Contributed by SBOC Member:
Founder of the Small Business Owners Community
You paid for the course. You showed up to the webinar. You followed the steps. And then you realized the steps didn’t actually get you anywhere, because the person teaching them left out the part that matters. These are classic business coaching red flags.
Congratulations, you just got Guru’d.
It’s happened to all of us. Pat Miller said it on today’s Businessing: “Raise your hand if you got sucked in by a guru before. Me. My name’s Pat Miller and I got sucked in by a guru.”
So how do you tell the difference between someone who’s actually trying to help you and someone running you through step one of their sales funnel? Pat laid out some warning signs that are worth memorizing.
The first business coaching red flag to watch for is advice that only makes sense as an on-ramp to more paid work. Ask: can you begin to implement and move forward without ever having to contact this person again?
Good advice gives you something you can act on right now. A worksheet, an actual tool, a set of first steps with a check-in in two weeks. If the advice only makes sense as an on-ramp to more paid work, that’s a flag.
This is the biggest business coaching red flag of them all — and it’s the one most people don’t recognize until it’s too late.
Coaches will frequently, and Pat said this out loud knowing full well coaches were listening, “show them what to do but not how to do it.”
You go to a webinar that says here’s how your SEO should look. Cool. Then you go to implement the SEO and realize you don’t actually know how to do it. The how is behind the paywall. You know enough of what it should look like, but you can’t execute it. That gap is by design.
When someone diagnoses your problem and the prescription is their own content, pay attention. “I’ve seen that problem before. Here’s the book that I wrote and here are three videos from me.” That means there’s more coming.
Sometimes coaches genuinely have resources standing by and they’re ready to help. But if we’re looking for instinctual warning signs, self-referential recommendations are one of them.
Pat put it simply: “Don’t take advice from people that haven’t done what you’re asking them to help you do.”
His analogy: “I want to go to Toledo. Cool. Have you been to Toledo? No, but I can get you to Toledo.” Red flag. If they haven’t been there or aren’t currently there, they can’t guide you.
One of the strongest defenses against business coaching red flags is having other business owners around you who’ve been through it. Inside the SBOC community, someone raised this exact question and the responses were immediate. People who’d been burned before could point out the patterns. That’s the value of not building alone: collective pattern recognition.
Listen to the full episode: Businessing with Pat Miller
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BusinessingShow
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/businessing-with-pat-miller/id1870663109
Fridays Off Newsletter: https://fridaysoffnewsletter.com
Pat spent two decades in broadcasting management and hosting. After leaving the radio industry, he spent time consulting small businesses and realized the support system for entrepreneurs was broken. Where could you find help for improving small businesses and building real connections with other like-minded people. In June of 2020, the Idea Collective Small Business Community was born.