thing of why am I doing that, I know that I want to make a difference. So I know who I want to serve and I know what differentiates me from others. Because I believe everyone has a differentiator. Everyone serves other people and doing it differently. So figure out what your motivations are And what impact do you want to make? And that can help you narrow down your niche, your focus, and also help you when you're struggling.

Rexhen Doda:

Thank you so much, Limor. It's been a pleasure having you on the podcast. And for anyone who wants to find you or connect with you in the future, they can find you on LinkedIn at Limor Bergman Gross. And they can connect with you there. Also, they can connect with you on limorbergman.com on your own website. Is that it? Are there other methods they can reach out to you?

Limor Bergman Gross:

I think, you know, I always tell people LinkedIn is probably the best because the website is a website, but I want people to get to know me. And LinkedIn is like, I constantly there and I post new things. So you can kind of, everything is there. Like if you're following me there or connect with me there, you'll not miss anything that is going on.

Rexhen Doda:

Well, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure having you on the podcast. So yeah, thank you for coming.

Limor Bergman Gross:

Thank you so much, Rajen. It's been a pleasure.

Davis Nguyen:

That's it for this episode of Career Coaching Secrets. If you enjoyed this conversation, you can subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to this episode to catch future episodes. This podcast was brought to you by Purple Circle, where we help career coaches scale their business to $100,000 years, $100,000 months, or even $100,000 weeks, all without burning out and making sure that you're making the impact and having the life that you want. To learn more about our community and how we can help you, visit joinpurplecircle.com.