The Hard Truth About Hiring Coaches & Consultants - EP 025

In this episode, I dive deep into the complexities of hiring the right coach, consultant, or service provider for your business. With the online coaching industry booming, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find high-quality support amidst a flood of mediocre offerings. 

I share personal insights and experiences, touching on the frustration of overpriced, under delivering programs, and the rise of buyer skepticism. We’ll explore the often-misunderstood relationship between price and value, the pressure tactics some sellers use, and the importance of asking the right questions before committing. 

Whether you’ve been burned by past investments or are navigating this space for the first time, this episode will arm you with the knowledge to make more confident, informed choices. Stay tuned for the next episode, where I’ll provide specific questions to ask before hiring.

Key Takeaways

• Choosing the right coach or consultant is crucial for business success.
• Many people are disappointed with high-ticket coaching programs.
• The online business boom has led to a saturation of low-quality services.
• Buyer skepticism is increasing due to poor experiences.
• It’s important to understand the difference between price and value in coaching.
• Pressure selling tactics are common in the coaching industry.
• Buyers should ask qualifying questions to ensure a good fit.
• There is a dichotomy of overselling and undervaluing in the market.
• Next episode will provide specific questions to ask when hiring.

Episode Chapters

00:00 The Importance of Choosing the Right Coach or Consultant

04:16 The Impact of Online Business Boom

09:26 Understanding Value and Pricing

11:01 Buyer Skepticism and Responsibility

25:56 Pressure Selling in Coaching & Consulting

30:54 The Importance of Vetting Service Providers

If you’re ready to have a deeper conversation about how to maximize impact, profit and pleasure in your business and life, you can schedule a time to connect with me right here >>> 

Did this message resonate with you? If you are enjoying the show, it would mean so much to me if you would take a few minutes to leave a review. Reviews like yours help podcasters like me get my podcast into the ears of more people. Thank you in advance for taking a minute to share your kind words. Rate this podcast on your favorite platform. 💜

Episode Transcript

Hello and welcome to Pleasure and Profits. I'm your host, Rachel Anzalone. And in today's episode, I'm gonna share some thoughts, some insights, some recent experiences around how to wisely choose a coach, a consultant, a strategist or an advisor for your business.

Some of this also applies to hiring freelancers and contractors and service providers in your business. And if you are a coach, a consultant, a strategist, an advisor, or a service provider of some sort, this may give you some insight as well into how you can be answering questions or providing information to prospective clients in order to ensure that you have good open communication, that you're finding a better fit with your clients.

So you can apply this from either direction, but I'm gonna talk about it specifically in terms of hiring. And the reason that I wanna talk about this today is because this topic has been coming up again and again and again in my circles in the last few months. Everything from one friend who enrolled in a very expensive coaching program only to find out that the material being taught inside the program was super basic and not worthy of the premium pricing that she paid for it. 

Another friend who enrolled in another very expensive coaching program. And while the material was really brilliant and well-crafted and super valuable, it turned out that the company had actually oversold the program and didn't actually have the capacity to fulfill on their promises in the way that she expected when she made the purchase. Another scenario where a friend invested in high ticket one-to-one work with a strategist only to end up getting generic templates and nothing even remotely customized for her business.

This is a story I've heard many, many times, people investing in high ticket VIP days and showing up and feeling incredibly disappointed in what they received, that the coach or the strategist hadn't really prepared for them, that they were sort of winging it or that they were sort of just sharing these sort of templated basic things that you could have gotten inside their group coaching program and there really wasn't anything that warranted the high ticket that they were charging for it. 

This next scenario, it's not really specific to coaching or consultants or strategists, but it's definitely industry related. And that is freelancers, contractors, service providers who present themselves as being highly skilled, highly experienced charging premium rates and then they show up and start working and you realize that it was all kind of bullshit that they have like very, very beginner skill set and that the premium rates they’re charging are really unwarranted. Like they just haven't earned the stripes to be able to charge that amount. And you're ending up having to train or teach or work around the inabilities of somebody who you expected based on how they presented themselves, based on the price that they were paying, that they were going to show up and be a highly skilled service provider.

These are just a few examples that I've been seeing. Mostly in the last few months, I feel like this is coming up a lot. And I think one of the reasons that this is happening is because of the boom in the online business and particularly in the coaching industry over the last few years. And so there are pros and cons to that, right? During the pandemic, it became very desirable to be able to work for yourself, to work online. And so many people who had courses and programs and who were teaching and training, service providers and coaches and certifications in different modalities really saw booms in their business as so many people signed on to get trained to be able to work for themselves. And I think there's a real beauty in that. I think that, you know, like most things, there is an upside and a downside. I think it's amazing that the barrier for entry is so low to get into having an online business or to being a coach and simultaneously as those industries have grown and more and more people are starting online businesses and becoming coaches and providing services and products and programs and teaching online, and that market has become more more saturated, often what I am seeing is that the quality of what's out there has gone down significantly.

And, you know, just an example of this, I'm scrolling on Facebook earlier today and I saw an ad to become a certified life coach for $7. Now, I don't know what you got for $7. I don't know that it's necessarily specifically about the dollar amount, but it's hard for me to imagine A, that somebody can deliver something of substance and of quality for $7 and then to call somebody certified after having purchased that. 

I mean, even to buy a book that might cost 10 or 15 or $20, even to buy 10 books, spend a hundred or $200 and read them doesn't actually mean that you have the skills to execute the thing. It means you've learned some stuff. It means you have some knowledge and some information, but there needs to be layers and really in any kind of business and any kind of service that you're providing and any kind of advising, consulting, coaching, whatever it is, there's a really important part of that that you have experience that you've done the work that you've gotten results. And paying to get an inexpensive certification does not mean that you're qualified. 

And so I think, and this is probably gonna come up again and again in the course of this episode, that there are pros and cons and there's this sort of pendulum swing and sort of trying to figure out where the right place is and where the balance is between things should be affordable so that they are approachable and are accessible and simultaneously if they're so inexpensive and the amount of time commitment is so low that you're not actually getting anything of substance from it, then really what's the value of that?  If I can read a book and complete a form online to get a certification, what is the actual value of that?

Okay, so there has been this boom in the online business and particularly in the coaching industry. And there have been so many people who are buying and ending up really disappointed, having bad experiences because they have hired somebody who proclaimed to be qualified or had really spectacular, shiny marketing, but didn't have the substance to back it and so there is a significant increase in buyer skepticism right now. People are afraid to pull the trigger, afraid to purchase because, and I'm not glossing over everything else that's happening in the world. There are lots of reasons that people might feel skittish about spending money at this particular time, or just not actually have the money to spend for a variety of reasons.

But I think that there's been a significant loss in buyer confidence because there is a lot of crap out there. There's a lot of junk on the market right now. And there seems to be kind of a split in the industry. On the two polarizing ends is this like race to the bottom dollar of people creating courses, content, certifications, training that is just shoving information at people and they're racing to the bottom dollar and charging such small amounts of money that it really dilutes the entire value of anything related to that. 

And so if you can get a coaching certification for $7, why would you pay 2,000 or 3,000 or 5,000 or 10,000, right? And you may think that paying $10,000 for a coaching certification is absurd and outrageous and nobody should have to pay that.

But what I would ask is, what are you getting for that investment? It is maybe years, maybe years of engagement, years of learning based on somebody else's decades of learning. There is a value that often warrants a higher price tag. So that's one end, and then on the other end, what I'm seeing a lot of is people charging ultra premium prices for offers and experiences that often don't warrant that. But these are kind of the stories I'm hearing from people where they're like, I paid 10 or 15 or 20 or $30,000 or more. And I got in this program and it was all information I could have just read in a book. It was very low touch. You know, the person they purchased from maybe has super shiny marketing. They look uber successful and they are uber successful, but what they're selling is the image of success and they don't have the substance to back it up. They're not delivering at a level of quality to warrant those prices. 

And so, I'm gonna get into this in a minute, a little more about like what constitutes value and what our responsibility is as a buyer when we're making these choices, because the argument could be made, the value is there, if you're willing to pay it, then that's what it's worth if people are willing to pay it.

And so there becomes this sort of tension between what something's worth, what people are willing to pay, what the actual material value is of the thing, and who gets to make those decisions, and who's responsible ultimately for getting or giving what’s expected.

So I mentioned a couple of experiences that friends, colleagues, peers of mine have had where they invested and ultimately were disappointed with their investment, that they didn't get what they were expecting to get. I think that we have a perception that when something has a high dollar amount, that it's going to have a better experience, a richer experience, a more in-depth experience. And we have an expectation in our own mind based on past experiences, based on our own access to money and what that money means to us. We have an expectation of what kind of value we're going to get for that. And often it seems that doesn't match up necessarily with a person who's selling it.

So I had an experience like this myself, handful of years ago, where I invested in a program that based on the marketing, based on the coach, the leader, the facilitator, I expected to be in a group with some really high caliber people and surrounded by peers and that I would be with people who were sort of where I was at in terms of my personal development experience, in terms of my business experience, and that we would all be really working to grow to the next level and that this course, this program was going to provide the substance for us to be able to do that. And pretty quickly, it doesn't take long when you're not in the right place, you notice it really quickly. Pretty quickly, I realized that the majority of the people in the space were not that. Many of them were very beginners in their personal development journey. Many of them, the dollar investment was such a stretch for them, but often our calls involved a lot of very emotional expressions of people. Well, I'm being polite. Meltdowns, it was meltdowns of people trying to figure out how they were gonna pay every month for the program. Well, in the meantime, there's no teaching happening. There's no substance being delivered.

And at first I thought like maybe I'm missing something. There has to be like, are there emails that I'm not getting? Is there a curriculum that I'm not seeing? Like what are we actually doing in here? And so I really invested the time to make sure that I was looking at every single email I was getting. I checked in to make sure that I was getting the right stuff. I finally requested like it would be really helpful if before these group calls that we did, we got an email saying, this is what the topic is going to be. You're referencing material that it feels like maybe I should have read, but I didn't know I was supposed to read it because it wasn't assigned. It all feels really ambiguous. And that request got sort of a, “OK, we'll share that feedback.” And eventually, I just gave up and I realized that I had to just accept my loss, that I did not ask the right questions, that I did not qualify the experience to see if it really was the right fit for me, that I bought emotionally, I bought impulsively, I bought from a place of feeling like I needed something.

And so that's one example. I can't even tell you how many times I have been hired to come in after some other consultant didn't deliver and didn't do the work. What some other consultant or advisor or coach recommended or started to implement but didn't finish or implemented in a way that was just completely poor, completely off-brand, copy and paste. There was a period of time where it went from client to client to client. I think there were three or four in a row that had all hired the same individual to implement a specific funnel for them. And I came in after this person and you wouldn't know this unless you saw multiple people's businesses that the entire thing was just copy and pasted and none of it was customized or branded for these individuals. 

And they had each paid, you know, upwards of $30,000 to have this particular funnel. And so then I found myself in the position of needing to like clean it up, fix it. They were like, we paid $30,000 and this produced nothing. And by the second or third one, I was like, this is what this person does. They sell this copy and paste thing. It's $30,000 to buy it. And there's no guarantee of results. So customer buys it, they deliver it, and then they're gone and that's the end. And if you want them to keep working on it, they'll keep working on it, but you'll have to keep paying them. In the meantime, the material, like what was actually delivered, is such poor quality and is literally just a copy and paste.

The other place that I see this happening so often lately, and this I can say with 100 % certainty that prior to 2021, this was not an issue that I had ever run into. I used to hire contractors all the time and find great people and there was like integrity and there was a level of quality of work and I had never run into this until it was in 2021, the first time that I hired someone that was an online business manager and sort of around that time, I think there was an evolution of some training programs, some courses to train people how to be VAs, virtual assistants, and OBMs, online business managers, and project managers, and launch managers. There were a number of sort of different certification programs happening. And so I made the mistake of hiring someone who was an online business manager, certified, had been in training, and presented all these materials to me that appeared like evidence that they knew how to do this job and they were charging a premium rate. And I felt confident based on what I saw that they were gonna do a great job. 

And within weeks and in the middle of a launch, it became really apparent that this person had no idea what they were doing. And it was in the replacing of this person when I got referrals from other people who had also done the same certification program that I realized that all the materials that had been presented to me were homework from the certification course, not actual client evidence experience, even though they were presented that way. They were made to look as if it was a real client project that was managed, when in fact it was a homework assignment and it was sort of all fabricated because all of a sudden I saw that same exact evidence, that same exact material from multiple people and they were clearly just a template fill in the information.

And so I share that to say with additional evidence that getting a certification does not qualify someone to do a job, nor does it automatically warrant a certain pay rate. And I think that the promise that so many of these, not just service provider certifications, but all sorts of digital marketing certifications, there's a promise being made that if you do this training, that you can earn a certain amount of money and they're being coached to charge a certain dollar amount. And so I think that is true of a lot of people in the digital marketing space and in service providers for online business and also in the coaching industry as well. Like I think there's an epidemic of coaches, training coaches, and then telling them what to charge and they're charging these premium rates right out the gate when they don't have the experience or the substance to back it up.

And the ultimate irony of this is that there are so many incredibly skilled, experienced individuals, especially women who struggle with rate that actually matches their skill and their capability. And I think part of this maybe is generational. I think part of this is a cultural issue of women feeling like they need to be told that they have value, they need it to be acknowledged from some outside source, they don't recognize it for themselves. 

When I first started my business, I wrote an article and it was based on the fact that every conversation I had with every woman, women in particular, who was a holistic health practitioner, that every single one of those conversations, I was talking to these women who had like decades of experience, who were incredibly skilled, talented, brilliant, had so much value to bring. And every single one of them felt like they needed more certifications, more validations. They were way under charging. You know, they were afraid to ask for the money. And there was just this pervasive lack of confidence to go do the work and charge for it. 

And so I wrote this article, it's called Fake It Till You Make It. And it was about that. And it was about sort of this idea of borrowing confidence and pretending that if you don't believe that you are skilled, qualified, capable, then to make the choice to fake it, and that if you fake it for a little while, you'll start to believe it. Kind of like this idea of if you feel shitty, if you feel crappy, make yourself smile, and by the act of smiling, you will start to feel happy. And so by the act of choosing to pretend to be confident, choosing to pretend to feel that you have the value there, that you will start to believe it. You'll start to tell people that, even if it feels like a lie at the beginning, and then eventually you'll start to believe it. And it was specifically because so many people, again, so many people I was interacting with were so skilled, so capable, so experienced and were really, really undervaluing themselves. 

And somehow a male business coach saw it. Somebody who is way more experienced and successful in the business coaching realm than me, and who also worked with a similar audience, he saw the article, he reached out to me, asked if we could talk. I think we got on Skype because that's what we did back in the day. And he proceeded to chastise me for encouraging people to pretend that they're qualified to do things that they're not qualified for and that there is an epidemic in the holistic health and wellness industry of people who are under qualified pretending that they're qualified. 

And I just felt like, clearly we're not talking to the same people. He must have been finding clients who were brand new just out of school, just figuring out their craft. That is not the people who are coming my way. My people were women in their 40s and 50s and 60s who had been doing this work for decades and were afraid to charge for it.

And so the irony of all of this is that both things are happening at the same time. And I do feel like there's a little bit of a demographic element of women in particular who are over 40, over 45. I think that our expectation of how hard we have to work and what we have to do to earn is different often than what is the experience of people under 40.

And I have mixed feelings about this. I definitely feel some conflict about it. And it comes up fairly often where part of me is like, well, good for them for being willing to ask for the dollar amount, for not being willing to overwork and self-sacrifice and having what is a pretty reasonable expectation of a quality of life that they want to be experiencing and like good for them. And then part of me feels like, yeah, but I learned so much. There was so much experience gained from being in difficult situations and working really hard and needing to figure out how to do it and there's a level of character, yes, but also ingenuity.

There's a level of needing to figure out how to make things work when situations aren't ideal. And I've had this really funny conversation with a contractor a few months ago where every time we talked, she would say, well, yeah, but it would be great if we could do this and this and this and this. And then I would say, yeah, but that's not possible. Like we have constraints and the constraints are there's a budget, there's a number of hours that people have, there are limitations to what we can all get done in a day. So you need to learn to work within the constraints that we have. 

And then a few days or a week would go by and she would say, well, I really wish that I had this and this and this and this. And was like, you're not living in reality. Reality is that there are constraints and there's always gonna be constraints. And that's what makes us scrappy and that's what makes us capable of solving problems and figuring things out. And those are skill sets that are needed if you're gonna be an entrepreneur. They're skill sets that are needed if you're going to be supporting other entrepreneurs in their business. You know, it's not always a dream scenario. 

And so I feel sort of torn between these two things where part of me is like, you all need to go scrub a toilet. You all need to go clean a hotel room. Like you all, need to, you need to know what it's like to be 22 and be doing physical labor or working multiple jobs. Like there's just so much value in those experiences, even if they're not ideal. That's my, that's my soapbox. I'll get off of it now.

There are some people who are overselling and under delivering, and then there are other people who are undervaluing and undercharging. It's a really strange dichotomy. When you are looking at the landscape right now of online business and coaching, it's wild to try to pin down what's happening.

So when it comes to hiring, when it comes to making the decision to buy, there's also a factor in the world of online business and in particular in coaching of a pressure selling, that if someone isn't ready to buy immediately, that if people aren't ready to buy without asking questions, I mean, it's completely insane. You would not show up to a car dealership where you're gonna spend 20 grand or 30 grand or 40 or 50 grand. You would not show up there and not test drive the car. You would not show up there and not see a detailed contract for what you're purchasing.

And yet in the coaching world, there is a culture of setting up environments in live events, online events, in sales calls even, where the dynamic is to pressure the person to buy in that moment. And the messaging around if you're not ready to buy right now, then there's something wrong with you. I've seen and heard that delivered so many times in so many different ways.

And the truth is that there are people with different levels of comfort of investing, different levels of comfort of making decisions quickly or not. There are so many variables in this story of like that you have to be ready to buy immediately. And in these really pressure cooker situations, in these environments where An entire event is set up to get people charged up and emotional and feeling like they need to take the next step, and then once that step is put in front of them, it's positioned that either you're going to take this next step and you're going to make this investment or you're going to go back to your life the way it was. And the emotional dynamics are set up to make not buying feel like a failure.

And it's really sad and it creates this environment where people are buying and they're not asking questions. I've seen recently a couple times some threads where people are talking specifically about having invested and been really let down, disappointed. And often the language is “I was taken advantage of. I got screwed out of this money.” And while I feel really strongly that we should not be pressure selling people into buying things, there is also a responsibility on the buyer to not invest money that you don't have and to make good choices and to be an integrity with yourself of what you can afford and what you're willing to risk and to know and understand that there is no guarantee of any particular outcome of any service or coaching program or anything along those lines.

And I think we really need to learn to take ownership of that. And I also acknowledge that often what's happening is there's a pressure sell tactic happening to take advantage of people who are feeling vulnerable and are in the position to make a well-informed decision. And so there's an issue on both sides of this. So as a buyer, it becomes really important that you learn how to protect yourself and make good choices, especially if you're investing in something for the purpose of growing your business and that's where becoming a smart business person and understanding your profit and loss and understanding what you actually are able to invest is a responsibility that you have.

And so, as I wrap up here, I just want to acknowledge that the listeners of this podcast, I believe are people who are high integrity that probably, probably over-deliver and undercharge and possibly struggle with setting boundaries around their value. And I think that if you are a person of that leaning, then it can be hard to imagine somebody taking your money and not fulfilling, not delivering. And that's when it becomes more likely to be taken advantage of, or even not to be taken advantage of, but to just make a bad investment because you can't imagine that somebody would not over deliver. You know what you would do for that dollar amount and so you expect somebody else to do it for you, but someone else might have a completely different expectation of what that dollar warrants in terms of their delivery and their execution.

And so I shared in some previous episodes a lot about my belief about anything that we do in business. If we are intending to be leading from feminine energy, that the dynamic that we're working to create is one of partnership. And in the spirit of partnership, you as a buyer, you as an investor in somebody else's services, have every right to ask qualifying questions is really fascinating to me that as coaches, strategists, advisors, freelancers, et cetera, that we often will interview the people who are looking to hire us to make sure that they're qualified to work with us, that they meet all of our criteria. And if they were to try to do the same back to us, we would be horrified that they are not just buying what we're selling at face value. 

And as a person who is investing in coaching or consulting or some sort of high level service provider, or even just your basic freelance or a contract service that you're gonna hire, you absolutely should be vetting that person to make sure that they meet the criteria that you have set for what you're willing to invest in and that your expectations are gonna be met and that they're meeting the needs that you have as well. 

And so I'm gonna leave you on a little bit of a cliffhanger here because I have some very specific questions that I recommend that you ask when you are looking to hire a coach, a consultant, a strategist, a service provider to see if they're a good fit, to see what their skill level is, what their capability is, to see if they're a good fit for you. And I'm going to share them in the next episode because I think we've gone on long enough here.

So come back, the next episode will be the very specific questions that I recommend you ask to figure out if a coach or consultant or a strategist is a good fit for you for what you need if they're gonna be a match, if they're qualified, if they have the skills. These are the questions that are gonna help you to figure that out. 

So thank you for listening. As always, I am wishing you even more pleasure and profits. Take care and I will catch you in the next episode.