The Difference Between Coaches and Consultants (and good vs bad!)

In this episode, I'm going to talk you through the different types of coaches there are for you and the signs to look out for when choosing the good ones. Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach. And welcome to the Weeniecast. Here's my promise to you. If you ever book a call with me,

come to Brave Biz Labs, which is the call that I do every single fourth Friday of the month, where I offer free business strategy and coaching to anyone who wants it or message me asking me about your business idea. I promise you that I will tell you if it sucks. And this is why I'm considering dropping the term coach from my title.

I recently had a conversation with one of my business partners. We're doing market research for a new offer that we're launching for a new business, and it's very exciting, but we're interviewing business owners about where they're struggling, what their idea is, how they want to grow, so on and so forth. And he was telling me about his most recent interview with a gentleman who has spent about two years trying to get his business off the ground. He hired a

coach who told him that his business idea was good. It is not. This coach also told him to stop creating content for social media on LinkedIn and to start just cold calling a bunch of investors and asking them for money. If you're also a trained coach, you know that this is not coaching. The term coach gets used in a lot of different ways. And I want to explain this first before we get into how you can really find the right coach, mentor, consultant, whatever it is

that you need for where you're at in your business. But before we get there, let's talk about what the definitions are so that it makes sense when we get there. Classical coaching, where you've gone to school, gotten trained, you either got trained in life coaching, leadership coaching, executive coaching. In traditional coaching, your coach is not telling you what to do. In traditional coaching, your coach is

literally asking you very open ended questions so that you can figure out your way of getting to your own goal. And if you don't know what your goal is, they're also asking you very clear, open ended questions so you can figure out what your goal is. In talking to my business partner, David, you know, he was saying it was really irresponsible of this guy's coach to not tell him

that his idea was bad. To which I said, well, actually, if he was following the ICF, the International Coaches Federation code of Ethics, he actually can't tell his client that his idea is bad. It is not a coach's responsibility to on their clients dreams. Now, obviously, I don't think this coach was following the ICF code of ethics because he was very clearly giving directions on what this person should and shouldn't do. Don't post on LinkedIn, just go and cold call, which is bad

advice. We're not doing that anywhere. It doesn't matter what kind of business you're in. We're not doing that. But it does open up a really interesting conversation around what coaching is and what it isn't. Now, there are coaches who are classically trained who are not going to give you answers, who are not going to tell you what to do. They're only ever going to ask you questions and help you figure out what you want to do.

This is how I was trained and I no longer really do this because it really doesn't matter how many questions I ask my clients about what they think they could do on a sales call. If they've never sold anything and have no idea about best practices for a sales call, me asking them a whole bunch of open ended questions isn't going to do to make them better at sales. One of the things that I learned in kind of stumbling along and changing my niche is that I really enjoy teaching. I really

enjoy sharing my expertise. I really enjoy helping people figure out which of the seven options to grow their business is the best option for them and then showing them exactly how they can take action on it. And in the world of coaching, the term coach gets very messy at this point because you have people who are trained coaches who think, okay, well, I'm not telling you what to do. I'm going to do classical coaching with you, and that's how I'm going to help

my clients. And that's valid. And then on the other side, you have people who are experts at a specific thing, like LinkedIn, copywriting, podcasting, and they can call themselves coaches because they are helping people with a very specific thing, but they're giving advice and they're teaching and they're sharing their expertise and knowledge. And then you have people like me who kind of like, bastardize both. You know, I'm so grateful for the training that I have as

a coach. I use a lot of it with my clients, but it's not the primary service that I offer. When my clients come to me with their business idea, I will tell them if it's a good idea or a bad idea, if it's a bad idea. I'll help them figure out what questions to ask to either figure out if they can improve it or is there something similar that we can switch to that

actually has a market for it? If it's a great idea, then we'll just jump right into creating a strategy to start making them money and getting them clients. So how do you know the difference? How do you as a business owner and also a business owner who like, has ADHD, who's already overwhelmed by all the options out there, how do you tell the difference between who a good coach is and who a bad coach

is? And when I say bad coach, they may not necessarily be bad. They may just not be right for what you need right now. So here's some things that you need to look at before you start looking for your coach. First and foremost, are you at the point where you need to start this business? If you're not, if you're still at the ideation phase, if you're still not sure if this is really what you want, if you're still toying with a bunch of other options in your life, I would actually

recommend that you work with a classical coach. I would recommend that you find a coach who is trained and certified, who follows the International Coaches Federation for the definition of coaching, who can help you discover what it is that you really want. Because it doesn't matter how much money you throw into starting a business if it's not actually something that you want and if you don't have a clear idea of how it's going to make your life better, I guarantee you

you're not going to do the work. And because you're not doing the work, you're not going to get the results. And because you're not getting the results, you're going to have zero return on investment for that program, those sessions, whatever it is that you signed up for, really take your time to make sure that this is the path that you want.

And the only way you can do that is by working with someone who's not giving you advice on it, who's genuinely asking you the right questions to help you figure out what you want your life to look like. There are some really shady coach schools out there. So here is the gold standard is you want to find someone who has been to a coaching school that is ICF recognized International

Coaches Federation. I personally know really talented coaches from the Coactive training institute where I was trained and certified, from IPEC, which is very similar to coactive and from accomplishment coaching. If you're looking for a coach like this, then you can also dm me on any of the social media platforms, or you can email me@katyatimcmanis.com and ask me if I can give you a recommendation. I'm happy to offer this to

anyone who's listening. If you need to figure out what your next steps are and you're not at the point where you know what kind of business you want to start, okay. But you do not want to sign up for a mentorship. You do not want to sign up for a program. Here's what I did and how you can do the same, because it's not going to work for you at this point. If you know you want to start a business and you have an idea, then you have to ask yourself this question.

Do you have a really clear idea of what you want this business to look like? And is there a model out there that already matches that perfectly? Because if there is and you're really good at following instructions, you can absolutely find someone who will mentor you, who's done exactly what you want to do, and will turn around and say, cool, here's what I did. Here's how I did it. Now go ahead and do the same. I will mention a caveat here, that this typically works better for people who are

neurotypical. So if you have ADHD, like most of my listeners do, because this is an ADHD business building podcast, these programs may not work for you. You know, you may take really useful tips from them, but a lot of the instructions, a lot of the processes in these programs just aren't designed for an ADHD brain. So make sure that if you want to sign up for something, that it's going to be the right fit for you.

Now, if you aren't really sure what you want it to look like and you don't really see a model out there that is like, oh, yeah, I want that. Then you're probably going to need to look for someone who kind of mixes coaching and consulting like I do. You want to look for someone who has a level of customization in their program that really

helps you find your way, but also add some expertise who also trains you on the bits that you don't even know, that you don't know. Okay. So now that you've asked those questions and you kind of have an idea of who you want to work with, here's how we spot the good ones and the bad ones, all right? Because there

are a lot of charlatans out there. There are a lot of people who are really profiting off the fact that this is not a regulated industry, and so we want to be able to spot them from a mile off. First and foremost, anyone who has a gazillion followers on social media and uses the fact that they have a gazillion followers on social media as proof that they're good at what they do. How many followers you have doesn't mean about the quality of service that you provide. It

has no correlation. Even if someone is a social media coach who trains people how to build their following on social media, if they're bragging about how many followers they have and not how many followers they're closer clients have gotten and how that has helped their business monetarily, they're not legit. They're selling some snake oil, and they're hoping that you

won't notice. Now, how do you spot these people? Because there are some good people out there who train on social media, who have massive followings, who actually provide a quality service, and they have massive following. So how do you tell the difference between someone who's good at what they do with a massive following and someone who's really at what

they do with a massive following? Here's the key is you go into their comment section and you see if the people who are commenting actually sound like real humans or if they sound like AI bots. It used to be a lot easier before OpenAI came out because you just like, go into their comment section and be like, great post. Thanks for sharing. Great post. Great push. Thanks for sharing. Wow. Now it's a little harder because it's now very stilted language that is obviously a robot

that's synthesizing whatever was in the post. And the comments that you'll see will basically be summarizing what the person said in their post. All these comments happen within a very quick succession after the post was made. If I post something, not all my people that follow me, that see my content and comment on my stuff, they're not all just waiting by their computer to be like, oh my God, did Katie post yet today? Like, I bet

she posted, I bet she posted. I'm just going to keep refreshing, refreshing, refreshing, refreshing. Oh my God, she posted something. I'm going to comment within 30 seconds of her posting this. No, that's not how it goes. I don't have that big of a following. I have like 17,000 followers on LinkedIn and then smaller amounts on the other platforms. That's okay. You don't need a massive following to have a multiple six figure business. You need solid people who are following you,

who are your ideal client. But even my posts that get a ton of engagement, that get hundreds of likes and hundreds of comments, you know, they happen over days. It doesn't happen all at once. So pay attention to what the comments say and when the comments were made and that'll tell you if someone is falsifying their engagement versus having legitimate engagement, their engagement is clue number one as to whether they're legit or not. Next, we want to go and we want to look at their testimonials.

Testimonials that are worth anything should be given after someone has completed work with a coach. One of the biggest red flags that I see when I go onto scammy coaches websites is all of their testimonials are from people who just signed

up for their thing. I just made payment and signed the contract. I'm so excited to start. Oh my God. I'm one week into the content and it's so helpful. This is going to be great. Just enrolled in the program. I've been following them forever. This is going to be so transformational to my business that doesn't help anyone, that doesn't have any proof of concept, that doesn't tell anyone about the results that they've

gotten after working with that person. When you go into someone's website, you want to look for testimonials that speak to how long they've worked with the person, where they started from, what they were struggling with when they hired this person, and what results they've gotten out of it. We're looking for ROI, which if you don't know what that is, it's return on investment. I don't want you going out there and hiring coaches who don't have any

proof of a good return on investment. That said, it's not necessarily bad if they have some negative reviews, especially if they've had a lot of clients say they have a lower ticket option. Not everyone's work is going to work for everyone. You want to be very cognizant, however, about what kind of negative review they have. This just didn't work for me. It's allowed for someone to have a couple of those if they have dozens of other good ones where people did see results.

You're not looking for perfect because perfect does not exist. What you're looking for is real. Another red flag is if there's no last name, if it's a first name only and there's no indication about what kind of business they have or there's really no way to go. And, like, kind of like cyber stock and see if they're actually like real human beings in the world. That's another red flag. Now, of course, in the coaching space, we have confidentiality with a lot of our clients.

So, of course, like, there may be some testimonials where there's no last name or it's just happy client, or it says, you know, senior executive, and that's okay. But all of the testimonials shouldn't be that. There should be some testimonials where you're able to literally just go and look up this person's name and find them on LinkedIn and see that they're a real human being that does the job that they say they do. Lastly, you want to look at their

content and what their messaging is. What we're looking for is we don't want rainbows and sunshines only, and we don't want doom stayers. Rainbows and sunshines means, like, your idea can be turned into a million dollar product, blah, blah, blah, blah, without any caveats around how you determine what ideas are good and what ideas are bad. Rainbows and sunshines can also be, oh, it's just your mindset. Once you have your mindset dialed in, then you can have a. A seven figure

business. No, go off mindset alone will not help anyone have a seven figure business. You have to learn how to do a lot. You have to have a good idea. You have to have a really strong market presence. There's so much that goes into it. And if you're not also talking about all the stuff you have to learn and do and fix and figure out as you go along, if you're only saying mindset, then you're a snake oil salesperson and you should go away. And you,

as my listener, I hope you're not spending money with these people. The doomstairs on the other side, they're making it seem like if you don't hire them, then you'll never be successful. The doomsters also have this edge of, like, I have the secret and you don't have the secret. And the only way you're gonna get the secret to do this thing is if you hire me. No, they don't have a secret. There's no secret. They're just like, best practices. They know one of the best practices.

And sure, you can hire them to learn that best practice, but it's not anything special. Like, there's no new story. Every single story we have, every single movie, every single book follows the same model of the hero's journey. It's the only way we pay attention to sh t. Have you read a self help book recently? It's the same thing with different words. There's no new ideas and there's

no big secret to starting a business. If someone's trying to sell you that they have the secret and no one else has a secret, and so you should buy from them because they'll give you the secret, please don't buy from them. Please don't. You can find best practices from so many other people and this is my promise to you. Like, sure, I know a lot of really helpful things that help my clients start businesses. I'm never going to claim that any of them are

super special secret stuff that only I know. No, because it's bull. I just happen to have a collection of really helpful best practices that I know across a really broad range of business building things like sales, marketing, branding, how to figure out your niche, how to design an offer like it just happens to be the right collection to help people start businesses. But back to, like, the proper doomsdayers.

Anyone who's telling you that there's something wrong with you and that if you don't hire them, it's going to continue to get worse for you. Anyone who goes down that road in their messaging and doesn't at least explain the parts that you need to work on doesn't at least point to, here's what you need to learn. They're actually not going to teach you anything. They're just selling fear.

Fear that you're in a up, fear that you're not gonna be perfect. They're selling this idea that if you hire them, then you're gonna get the answer. But doesn't that sound a bit like a cult? We're not signing up for snake oil stuff. We're also not signing up for cults here, thank you very much.

We're also not signing up for the just work harders. This is a big one because especially for those of us with ADHD, we have grown up being told that we just need to try harder, that we just need to work harder, that we just need to focus harder, that we just need to

do so much more harder. And throughout that messaging, throughout growing up that way, you really start believing that there's something wrong with you, that you're lazy, that you just don't try hard enough, and that if you could just get yourself to work another extra 10 hours a week, it would somehow be magically different. These are the hustle bros. You're not hustling hard enough. Now go shove it in a very

uncomfortable place, please. You and I both know that it's not that you're not trying hard enough, it's that you need to figure out the way to work that's going to work for you. That's going to work for what you enjoy doing, right? Because with ADHD, if you don't enjoy doing something, you're never going to do it. You need to figure out what it is that you want to sell. What's the difference you want to make in the world. You have to actually

believe in it. And when you have the right support, that support is going to help you figure out what that thing is. I can't tell you how many clients I've had who've started with me thinking that one thing was going to be their niche, and they get a few months in, they're like, I hate this. I don't want to help these people with this thing. I'm so bored with talking about x, y and z topic. Trying harder, hustling

more is not going to help you be more interested in that thing. For an ADHD business owner, having someone who will support you through the pivot is the most important thing. Having someone who can tell you when it's time to quit is the most important thing. Because we're programmed throughout our whole life to just stick with something and try harder because that's what we've always been told is the problem with

us and it's actually not. That's what we want to look out for when we're trying to identify the baddies and not the, like, fun baddies, the bad baddies. The thing. The people that we do not want to work with. How do we identify someone who's the right person for us to work with? Oh, what am I going to say next? Well, you'll have to keep listening to find out. But first. Squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel. How do we identify someone who's the right person for us to work

with? Now, first and foremost, our instincts are spot on. Our intuition is spot on. Right. So, like, when you have this intuition that you're connected to someone, like maybe you feel like, oh my God, I already feel like we're friends. I already feel like we have this connection. Trust it. Don't just trust that. But that is a really good sign. Your intuition will never lead you wrong. If you ever have a I'm not so sure about this person kind of feeling, trust that too.

Second, like I said, testimonials. If their testimonials are solid, and they're talking about real results they got after working with this person. That's amazing.

But on top of that, you want to look to see, are these people like me, the people who've gone through this program or worked with this person before me? Did they start from a similar position that I'm in now? Did they have similar goals? Did they need help with the same stuff? And there's nothing wrong with reaching out to some of these people and asking about their experience, right?

Anyone who has genuinely had a really good experience with a service provider is generally going to be happy to share about that experience. Another green flag for a solid coach is they're going to tell you exactly who they do not work with. Someone who is willing to take money from anyone because they're like, yeah, you can do anything you want. They're full of

crap. Someone who says, hey, listen, I only work with these types of people who have these kinds of situations going on for them, they have some standards, and the reason they do this is because they understand that they can best support people who fit a certain criteria. They're not out there. Just take everyone's money. For instance. I don't work with people who want to start retail businesses

because I don't really know anything about retail business. My only experience in retail is a managing a yarn shop, which I had a lot of fun with, but it's not something that I'm an expert at. And working at J. Crew 4 hours every two weeks for a summer when I was in college, so I could get the discount. Okay. You don't want me helping you with your retail store. All right. Also, restaurants. I used to work in restaurants. I hate restaurants. I don't want to

ever talk about starting a restaurant again. Not my bag, baby. I also don't work with people who charge generally less than $200 an hour because it's not worth it for them to hire me if you're charging less, you know, and I'm not saying that you can't make really good money from starting a virtual assistant business. I specialize in helping people sell high ticket services like legal services,

copywriting, coaching, consulting. My clients generally charge anywhere from $300 to $1,000 an hour, if not more. And they're able to do that because they provide a ton of value. Look for a coach who is that specific about who they work with and who they do not work with, because that shows that they have some integrity. People who can help anyone and everyone under the sun don't buy it. Squirrel. Squirrel.

And lastly, and this takes some time to glean from someone, if you're following someone for a while, you can generally see that they're consistent. They have consistent beliefs, they have consistent opinions. They have consistent lessons that they teach. There's no bait and switch. They're not changing their mind and being contrary without explaining how they changed their mind. I don't think I'll ever change my mind on this. That if you're starting a business, the best way to

start is with one on one clients. They are your fastest path to cash. You do not want to start a business where you're immediately jumping into group programs or into digital classes. The failure rate is just too high, and you have to get too many people to buy into it versus just working with one

person, and you also charge less. Find someone who has an opinion, and you might not like that opinion, but find someone who has a stalwart opinion that they're not changing, and they give good reasoning for it. And lastly, find someone who isn't pressuring you to sign up to their timeline. Anyone who tries to pressure you into spending the money now. Signing up now. Now's the time. You don't want to waste time. Give me your credit card information right now, and then we'll jump right in.

Now. This is your life and this is your business. If you have urgency, if you're ready to jump in now, great, do it. But if you need time, if you need to fill out, if this is the right person, someone who's trying to get you to bypass that process for yourself is not going to be the right person. So find someone who supports you making the decision to hire them

on your timeline. It's funny, whenever I get on a sales call with someone and we get to the conversation about the program and how much it costs, and, like, when the start date would be, oftentimes people are terrified to say, oh, well, I just need some time to think about it, and they start justifying it and I have to stop them. I say, you know, I will never pressure someone to start a program to my timeline. If you want to start right

now, great. But if you also need a week, if you need a few days to think about it, if you need to talk to some people, go for it. If you're talking to me and you're realizing this is not the right time for me, I think I need a few months to be able to get some ducks in a row then absolutely take that time, come back to me, find the people who are there. For you making the right

decision. And lastly, and this is a really important part that gets overlooked a lot, find someone that you know you'll have fun working with. Remember in school where, like, you had classes where the teacher was just mean or, like, wasn't fun or was really boring? How hard was it for you to learn things in those classes? Like, you were always nervous that you get it wrong or you were always really struggling to pay attention, especially

if you have ADHD. And it was just. It was such an uphill battle, and it didn't need to be. The class is where the teacher made it fun and engaging and, like, let you kind of ease yourself into it. One of my favorite teachers who I'm, like, super excited. I'm actually going to have a beverage with her this Friday. Miss Blanchard, she was my french teacher in high school. I adore this woman. I always idolized her. I always wanted to be her.

When I was a kid, she had this way when you showed up in class, she wouldn't jump right into teaching. Generally. She would tell you kind of a funny story. She'd tell you about something like self deprecating that happened that morning, or she'd vent about something. She treated us like peers, and she'd ask us questions. And, like, I remember one class she came in, she was talking about dream analysis, and then she just, like, did some dream analysis for

some of the kids in the class, and it was great. And then she went into teaching. And to this day, I remember some of the weird mnemonic tools that she gave us to remember verb conjugations or different words that were really hard for us to remember. The fact that she made it fun and low pressure and made that classroom a safe space where everyone got to show up just as they were. That made the things

she taught that much more sticky. I cannot tell you a single thing that I learned anywhere else in school, but I, to this day, know how to conjugate for the imperfect because she taught us a rap song about it. Ah. E sde r e s I e tay e o n s e o z I e o n tay like, that's sticky. I will remember that when I have dementia and I am in an assisted living situation in about 60 years from now, and my nurses will have no idea what the f I'm singing about, but it'll

be hysterical. Find a coach. Find a mentor. Find a consultant. Find whoever it is that you need to work with who is going to make it fun and memorable and easy for you. There's nothing wrong with sorting for that. The best money you will spend is on a learning environment that supports how you learn best. And as people with ADHd we learn best when we're having fun, when we're laughing, when we feel lit up on the inside. So go and find that. And if I in hearing all this you

sense that you want to work with me. If you want to find out about any of my programs with no pressure then I invite you to go to winniecast.com strategycall and go book a generate income strategy call with me. We'll talk about your business. I'll be very honest. If your idea is good or bad or just needs some work, we'll talk through where you're struggling in getting this off the ground or in growing it. And if it's a fit for both of us, we can talk about the different options to work together.