Too much of the coaching business runs on one trick. It sells you a seat at the chef’s table and then serves you a frozen dinner out of the microwave, at steakhouse prices, with a smile. I’ve eaten that dinner twice, once from a coach I paid and once from a webinar that ate an hour of my life, and I’m still angry about both of them, years later.
I coach writers myself. A good coach is worth every dollar you pay.
The ones who sell reheated material at restaurant prices make me furious, because they count on you not knowing the difference. Most people don’t. They see a confident person on a video call with a polished program and a payment link, and they assume somebody cooked something. Somebody did cook it, once, years ago, in a factory, and it’s been sold to thousands of other people since.
The coach who sold me a course I already owned
A few years ago I paid a coach a couple of thousand dollars.
He sold me a package of 52 courses, one a week for a year. On paper that’s a lot of lessons for the money.
Then I looked at what I’d bought. It was PLR, private label rights material, a course in a box, and it was stuff I already had. The PLR had cost me a couple hundred bucks on my own. He’d charged me about ten times that for the same material.
Run the numbers on that markup. Is a coach entitled to charge ten times what he paid for something he didn’t write?
Would you pay a chef for a meal he pulled out of the same freezer case you shop from?
The course itself is okay if you’re a beginner. Somebody starting from zero would learn a few things from it. My complaint is the packaging. He sold a generic course in a box as coaching and charged coaching rates for material anybody can license online for the price of a nice dinner.
I hate that. It treats the buyer as a mark, and I was the mark.
At least now I listen to it. I paid for it twice, so I figure I’d better.
What is PLR content, and why do coaches resell it as their own?
PLR stands for private label rights. A writer or a content shop produces a pack of material, articles, ebooks, email sequences, worksheets or a whole course, and sells it with a license that lets each buyer edit it, put their own name on it and resell it. The packs are cheap because they’re sold to hundreds or thousands of buyers, and the same course can land in a dozen coaching programs in the same month. The license is the product.
There’s nothing illegal about PLR, and it has honest uses. A busy business owner can buy a pack of articles, rewrite them in their own voice and save a week of staring at a blank page. A trainer can use a PLR workbook as a skeleton and build real lessons on top of it. A course creator can license a PLR module on a narrow topic, tear it apart and rebuild it around examples from their own clients. Used as raw material, it’s a shortcut, and shortcuts are fine. I’ve bought PLR myself.
Trouble starts when somebody resells it untouched, under their own name, at a price that implies they wrote it. A so-called coach who buys a 52-week PLR course, slaps a logo on the cover and sells it as a signature program has spent an afternoon on branding and nothing on you. He’s betting you’ll never run a sentence through a search engine. Most buyers don’t, and he knows it. Somebody who paid a couple of thousand dollars wants to believe they bought something special, and he’s counting on that too.
So the markup survives. It sits right next to the other cons I’ve laid out in the freelancer’s scam playbook, with one difference: this one is technically legal, so nobody ever gets in trouble for it.
Would you go back to a restaurant that charged you steakhouse prices for a dinner you’d seen in the grocery store freezer? Would anybody?
He never let me finish a sentence
Half of it was the course. The calls were the other half.
I’d be talking, and he’d cut me off. Every time.
He’d give me the answer before I was done talking. He was in a hurry.
In my opinion that habit fits a canned course perfectly. A coach selling generic material gives generic advice, and generic advice doesn’t require hearing the specifics of anybody’s situation. Why listen when week 14 already says what week 14 says?
Interrupting isn’t the sin. When I’m writing a book with a client, some of them will talk at length about things that have nothing to do with the book, and we’d never finish if I let it run. So we agree at the start that I’ll stop them politely and steer us back on course, and they know it’s coming. A writer who wanders for twenty minutes on every call can burn a whole month of sessions without a usable page. My interruptions protect their book. His protected his calendar.
Compare that with the coaches I trade work with. An hour a month with one of them changed how I see my own business, and he lets me finish my sentences. Shouldn’t that be the minimum for a person whose whole job is listening to you?
The webinar that taught nothing
The second dinner came from a webinar. A company selling coaching services put it on, a few hundred people showed up, and the pitch was that webinars are the way to get business. Run webinars, the host said, and the clients will come.
Then he droned on and on about how great webinars are, blah blah blah, and how you should schedule another meeting so they could talk about what they could do for you.
I kept waiting for the tidbits of information: a script, a structure, one technique I could use the next morning.
Nothing came, and the clock kept running.
I quit halfway through.
“This is just a waste of my frigging time,” I thought.
A webinar selling webinars as a business tool couldn’t do the single thing a webinar exists to do, and it was supposed to be the sample. If their own webinar couldn’t hold me, why would I trust them to teach me to build one that holds anybody? Who signs up for swimming lessons from a guy who’s drowning in front of them? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a webinar done more poorly than that one.
And it probably worked a little. They had the advertising engine to fill the room, and when you pour a few hundred people into a funnel, a handful of them will sign up for anything. Those buyers will get the frozen dinner. If anything, it convinced me that maybe I should start doing some webinars myself.
If you have a hundred tips, give away at least ten. – Richard LoweShare on X
Why should a coaching webinar give away free advice?
Because the free part is the proof. My rule is simple arithmetic: if you have a hundred tips, you give away at least ten of them. Ten real ones, out loud, in the session, with nothing held back for the paid tier.
A good restaurant sends a little plate out to your table before the meal, because the cook knows one bite does more selling than any menu description. A webinar is that plate. If the host has a hundred useful things to teach and hands you ten, you leave knowing the other ninety are there, and you’ll pay for them.
If he hands you nothing, there are two possibilities. Either the kitchen is empty, or he thinks you’re too dumb to notice that it is.
Does either one deserve your money?
Count a tip only when you can use it tomorrow without buying anything. “Webinars build trust” doesn’t count. “Open with the result your audience wants, teach three specific steps toward it, and pitch for no more than the last ten minutes” counts. One is a slogan and the other is something you can do.
Ten tips cost a real expert almost nothing. They’ve got ninety more, plus the judgment to apply them to your situation, and the judgment is what people pay for. The hustlers can’t afford to give anything away. The free ten would be most of what they have.
How do you spot a canned coaching program before you pay?
Ask to see a full sample lesson before you pay. A sales page doesn’t count, and neither does a table of contents. You want a complete lesson, the same thing you’d get in week one. A coach who won’t show you one has told you something, hasn’t he?
Copy two or three distinctive sentences from that lesson and paste them into a search engine inside quotation marks. PLR shows up on dozens of sites at once, because every buyer posts it. If the same paragraphs appear on a stranger’s blog, a marketplace listing and three other coaching sites, you’ve found the freezer the dinner came from. It takes five minutes, and it would have saved me a couple of thousand dollars.
Ask the coach straight out who wrote the curriculum and whether any of it is licensed. A decent coach will tell you. Some will say they started from PLR and rewrote it heavily, and that’s fair. Walk away from the ones who get evasive or change the subject. That dodge is a confession.
Look at how the price splits between live time and recorded material. A 52-week program with one short group call a month is a content subscription wearing a coaching costume. If you want a content subscription, pay subscription prices for it, and don’t let anybody bill you for a coach you’ll barely see. Read the refund terms before you pay, in writing. Are people who sell reheated courses likely to be generous about refunds? Don’t count on it.
Watch for round-number structures with generic titles that could fit any industry. Fifty-two weeks, twelve modules, thirty days to a new you. Nothing’s wrong with any of those numbers, but if lesson titles like “Mindset for Success” could sit in a course for dentists or real estate agents or novelists without changing a word, nobody wrote them for you.
Writers should hold a book coach to a harder standard.
Real book coaches read your pages and tell you what’s wrong with them. No PLR pack has ever read a manuscript.
How can you tell a free webinar is just a sales pitch?
Start before you register. A sign-up page that promises secrets without naming a single one is selling the pitch. So is a host whose bio is mostly screenshots of income.
Once you’re in, watch the first fifteen minutes. Are they spent on the host’s life story, a rented car and testimonials? You’re watching an ad. Listen for the difference between what and how. A pitch tells you what to do, build an audience, run webinars, raise your prices, and saves the how for the paid program. A lesson tells you how, right there, for free, and you can try it before the replay link expires.
Countdown timers, bonuses that vanish at midnight, a replay that expires in 24 hours and “stay to the end for a special gift” all tell you the same thing. Want to guess what the gift turns out to be? A discount code. What a load of crap.
Count the usable tips at the halfway mark. If you’re at zero, leave.
Your hour is worth more than their conversion rate, and nobody’s going to pay you back for it.
Attendance counts shouldn’t impress anybody. A few hundred people in a room is an advertising budget talking, and vanity metrics fool authors into mistaking a crowd for results all the time.
Does a webinar ever deserve its pitch at the end? Of course.
Teach for forty minutes and sell for ten, and I’ll listen to every word of the ten. That host earned it.
What does a coach worth paying look like?
Coaches worth paying listen until you’re done. They ask questions about your situation, and the advice they give couldn’t have gone to the last client without changes. If the material is licensed, they say so. If they don’t know something, they say that too, and point you to somebody who does.
They also give you something useful before you pay them a cent, a free call, an article or a webinar with ten real tips in it. The best ones are almost careless about how much they give away. That’s my favorite kind of coach. They’re confident there’s more where it came from.
The rest of the industry wants you dependent, and business gurus are after your money for a plain reason: a successful client stops paying, so a bad coach has every reason to keep you a beginner forever. Why would he ever graduate you? Advice from people like that is worth checking before you act on any of it, so stop listening to the gurus and verify everything.
If you’re an author being pitched a marketing coach, read Sell Your Books: Marketing Without the Hype first, so you know what honest book marketing sounds like before somebody sells you the other kind.
Stop paying for the frozen dinner
I’m done being polite about this. A coach who resells a course in a box at ten times its price, or a company that runs an hour-long webinar and gives away nothing, is taking money and time from people who came to them trusting they’d get real help. Beginners pay the most for it, because they can’t tell the difference yet. How many of them quit on their business or their book because a hustler sold them a box of leftovers and called it coaching?
Check the kitchen before you sit down. Ask to see the food, search for where it came from and walk out the minute you’re served something reheated. If you’re writing a book and want coaching from somebody who reads your actual pages and lets you finish your sentences, start with the guides in the Technology of Writing hub, then look at my book coaching service. Everything there gets cooked to order, and none of it ever came out of somebody else’s freezer.
