Let’s be honest, you’re going to see a lot of Halloween-esque episodes in your podcast player this week, but the shit we’re talking about today is downright terrifying. Danielle Ryan is a Vancouver based content creator who creates a mix of educational and commentary content as an entrepreneur of over six years. She shares a lot of her experiences, both building a business as well as, and this is what we’re going to talk about today, calling out problematic behavior in the business coaching industry. We are talking about coaches coaching coaches and other pyramid schemes in the online industry.
I have followed her for a few years and I love her honest takes. If you follow her on Instagram, you’ll get tons of funny, “I made a million dollars in four minutes, pay me 2 million to teach you how” kind of thing. It just such a good conversation and it felt really fitting because let’s be honest, this is definitely the spookiest part of my job. It is navigating the waters of helping people market ethically but still effectively, and yeah, she’s so passionate about it, you’re going to feel her energy.
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Table of Contents
Who Is Danielle Ryan?
My name’s Danielle and I’m based in Vancouver, BC Canada. I’ve been an entrepreneur now since 2018 and in that time I’ve owned a couple different businesses. I started as a yoga studio owner originally, and in 2022 I decided to kind of flip my life upside down, sell all my things and move across the country. So I closed that yoga business and went full-time into content creation, freelance UGC work, that sort of thing. I also have a YouTube channel now, and I make a lot of content over there, specifically discussing what I believe to be problematic behavior found in the life spiritual and business coaching spaces.
It all stemmed from my own personal experience hiring a coach back when I started that original business in 2018. I also, for a brief period of time, thought that I would be a life coach and I did an $8 certification online and tried to sell that in conjunction with my yoga business. So it’s been quite an interesting journey and now I won’t shut up about it, so I’m super excited to talk to you.
You started talking about online business scams after you hired your own business coach, can you talk about that experience?
I often tell people the story of my first investment I made which was in 2018, but the reality is that I did not tell a single person how much money I had spent hiring this coach until at least 2021, if not 2022. I felt like I needed to keep it a secret, I was embarrassed, and honestly feeling so much shame. I really felt like “nobody needs to know.”
If you think about the psychology behind these investments and how much I know, at least in my experience and from the hundreds of people that I’ve talked to at this point, we gaslight ourselves into trying to grasp at things that we took away from our period of mentorship.
So I hired my original coach to help me start my yoga slash lifestyle coaching business, and she would just tell me to write in my journal as if I had a successful business and that’s how I was going to be successful. That’s not worth the $4,500 that I paid, but I would tell myself, “oh, I feel so much more confident in myself and I know how to show up online and I believe in myself” when the reality was I should have been like “Danielle, what are you doing?”
I feel like we have a tendency to blame ourselves when it comes to bad investments, like “did I not do the work” or “did I not believe enough” in the case of manifestation. Why do you think that it?
I think that’s a byproduct of how people in the industry act as a whole. A lot of these coaches do this as a way of skirting responsibility or not having to take accountability for their own behaviour. They put the onus on the client of like, “well, maybe Danielle, you didn’t do your due diligence when you made this investment. It was your problem that you didn’t discern that this wasn’t the right program for you.”
Or like you said, “the reason you didn’t get results is because you didn’t stay in the belief long enough and you didn’t truly think that you were capable.” These are all just excuses for the coach to not have to recognize that they sold me on something they couldn’t deliver on.
Do you think the amount of the investment makes a difference in how we feel about online business scams? I feel like with certain things we’ve normalized spending $20K on a mastermind but if you talk to someone OUTSIDE the online space they are like, you spend HOW MUCH?
I think the interesting piece is when you are in it, it doesn’t sound crazy, does it? I remember, this is a story I’ve told a few times, but before I hired that original first coach that I paid $4,500 to, I had actually been on a sales call about a week or two prior with a different coach who was charging $6,000 US I think, and I’m based in Canada, so with the exchange rate it was over $8,000 and that to me was like, that’s way too much money. So then, when I got on this other sales call a couple of weeks later where it was $4,500, I was like, this is a sale.
Now, objectively, I’m like, “$4,500 is a lot of money and I could do a lot of other things with that,” but at the time, the high prices just have become so normalized within the industry. You see people starting their business tomorrow and charging $10,000 because their coach told them that they should.
I’ve heard you talk about this before, but when we end up paying so much for online business coaches, we need to raise our prices, which ends up making everything more expensive because our costs are so high.
Exactly, so I saw a thread, this is a few months ago now, of this woman talking about how she ended up having to get a part-time job because her business expenses were so high. She was in the coaching industry working with coaches. And I just felt like, I run a business now and my costs are about 10 to 15% of my income. I can’t imagine running a business that’s not a product-based business or something that would traditionally have pretty high overhead where your costs are exceeding your income because you’re paying this mentor so much money. To me that is just unfathomable.
What do you think is one of the biggest offenders when it comes to online business scams?
I think that what I’m seeing as an online business scam trends, and I was just discussing this with someone the other day, is something you see in every single industry. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a coach, whether a service provider, whatever. The biggest trend that I’ve started to really notice, and I’ve been talking about this more on my YouTube channel, is people no longer doing the thing, whatever the thing is, and instead selling other people on the idea of doing the thing.
So for example, I myself am a UGC creator. Brands hire me to create silly little tiktoks that they can run as Facebook ads. What I’m seeing in my space is tons of other UGC creators no longer creating silly little tiktoks. Instead, they’re selling eBooks, courses, whatever, teaching you how you could become a UGC creator, but then posting on Instagram or Threads saying, “I make a hundred thousand dollars as a UGC creator.”
Then, when you look at their income breakdown, they’re only making a thousand dollars a month from UGC, and then they’re making $20,000 a month selling their UGC course. And I mean, I’ve seen that in coaching. I’ve seen it in the virtual assistant space. I’ve seen it everywhere. So many people want to make a lot of money, and the easiest way to make money is to convince other people that you know how to make a lot of money.
When it comes to pyramid schemes and online business scams, can you talk about the whole “coaches coaching coaches to coach coaches” phenomenon?
This ties back into this idea of like, “well, I’m not going to be a life coach because to be quite frank, not a ton of people are out there looking for life coaching and it’s much more lucrative for me to coach other coaches on how they could be the life coach, because as long as I’m making money, it doesn’t matter to me that they’re not making money.”
I’ve shared this story on my YouTube channel, but I’ll share it here as well: the first time I kind of noticed that this was a trend was in 2019, I was still doing my yoga business. I had started an online membership platform, so it was like a monthly subscription where I would livestream yoga classes. Then, I was also tying in that mindset coaching sort of work. So I had these little master classes that I would post on there. And so basically my target audience was just people that were like me that just wanted to do a little personal development, and do a little bit of yoga.
I was also working with a different coach, so not the original one I had hired, but a marketing specific coach. And she said to me, “Danielle, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to stop teaching yoga. You’re not making enough money. Instead, you should teach other people how to quit their jobs and open a yoga business.”
Keep in mind, I was making less than $20,000 from just the yoga specific portion of my business at this point in time. And I looked at her and I was like, but I’m not making a full-time income as a yoga teacher. That doesn’t seem ethical to me to sell people on something I’m not doing.
Why do you think so many of these business coaches charging a ton of money and offering very little (essentially an online business scam) have so many “ride or dies” cheering them on in the comments section?
I call it drinking the coaching Kool-Aid, so we’ll just go with that. But the people who haven’t yet realized or woken up, I guess, are typically the ones that are in those positions. And again, I say this as someone who at one point was drinking the Kool-Aid, and I would’ve been in my coach’s comments being like, “oh my God, you’re so inspirational.”
Because again, speaking to our original conversation, I had been gaslighting myself thinking, “oh, she’s great. She taught me all this stuff.” At the time, I still thought that her work was valuable and that I was getting value out of it. And so I think to be quite frank, a lot of the people that are presenting online that way are still sort of in it and they haven’t seen what’s going on.
And I say this, having had a conversation with someone on my YouTube channel, where she was talking about how she had hired this coach and given this glowing testimonial, and the coach posted it publicly online and now it’s been six months, a year, two years since then. And now, she feels like actually she didn’t get as much out of it, and asked to have it taken down and the coach refused.
So it’s super interesting then to think about, “okay, at what point in time are these coaches gathering testimonials?” And I think that it’s likely when people are still riding that high after investing. How outdated are they? Because I know I’ve looked at a few coaches websites, obviously I keep tabs on a few people for content’s sake, and they have the same testimonials they had two years ago. So it’s like where are your new clients and how are they feeling?
Do you feel like the more debt you’re in, the easier it is to ignore some of these online business scams?
Yeah, so I there’s that sunk cost fallacy of like, “okay, so I spent $2,000 on Kara’s program and I didn’t really get results, but Jenny’s program is just another $3,000, so what’s the difference? Might as well invest, I’ll get it back eventually.”
That’s what a lot of these coaches do on sales calls and in their marketing to convince you. They use the word investment for the purpose of trying to make you think that you’re going to get value out of it. And so once again, once you see what’s going on, it’s really hard to ignore. Now, if I read through a sales page, I’ll instantly get the ick if I see specific words that I’m just like, this person is trying to trick me.
Do you believe there is value in business coaching or have you veto’d it entirely?
Yeah, I think for me personally, I’m not in a position right now where I would hire a coach, but I don’t think that’s to say that all coaching is horrible. There are certainly people that I’ve connected with even through specific videos that I’ve made and just like being on the internet who are doing valuable work in the coaching space. My partner is an entrepreneur too and he’s been connected with mentors through our university that have been incredibly valuable for him too (mind you, he’s not paying them any money to get the mentorship.)
I think that there are, especially in the entrepreneur space, better options often than hiring a coach. I think that networking, building a strong community of people that can give you that kind of more candid feedback is super valuable. And I’m in a position where I have that support system, thankfully, so I don’t really see the value in paying someone a significant amount of money to get that.
I think that if I were to hire support in my business, it would be more in the capacity of consulting or systems, someone who comes in and actually tells me what to do. But again, I don’t think that it’s fair to say that all coaching is bad.
What are some red flags when hiring a business coach if we want to avoid some of these online business scams?
Knowing what your end goal or desire is, is super important. Take me for example, six years ago, I’m starting my business, and I don’t know anything about business. I don’t even know what I should put on my website. I don’t know anything. So I didn’t have a specific end goal in mind because I just didn’t know. And so hiring a coach that is telling me they’re going to magically help me figure this out, that should have been a red flag. But again, you don’t know what you don’t know. So if you’re in a position where you don’t have this specific goal that you’re trying to achieve, hiring a mentor probably isn’t going to get you anywhere because they won’t even know where to lead you.
The value of having a coach, I think, is being able to guide you and hold you accountable to achieving whatever that specific outcome is that you’re trying to get to. So yeah, first thing is, know what it is you want help with. And again, ask yourself, is this something that a coach is going to be best for? Or am I more fit to hire an expert in a specific topic to help me get there?
Because I think a lot of the times what I’ve seen is this overlap of coaches calling themselves coaches, but then cosplaying as more of a consultant. The role of a coach isn’t actually to tell you how to do anything. They’re just there to ask questions and guide you to figure it out on your own. So if you are in business, and let’s say you want to start email marketing and learn how to sell to your email list, hiring a coach might not be the best choice. You’d be better off hiring an email marketing consultant that can actually help you set that system up.
So really knowing where you’re at now, where you want to get to, and what the best option to take you from A to B, is super important.
I think too, this was something that someone brought up to me and I thought it was super valuable, is if you come across someone online and you think like, “oh, Sally looks pretty cool, maybe I’ll consider hiring her, go through their sales page, the testimonials and look those people up.”
Because I was listening to a woman tell a story where she was like, gung-ho, ready to hire this person. And she was some kind of online service provider, whether it was a VA or OBM, I’m not sure. Anyway, she started going through all the testimonials and it turned out they were all also coaches, and she was like, wait a minute, this person is a coach that coaches coaches, and I need help with my VA/OBM business, so this isn’t going to be a right fit.
So just being extra careful, I think, which is unfortunate. I wish we could just show up online and believe what people are saying. But we can’t, so that would be my biggest piece of advice.
I know when I was trying to grow my wedding planning business, there was a lot of people who would teach me how to MAKE MONEY in my wedding business, and very few that would teach me how to be a better wedding planer. Do you find that too?
I think that’s the most common complaint I get. Especially the unknowing, beginner entrepreneurs that want to start a coaching business or want to start whatever it is where they hire this person to teach them marketing and sales, but none of them are actually teaching proper coaching. Even if we look at the coaches who coach coaches on how to be a coach, those people are only teaching the sales. They’re not really teaching the, again, coaches shouldn’t be teaching anything, but they’re cosplaying as consultants, we’ve covered this, but they’re not actually addressing how to be a coach so much as teaching “how to get 10 people to buy your $5,000 program by following this formula.”
There’s no focus on the actual delivery of service so much as how to just make money. And like yes, sales and marketing is important, but if you’re just selling air, it’s going to blow up at some point, and that’s why we end up with all these Reddit threads of all these people (which by the way, if you want to hire someone, search their name and the word Reddit and have fun).
Plus, I think another interesting piece that I’d like to bring up too that kind of ties into this conversation is, again, when you’re trying to discern whether or not this person is a valuable mentor, really paying attention to whether or not they’re using their own success as the qualifier for why you should hire them or if they have a track record of helping other people be successful.
I think about this specifically in the YouTube space, obviously because I’m a YouTuber, there’s a lot of YouTube channels built on how to be successful on YouTube, but if you look at those channels, very few of them actually have other channels that aren’t about how to grow on YouTube, and so it’s like, okay, so you’re going to teach me how to go from one to 10,000 subscribers in a month because you did that by teaching other people how to do that.
We need to ask: have you actually done it in practice or do you have clients that have done it? Is there a track record of you doing this? Because again, business coaching space, we see messages like “I built a half a million dollar business in two years,” but what results are your clients getting? Are you actually able to duplicate the thing that you’ve done for yourself? And I just think that’s super important because it can be really easy to fall for, “learn how to grow on Instagram.” for example, when those platforms have only been built through selling people on the idea that they can do it too.
Do you feel like extended payment plans (framed as “to make things more accessible”) lend themselves to online business scams?
I think this kind of ties into where your ethical or moral compass is at. For me, it’s none of my business how clients want to pay me. I’m never going to ask someone, well, do you have this money in your bank account? However, that being said, if I’m giving a client an invoice and they say to me, oh, I’m going to need to put this on a credit card, or, oh, I’m going to need you to break it up into five separate payments. For me personally, I would be like, well, maybe this isn’t the right time to work together. Perhaps you should come back in six months when you’ve saved the money.
Anyone who’s encouraging you to pay immediately, go into debt, take out a credit card, get a line of credit, et cetera… that to me is a huge indicator that they want to make money or them making money is more important than your wellbeing as the client. Some people might disagree with that. I think that there’s value in having a payment plan that makes the price more accessible, but the trend that I’ve seen a lot and is taught actually from people I’ve spoken with is if you’re going to make a payment plan, then you make the price more expensive because the cost of you not being able to have the money right away, but to me, that’s bullshit.
I guess my answer is that I have mixed feelings. I think there is value in making things with payment plans, and try to make thing accessible, but if you’re putting someone in a financially compromising position just so that they’ll hire you, that’s where I draw the line.
Last question: do you feel like the industry is getting better or worse?
As someone who is so deep in this, I’m making content every single week, and it’s like as soon as I think I’ve discovered everyone, somebody else doing something else completely ridiculous is coming out of the woodwork. So as much as I want to hope that people are definitely waking up and kind of realizing what’s going on here, I’m also well aware that it’s likely just going to transition or morph into some other scheme that people are going to fall for.
Now we see MRR, digital products, all of that, because people are always going to want to learn how to make money, so the idea of selling people on how to make money is always going to exist. I think just how it looks might change and it’s already starting to change even.
For example, we’re seeing a lot of these celebrity coaches shifting their marketing into their soft girl era. So as much as I want to say it’s going to be over, it’s never going to be over.
How can people connect with you, work with you, and watch more of your videos?
In an effort to not make this podcast five hours long, you can come find me on YouTube. I have over a hundred videos talking about this, so lots to binge. It’s lots of fun. I live stream every Monday at 4:00 PM Pacific, so if you’re interested in hanging out with a bunch of people who love to snark on this kind of stuff, that’s a fun place to be. But I’m @itsdanielleryan everywhere on the internet, so come and find me!
LINKS MENTIONED
- Check out Danielle’s Website
- Follow Danielle on Youtube
- Follow Danielle on Instagram
- Learn more about working with our marketing agency here
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