How “Teach People to Coach” Has Become the New MLM
The Coaching Pyramid: How "Teach People to Coach" Has Become the New MLM
There's a peculiar phenomenon sweeping through LinkedIn, Instagram, and every corner of the digital marketplace: coaches teaching people to become coaches, who then teach others to become coaches. If this sounds suspiciously like a pyramid scheme dressed in motivational quotes and pastel Instagram templates, you're not alone in thinking so.
The coaching industry, once a legitimate profession built on years of experience, training, and genuine expertise, has morphed into something that bears an uncomfortable resemblance to multi-level marketing schemes. And it's creating serious problems for everyone involved—except, perhaps, those at the very top of the pyramid.
The MLM Playbook, Repackaged
Traditional MLMs operated on a simple premise: recruit people to sell products, but make most of your money from recruiting more sellers rather than actually selling products. The "coaching about coaching" model follows an eerily similar pattern.
Here's how it works: Someone completes a weekend certification course (or sometimes no formal training at all), declares themselves a "life coach" or "business coach," struggles to find actual clients, then pivots to the far more lucrative business of teaching others how to become coaches. Their primary income doesn't come from coaching clients through genuine transformations—it comes from selling courses, masterminds, and "coach certification programmes" to aspiring coaches.
The pitch is seductive: "I made six figures in six months as a coach, and I can teach you how to do the same!" What they often fail to mention is that those six figures came almost entirely from selling coaching courses to other would-be coaches, not from actual coaching work.
The Red Flags
Several warning signs indicate you've stumbled into the coaching MLM ecosystem:
The Timeline Doesn't Add Up: Someone who became a coach eight months ago is now selling a premium programme on how to build a successful coaching business. They haven't had time to develop genuine expertise, build a substantial client base, or navigate the challenges of running a sustainable coaching practice.
The Income Claims: Flashy promises of five or six-figure months, often accompanied by screenshots of payment platforms (which, conveniently, don't show refunds or actual profit margins after expenses). These claims mirror the income opportunity presentations that made MLMs so controversial.
The Constant Recruitment: Their content focuses less on the transformation they provide to actual coaching clients and more on recruiting the next cohort of coaches. Their ideal client isn't someone seeking genuine help—it's someone seeking to become a coach themselves.
The Vague Niche: They coach "coaches" or "service providers" or "women in business"—categories so broad they're essentially meaningless, requiring no deep expertise in any particular field.
The Cookie-Cutter System: They promise a "proven framework" or "signature system" that anyone can replicate, regardless of background or expertise. Real coaching, however, requires nuanced understanding that can't be packaged into a one-size-fits-all template.
Why This Harms Genuine Clients
For individuals genuinely seeking coaching support—whether for career transitions, personal development, or business growth—this proliferation of inexperienced "coaches teaching coaching" creates significant problems:
Difficulty Identifying Legitimate Expertise: The market has become so saturated with newly minted coaches that finding someone with substantial experience and a proven track record has become genuinely challenging. The signal-to-noise ratio is abysmal.
Diluted Standards: When anyone can call themselves a coach after a weekend course (or no course at all), the profession loses credibility. This makes it harder for qualified, experienced coaches to command appropriate fees and easier for charlatans to exploit vulnerable people.
Mismatched Expectations: Clients may invest thousands in coaching, expecting transformation from someone who presents themselves as an expert, only to discover their coach has minimal real-world experience and is essentially learning on the job—at the client's expense.
Potential Harm: Coaching can delve into sensitive areas of people's lives. An inexperienced coach, lacking proper training in ethics, boundaries, and recognising when issues require therapeutic intervention rather than coaching, can cause genuine psychological harm.
Why This Damages the Industry
The long-term consequences for the coaching profession are severe:
Erosion of Trust: As more people have disappointing experiences with inexperienced coaches, or witness the obvious pyramid-like structure of "coaching about coaching," trust in the entire industry diminishes. This affects even the most qualified, ethical practitioners.
Regulatory Backlash: The wild-west nature of the current coaching landscape may eventually prompt heavy-handed regulation. Whilst some oversight might be beneficial, knee-jerk regulatory responses could create barriers that harm legitimate practitioners.
Devaluation of the Profession: When everyone's a coach, no one is. The proliferation of under-qualified practitioners drives down perceived value and makes it harder for experienced coaches to maintain sustainable practices.
Talent Drain: Promising coaches who might have developed genuine expertise instead get caught in the "teach coaching" cycle because it's more immediately lucrative. The industry loses the deep practitioners it desperately needs.
The Economic Reality
The uncomfortable truth is that the "teach people to coach" model persists because genuine coaching—the kind that requires years of experience, ongoing professional development, and deep expertise—is actually quite difficult to scale and monetise quickly.
Building a sustainable coaching practice takes time. You need to develop genuine expertise, establish credibility, generate referrals, and continuously improve your skills. It's far slower than selling a £2,000 course to 50 aspiring coaches.
This creates a perverse incentive structure where the fastest path to "coaching income" isn't becoming an excellent coach—it's teaching others to become coaches, regardless of whether you're qualified to do so.
What Genuine Coaching Looks Like
Legitimate, experienced coaches typically have several distinguishing characteristics:
- Substantial experience in their niche before becoming a coach (often 10+ years)
- Ongoing professional development and supervision
- Specific, demonstrable expertise in a defined area
- Client results they can point to (with appropriate confidentiality)
- Realistic timelines for building a coaching practice
- Primary income from actual coaching, not from teaching others to coach
- Appropriate boundaries around what coaching can and cannot address
- Transparency about their qualifications and experience
Moving Forward
If you're seeking a coach, ask hard questions: How long have they been practising? What's their background in the area you need support? What percentage of their income comes from actual coaching versus teaching others to coach? Can they provide references or case studies?
If you're considering becoming a coach, ask yourself: Do I have substantial expertise to share? Am I prepared to invest years in developing my skills? Am I interested in the actual work of coaching, or primarily in the income promises?
And if you're already a coach, consider: Are you contributing to the problem or the solution? Are you recruiting more coaches because you have genuine wisdom to share about the profession, or because it's more profitable than doing the hard work of actual coaching?
The coaching industry has immense potential to support people through transitions, unlock potential, and facilitate genuine growth. But that potential is being squandered by a pyramid-like structure that prioritises recruitment over transformation.
It's time we acknowledged the problem and demanded better—for clients, for the profession, and for the coaches who are doing the real work.
Digging Deeper: The Anatomy of the Coaching-to-Coaching Pipeline
Let's pull back the curtain further on how this system perpetuates itself, why it's so appealing despite its flaws, and what the broader implications are for both individuals and society.
The Vulnerability Funnel
The coaching MLM model doesn't target just anyone—it specifically appeals to people in vulnerable positions, much like traditional MLMs. Understanding this targeting is crucial to seeing why the system is so problematic.
The Recently Redundant: Someone who's just lost their job, perhaps in their 40s or 50s, facing an ageist job market. The promise of reinventing themselves as a coach, being their own boss, and turning their "life experience" into income is incredibly appealing.
The Burnt-Out Professional: The corporate refugee who's exhausted from the rat race and desperate for meaningful work. They're sold the dream of "making an impact" whilst working from a laptop on a beach.
The Stay-at-Home Parent: Someone who's taken career breaks for childcare and feels disconnected from their previous profession. Coaching is pitched as flexible, home-based, and requiring no specific qualifications—perfect for school runs and nap times.
The Chronically Ill or Disabled: People who need flexible work arrangements and are told coaching can be done entirely remotely, on their own schedule, with minimal physical demands.
The Recently Qualified: Fresh graduates facing a competitive job market, or career changers who've invested in coaching qualifications and now need to recoup that investment quickly.
These aren't bad people making foolish decisions—they're often people in genuinely difficult circumstances being offered what appears to be a lifeline. The problem is that lifeline is attached to a system designed to extract money from them rather than genuinely support their success.
The Psychological Manipulation Tactics
The parallels with MLM psychology are striking:
Toxic Positivity: Any doubts or concerns are reframed as "limiting beliefs" or "scarcity mindset." If you're not succeeding, it's because you're not "showing up" enough, not because the business model is fundamentally flawed. This shifts all blame onto the individual whilst protecting the system from criticism.
The Cult of Personality: Success is attributed to the guru's special system rather than luck, timing, existing audience, or the fact that their income comes from selling the system itself. Followers develop parasocial relationships with these figures, trusting them implicitly.
Manufactured Urgency: "Only 10 spots left!" "Doors closing at midnight!" "Investment in yourself!" The pressure to make quick decisions prevents proper due diligence and critical thinking.
Social Proof Engineering: Testimonials from people who've "made back their investment" (often by immediately turning around and selling the same programme to others), carefully curated success stories, and glossy case studies that omit crucial context.
The Sunk Cost Trap: Once someone has invested £2,000, £5,000, or £10,000 in a coaching programme, they're psychologically committed. To admit it was a mistake feels unbearable, so they double down—often by trying to recruit others to recoup their losses.
Love Bombing and Community: These programmes create intense community experiences—Voxer groups, accountability pods, live calls. The social connection becomes as addictive as the promise of income, making it harder to leave even when results don't materialise.
The Content Mill Problem
Here's where things get particularly insidious: the coaching-about-coaching model has created an entire ecosystem of recycled, surface-level content.
Coach A learns from Guru B, then teaches essentially the same material to Coach C, who teaches it to Coach D. None of them have substantially different expertise or perspectives. They're all regurgitating the same frameworks, using the same buzzwords, posting the same "vulnerable" stories (that are actually carefully crafted marketing).
This creates several problems:
Echo Chamber Epistemology: Ideas never get tested against reality because everyone's teaching rather than doing. Bad advice perpetuates because there's no feedback loop from actual client outcomes.
Intellectual Homogeneity: The coaching world becomes ideologically uniform. Certain mantras go unquestioned: "Charge your worth!" "Six figures is just a mindset!" "If you're not booked out, you're playing small!" These may sound empowering but often lack nuance or applicability to individual circumstances.
The Death of Expertise: Why spend 10 years becoming genuinely expert at something when you can do a weekend course and start "teaching" immediately? This devalues deep knowledge and rewards superficial credibility.
The Financial House of Cards
Let's talk numbers, because the mathematics of this model reveal its fundamental instability.
Imagine a coach charges £2,000 for their "become a coach" programme. They sell it to 50 people. That's £100,000 in revenue—impressive! But here's what happens next:
Those 50 people now need to recoup their £2,000 investment. The easiest way? Sell the same programme to others. But if each of them needs to find 50 people to match their mentor's success, that's 2,500 people in the next tier. Then 125,000 in the tier after that.
The mathematics are identical to MLM structures. The model only works whilst there's an ever-expanding pool of new recruits. Eventually, market saturation is inevitable.
But unlike MLM products (which at least theoretically have end consumers who aren't sellers), the coaching-about-coaching model has no end consumer. It's coaches all the way down. When the pool of aspiring coaches dries up, the entire structure collapses.
The Credentialism Paradox
Here's a fascinating contradiction: the coaching industry simultaneously dismisses formal credentials whilst creating its own credentialing system.
Traditional coaching qualifications—ICF accreditation, psychology degrees, counselling training—are often dismissed as unnecessary or even limiting. "You don't need permission to help people!" "Your lived experience is enough!" "Certifications are just gatekeeping!"
Yet these same voices then sell their own certifications, frameworks, and "proprietary methods." They've simply replaced established credentialing systems with their own, self-created ones—but without the accountability, ethical oversight, or educational rigour of established professional bodies.
This creates a two-tier system: established coaches with recognised qualifications, and a parallel universe of self-certified coaches whose credentials mean nothing outside their specific guru's ecosystem. The latter group often doesn't realise they've been sold worthless credentials until they try to establish credibility with sophisticated clients.
The Harm to Specific Populations
Certain groups are disproportionately harmed by this system:
Those with Genuine Mental Health Needs: People who actually need therapy or psychiatric support are sometimes told that coaching can address their issues. Unqualified coaches, not trained to recognise serious mental health conditions, may inadvertently cause harm or delay appropriate treatment.
Small Business Owners: Legitimate small business owners seeking genuine business coaching may encounter "business coaches" whose only business experience is selling coaching about coaching. The advice they receive may be completely inapplicable to their actual business model.
The Broader Economic Context
This phenomenon doesn't exist in a vacuum—it's a symptom of larger economic problems:
Precarious Employment: The gig economy, zero-hours contracts, and job insecurity make people desperate for alternatives. Coaching is marketed as a stable, self-directed income stream in an unstable world.
Credential Inflation: Traditional career paths require ever-more qualifications for diminishing returns. Coaching is positioned as a shortcut—monetise what you already know without years more education.
The Financialisation of Everything: We've been taught that everything must be monetised. Your hobbies, your trauma, your personal growth—all of it should generate income. Coaching fits perfectly into this narrative.
The Attention Economy: Social media rewards aspirational content over substantive expertise. A coach with 100,000 Instagram followers but minimal actual experience will out-earn a deeply qualified coach with 500 followers, regardless of who provides better outcomes.
What Legitimate Coach Training Actually Involves
To understand how far the "weekend certification" model has strayed from professional standards, consider what robust coach training actually includes:
Hundreds of Hours of Study: Proper coaching psychology, adult learning theory, behaviour change models, neuroscience, communication skills, business ethics.
Supervised Practice: Extensive real coaching hours under the supervision of experienced practitioners who provide feedback and guidance.
Personal Development: Deep self-awareness work, addressing one's own biases, triggers, and limitations—because you can't take clients further than you've gone yourself.
Ethical Training: Understanding boundaries, recognising scope of practice, knowing when to refer to other professionals, maintaining confidentiality, managing power dynamics.
Ongoing Professional Development: Continuous learning, peer supervision, staying current with research, regular skills refreshers.
Specialisation: Developing genuine expertise in a specific domain—executive leadership, career transitions, health behaviour change—through both study and extensive practice.
This takes years, not weekends. It requires intellectual humility, not the confidence to start "teaching" immediately.
The Defense: "But I'm Helping People!"
When confronted with these criticisms, coaching-about-coaching practitioners typically respond: "But I'm helping people build businesses! I'm empowering them to make an income! Who are you to gatekeep?"
This defense deserves examination. Are they actually helping?
If the people they've "helped" can only make money by replicating the same model—teaching others to coach rather than doing actual coaching work—then no, they haven't helped them build sustainable businesses. They've recruited them into the same pyramid structure.
If their students succeed only by targeting the same vulnerable populations with the same misleading promises, they haven't empowered anyone—they've simply expanded the harm.
Real help would involve: honest disclosure about success rates, realistic timelines for building a practice, acknowledgment of the challenges, emphasis on developing genuine expertise, and primary focus on creating excellent coaches rather than profitable ones.
The Industry's Reckoning
Some positive developments are emerging:
Increased Skepticism: More people are publicly questioning the coaching-about-coaching model, writing articles, creating content that exposes the problems.
Professional Body Responses: Organisations like the ICF are working to establish clearer standards, though enforcement remains challenging.
Client Education: Sophisticated clients are asking harder questions, demanding evidence of expertise, and seeing through superficial credibility markers.
Guru Fatigue: The market may be reaching saturation. The same promises, the same launches, the same testimonials—people are becoming numb to it.
However, as long as economic precarity exists and social media rewards aspirational content over substance, the fundamental conditions that enable this model will persist.
For Those Already Caught in the System
If you're reading this and recognising yourself—perhaps you've invested in one of these programmes, or you've been teaching coaching despite limited experience—what now?
First, self-compassion. You weren't stupid or gullible. You were targeted by sophisticated marketing during a vulnerable time. That's not a moral failing.
Second, honest assessment. Are you genuinely helping your clients achieve meaningful outcomes? Are you qualified to do what you're claiming to do? Is your income primarily from coaching or from recruiting other coaches?
Third, consider pivoting. If you have genuine expertise in a specific area, focus on developing that. Get proper training. Accumulate real hours with real clients. Build slowly and sustainably rather than trying to scale immediately.
Fourth, break the cycle. Don't recruit others into a system you now recognise as problematic. If you teach coaching, do so ethically—with honest success rates, appropriate prerequisites, and focus on genuine skill development.
The Path Forward
The coaching industry can be valuable. Genuine, experienced coaches do provide meaningful support for people navigating transitions, developing skills, and achieving goals. But the current trajectory is unsustainable.
We need:
- Radical transparency about success rates, income realities, and timelines
- Higher barriers to entry—not to gatekeep, but to protect clients
- Clearer distinctions between coaching, therapy, consulting, and mentoring
- Accountability mechanisms for practitioners who cause harm
- Cultural shift away from "everyone can be a coach" towards "coaching requires genuine expertise"
- Economic alternatives so people aren't driven to predatory business models out of desperation
The coaching-about-coaching model thrives on information asymmetry, economic desperation, and the human desire for meaning and autonomy. Addressing it requires tackling all three.
Until then, buyer beware—and seller, examine your conscience.