Pay to Play is a scam.

Yo, yo, I can taste yo, yo, yo, yo, I can taste yo, yo, yo, I can taste yo, yo, yo, yo, I can taste y. Hello, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach, coming to you today with a bit of a rant. And I want to be clear, this is a rant about something that is sustained, endemic in the personal development and coaching world. And of course, it shows up in individuals. I am not on a rant about this individual. I will not name this individual. I am not trying to paint them in a bad light, because here's the thing. They are just victim to a crappy system and a crappy belief system about how you get your name out there and just drives me crazy. So there's. If you. If you're not in the coaching world, there's this thing called pay to play. And basically, there's so many things that you can pay for for exposure. So you can pay to speak on stages, and it's called sponsorship. Usually. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes you're just, like, paying to be on the stage. It's not advertised. You can pay to show up in people's books. You can. You can pay for awards. I get DMS all the time. Like, do you want to be award, like, awarded best women in coaching? You know, 2023. I'm sorry. Just not a real thing. And here's. Here's why this is problematic. Well, actually, let me just tell you the story first. Okay, let me tell you the story. So a friend. Not a friend, an acquaintance from a coaching program that I was in previously reached out to me this past week. They're writing a book. He's writing a book. And he wanted my input on the topic. And I will reveal the topic in a little bit because it's kind of ironic. So that he could, you know, write this book. And so, you know, being someone who's like, yeah, always happy to help a friend, let's hop on a call. We hopped on a call yesterday, and he informs me that this is a collaboration book, right? And to be in it, I would write. I would write a whole chapter which is only 1500 words. And we'll get to that. 1500 words. And I would pay a thousand dollars to be included in this book, along with 11 other people. I don't know who these other people are. I would have. If this had been at all appealing to me, I would have wanted to vet them and make sure that it was a diverse enough crowd for me to be involved in this project. But we didn't even get there. So let me just break down a couple of things. So a book is typically 70,000 to $120,000. I'm sorry, words per book, right? If. If 12 people, myself included, were paying $1,000 to do 1500 words in our chapters, that's only 18,000 words. Which means this individual, who's charging a thousand dollars per chapter for people to write in this book just to be listed as co authors, would be doing most of the writing. It would be 52,000 other words that this person would be writing to get to lowest benchmark for this book. Right? So already not equal. But here's. Here's what offended me more than anything else is that this individual has 161 followers on LinkedIn, has less than 100 followers on Instagram, has a fraction of what I have for their Facebook page, and isn't really showing up anywhere else. He was asking me, I have 8,700% more followers on LinkedIn alone. He was asking me to pay $1,000 to write in his book for exposure, to get listed as. As an author. Can we, like. This is the white male audacity that we're mad about. This is the white male audacity. That is just infuriating. It's like you have to pay to play in your world where, like, it doesn't benefit me at all. No, absolutely not. And let's call it what it is. If you want to call this a collaborative, a collaboration book, you can't assign work. The. The topic he wanted me to write about, ironically, was money. He wanted me to write about money and the energetics of money and how to be in relationship with money and all this stuff. Sir, sir, let me teach you the basics of energetics of money. For there to be any positive flow in money, there has to be equity. There has to be equity in the exchange. Okay? Asking for an inequitable exchange is money. No, no one on one, just money. No no's 101. We're not doing that. If it were to be a true collaboration, this person would reach out to 11 or 12 people and say, hey, listen, I want to do a collaborative book. It wouldn't be like a weird, I have a book idea I need your input on. It would be an open invitation. I want to do a collaboration. I'd love to have you in. Let's collaborate and you come up with what you want to write about. Okay? The fact. The sheer fact that he had assigned a topic to me already before we even got on the Call sir. That is assigning work. That is assigning work. When you assign work to a person, that person needs to be compensated, okay? That is not collaboration. That is employing someone to do a job because you don't have the ability to do that job. And there's nothing wrong with hiring someone to write portions of your book. But here's. Can we not call it collaboration when it's not collaboration? Okay, I understand the pay to play. If you're collaborating on a book and you have people who are like minded, who have diverse takes on things or whatever, and they come together and they all want to like come up with an idea of what they can write about and it's equal and it's equitable and everyone has similar follower count, it's going to grow and blossom for everyone. I understand that model, that is a fair model, okay? But this is not that model. This is not a collaboration. But here's where I want to bring it back to the coaching world at large, is that this pay to play model is so normalized in the coaching world and here's where it actually gets sucked into being kind of a bottom feeder tactic. Because there's no push for people to go outside of this pool of people, right? There's no push for people to like go and become bigger on other social media platforms. There's no push for people to like go out and do all this stuff. So what happens is they, they have this pool of people that they're already in and they collaborate and everything and, and they just keep selling to the same group of people. They just keep selling to the exact same group of people who then have to sell to the same group of people who then have to sell to the same group of people. It just becomes this twisty, turvy version of a pyramid scheme and I am so over it. I am done with it, okay? This is not how we build businesses. This is not how we build ethical businesses, okay? This is oftentimes a little predatory, right? Because the people who are desperate to grow their businesses, they're going to see opportunities like this. Opportunities to speak on stages, opportunities to write books and they're going to think, oh cool, a thousand dollars. That'll get me the thing. It won't. It absolutely will not. Racial, okay, so LinkedIn user, why would you make this racial consideration at all? For me, this is not the white man, but much more of a white female who has entitlement issues. Oh, I mean, I can't see who you are, but I can guess. I can guess a couple Things about you, sir. Anyway, gonna leave you there. And just to answer that, like, this is the trope, right? I'm not saying, like, I can't believe I have to say this. It's not all white men. Okay, let's. Let's give them a cookie, all right? If it needs to be said, it needs to be said. But this is the trope, the classic trope of taking advantage of other people and asking them to pay to do work or asking them to do work for free. I'm sorry that. That's the trope, but there are enough people out there who fit that description to make it true for a lot of situations. I didn't make it up, okay? It's. It's pretty common knowledge these days, so I thought I would ruffle some. Some feathers that. With that phrase. But anyway, we need to, like, disavow this in. In the coaching industry. We need to disavow this in the coaching industry. What ends up happening is the only voices who end up being heard in this kind of system are the people who can afford to pay. All right? That is not an equitable system. I would even go so far as to say that wreaks a little bit of white supremacy. It's not an equitable system. It also ensures that the events that you go to that do this, the books that you read, that they are just massive pitch fests because people have paid to play in that they're expecting to get some roi, right? And oftentimes, when you pay to speak on a stage, you are. You are allowed to sell from the stage. Okay? Like, there are so many things that bother me about this, but ultimately, if I go to an event, I don't want to listen to a bunch of commercials, I don't want to be sold to over and over and over and over and over again. And there's also this thing that it comes across as the person who's organizing the event as double dipping, right? They want to make money from attendees, they want to sell their program to those attendees, and they want to make money from the speakers. Let's also talk about how having people pay to. To sell from the stage at your event actually is brilliant sales psychology, because once the people in the audience have bought once in that setting, they're more likely to buy again. So that's a triple whammy for someone who's organizing an event, selling tickets for the event, selling speaking spots for the event, and then benefiting from everyone being primed to buy by those speakers, selling smaller products in the beginning. Okay, let's stop this. Let's just stop doing this, okay? This just ensures that we're just selling to each other over and over and over again. It doesn't actually ensure that we're going to get out there and spread our bigger message and be a help to that many more people, all right? It just ensures we're going to sell to each other. It's just going to be this insular little swamp of people trading money around. And like, ultimately, it's not sustainable. It's not sustainable. And so this individual who reached out to me and gave me the opportunity to be a collaborator on his book, I don't blame him. I don't blame him. This is the system that he's been taught. This is the system that has been handed around the coaching industry for so long. Of course. Of course. This is what he sees as normal. Of course. But let's. Let's take a step back and let's acknowledge the problems within the system. This is no longer. Okay, all right? And I want to just make this vow right here, right now, that if I do an event, if I do an event, I'm not charging people to speak. If I'm having other speakers, okay? Not doing it. Nope. If I have to eat the money, if I don't sell enough tickets, whatever, if I have to eat it, I am not doing that. Okay? Because I'm asking people to do work for me to fill in time that I don't want to be speaking, okay? That is work that should be paid. All right? If ever I have someone write something for a book that I write that will be paid, okay? We are paying people for work. We are no longer expecting other human beings to do work for free or do work and pay for that work to be at all, you know, exposed. It's just not. Okay. So that's my rant. I. Yeah. If you have any questions, if you didn't know this about the coaching industry, like, how did you avoid this? I just. I want to be able to advise my clients to avoid this. But I also want to say one final thought is that if you've been in these systems before and if you've charged pay to play, and if you didn't see the problematic nature of it, like, I don't want you beating yourself up, okay? Because, you know, oftentimes we just don't know any better. But here, here's your call to do better in the future. Okay? We're not doing that going forward. All right? And let's talk for a second. Also about what true collaboration is, right? Say you're a leadership coach and you know a bunch of leaders in the space who all have incredible voices, and you start talking to them openly about, hey, I'd love to do a collaborative book. You know, here's what that typically costs. If we were to do that, would you be interested? And what would you want to write about that is a collaboration, okay? Not assigning everyone a topic and saying, this is what you have to do. Absolutely not. Anyway, Sunday rant over. I promise to be in a cheerier mood tomorrow when I go live. Anyway, thank you for joining and if you took offense, the white guy thing. Sorry. Not sorry. Yeah. Anyway, have an amazing rest of your Sunday. Sending so much love to all of you, even those of you who have been taking advantage of this kind of system. Like, you need some grace right now. I get it. I hope you have an amazing rest of your weekend and I will see you all soon.