Are business coaches worth it? Not if they're doing this

A few years ago, I hired a business coach who had all the credentials and all the confidence. I showed up to our calls with questions I was genuinely sitting with. She showed up with answers she'd already decided on before I even opened my mouth.

I took her advice. I built the thing she said to build. I priced it the way she said to price it. I spent months doing work that wasn't a good use of my time, in a space that wasn't right for me, wondering why I felt so off in a business that was supposedly going in the "right" direction.

Here's what I eventually figured out: she wasn't listening to me. She was listening for the parts of what I said that fit the plan she already had for what my business should look like. Everything else got filtered out.

That experience stuck with me. And the more I've worked in this industry, the more I've realized it's not an isolated story. A lot of people ask whether business coaches are worth it. I think that's the wrong question, or at least, it depends entirely on what kind of coaching you're actually getting.

Why I kind of hate the term "business coach"

Most of what gets called coaching in this industry isn't actually coaching. It's consulting in a trench coat. Someone telling you what they did, or what they think you should do, and calling it coaching.

The distinction matters. Consulting is a real thing and it has its place. If you have a specific problem and someone has the specific expertise to solve it, hire the consultant. That's a legitimate transaction and it can be genuinely useful.

But consulting and coaching are doing different jobs. A consultant brings answers. A coach brings questions. A consultant has a framework they apply to your situation. A coach starts with your situation and works from there. When someone shows up to a coaching relationship with a predetermined plan for where you should end up, or is determined to just give you advice and tell you what to do, they're consulting. That’s not coaching.

The problem isn't that consulting exists. The problem is that a lot of people hire a coach when what they're actually getting is someone else's roadmap dressed up as support.

And most solo business owners don't need another roadmap.

What actual coaching looks like

Let me tell you what I mean when I use the word coaching, because I think it's worth being specific.

It's a thinking partnership.

I'm not coming in with a plan for your business. I don't have an agenda for where you "should" end up. What I have is genuine curiosity about where you actually are, what you actually want, and what's actually getting in the way.

Most solo business owners aren't short on information. We're drowning in it. Every person with a podcast has a framework. Every framework contradicts the last one. And somewhere in all of that noise, your own actual thinking gets buried. A good coach doesn't add to the noise. They help you hear yourself think again.

That looks like asking the questions you've been avoiding. Reflecting back what you said three sentences ago that you immediately glossed over. Sitting with you in the uncertainty instead of rushing to resolve it. It's slower than being handed a plan. It's also more likely to actually work, because the thinking is yours.

It's an antidote to the isolation of working for yourself.

When you work by yourself, every decision is yours alone. There's no team to gut-check with, no manager to escalate to, no colleague to brainstorm ideas with. You're it.

That isolation is one of the hardest parts of building a business solo. Having someone genuinely in your corner, not performing a role but actually there, changes how you move. Not because they tell you what to do. Because you stop having to hold everything by yourself.

It's a filter.

One of the quieter things that happens in good coaching is that you get clearer on what you actually want. And once you're clearer on that, the noise gets easier to manage. You start to know which advice applies to your situation and which doesn't. Which opportunities are worth pursuing and which are just shiny. Which feedback to take seriously and which to let pass right by.

That clarity isn't something I hand you. It's something that emerges when you finally have space to think without the pressure of having to decide something immediately.

This might be for you if...

You don't need a checklist to know if coaching is right for you. But there are a few patterns I see again and again in the people I work with.

You're stuck and you can't quite figure out why. You're not lacking effort or ideas. Something just isn't moving, and you've been trying to think your way out of it for longer than you'd like to admit.

You're overwhelmed in a way that prioritization advice doesn't fix. It's not that you don't know how to make a to-do list. It's that everything feels equally urgent and you've lost the thread of what actually matters.

You're tired of making decisions alone. Not because you can't, but because the weight of having no one to think alongside is starting to show up in how you work and how you feel about your work.

If you're curious what it actually looks like to think alongside someone — not be told what to do, not follow someone else's roadmap — you can read more about how I work here.