In this episode, I'm going to talk you through the different types of coaches
there are for you and the signs to look out for when choosing the good
ones. Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset
coach. And welcome to the Weeniecast.
Here's my promise to you. If you ever book a call with me,
come to Brave Biz Labs, which is the call that I do every single fourth
Friday of the month, where I offer free business strategy and coaching to
anyone who wants it or message me asking me about your business
idea. I promise you that I will tell you if it
sucks. And this is why I'm considering
dropping the term coach from my title.
I recently had a conversation with one of my business partners. We're doing
market research for a new offer that we're launching for a new business, and
it's very exciting, but we're interviewing business owners
about where they're struggling, what their idea is,
how they want to grow, so on and so forth. And he was telling me
about his most recent interview with a gentleman who has
spent about two years trying to get his business off the ground. He hired a
coach who told him that his business idea was good. It
is not. This coach also told him to
stop creating content for social media on LinkedIn and
to start just cold calling a bunch of investors and asking them for money.
If you're also a trained coach, you know that this is not coaching. The
term coach gets used in a lot of different ways. And I want to
explain this first before we get into how you can really
find the right coach, mentor, consultant, whatever it is
that you need for where you're at in your business. But before we get there,
let's talk about what the definitions are so that it makes sense when we
get there.
Classical coaching, where you've gone to school, gotten
trained, you either got trained in life coaching, leadership coaching, executive
coaching. In traditional coaching, your coach is not
telling you what to do. In traditional coaching, your coach is
literally asking you very open ended questions so
that you can figure out your way of getting to your
own goal. And if you don't know what your goal is, they're also asking
you very clear, open ended questions so you can figure out what your goal
is. In talking to my business partner, David, you know, he was saying it
was really irresponsible of this guy's coach to not tell him
that his idea was bad. To which I said, well, actually, if he was
following the ICF, the International Coaches Federation
code of Ethics, he actually can't tell his client that his idea
is bad. It is not a coach's responsibility to
on their clients dreams. Now, obviously, I don't think this coach was
following the ICF code of ethics because he was
very clearly giving directions on what this person should and shouldn't do.
Don't post on LinkedIn, just go and cold call, which is bad
advice. We're not doing that anywhere. It doesn't matter what kind
of business you're in. We're not doing that. But it does open up a really
interesting conversation around what coaching is and what it isn't. Now, there are
coaches who are classically trained who are not going to give you
answers, who are not going to tell you what to do. They're only ever going
to ask you questions and help you figure out what you want to do.
This is how I was trained and I no longer really do
this because it really doesn't matter how many questions I
ask my clients about what they think they could do on a sales call. If
they've never sold anything and have no idea about
best practices for a sales call, me asking them a whole bunch
of open ended questions isn't going to do to make them better at sales.
One of the things that I learned in kind of stumbling along
and changing my niche is that I really enjoy teaching. I really
enjoy sharing my expertise. I really enjoy helping people
figure out which of the seven options to grow their business is the
best option for them and then showing them exactly how they can take action on
it. And in the world of coaching, the term
coach gets very messy at this point because you have people
who are trained coaches who think, okay, well, I'm not telling you what to do.
I'm going to do classical coaching with you, and that's how I'm going to help
my clients. And that's valid. And then on the other side, you have people who
are experts at a specific thing, like LinkedIn,
copywriting, podcasting, and they can
call themselves coaches because they are helping people with a very
specific thing, but they're giving advice and they're teaching and they're
sharing their expertise and knowledge. And then you have people like me who kind of
like, bastardize both. You know, I'm so grateful for the training that I have as
a coach. I use a lot of it with my clients, but it's not the
primary service that I offer. When my clients come to
me with their business idea, I will tell them if it's a good idea or
a bad idea, if it's a bad idea. I'll help
them figure out what questions to ask to either figure out if they can
improve it or is there something similar that we can switch to that
actually has a market for it? If it's a great idea, then we'll just
jump right into creating a strategy to start making them money
and getting them clients.
So how do you know the difference? How do you
as a business owner and also a business owner who like,
has ADHD, who's already overwhelmed by
all the options out there, how do you tell the difference
between who a good coach is and who a bad coach
is? And when I say bad coach, they may not necessarily be bad. They
may just not be right for what you need right now. So here's some
things that you need to look at before you start looking for your coach.
First and foremost, are you at the point where you need to start
this business? If you're not, if you're still at the ideation phase,
if you're still not sure if this is really what you want, if
you're still toying with a bunch of other options in your life, I would actually
recommend that you work with a classical coach. I would recommend that you
find a coach who is trained and certified, who follows the
International Coaches Federation for the definition of coaching, who can
help you discover what it is that you really
want. Because it doesn't matter how much money you throw into starting
a business if it's not actually something that you want and if you don't have
a clear idea of how it's going to make your life better, I guarantee you
you're not going to do the work. And because you're not doing the work, you're
not going to get the results. And because you're not getting the results, you're going
to have zero return on investment for that
program, those sessions, whatever it is that you signed up for,
really take your time to make sure that this is the path that you want.
And the only way you can do that is by working with someone who's not
giving you advice on it, who's genuinely asking you the
right questions to help you figure out what you want your life to look
like. There are some really shady coach
schools out there. So here is the gold
standard is you want to find someone
who has been to a coaching school that
is ICF recognized International
Coaches Federation. I personally know really talented
coaches from the Coactive training institute where I was trained and
certified, from IPEC, which is very similar to
coactive and from accomplishment coaching.
If you're looking for a coach like this, then you can also dm me
on any of the social media platforms, or you can email
me@katyatimcmanis.com and ask me
if I can give you a recommendation. I'm happy to offer this to
anyone who's listening. If you need to figure out what your next steps are and
you're not at the point where you know what kind of business you want to
start, okay. But you do not want to sign up for a mentorship. You do
not want to sign up for a program. Here's what I did and how you
can do the same, because it's not going to work for you at this point.
If you know you want to start a business and you have an
idea, then you have to ask yourself this question.
Do you have a really clear idea of what you want this business to look
like? And is there a model out there that already matches that
perfectly? Because if there is and you're really good at following
instructions, you can absolutely find someone who will
mentor you, who's done exactly what you want to do,
and will turn around and say, cool, here's what I did. Here's how I did
it. Now go ahead and do the same. I will mention a
caveat here, that this typically works better for people who are
neurotypical. So if you have ADHD, like most of
my listeners do, because this is an ADHD business building
podcast, these programs may not work for you. You
know, you may take really useful tips from them, but
a lot of the instructions, a lot of the
processes in these programs just aren't designed for an
ADHD brain. So make sure that if you want to
sign up for something, that it's going to be the right fit for you.
Now, if you aren't really sure what you want it to look like and you
don't really see a model out there that is like, oh, yeah, I want that.
Then you're probably going to need to look for someone who kind of
mixes coaching and consulting like I do. You want to look for someone who
has a level of customization in their program that really
helps you find your way, but also add some
expertise who also trains you on the bits that you don't even
know, that you don't know. Okay. So now that you've asked those questions and you
kind of have an idea of who you want to work with, here's how we
spot the good ones and the bad ones, all right? Because there
are a lot of charlatans out there. There are a lot of people who are
really profiting off the fact that this is not a regulated
industry, and so we want to be able to spot them from a mile off.
First and foremost, anyone who has a
gazillion followers on social media and uses the fact
that they have a gazillion followers on social media as proof that
they're good at what they do. How many followers you have doesn't
mean about the quality of service that you provide. It
has no correlation. Even if someone is a social media
coach who trains people how to build their following on social
media, if they're bragging about how many followers they have
and not how many followers they're closer clients have gotten and how that has
helped their business monetarily, they're not
legit. They're selling some snake oil, and they're hoping that you
won't notice. Now, how do you spot these people? Because there are
some good people out there who train on social media,
who have massive followings, who actually provide a quality service,
and they have massive following. So how do you tell the difference between someone who's
good at what they do with a massive following and someone who's really at what
they do with a massive following? Here's the key is
you go into their comment section and you see if
the people who are commenting actually sound like real humans
or if they sound like AI bots.
It used to be a lot easier before OpenAI came out because you just
like, go into their comment section and be like, great post. Thanks for
sharing. Great post. Great push. Thanks for sharing.
Wow. Now it's a little harder because it's now
very stilted language that is obviously a robot
that's synthesizing whatever was in the post. And the comments
that you'll see will basically be summarizing what the person said in their
post. All these comments happen within a very quick
succession after the post was made. If I post
something, not all my people that follow me, that
see my content and comment on my stuff, they're not all just waiting by their
computer to be like, oh my God, did Katie post yet today? Like, I bet
she posted, I bet she posted. I'm just going to keep refreshing, refreshing, refreshing, refreshing.
Oh my God, she posted something. I'm going to comment within 30 seconds of her
posting this. No, that's not how it goes. I don't
have that big of a following. I have like 17,000 followers
on LinkedIn and then smaller amounts on the other platforms.
That's okay. You don't need a massive following to have a multiple six figure
business. You need solid people who are following you,
who are your ideal client. But even my posts that get a ton of
engagement, that get hundreds of likes and hundreds of comments, you
know, they happen over days. It doesn't happen all at once.
So pay attention to what the comments say and
when the comments were made and that'll tell you if someone
is falsifying their engagement versus having
legitimate engagement, their engagement is clue number
one as to whether they're legit or not.
Next, we want to go and we want to look at their testimonials.
Testimonials that are worth anything should
be given after someone has completed work with a coach. One of the
biggest red flags that I see when I go onto scammy coaches
websites is all of their testimonials are from people who just signed
up for their thing. I just made payment and signed the contract. I'm so excited
to start. Oh my God. I'm one week into the content and it's so
helpful. This is going to be great. Just enrolled in the program.
I've been following them forever. This is going to be so transformational
to my business that doesn't help anyone, that doesn't have
any proof of concept, that doesn't tell anyone about the results that they've
gotten after working with that person. When you go into someone's
website, you want to look for testimonials that speak to
how long they've worked with the person, where they started from,
what they were struggling with when they hired this person, and what
results they've gotten out of it. We're looking for
ROI, which if you don't know what that is, it's return on investment.
I don't want you going out there and hiring coaches who don't have any
proof of a good return on investment. That said,
it's not necessarily bad if they have some negative reviews, especially
if they've had a lot of clients say they have a lower ticket option. Not
everyone's work is going to work for everyone. You want to be very
cognizant, however, about what kind of
negative review they have. This just didn't work for me. It's allowed for
someone to have a couple of those if they have
dozens of other good ones where people did see results.
You're not looking for perfect because perfect does not exist.
What you're looking for is real. Another red flag is if there's
no last name, if it's a first name only
and there's no indication about what kind of business they have or there's really no
way to go. And, like, kind of like cyber stock and see if they're actually
like real human beings in the world. That's another red flag. Now, of
course, in the coaching space, we have confidentiality with a lot of our clients.
So, of course, like, there may be some testimonials where there's no last
name or it's just happy client, or it says,
you know, senior executive, and that's okay. But
all of the testimonials shouldn't be that. There should be some
testimonials where you're able to literally just go and look up this person's name and
find them on LinkedIn and see that they're a real human being that does the
job that they say they do. Lastly, you want to look at their
content and what their messaging is. What we're looking for
is we don't want rainbows and sunshines only,
and we don't want doom stayers. Rainbows and
sunshines means, like, your idea can be turned into a million dollar
product, blah, blah, blah, blah, without any caveats around
how you determine what ideas are good and what ideas are bad.
Rainbows and sunshines can also be, oh, it's just your mindset. Once you have your
mindset dialed in, then you can have a. A seven figure
business. No, go off mindset
alone will not help anyone have a seven figure business. You
have to learn how to do a lot. You have to have a good idea.
You have to have a really strong market presence. There's so much that goes into
it. And if you're not also talking about all the stuff you have to learn
and do and fix and figure out as you go
along, if you're only saying mindset, then you're a
snake oil salesperson and you should go away. And you,
as my listener, I hope you're not spending money with these people. The
doomstairs on the other side, they're
making it seem like if you don't hire them, then you'll never be
successful. The doomsters also have this edge of,
like, I have the secret and you don't have the secret. And the only way
you're gonna get the secret to do this thing is if you hire me. No,
they don't have a secret. There's no secret. They're just like,
best practices. They know one of the best practices.
And sure, you can hire them to learn that best practice, but it's not
anything special. Like, there's no new story.
Every single story we have, every single movie, every single book
follows the same model of the hero's
journey. It's the only way we pay attention to sh t. Have you read
a self help book recently? It's the same thing with
different words. There's no new ideas and there's
no big secret to starting a business. If someone's trying
to sell you that they have the secret and no one else has a secret,
and so you should buy from them because they'll give you the secret, please don't
buy from them. Please don't. You can find best
practices from so many other people and this is my promise to you. Like,
sure, I know a lot of really helpful things that help my clients
start businesses. I'm never going to claim that any of them are
super special secret stuff that only I know. No,
because it's bull. I just happen to have a collection
of really helpful best practices that I know
across a really broad range of business building things
like sales, marketing, branding, how to figure out your niche, how to design
an offer like it just happens to be the right collection to help people start
businesses. But back to, like, the proper doomsdayers.
Anyone who's telling you that there's something wrong with you and
that if you don't hire them, it's going to continue to get worse
for you. Anyone who goes down that road in their
messaging and doesn't at least explain the parts that you need to
work on doesn't at least point to, here's what you need to learn.
They're actually not going to teach you anything. They're just selling fear.
Fear that you're in a up, fear that you're not gonna be perfect. They're selling
this idea that if you hire them, then you're gonna get the
answer. But doesn't that sound a bit like a cult? We're not signing up for
snake oil stuff. We're also not signing up for cults here, thank you very much.
We're also not signing up for the just work harders. This is a big one
because especially for those of us with ADHD, we have grown
up being told that we just need to try harder, that we just need
to work harder, that we just need to focus harder, that we just need to
do so much more harder. And throughout that
messaging, throughout growing up that way, you really start believing that
there's something wrong with you, that you're lazy, that you just don't try hard enough,
and that if you could just get yourself to work another extra 10 hours a
week, it would somehow be magically different. These are the hustle bros.
You're not hustling hard enough. Now go shove it in a very
uncomfortable place, please. You and I both know
that it's not that you're not trying hard enough, it's that you need to
figure out the way to work that's going to work for you. That's
going to work for what you enjoy doing, right? Because with
ADHD, if you don't enjoy doing something, you're never going
to do it. You need to figure out what it is that you want to
sell. What's the difference you want to make in the world. You have to actually
believe in it. And when you have the right support, that support is going
to help you figure out what that thing is. I can't tell you how many
clients I've had who've started with me thinking that one thing was going to be
their niche, and they get a few months in, they're like, I hate this. I
don't want to help these people with this thing. I'm so bored with talking about
x, y and z topic. Trying harder, hustling
more is not going to help you be more interested in that thing. For an
ADHD business owner, having someone who will support you through the
pivot is the most important thing. Having someone who
can tell you when it's time to quit is the most important thing.
Because we're programmed throughout our whole life to just stick with
something and try harder because that's what we've always been told is the problem with
us and it's actually not. That's what we want to look out for
when we're trying to identify the baddies and not the, like,
fun baddies, the bad baddies. The thing. The people that we do not want to
work with. How do we identify someone who's the right person for us to
work with? Oh, what am I going to say next? Well, you'll have to keep
listening to find out. But first. Squirrel, squirrel, squirrel,
squirrel.
How do we identify someone who's the right person for us to work
with? Now, first and foremost, our instincts
are spot on. Our intuition is spot on. Right.
So, like, when you have this intuition that you're connected to someone,
like maybe you feel like, oh my God, I already feel like we're friends. I
already feel like we have this connection. Trust it.
Don't just trust that. But that is a really good sign.
Your intuition will never lead you wrong. If you ever have a I'm not so
sure about this person kind of feeling, trust that too.
Second, like I said, testimonials. If
their testimonials are solid, and they're talking about real
results they got after working with this person. That's amazing.
But on top of that, you want to look to see, are these
people like me, the people who've gone through this program or worked with this
person before me? Did they start from a similar position
that I'm in now? Did they have similar goals?
Did they need help with the same stuff? And there's nothing wrong with
reaching out to some of these people and asking about their experience, right?
Anyone who has genuinely had a really good experience with a service provider
is generally going to be happy to share about that experience.
Another green flag for a solid coach is they're going to tell you exactly
who they do not work with. Someone who is willing to take money from
anyone because they're like, yeah, you can do anything you want. They're full of
crap. Someone who says, hey, listen, I only work
with these types of people who have these kinds of situations going on for
them, they have some standards, and the reason they do this is because they
understand that they can best support people who fit a certain
criteria. They're not out there. Just take everyone's money.
For instance. I don't work with people who want to start retail businesses
because I don't really know anything about retail business. My only experience in
retail is a managing a yarn shop, which I had
a lot of fun with, but it's not something that I'm an expert at. And
working at J. Crew 4 hours every two weeks for a summer when
I was in college, so I could get the discount. Okay. You don't want me
helping you with your retail store. All right. Also, restaurants.
I used to work in restaurants. I hate restaurants. I don't want to
ever talk about starting a restaurant again. Not my bag, baby.
I also don't work with people who charge generally less than
$200 an hour because it's not worth it for
them to hire me if you're charging
less, you know, and I'm not saying that you can't make really good money from
starting a virtual assistant business. I specialize in helping
people sell high ticket services like legal services,
copywriting, coaching, consulting. My clients generally
charge anywhere from $300 to $1,000 an hour, if not
more. And they're able to do that because they provide a ton
of value. Look for a coach who is that
specific about who they work with and who they do not work with, because that
shows that they have some integrity. People who can help anyone and
everyone under the sun don't buy it. Squirrel. Squirrel.
And lastly, and this takes some time to glean from someone,
if you're following someone for a while, you can generally
see that they're consistent. They have consistent
beliefs, they have consistent opinions. They have
consistent lessons that they teach. There's no bait and
switch. They're not changing their mind and being contrary
without explaining how they changed their mind. I don't think I'll ever
change my mind on this. That if you're starting a business, the best way to
start is with one on one clients. They are your fastest path to
cash. You do not want to start a business where you're immediately
jumping into group programs or into digital classes. The
failure rate is just too high, and you have to get too many
people to buy into it versus just working with one
person, and you also charge less. Find someone who has an
opinion, and you might not like that opinion, but
find someone who has a stalwart opinion that they're not
changing, and they give good reasoning for it.
And lastly, find someone who isn't pressuring
you to sign up to their timeline. Anyone who tries to
pressure you into spending the money now. Signing up
now. Now's the time. You don't want to waste time. Give me
your credit card information right now, and then we'll jump right in.
Now. This is your life and this is your business. If you have
urgency, if you're ready to jump in now, great, do
it. But if you need time, if you need to fill out, if this is
the right person, someone who's trying to get you to bypass that
process for yourself is not going to be the right person. So
find someone who supports you making the decision to hire them
on your timeline. It's funny, whenever I get on a sales call
with someone and we get to the conversation about the
program and how much it costs, and, like, when the start date would
be, oftentimes people are terrified to say,
oh, well, I just need some time to think about it, and they start justifying
it and I have to stop them. I say, you know, I will never pressure
someone to start a program to my timeline. If you want to start right
now, great. But if you also need a week, if you need a few days
to think about it, if you need to talk to some people, go for it.
If you're talking to me and you're realizing this is not the right time for
me, I think I need a few months to be able to get some ducks
in a row then absolutely take that time, come back to me,
find the people who are there. For you making the right
decision. And lastly, and this is a really important part that gets
overlooked a lot, find someone that you know you'll have fun working with.
Remember in school where, like, you had classes where the teacher was just
mean or, like, wasn't fun or was really boring? How hard was
it for you to learn things in those classes? Like, you were always nervous that
you get it wrong or you were always really struggling to pay attention, especially
if you have ADHD. And it was just. It was such an uphill battle, and
it didn't need to be. The class is where the teacher
made it fun and engaging and, like, let you kind of ease yourself into it.
One of my favorite teachers who I'm, like, super excited. I'm actually going to have
a beverage with her this Friday. Miss Blanchard, she was my french teacher in high
school. I adore this woman. I always idolized her. I always wanted to be her.
When I was a kid, she had this way when you showed up in class,
she wouldn't jump right into teaching. Generally. She would tell you kind of a funny
story. She'd tell you about something like self deprecating that happened that morning,
or she'd vent about something. She treated us like peers, and she'd
ask us questions. And, like, I remember one class she came in, she was
talking about dream analysis, and then she just, like, did some dream analysis for
some of the kids in the class, and it was great. And then she went
into teaching. And to this day, I remember some of the
weird mnemonic tools that she gave us to remember verb
conjugations or different words that were really hard for us to
remember. The fact that she made it fun and low pressure
and made that classroom a safe space where everyone
got to show up just as they were. That made the things
she taught that much more sticky. I cannot tell you
a single thing that I learned anywhere else in school, but
I, to this day, know how to conjugate for the
imperfect because she taught us a rap song about it. Ah.
E sde r e s I e tay e
o n s e o z I e o n tay
like, that's sticky. I will remember that when
I have dementia and I am in an assisted
living situation in about 60 years from now,
and my nurses will have no idea what the f I'm singing about, but it'll
be hysterical. Find a coach. Find a mentor. Find a
consultant. Find whoever it is that you need to work with who is going to
make it fun and memorable and easy for
you. There's nothing wrong with sorting for that. The
best money you will spend is on a learning environment that
supports how you learn best. And as people with ADHd we learn best
when we're having fun, when we're laughing, when we feel lit up on
the inside. So go and find
that. And if I in hearing all this you
sense that you want to work with me. If you want to find out about
any of my programs with no pressure then I invite you to go
to winniecast.com strategycall and go
book a generate income strategy call with me. We'll talk about your
business. I'll be very honest. If your idea is good or bad or just needs
some work, we'll talk through where you're struggling in getting this
off the ground or in growing it. And if it's a fit for both of
us, we can talk about the different options to work together.