Can you trust your coach?

When the pandemic hit, self-employed customer care consultant Madeleine Fisher* saw her income evaporate. “My business predominantly works in the leisure, hospitality and non-essential retail sectors and they all closed, or they didn’t have any budget for customer care. I went into panic mode,” she says.

As the boss of a limited company, she had no government support to rely on. The business owner decided to use almost a third of the £4,500 (€5,275) she had applied for under the government’s bounce-back loan scheme — set up to enable smaller businesses to access finance more quickly during the pandemic — to pay for a coaching package with a “design influencer”.

Lack of commitment

At first, the phone sessions were “high energy”. Her phone would vibrate every morning with motivating texts. But Madeleine soon became frustrated at her coach’s lack of commitment. “There were supposed to be one to two calls a week, but I only ever had one a week,” she says. “Appointments weren’t structured, and that’s when I began to feel the amount I spent was not worth five 35-minute phone calls and generic text messages.”

Madeleine is not the only person to pay thousands for online coaching and then question its value. During the pandemic, many freelancers whose work decreased or dried up entirely have tried to improve their prospects by paying for coaching.

Ann Storr, 39, a writer living in Sevenoaks, Kent, spent £300 on a public speaking course last year after finding a coach on Instagram. “The content wasn’t even organized and sometimes points would be repeated over and over because it was just spliced together.”

She says the one-to-one session she had as part of the package was equally disappointing. “She was slumped on the sofa, holding her phone and fidgeting around. I felt like she’d just jumped out of the shower. She offered no real advice. It just felt like a pitch for her other services. It left a bad taste in my mouth.” Storr says she decided not to take it any further, as “I didn’t think it was a fight I could win, so I just shelved it”.

Francis Jenkins,* a business coach from Surrey, signed up to a programme that guaranteed her a certain income every month after completing the course. The £1,200-a-month membership involved group calls with the coach and her business partner, and one-to-one sessions. The amount of time varied from month to month.

“She would constantly make promises, just basic ones like calling at a certain time, then not showing up. It was deeply unprofessional.” Jenkins says she was “too scared of the fallout” if she requested a refund, as her coach had an intimidating character.

An unregulated sector

The coaching industry has boomed over the past decade. There was a 153 per cent increase in UK-based life coaches on LinkedIn in 2020 compared with the year before, according to the social network, while the number of business coaches went up by 115 per cent. The value of this sector in the US alone is forecast to reach $11.6 billion (€9.7 billion) in the US in 2021, according to Ibis World. However, it is unregulated, and anyone can claim to be a coach without qualifications.

“We exist to avoid these very things,” says Liz Rochester, president of the UK arm of the not-for-profit International Coaching Federation (ICF), which has about 2,000 accredited coaches in the UK. “There are charlatans taking advantage of the current situation. People are considering their life purpose. They are at the point of ‘What should I do next?’ because they have been furloughed or had time to think about whether they enjoy what they do. However, that doesn’t mean someone on Instagram promoting themselves can give them that.

“We make it categorically clear that we do not advise anyone to promote themselves as a coach after attending a programme for two days, for example. An entry-level coach has to do 100 hours of actual coaching practice, plus 60 hours of training.”

Lawyer Lucy Wheeler says the issues arising from the online coaching industry are increasing. “On average, I now get at least one entrepreneur approach me each week with a complaint about a coach they have worked with; sometimes there are many more,” she says.

“While bodies such as the ICF do great work promoting ethics and standards, there is no requirement in the UK that someone holding themselves out to be a coach has to have any qualifications. They could set up a website overnight and hold themselves to be a coach the very next day.”

Next to no benefit

Over one week last year, Wheeler was contacted by more than 20 people, all desperate to exit a 12-month contract with the same business coach. “They were getting next to no benefit or coaching. For some, the monthly instalments were more than their mortgage payments. Those involved were putting the payments on to credit cards, or had borrowed money from the family, and many were hiding the rising debt from their husbands.”

Similarly, the CPD Standards Office, an accreditation service for training and learning, reports that conversations and complaints about poor-quality courses sold via Instagram have significantly increased over the past 18 months.

Amanda Rosewarne, its co-founder, says there is a worrying lack of social media regulation around promoting online education or coaching. “Many unsuspecting individuals fall foul of unscrupulous marketing tactics,” she says. “Many Instagram courses, or ‘coach programmes’, are badly designed, overpriced and delivered by individuals who lack any authentic teaching or coaching experience.”

© Guardian News and Media 2021