Spending thousands on a business coach and getting nothing to show for it sucks. And unfortunately, Kendra says she has this conversation with coaches all the time.
In this episode, she breaks down the red flags she wants you to watch for before making your next coaching investment. Because not every business coach knows how to build the kind of business you want, and being good at mindset, strategy, or social media doesn’t automatically make someone the right coach for you.
Kendra walks through exactly what she would look for, from years of real-world experience and proof of client results to industry-specific knowledge, messaging expertise, lead generation, and an actual sales mechanism. The goal isn’t to convince you not to hire a coach. It’s to help you get a hell of a lot better at choosing one.
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Listen to the podcast here
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In This Episode:
- The two to three year red flag that tells you someone got online recently and started charging for it
- Why a general business coach will green light a niche that’s already broken (and can’t tell that it is)
- A follower is not a lead. Here’s what actually counts, and where most coaches quietly skip this part
- The question that instantly reveals whether you hired a strategist or a hype person
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How to Vet a Business Coach Before You Spend Thousands (The Questions Nobody Tells You to Ask)
I have probably had the same conversation about 50 times this year.
Someone comes to me, they really want to join Health Coach Accelerator, and then they say it: “I just spent thousands of dollars on a business coach and I didn’t really get anything out of it.”
And then they tell me who they hired. And they tell me what that person actually taught them, what they were coached to do, what strategy they were handed. And I’m not surprised. I’m usually pretty annoyed, because there are just so many red flags in what they’re describing. But here’s the thing. When you’re hiring a business coach, especially if it’s your first one or you’re in the earlier stages of your business, you don’t necessarily know what to look for. You don’t know what you don’t know.
So I want to give you a real framework for how to vet a business coach. Not vibes. Not “does this person feel aligned.” Actual questions you can ask and actual criteria you can hold someone against before you hand over thousands of dollars.
By the end of this post you’ll know the five things to assess in any business coach you’re considering, the two to three year experience red flag, why a follower is not a lead, and the difference between a strategist and a hype person. Let’s get into it.
First, Let’s Be Clear: This Isn’t About Trashing Coaches
I want to say this up front because I don’t want to throw anyone under the bus.
Good business coaches are worth every penny. And honestly, if you are in the earlier stages of your business, you probably need a business coach. This is not me saying “hire me.” I’m just being truthful. I think most of us need coaches.
Here’s why. When you’re newer, there is so much to learn. In the first three years of your business, you are doing triple the work I’m doing right now. Because first, you’re figuring out what you actually need to do to make this successful. Then once you figure out what you need to do, you have to educate yourself on that. So you’re learning. And then third, you’re executing.
Me personally, I’m in my thirteenth year of business. I’m not figuring out what to do anymore. I generally know what to do. I’m not doing much education. Yes, sometimes I’m doing new things. Right now I’m building a funnel that’s a little different than what I’ve done before, so there’s a bit of learning. But primarily what I’m doing is execution, execution, execution.
You are doing triple the work early in your business. And two of those three things, the figuring out and the education, can be outsourced. That is worth every penny.
The other reason is that we are all really bad at looking at our own businesses. I’m a business coach and I have a coach. I know what to do. But when I look at my own business, I get turned around. I get discombobulated. Sometimes I am just terrible at assessing my own stuff.
Me needing a business coach doesn’t mean I’m a bad business coach. It just means I understand where my blind spots are. I’m a huge proponent of hiring someone who knows more than you. But only when they’re the right person for the job.
If You’ve Already Made a Bad Investment, Welcome
Before we get into the criteria, one thing.
If you’ve hired someone and felt like it wasn’t a good use of your money, welcome. It’s kind of a rite of passage. The more time you spend in business, the more bad investments you are going to make. I have hired service providers, I have hired team members, I have bought courses where I thought afterward, yeah, I don’t really think I got what I thought I was going to get out of that.
That’s normal. It is not a sign that you should never hire anyone again. It just means you need a bit more discernment next time. And it’s tough, because when we’re newer we genuinely don’t know what we don’t know. Sometimes we make decisions out of pure unknowing rather than from a place of experience, because we don’t have the experience yet.
Also worth naming: a lot of the time, the coach wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t the right type of business coach for what you were trying to build. Or, and this one is huge right now, they were teaching tactics that worked a few years ago but haven’t been adapted for how the online space actually works today.
Hiring a business coach is one of the biggest investments a coach makes. And there is zero regulation on who gets to call themselves one. Anyone with two years of business experience can hang up the shingle. So let’s talk about how to actually assess them.
1. Do They Run the Type of Business You Actually Want to Build?
This is the first question to ask yourself when you’re vetting a business coach. What type of business does this person run, and is it the kind I want?
Selling low ticket courses is a legit business model. So is selling high ticket programs. So are memberships, courses, done for you services. All legit. There are many ways to build a business. There’s no wrong way and no right way. But they are very different types of businesses that require very different skills.
When you’re in a high ticket business model, you have to get really good at conversations and selling on sales calls. You have to be in your DMs. You have to run webinars. That’s a specific skill set.
A low ticket business, where you’re selling something around $300, is a completely different animal. You have to be excellent at messaging, copywriting, and strategy. Different problems, different skill sets entirely.
So hire someone with real expertise in the business type you want to run. A high ticket coach who has only ever run a high ticket model teaching you how to build low ticket may not work out for you.
That said, sometimes we can coach people to run a business model we haven’t personally run ourselves. So if that’s the situation, look for proof. And I don’t mean one person. You want evidence they have helped many people do the thing you’re trying to do, not a single lucky case study.
2. The Two to Three Year Red Flag: How Much Experience Do They Actually Have?
A lot of people have been online for a couple of years, had success with one thing, and are now calling themselves a business coach.
So ask about experience.
I started calling myself a business coach after about six years in business. At the time I made that shift, I had built a multiple six figure health coaching business. I think I was doing around $300,000 to $400,000. And it was very organic. It wasn’t even my intention. So many of my colleagues were asking how I did it that I started offering it as a service, and then realized how much I enjoyed it.
I want to be fair here, because there’s nuance. When I started my business, I was working for Functional Diagnostic Nutrition, where I was certified. I became a course mentor. So I was doing business coaching to some degree that whole time, because people saw I was having success online and asked me about it, and I shared my experience. That eventually turned into a coaching program. But I wasn’t calling myself a business coach until I’d had about six years of success behind me.
Here’s my recommendation. Make sure the coach you’re working with has at least five years of experience in the online space, and make sure they have personally built a successful business.
The online space is so unique. It requires such a different skill set. If you’re hiring an overall business coach to help you across all aspects of your business, make sure they built their own successful business first.
The coaching industry has exploded and there is no gatekeeping on the title. It’s unregulated. So just verify the experience, because there are a lot of people out there calling themselves business coaches who don’t have a ton of business experience.
And go one layer deeper: make sure they’ve gotten results for more than just themselves. Their own success is not proof they can transfer it to you.
This is why I always felt so ethical in my own business coaching journey. In the beginning I wasn’t calling myself a business coach at all. I was just providing advice when people asked for it, and I was honest that this was simply my experience. I wasn’t out there claiming my experience meant I could get results for everyone else. By the time I did call myself a business coach, I had actually helped hundreds of people. I’d given tips and support to people who went on to have success. So I felt very comfortable with the title at that point.
3. Do They Have Experience in the Health and Wellness Space?
This isn’t true for every industry, but for health and wellness I think it’s essential. Your business coach needs to understand your world.
They don’t need to currently be a health coach. But they need some real understanding of the health and wellness space, either from working with a lot of clients in it or from having been a health coach themselves, like me.
Why It Matters: Niching and Messaging
The main way this shows up is in niching and messaging.
Health coaching niching is different than other industries. It requires understanding health conditions, symptoms, and the difference between a root cause issue and the surface level symptom the client is actually aware of.
A lot of general business coaches, despite their best intentions, will mislead health coaches unintentionally. They’ll green light a niche that is actually broken, because they don’t understand that the thing the client is searching for and the thing that’s actually wrong are two different levels.
I see this constantly. Someone comes to me after working with a business coach and they have this vague niche. Perimenopause. And I’m like, yes, you can help someone in perimenopause, but that’s not a niche. You have to go deeper. Or hormone imbalance. Or stress. Or overwhelm. Things that seem like a niche but actually aren’t.
It comes down to understanding the specific lived experience of someone with a legitimate health concern. A general business coach usually cannot get you there.
If You Run Labs, Go One Step Further
Functional health coaches who run labs probably need to go further still. I recommend working with someone who has run labs in their own business, because labs add a layer of technicality that has to be handled a very specific way. You want feedback from someone who actually understands that complexity.
I’ve heard horror stories. People told to structure things in ways that made everything complicated and a huge pain. Or business coaches who told their clients not to run labs at all, or to only run them at the highest tier. Meanwhile I believe labs are one of the things that can actually make you unique.
I’m a functional health coach. I understand the complexity of running labs. That understanding matters when someone is advising you on how to build your offer.
4. What Is Their Expertise in Messaging?
Number three on my list, and one of the most important. Messaging is the communication, the actual words you use to speak to your audience. And messaging is non negotiable.
It has always mattered. But a few years ago you could get away with average messaging, because the market didn’t demand more. There wasn’t as much competition, as much saturation, as much noise. You didn’t have to nail it the way you do now.
Here’s the problem. A lot of business coaches are good at strategy but they are not deeply studying copywriting and messaging. So they don’t grasp the level of specificity that’s now required to stand out. And they approve things they shouldn’t. They’ll green light a sales page or a piece of social content that is way too generic to work today.
What Good Looks Like
A good coach can hear your positioning and immediately spot where it’s vague, where it blends in, and where it’s not specific enough to make someone stop scrolling.
This is something we are crazy about inside HCA. We give very, very detailed messaging feedback, and a lot of our students find it hard. They feel genuinely challenged by the level of feedback, because we are pushing them to be so specific that it’s uncomfortable.
But what they get out of it is that they actually learn how to communicate with their audience. They learn to be good copywriters. They learn to use words that trigger people to take action. That is what gets you online sales.
Questions to Ask
- Ask about their experience with messaging specifically
- Ask how detailed they’ll get. Will they look at your copy word for word?
- Ask if they’ve formally studied copywriting and messaging
- Look at their own messaging. Look at what they’re posting. Does it make you stop?
5. Do They Give You a Reliable Lead Generation System?
This one really grinds my gears.
You need a reliable way to generate leads. And if their whole answer is teaching you how to create better social media content, that is not going to be enough.
Let me define terms, because this is where people get fooled.
A social media follower is not a lead. I’ve been saying this for years. You can turn a follower into a lead, but that happens in the DMs. A real lead, in my book, is an email subscriber or someone you are having an actual conversation with in the DMs. Likes and follows are not leads.
So you need to take deliberate steps to turn a follower into a lead by engaging with them in the DMs, or you need to get people onto your email list, which is a legitimate lead.
Why I Will Die on the Email Marketing Hill
I think email marketing is paramount. I know there are a lot of coaches who will teach you to do everything on social media.
I actually had a guy comment on my Threads post the other day when I was talking about the importance of email marketing. He was like, well, I’ve never done any email marketing and I’ve generated X, Y, Z. And I mean, he does have 130 Instagram followers, so that’s not nothing. But also, what happens if his account gets deactivated?
This happens all the time. Even in the past few weeks I know several people with huge accounts that just got totally disabled. If you don’t have your email list, what are you going to do?
I actually think it’s really stupid to not have an email list, and I will stand by that. This is a hill I will die on. Even if you do most of your marketing through Instagram, you should still be getting those people onto your list.
You Don’t Need a Big List. You Need a Growing One.
You do not need a huge list to make sales. But you do need a list that is constantly generating new leads. You don’t want to be reselling to the same 500 people over and over and over again. That won’t work.
I post about this on Threads a lot and I get a ton of hate for it. Go to my Threads account and watch me get roasted in the comments for saying you need an audience. People come for me.
One woman said, “well, that’s the third thing this month you’ve said that was wrong.” And I’m like, wow, I can’t believe you’re keeping tabs on me. What are you doing with your time? And also, what is wrong with being wrong? Maybe we’re both right.
Another person said they’d been in this for 10 years, never had more than 500 email subscribers, and had generated X amount of money. And I said, that’s great. But I’m pretty sure those aren’t the same 500 people you started with years ago. I guarantee there’s been growth in that. People fall off, new people come on. You need a consistent lead generation system.
When I say a small audience isn’t going to get you there, I offend tons of people. People get so upset about it. I find it funny at this point. I’m almost posting it for rage bait because it’s so easy to trigger people. Maybe I’m twisted, but I find some humor in it, because it’s not that deep.
To be clear about what I actually mean: I am not saying you need an influencer sized audience. That’s a total misread. You can make great money off a small list. You just can’t resell to the same few hundred people forever.
What a Legit Coach Actually Teaches
A real coach teaches you a genuine way to fill the top of your funnel beyond posting. That’s going to be one of these:
- Paid ads. This is my recommendation. You’re either paying with your time or your money, and I think time is expensive and money is cheap. I’m a big fan of paid ads.
- Collaborations. Podcasts, summits, freebie swaps, course bundles, speaking events. Get out there and collaborate your pants off.
- Going hard in the DMs. Meaning DMing 30 to 40 people a day. That’s how you generate your leads.
There’s no right way and no wrong way. Those are all legitimate ways to grow your list and create leads. But it cannot just be “I’m going to help you create better content,” because content alone does not generate leads.
Especially when you’re new. If you have 10,000 Instagram followers and a ManyChat trigger set up, sure, your content will generate leads. But it can’t just be posting. Numbers actually do matter.
I had a conversation with a woman who had spent a bunch of money on a business coach. She has 200 Instagram followers and 62 people on her email list. She’d been working with this coach for months. And I said, I don’t know what advice this coach is giving you, but they could be giving you the best strategy advice in the world and it wouldn’t matter. You’re not going into your DMs. You don’t have email subscribers. You’re not doing collaborations. Therefore you have no leads.
6. Are They a Strategist or a Mindset Coach?
This is the distinction that I think costs people the most.
A lot of business coaches are actually mindset coaches. They pump you up. They help you believe in yourself. They help you build a good mindset. And fair, there’s nothing wrong with that. Mindset work is real and some people genuinely need it. I’m not knocking it.
But mindset does not overcome bad strategy.
You need a coach who is a strategist. Someone who gives you actual strategic direction, not just a confidence boost.
Here’s how you test for it. Ask what strategic decisions they’ve made in their own business, and ask what specific strategy they would give you.
If every answer is about belief and energy and abstract concepts, and nothing is about mechanism, funnel, offer, or numbers, then you have a hype person. There is a place for that coach. But you’re going to need someone beyond that. You need a coach who knows how to help you sell.
Bonus Criteria: Do They Teach You a Sales Mechanism?
This one is technically optional, but I almost want to put it in the mandatory column.
You want to work with someone who teaches you how to sell through an actual sales mechanism. If we’re talking about getting consistent clients, we need something that makes it consistent. In my opinion, that’s a webinar or a live event.
The people who work with me are selling mid to high ticket. The best way to sell that is through some sort of live webinar.
Automated webinars still work, but they don’t work as well. I feel like they’ve gotten a lot harder. A bunch of my automated webinars have broken and we’ve moved to primarily live at this point. I’m just seeing live work a lot better.
Now, you can get all your clients through DM marketing. DM marketing is very effective, and if that jives with you, go for it. You probably don’t need a webinar. But the problem is that it’s labor intensive. DM work often burns people out, so people are usually looking for another way. And the best way to do that is a live webinar.
So at this point in time I would work with a coach who’s going to teach you how to run a live webinar, like we do inside HCA. We help our students create their webinar, we give them a live webinar builder and a script to follow, and it works.
Make Sure They Understand Data
But here’s the part people miss. Make sure your coach understands data.
If you’re going to run your live webinar once and then never again, there’s no point in doing it at all. A good webinar needs to be run over and over in order to consistently generate sales. It has to be optimized over time.
It is very normal for a first webinar to go well and then have the next few not go so well. Then you have to optimize and make it better. That’s the actual process, and your coach needs to know how to read the numbers to guide it.
The Bottom Line on Vetting a Business Coach
That’s a lot of information. But I’ve been having this conversation over and over and over again, and I just don’t want you to make a bad choice.
Run through it before you spend a dollar:
- Do they run the type of business you want to build, and have they helped many people do it?
- Do they have at least five years in the online space with a business they personally built?
- Do they understand the health and wellness space, including labs if you run them?
- Can they give you specific, word level messaging feedback?
- Do they teach a real lead generation system beyond “post better content”?
- Are they a strategist or a hype person?
- Do they teach an actual sales mechanism, and do they understand the data behind it?
I want you to find someone who is actually going to help you, whether that’s me or someone else. There are a lot of amazing business coaches out there. It’s just a lot harder these days to sort the good ones from the bad ones.
