As it turns out, portraying your business as ultra-successful has its downsides.
“I’ve realized I hate making content for Instagram.”
Two successful business owners (Amanda Nowak and Rachel Ridgeway) have said this, separately, to me just this past week.
I feel the same way.
If you’re an online business owner (as in, your business exists primarily because of the Internet) you most likely have fallen into the same content-creation hamster wheel that I have. You know you have to make content to drive traffic, but you end up spending tons of time trying to figure out what the “algorithm” wants you to create, burning yourself out in the meantime.
And then there are those coaches.
You know the ones.
They have Reels of them walking the beach with a text overlay about how they’re taking “me time” to plan for the next quarter.
They’ve got photos of them laughing with a coffee mug on a shiny white countertop, which you assume must be their own countertop (right? how did they get into that house otherwise?)
They’re showing off videos of their recent purchases, all of which are designer and incredibly expensive. Everything is crisp, white, shiny.
They do photoshoots on balconies or coffee shops and they tell you how easy and fun their lives are because they make seven figures. Your life could be easy and fun, too, they say, if only you took their course or signed up for their coaching sessions.
When I run into these coaches (which I do, all the time) I often spend some time looking through their content and trying to figure out what it is that they actually do.
My rule of thumb: if you spend 5 minutes on someone’s website and it’s not clear how they make money…they probably don’t make money.
You can portray yourself ANY WAY YOU WANT on your own website/social media and there are no coaching police out there to catch you in a lie.
The catch?
Once you start portraying yourself as a super-successful, buy-everything-I-want, go-live-on-a-beach-while-making-six-figures coach, you have to keep doing it.
…even if that isn’t what you want to do anymore. Now it’s your brand.
It was 2019 and I’d been following a business owner/coach on social media for a while.
I liked her content:
- She appeared to be relatable and honest
- She showed her audience how she built a successful business
- It was clear what her business was and how it worked
- She offered courses to teach other people how to do a few very specific things
I signed up for her courses and learned a lot. Because the courses were so good, I also signed up for her group coaching.
I was (and am) happy with my purchases: this coach delivered on what she was telling her audience she was going to provide.
As the years went on, though, things began to change.
The “coaching coaches to coach” vibe that she once joked about started to creep into her content.
Suddenly, she was posting about big purchases she’d made: houses she’d bought, luxury cars, purses, jewelry, big renovations for those new properties.
What the hell was going on?
I remember asking a friend who knew her, “Is it just me, or is ____ turning into one of those coaches?”
After a while, her content became entirely about how much money she was making and how easily she was making it.
It reminded me of the feeling you get when you find a great TV show that, after a few seasons, suddenly takes a turn for the worse. They lose the plot. The characters make bizarre, seemingly random choices. New concepts are thrown in to keep the show fresh, but the reasons you originally loved it are gone.
The coach I once trusted for her honesty continued to post photos of her sipping coffee on shiny countertops. She kept buying new bags and posting screenshots of her income.
Who was all of this for? Had she changed or had she simply lost the plot?
The strangest thing about this type of “business owner” is that their entire business model becomes making money off of people who are paying them in order to learn how to make money off of other people.
I often wonder if the people who do buy their courses or coaching realize the irony of it all. I wonder if they realize that the dollars these coaches are flashing are quite literally the dollars the patrons just paid the coach.
The coach I once loved began to slow down on her posts after a couple of years. While they’d originally come every day, they now began to show up a few times a week. After a few months of that, they fizzled even further: now it was once a week, or a couple times a month.
Eventually, her accounts went completely dark. Zero new posts, no new Stories or Reels.
I found myself wondering if she was no longer making money worth bragging about.
I found myself wondering if she ever had.
