Another day, another “guru” promising coaches can earn £10,000 in 30 days with five ChatGPT prompts. Forbes published it, so it must be legitimate, mustn’t it? No actually, it’s not legitimate at all – it’s disingenuous in the extreme.
This type of content makes me furious. Not because I’m threatened by competition – I’m not, there’s enough work for everyone – but because of the damage it does to coaches who are already struggling.
The Seductive Lie
These articles prey on your belief that there’s ONE thing you’re missing. One magic bullet. One secret formula. Just paste these prompts into ChatGPT and watch your cash machine start churning out clients.
The reality is that you’ll get generic outputs that lead nowhere. When you download these prompts (which of course I did!) the blurb that comes with them talks about the need to create landing pages and split test your messaging as if we all know what that means or how to do it. When it doesn’t produce $10,000 in 30 days – because of course it won’t – coaches conclude that marketing doesn’t work.
And another coach bites the dust.
Marketing Is Not An Event
These “gurus” present marketing as something you do once. Set it up, switch it on, collect your money. They’re selling a fantasy because the truth doesn’t generate clicks.
Marketing is a process, not an event. It requires:
- Finding your niche (not with a prompt – with deep thinking)
- Understanding your potential client’s 3am problem (the thing that’s keeping them awake that coaching with you can resolve)
- Crafting a marketing message that resonates
- Curating an audience systematically
- Becoming visible consistently
- Staying visible indefinitely
That’s months of work, not 30 days of copying and pasting.
Why Clever People Fall For Stupid Promises
We’d never believe someone could build a legal practice with five prompts, or become a doctor, or an engineer. Yet somehow, when it comes to building a business, intelligent professionals abandon all logic.
We do it because we’re dealing with a skill we know nothing about – and worse, we don’t know that we don’t know. Coaches think marketing is simple, we believe that everyone who succeeds has found the secret. We think we’re just one prompt away from success.
Spoiler alert – we’re not.
The Professional Paradox
Here’s what baffles me – we spent time and energy learning to coach. We invested thousands in our training and we understand that coaching skills take time to develop. When it comes to client acquisition however – the other half of our businesses – we expect instant results from free AI prompts?
Building a business is HARD – of course it is – anything worth having is hard. If five prompts could generate $10,000 monthly, every coach would have 6-figure businesses. Look around, do they?
The Real Damage These Articles Do
When these quick-fix promises fail, we don’t blame the person who sold us the lie. We blame ourselves, or worse, we blame marketing itself.
“Marketing doesn’t work.” “I’m not cut out for business.” “The market is saturated.”
Not one of those statements is true. We were sold a lie by someone who profits from our desperation.
What Actually Works
Let me tell you the truth that these articles won’t tell you? Building a sustainable coaching business takes:
- Time (months, not days)
- Learning (actual skills, not prompts)
- Consistency (daily effort, not one-time setup)
- Focus (specific audience, not everyone)
- Patience (slow burn, not instant results)
There’s no prompt for that.
The Choice You Need To Make
You can keep chasing magic bullets and keep believing that everyone successful has a secret they’re hiding. You can keep falling for $10K in 30 days fantasies – or you can accept that client acquisition is a professional skill that requires the same dedication you gave to learning coaching.
One path leads to joining the 82% of failed coaching businesses, the other leads to sustainable success.
Choose wisely.
An Opportunity
If you’d like the opportunity for a robust conversation about this, why not join my next free challenge, Nail Your Niche? We run it several times a year and there’s even an option to upgrade to a VIP version, which gives you 3 x 60-minute group mentoring sessions with me for just £99 (inc VAT).
If you’re open to having a conversation with me about the reality of building a successful coaching business looks like, register for the challenge by clicking here.