Lauren Bateman (YouTuber and business owner) discusses how to evaluate business coaches, arguing that coach experience and relevant track record matter. She emphasizes that the client must be the primary actor (be coachable), that coaches should have real business success at the level the client aspires to (e.g., million-dollar revenue), and that peer community members can sometimes provide more practical help than a coach. She illustrates points with personal anecdotes: hiring an inexperienced coach early on, a car crashing into her music school (Sept 2014) which forced an ~8-month disruption until Jun 2015, and later handling COVID-19 in 2020 with greater ease. She notes her business does over $1M/year and her YouTube channel grew to over 270,000 subscribers.
Chapters
How do you know when business coaching is a good deal or a bad deal? I've worked with a number of coaches over the years, and some of them were better than others. But what I've discovered is that everyone has their own unique specialty, their own unique angle that they're really great at.
Now, the bottom line, the best coach in your life is going to be you. Because you are the person, you know, you can pay for coaching, but you. But you're the person who has to take the action. You're the person who has to make the decisions. You know your business. So ultimately, you can work with the greatest coach in the world. But if you are not willing to make those decisions or take those actions in your business, it's not really going to be helpful. Okay? So that's why I say, like, you are the foundation of coaching, so be coachable. Okay? When someone tells you to do something, take action. But how do you know if someone's telling you to do the right things for your business? I've definitely been given advice that wasn't the best advice in my business situation. And this is where the experience of your mentor or your coach is going to come into play. Now, the experience of your coach is super important. You know, I've worked with a lot of people. I actually have a friend, and he's a good friend of mine and, you know, he's always trying like some new scheme to try and make money. And one of his things was, was how to make money online. And I was like, how are you going to help people make money online? One, you've never started a business before and made money, period. How are you going to help people make money online when you don't really make money online? And this was a fad for maybe a year or two and then of course gave up and moved on to the next thing that was going to make him money. Now a more experienced coach is going to pull from their experiences. So, for example, if, if, you know, maybe you're in a brick and mortar business or in an online business, what happens during recession? If you've never been through a recession and your business coach hasn't been through a recession, they might not be able to advise you on what actions or what steps to take. For example, I had a coaching program that I did many, many years ago. It was one of the first coaching programs I did around business. And when I look back on that, I realize that, that the business coach was actually using his clients as guinea pigs. So I was a music teacher. You guys know that you see the guitars in the background. My big channel here on YouTube is a guitar teaching channel. So I started out teaching guitar, teaching singing lessons, and you know, you need. I'd never done business before, so I was looking for a coach, but I hired a coach who had never really done business themselves. All right, they had worked at some music school schools, they've done some private teaching, but I don't think they had created a really big music teaching business. Now fast forward. I get successful, I start a music school, and you know, this person had never run a music school before. In fact, they had no experience doing so that years later when they tried to open an actual brick and mortar music school, they closed down. They failed miserably. So that's the person I was taking advice from quite a. On my business. And I realized years later I had a car actually crash through my business. Believe it or not, I had been open two years in business and see, this is where experience matters. I've been open two years in business as a brick and mortar at a commercial location, a music school, and a car crashed through our building. 4 o' clock in the morning. Yes, we had to shut down the whole building and we have moved everything back to my house briefly. But during this whole situation, I mean, we were out of my house for about six, six months. So the car crash happened in September of 2014, and I wasn't able to get into a new commercial location until June of 2015. So it was more. It was like eight months. All right? It was, it was crazy. It was insane. And throughout this whole experience, this person had no clue what to do. They had never experienced that. Actually, I talked to him later at an event and everyone thought I was going to fall flat on my face and fail. Like, I think maybe they didn't help me. One, because they didn't know what to do and, and two, they, they didn't know if I was going to pull through anyway. But what happened was there was someone in the group who did have a lot of experience in business. And that person stepped up and almost personally coached me how to get through the situation. Now, this person was twice my age, so they, they had lots of experience in life and in business. And it was at that moment that I realized I was like, yeah, I don't know what I'm paying for here because the actual business coach and mentor is not the one who's helping me through this situation. And that also shows you, like, why it's good to be part of a community of people, a community of business people because it wasn't the mentor that helped me. The business coach was actually one of the students that helped me because he had no experience. He had no idea what to do in this. But now I do. Okay? And the great thing about that experience for me is when Covid happened in 2020, going through Covid was like a breeze compared to that car crashing through my business. I had already gone through a total shutdown in my. So a lot of people who are new to business were panicking. I mean, it was a good time to panic. I learned about diversification. I learned about the problems of having all your eggs in one basket. All my money was tied to this one school. So as a business owner, you know, that was 2005, 2014, 2025. Six years later, I go through 2020 like it's a breeze. And people like, why aren't you stressed? It's because I had this experience that I learned from. So I knew how to make decisions under stress like that. So when you're looking at a business coach, are they doing the things that you want to do? You know, I've seen lots of people who are business coaches and they're telling you about how to, how to grow wealth and how to be successful. And, you know, they're driving a beat up Toyota Corolla and, you know, they got 1990s cabinets in their kitchen. And, you know, I'm not trying to make fun of people for, I mean, I literally just got my kitchen remodeled. My kitchen was from like the 1930s. And, you know, so there's some people who, who just live frugally. But, I mean, if someone's trying to teach you about finances and wealth, they should look the part. Okay? It's not fake it till you make it. Like, they should actually have made it and not need to fake it. You know, if someone's doing business coaching, typically they don't need the money from the business coaching to live their life and be wealthy. I know a lot of business coaches who made money being business coaches. They make most of their money off of coaching people to be successful. And that's great, that's awesome. But, you know, you really want someone who's made money in business. They've either exited by selling their business or they're doing something else. And they're doing it well, that, you know, they'll coach you for free. And I don't believe in free coaching, but they, you know, if you didn't pay them, it wouldn't make or break their day. So how do you know, if your guru is really ripping you off, you just gotta ask yourself the question one, do they have the experience I need to get to the next level? Okay. If you're someone just starting in business, getting coaching from someone who's Maybe only making $100,000 a year could be helpful. You might not need a coach that's making millions or multi millions. But if you want to get to that million dollar level, you can't get there from $100,000 a year. Coach. Okay? If you want to make multiple millions, you can't get there working with a coach that's only made a million dollars. All right. That was a big point of me getting into business coaching because I was like, I have to make at least a million dollars in business every year. Because like, for me, that was kind of like the bottom line, the basics. Okay? I've been in business for a very long time, over a decade now, and I've done brick and mortar, I've done online, and I was like, you know, I'm not going to get into business coaching until I've done over a million dollars in business. And we do our business does over a million dollars a year. Um, I've done over a million dollars in core sales online. And for me, it was just the marker I wanted to put on myself to say I can help someone who needs help in this business or in this industry. So you just want to make sure that the coach is operating at a level that you want to get to next. If you guys are interested in learning more about my YouTube journey, how I went from the bottom and then grew that to over 270,000 subscribers, go check video right over there.
