The Coaching Industry's Credibility Problem (And Why It Should Matter to You)

A polite call-out to all coaches and coaching programs out there burning clients and the market.

Dec 02, 2025

I’ve spent the last several months watching the coaching industry with the kind of morbid fascination you’d reserve for a slow-motion car crash. Not because I enjoy watching things fall apart, but because I’m trying to build something in this space and I needed to understand why “coach” has become a word that makes thoughtful people instantly skeptical.

What I found wasn’t surprising, but it was more systematic than I expected. The negative connotations around coaching aren’t accidents. They’re the natural result of an industry built on a foundation of contradictions so obvious that you’d think they’d be disqualifying. But they’re not. They’re just how things work here.

And if you’re someone who’s ever considered hiring a coach, or if you’re thinking about becoming one, you need to understand what you’re walking into.

The Fundamental Contradiction

Start with the most basic problem: business coaches who’ve never built a business telling you how to build a business. Life coaches who’ve never figured out their own life. Career coaches who’ve never had a successful career outside of coaching.

This would be absurd in any other professional context. You wouldn’t hire a financial advisor who’s never managed money. You wouldn’t trust a therapist who’s never been trained in therapy. You wouldn’t take medical advice from someone who’s never studied medicine.

But in coaching? This is standard. It’s not even considered a problem worth addressing.

I’ve seen coaching programs celebrating “your landing page in 3 months” as entrepreneurial success. Celebrating the creation of a website as if it’s a business outcome worth mentioning. This is like a fitness coach celebrating that you bought gym shoes and calling it transformation.

The industry has virtually no entry requirements. No proof of expertise. No credentials showing you actually know what you’re doing. Just good positioning, a decent website, and the right vibes.

You can wake up tomorrow, call yourself a coach, and start selling. No one will stop you. No one will ask for proof. The barrier to entry is so low it might as well not exist.

Why This Keeps Working

You might be wondering how an industry this obviously problematic continues to grow. The answer is uncomfortable but important: coaching sales happen when people are desperate, anxious, or chasing dreams.

This isn’t an accident. It’s the business model.

Someone’s stuck in their career and feeling trapped. Someone’s burnt out and doesn’t know how to fix it. Someone’s got a business idea but no idea how to execute. Someone’s going through a major life transition and feels lost.

These are vulnerable moments. Moments when you’re willing to invest in something that promises clarity, direction, or transformation. The purchase happens in that emotional state, and the promise sounds like exactly what you need.

From a psychological perspective, this is where coaching sales exploit something called affect-driven decision making. When you’re in an emotional state, especially one involving fear or aspiration, your brain prioritizes immediate relief over careful evaluation. You’re less likely to ask hard questions about credentials or track record. You’re more likely to respond to promises that speak to your emotional state.

A good therapist would recognize this moment and slow things down. They’d help you get some distance from the emotion so you could make a more considered decision. A good coach should do the same.

But most coaching sales do the opposite. They amplify the emotion. They create urgency. They make the gap between where you are and where you want to be feel even more painful, and then position their program as the bridge.

And here’s the part that really matters: in most cases, the prescribed solution is not the actual solution for the individual. It’s the solution the coach knows how to deliver, packaged as if it’s what you specifically need.

The Hormozi Effect

Scroll through any coaching feed on LinkedIn and you’ll see the same playbook repeated endlessly. “X outcome in Y days.” “Guaranteed systems.” Fake urgency. Wins without context. Before-and-after stories that tell you nothing about whether the method actually works or whether the person would have succeeded anyway.

Alex Hormozi popularized a particular style of marketing and sales for coaching and info products. It works, at least in terms of generating revenue. But it’s spawned an entire generation of coaches who’ve cloned the approach without understanding why it’s problematic.

The formula goes like this: identify a painful problem, promise a specific outcome in a specific timeframe, create urgency through scarcity (real or manufactured), share testimonials that show transformation, make the offer.

Nothing in that formula requires you to actually know how to deliver the outcome you’re promising. Nothing requires you to have deep expertise. Nothing requires you to assess whether your solution is right for this particular person.

So you get lots of coaches who, in their effort to promise something tangible and specific and stand out from the crowd, end up selling simplistic, unintelligent solutions that smell a bit scammy if you have an inch of actual experience in the domain.

A real expert knows that most meaningful outcomes can’t be guaranteed in a specific timeframe. They know that what works for one person might not work for another. They know that real transformation is usually messy, nonlinear, and requires customization.

But real expertise doesn’t sell as well as a simple promise. So the market selects for coaches who are willing to make promises they can’t necessarily keep, using frameworks they haven’t necessarily tested, for people they haven’t necessarily assessed.

The Ouroboros Problem

Here’s where it gets truly absurd. The coaching industry’s main customer has become other coaches.

When coaches struggle to get real clients, they pivot to teaching other coaches “how to get clients.” Those coaches then struggle to get clients, so they eventually pivot to teaching coaches how to get clients. The market feeds on itself while actual transformation work becomes increasingly rare.

I call this the Ouroboros problem, after the snake eating its own tail. The industry has created a self-contained ecosystem where the product is teaching people to sell the same product to other people who will also sell the same product.

This isn’t coaching anymore. It’s a dressed-up version of multi-level marketing with better branding and LinkedIn profiles instead of Facebook groups.

And the tragedy is that this crowds out the actual work. When the most visible coaches are the ones teaching other coaches marketing tactics, when the most profitable business model is selling “how to build a coaching business,” the coaches who are doing genuine transformation work get lost in the noise.

The Evidence Gap

I’ve interviewed hundreds of people across my years in product management and therapy. One of the most useful questions I’ve learned to ask is some version of “what’s the concrete evidence you know what you’re talking about?”

In product management, this might look like: “What products have you launched? What were the results? What did you learn from the failures?” In therapy, it’s: “What’s your training? What modalities do you practice? How do you handle your most difficult cases?”

These questions separate people who have genuine expertise from people who are performing expertise. They make visible the gap between what someone claims and what they’ve actually done.

When you ask this question of most coaches, what you get back is inspirational claims and anecdotal stories. “I helped someone double their revenue.” “My client got promoted.” “People tell me I changed their life.”

These aren’t evidence of knowledge. They’re testimonials. And testimonials, without context or verification, are just marketing copy.

Real evidence looks different. It’s specific about methodology. It’s honest about limitations and failure cases. It acknowledges what it doesn’t know. It can point to training, experience, or track record that’s verifiable.

A coach with 18 years of experience as a licensed therapist who’s also spent a decade in senior product roles at major tech companies can point to concrete evidence. The licenses, the companies, the outcomes, the expertise developed over time.

A coach who spent six months in a coaching certification program and has been coaching for a year cannot offer the same level of evidence. That doesn’t mean they’re a bad person. It means they don’t have the depth of expertise to handle complex situations.

And most coaching situations are complex. If someone just needed a simple framework or a bit of accountability, they probably wouldn’t need a coach. They’d need a book and a friend.

The Innocent Casualties

The thing that frustrates me most about all this isn’t even the scammy operators. Those exist in every industry. What frustrates me is that the coaching world has some incredible people doing genuine work, and they’re operating in an environment where just being a coach requires you to prove you’re not an elephant.

I know coaches who are former executives with 25 years of experience helping companies scale. I know coaches who have legitimate therapeutic training and treat the work with appropriate seriousness. I know coaches who’ve built multiple successful businesses and understand what actually drives business outcomes.

These people are great at what they do. But they’re competing for attention in a market flooded with people whose main qualification is that they completed a weekend certification and learned how to run Instagram ads.

The good ones spend half their energy just differentiating themselves from the noise. Proving they’re not like the others. Establishing credibility that should be baseline but has to be repeatedly demonstrated because the industry has no standards.

This is exhausting and it’s unnecessary. In any other professional field, credentials and experience would do this filtering work. But coaching has actively resisted creating those structures, usually in the name of keeping things “accessible” or avoiding “gatekeeping.”

The result is that the field is accessible to everyone, which means it’s credible to almost no one.

What This Means for You

If you’re considering working with a coach, you need to approach it with the same level of scrutiny you’d apply to any other significant professional service. More scrutiny, actually, because there are fewer guardrails.

Before you buy, ask for concrete evidence of expertise. Not testimonials. Not inspirational stories. Actual evidence.

What’s their background? What experience do they have in the domain they’re coaching you on? What training have they had? What’s their track record look like, and can you verify any of it? What do they actually know that you don’t, and how did they learn it?

If they get defensive about these questions, that’s your answer. Walk away.

If they can’t point to anything more substantial than a certification program and some client testimonials, think very carefully about whether they have the depth to help you with complex problems.

And pay attention to how they sell. If the sales process is all urgency and emotion and promises, if it feels more like you’re being closed than being evaluated for fit, that’s information. A good coach assesses whether they’re right for you as much as you assess whether they’re right for you.

What This Means If You’re Becoming a Coach

If you’re thinking about becoming a coach, or if you already are one, you have a choice to make about what kind of coach you’re going to be.

You can follow the dominant playbook. Clone the Hormozi approach, make big promises, sell urgency, hope you can figure out how to deliver once people buy. Lots of people do this. Some of them make money.

Or you can build something real. Develop actual expertise before you start selling transformation. Get training that goes beyond a weekend certification. Build a track record that’s verifiable. Learn to sell based on fit rather than emotion.

The second path is harder. It takes longer. You’ll make less money initially because you won’t be optimizing for volume. You’ll lose sales because you’ll tell people when you’re not the right fit for them.

But you’ll also build something sustainable. You’ll be able to point to concrete evidence when people ask. You’ll sleep better knowing you’re not overselling your capabilities. And you’ll do actual work that creates actual transformation instead of just selling the promise of it.

The coaching industry doesn’t have to be what it currently is. It’s this way because enough people made choices that prioritized growth over credibility, speed over depth, marketing over substance.

Different choices would create a different industry. One where “coach” doesn’t come with an automatic credibility discount. One where the good practitioners don’t have to spend half their time proving they’re legitimate. One where people in vulnerable moments can trust that the person they’re hiring actually knows what they’re doing.

But that industry only exists if enough people decide to build it. And that starts with asking one simple question and actually requiring a real answer: what’s the concrete evidence you know what you’re talking about?