Why Most Coaches Are 6 Months Away From a Revenue Crisis

A brand new client of mine just told me that her Instagram DM sales are down 80% compared to this time last year, and she's creating more content right now than she did at this time last year. And she's not the only one. The whole coaching industry is really breaking right now, and so many coaches aren't seeing this coming. In the next 12 minutes, I'm gonna walk you through exactly what has shifted, why everything you've been doing is producing worse results than it did before, and the one move that's still working for coaches who refuse to go broke trying. Listen, this isn't just one thing going wrong. It's like 3 things converging, which is making coaches feel like nothing is working anymore. Give me a yes in the comments if you are feeling that right now as a coach. So the first thing we want to talk about that has shifted is ads. They are getting more expensive and less effective because of all the new rules and regulations that allow us to target specific people. We are not able to do that on ads anymore. The golden days of of dumping like $1,000 into ads and making $5,000 to $10,000 on that $1,000 are completely over. When I talk to my ads manager and other coaches, they're lucky to make at least 1.5 to 2 times, maybe sometimes 3 times their return on ad spend. I was just talking to a friend of mine who runs a hugely successful coaching program that she's been running for years, and she told me this March was her worst results from ads. And it's something that she has never seen in her entire time doing business. So this isn't just me, this isn't just for you, this is industry-wide. Because as I said, as the platform changes, Apple privacy, audience restrictions means you can't target like you used to. And this is how a lot of coaches were generating leads. Maybe you were— let me know if you were using ads down in the comments below to generate leads to your coaching business. The second problem that is going on right now for coaches: Instagram has changed a lot and engagement has really flatlined. You may have people like your carousel or your post or your video or your reel, but nobody's really commenting anymore. And it's really hard to get that conversation going in the DMs like it used to. I will say DM conversations are up, but what used to work to get those conversations going doesn't work anymore. And I don't know about you, but it feels like the Instagram algorithm is changing every other week and telling us it likes this and it likes that and it wants this. And so it's almost a full-time job to keep up knowing what's going to work on Instagram just to get your content in front of people who want to work with you in your coaching program. So even that strategy of showing up daily, get conversations going, book in the DMs, is dying. Just like I mentioned from my client at the beginning of this video, and that was her entire way of getting clients and now it has dried up. The third part of this perfect storm for the coaching industry is this trust recession, and it's totally a buzzword and I hate saying it, but I think that word does a really great job of explaining what the biggest problem is right now in the coaching business. More people in 2026 have bought coaching or courses than ever before, and a lot of those people have been burned. Disappointed, or felt they wasted their money on those programs. In addition to that, they're also wondering, is this person AI or not? Which we're gonna talk about in a moment. But it is taking them longer now to say yes, to actually invest in a course or a coaching program, which we're talking about here. I'm talking way longer. I have seen in my industry, it takes about 200+ days to turn a cold lead into a client. And so a 30-second reel is just not going to earn that trust like it used to before, and a pretty Instagram carousel isn't going to do it either. Now there's a fourth thing happening on top of all of this that I just mentioned, and it's one a lot of coaches haven't really thought of yet. And you heard me mention it earlier— people have stopped going to Google to search business coach or Instagram strategy help. They're now opening up ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and they're asking deeper conversational questions. They aren't just using words and phrases anymore to find recommendations for themselves. People are now vetting coaching options through AI. They're asking AI tools to recommend who is legit. And if you don't have content that AI can actually read or scrape, which means if you don't have YouTube content— because that's one of the only social platforms that AI will scrape and pull from, and that AI prefers because it's long-form content, which signals to AI that this is good content— it prefers long-form content— then you don't exist to AI. And so you will not get recommended in the research process that your potential coaching clients are going through on ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini. So while you're pouring all these hours into ads, into Instagram Reels, into stories, your potential coaching clients are asking ChatGPT and Claude who to hire, and they never heard of you because they don't have readable content from you. I do think at this point I need to have a conversation with you about something that's different in the coaching industry that I've been talking to my clients about as well. If your coaching program is a general coaching program, or like do all the things, like you're a life coach or you're a business coach, I'm sorry, but the math isn't going to work on that style of coaching anymore. Buyers potential clients are wanting something more specific. I mentioned AI. They're going to AI to help them figure out a very particular problem that they are having, and they want someone that can solve that specific problem for them, not somebody who's good at helping people or can help anyone. Let me break this down in a drawing for you. So a generalist is like I said, a life coach, a business coach, become a thriving woman. That doesn't cut it anymore. You want to get very specific. So you want to think about an example of perimenopause weight loss by increasing protein. If somebody is looking for a coach doing that, they are serious about investing. They know that they want to invest. They've gone down the route of figuring out what they want to do to lose weight, so they are invested. They have a specific problem. Same thing with saving for a college fund. You don't just want to be like, I'm a money mindset coach. You want to talk to the specific problem that somebody is having, like saving money for college for their kids. And another one, instead of just being like an Instagram strategist, people want something tangible. People want a specific outcome. So instead of like an Instagram strategist, you want to think about Instagram strategy for closing in the DMs. Those are the types of coaches that are making money right now, that people are investing in. Typically, when coaches start to see their leads drop and the clients and the amount of clients they're booking each month. They start to freak out, and maybe you are. Let me know in the comments. And the wrong move right now is to throw more content out there, is to run more ads, spend more ads, decide to hire a whole new content team, get on another platform like TikTok. None of that is going to work. It is just going to burn you out faster while producing less and less results. The right move for you right now is the opposite. It is actually to do less, but on a platform that actually compounds. And you can guess where I'm going with this. This is getting on YouTube because YouTube is the only platform where you can have one video generate you leads for months and years to come. And YouTube is the only platform right now that AI pulls from, that AI scrapes. And YouTube gives you that long-form runway to earn the trust that people need right now before they are ever going to buy. People are more likely to watch multiple videos of you on YouTube if you do it right and be more ready— more ready, is that more ready? More ready, uh, be more ready to want to invest in you because they're getting a sample of what it's like to work with you through multiple YouTube videos, they could spend like 45 minutes to an hour with you just on YouTube and realize, hey, tell me where to sign up, that's who I want to work with. But it's not just putting any video that you want on YouTube, it's creating those videos that are going to attract your coaching clients with a very specific problem. So I created a quick little GPT for you where you can plug in a video idea that you have and it's going to tell you whether or not that video idea is going to attract a ready-to-buy viewer who I call an Expert Esther? Expert Esther is the one who is ready to buy, and that is a topic she is actively searching for. Or are you creating content for Beginner Bettys? These are ones that may get lots of views, but they are never going to attract your paying clients. So you can go to trenalittle.com/who's-watching to get that free GPT to see if you are creating the right videos or you have the best video ideas that are going to attract people that will actually buy from you and not beginner Bettys who will not be ready to invest in you. So here's what's actually going to be working in 2026 and beyond for coaches. I talked about YouTube and I talked about Expert Esther. You do not need a lot of views to book clients from YouTube. You need quality views, not the quantity of views. You need to be focused on very specific problems that they are having, the ones that are keeping them up at 1:00 at night, that they're searching AI or they're searching Google or even YouTube, because that's how you're going to catch them. And I really want you to think about that. Your expert Esther, your ready-to-buy viewer, is up at 1 o'clock in the morning, anxious, stressed about a specific problem that she is having. If you have a YouTube video that addresses that exact same problem keeping her up, you're not just a coach to her anymore. You're the person that made her feel safe at 1 AM. That's the trust you cannot build with an Instagram Reel. That's the trust that YouTube delivers specifically. And the best part about YouTube, because of how YouTube works, that one video doesn't just stop with her. YouTube starts recommending your next video and the next one and the next one, kind of like a Netflix-style binge, right? Where you accidentally watch an entire season on Netflix and it says, "Are you still watching?" Yes, stop judging me. But it is serving you exactly what you need. And if it is you that comes up time and time again serving that client at 1 AM, it's not going to take much to convert that client. And that is the strategy that I teach my clients how to build on YouTube, and I call that the playlist funnel. Because instead of wasting time on daily Instagram content, when you create one weekly YouTube video that has a purpose, that creates a binge watch on YouTube, by the time they hit video 4 or video 5, they're no longer a cold lead. They're warmed up, and they realize this is the person for me, this is who I need to invest in. This isn't theory. This is happening all the time in my YouTube coaching experience with my clients. I had Belle, who after her first 5-video playlist with less than 200 YouTube subscribers had made $42,000. And another client of mine, Nikki, who has less than 20 subscribers after her first 5-video playlist funnel had made $19,000. Both of them are doing this without dumping money on ads, without even posting on Instagram. In fact, Belle deleted deleted her Instagram account completely, and none of them are doing sales calls. This is what the right move looks like when the old way of doing things breaks. Here's what I want you to understand: the coaching industry is shifting under us, and the coaches who recognize that right now are the ones that will still have a business 2 years from now. The ones who keep doubling down on the things that aren't already working for them are going to spend the next 12 months watching their revenue shrink. And shrink and shrink. They're gonna blame the algorithm, they're gonna blame the ads, and they're gonna wonder what happened. But you don't have to be one of those coaches. I will tell you, there is one thing wrong that coaches get even when they start to realize this is the direction that they need to go to future-proof their business. They start making YouTube videos for the wrong audience, like I mentioned earlier, and they start to build an email list and get excited that their email list is growing but the people on their email list never buy. So I created a whole video, it is on your screen right now, to show you the one mistake that will keep you from generating an email list full of buyers instead of an email list full of freebie chasers. I'll see you over there.