WARNING Closes tonight..

Countdown is on

I'm about to close...

Masterclass details inside

I'll make this quick

You could be earning $20k per month

This is disappearing tonight

The above are the subject lines from just a few of the emails I have received in the last twenty-four hours, which is uncoincidentally the lead up to my payday – the day when every self-appointed life/business/wellness/marketing/creative guru comes out to play. They have one goal: to extract cash from you before midnight.

Maybe they have always been around, but I have not noticed them before; with that said there seems to be a ridiculously high number of coaches and experts over all social media platforms these days.

It doesn’t matter what advice you’re looking for since they are almost all the same, enticing you with sales pages that go on for an eternity before an inflated price at the bottom (if you make it that far) and lucky you, the stars must have aligned for you to have found this just before it closes.

I have a few favourites which I’ve looked into recently and they do seem to be experts… but not in the advice they sell so much as efforts to ensnare the unwary. It usually goes like this….

“Is this you? You worry that you’re not good enough, you worry that your prices are too high, you worry about what people will think”

Now you may actually have these worries but, if not, you’ll start to believe you have them when you read their largely made-up story and therefore think you need the help of the expert who was in your exact position and overcame it to be a huge success.

Now to be fair there are also a few good coaches out there, and even some of the sketchier seeming ones might successfully aid a few of their clients – you know, the totally believable testimonials.

On that point: I dug deeper into how some of those previous clients are doing and, well, more that a few some appear to have taken a break from whatever their intended venture was. More interesting is that those same people who signed up to learn how to better run their businesses are somehow now also experts at selling courses to other people who are desperate for the success that seemingly eludes them for reasons they can’t quantify.

Both at first glance, and in closer detail, it’s like some giant course selling pyramid or ponzi scheme: you go to the first coach to improve your fill in the blank business, appear to abandon your idea entirely, then instead become another business expert.

It is just me, or should anyone professing expertise be able to evidence that your first business has some degree of success, or even traded, before one declares themselves an entrepreneurial guru?

Why am I coming down on these gurus who have clearly worked out how to sell a course, full of information you can probably find online for free, multiple times over: I found myself scrolling through the comments for some £900 training course offer on Facebook, one that guaranteed it would make every Personal Trainer able to quit the gym, sell the same package to hundreds of clients online, and retire to what I imagine is some PT filled tropical island, full of free weights on the beach, and health bar cabana.

Amongst the comments was a father of three who, owing to the current pandemic, was out of work and really struggling, basically begging the expert to let them pay in instalments; I have to be honest, I was a little upset: to the guru, this was a live one – someone desperate, someone believing the sales pitch because they are at rock bottom.

Maybe that client will go on to achieve great things, but if they do not, you can guarantee that the guru will take no responsibility: “The client wasn’t passionate enough” “Client was lazy”, “They didn’t have the drive, skills…”.

So-called experts who make wild promises with not even the pretence of accountability.

Real, decent coaches out there know that mentoring only works with trust. How can your relationship with a coach or mentor be from a place of trust, if the relationship started with you paying ridiculous fees within a tight deadline?

I do not believe any reputable mentor would work this way. And neither should you.