Queen of Transformation – Exclusive Interview With Sara Sabin

Sara Sabin is a qualified tax accountant from a Top 10 firm, former start-up company founder and a transformational leadership coach and consultant. She is a regular contributor to the Entrepreneur Magazine Leadership Network and The Fast Company. She understands the rollercoaster ride of entrepreneurship through personal experience and is an advocate of continuous personal development. She calls herself the Queen of Transformation, but it wasn’t until she discovered her passion that she really cracked it!

She built a multi-six figure coaching practice that she loves, working with successful leaders and entrepreneurs of high-growth 7 figure businesses, helping them to accelerate progress through developing their leadership capacity and EQ, and enhancing team performance.

She also supports other coaches and consultants to build a business working with high performers. Through an individualised roadmap to success, she helps them to build a profitable, sustainable coaching practice that they love, simply and rapidly, using cost-effective strategies.

Sara Sabin, Leadership & Entrepreneurship Coach

Introduce yourself! Please tell us about you and your life, so we can get to know you better.

Hi, my name is Sara Sabin. I split my time between London, UK and Malaga, Spain. I am getting married next year to my partner of 8 years. I’m a Fur Baby Mama. I have one cat (he’s a rescue cat with one ear and one eye) and 5 other cats that live outside and I feed. I guess you could call me an accidental cat lady 😊

I call myself the Queen of Transformation because I’ve successfully changed career multiple times.

From tax accountant to (twice) start-up entrepreneur, to transformational leadership coach and consultant. It wasn’t until I started my coaching business that I cracked the Purpose code – how purpose is intricately linked to satisfaction, contentment, and abundance (financial and otherwise!)

I love travelling (and did it extensively pre-COVID); hiking and generally being in nature; spending time eating and drinking with friends and family (my second career could be a food critic) and have been known to do the odd juice fast! And I’m currently rediscovering my love of reading. What is your business name and how do you help your clients?

I am CEO of Sara Sabin Transformational Coaching.

I built a six-figure coaching business working with leaders and successful entrepreneurs of high growth businesses. My clients’ companies are past the start-up phase and ready to level up and scale. I help them do this through discovering and developing their leadership identity and skills thereby creating more emotionally smart and focused leaders and strategic business consulting work. I also do leadership developmental work with their teams.

As more coaches started asking what the secret to my accelerated progress was, I launched a program helping early-stage coaches to establish their business, and acquire and retain high-quality, high-performing clients that they love. I help them get to $10-20K months, sooner rather than later!

What is your work inspired by?

The very first transformational coach I ever came across was Rich Litvin. He literally set my world on fire! It had never occurred to me that your internal world affects results in your outer world. That a shift in perception or an insight can change everything because it influences your thoughts, actions, and behaviours. He literally made me obsessed with coaching and building an impactful business around it.

What I found as I continued my coaching business journey was that transformational coaching combined with strategic business consulting was the magic needed to accelerate my clients’ progress. Working on the inner and outer pieces simultaneously is where the impact of your actions is magnified!

What would you like to achieve for yourself and your business in the future?

I’m a big believer in Go Big or Go Home. I started leadership coaching because I wanted to help shift the world to a new paradigm of leadership. One that is more suitable for a fast-paced, changing world, sorely in need of conscious leaders.

My plan personally is to scale my business to 7 figures, through continuing & expanding upon my current work with successful entrepreneurs and their companies and scaling my program for coaches. Coaches can’t focus on their Zone of Genius if they’re constantly struggling to survive.

I’d like to eventually build a team of coaches that can help me in my leadership coaching work.

I realise I can’t achieve my mission alone. I want the network effect of my work to start to create change on a bigger scale.

If leaders change the way they interact with their employees (and other stakeholders), they create change in turn.

The world also needs more coaches who help people step into their higher potential. Who inspires you to be the best that you can be?

My coach and mastermind mentors. Coaches need coaches and mentors 😊

All of them are super kick-ass people, doing amazing things in the world. They are people who care about being ethical, spreading a positive message and getting results for their clients.

Also, my fiancé. He always believes in me, reminds me to take breaks, and is always in my corner. Tell us about your greatest career achievement so far.

Hitting Six Figures in £ terms in my coaching business in 15 months!

This meant more than any other achievement because it was the first time I realised that I could make a difference and generate abundance from that. As my clients got amazing results, it filled me with joy and my business flourished!

If you could change one thing about your industry, what would it be and why?

I wish that newer coaches would have the confidence to put themselves out there. Just get out there and start coaching. Rather than doing qualification after qualification. I’ve realised that structures are great, but you don’t make something your own until you get out there and experiment and develop a coaching style that is unique to you.

Tell us about a pivotal moment in your life that brought you to where you are today.

When I walked away from my second start-up.

It was going well, getting traction, we’d just had a large investment offer, and I was in inner turmoil. It had been 2.5 years of chronic stress, anxiety and near burnout (twice). My personal life and relationships were falling apart around me. I knew if I accepted the investment and continued, I was headed down a dark path. So, I walked away.

No one got it.

They saw the outside success. The blood, sweat and tears I’d put into it, and they couldn’t understand. But I knew that it was the right thing to do.

I swore I would take a break and not start any new business until I knew it was something I loved. I knew I’d got into the start-up world as a vanity project and was determined not to make the same mistake.

That’s when I came across transformational coaching. And it changed my life. Forever.

Follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook and visit my website for more on leadership, entrepreneurship, and business building. You can check out my regular articles for Entrepreneur Magazine here. I also invite you to download my ebook “6 Myths about Building a Six Figure Coaching Business and What You Should Do Instead!”

If you would like support reaching $10-20K months in your coaching business, check out my Business Accelerator Program.

Read more from Sara!