Why We Stopped Calling Ourselves Coaches
A pattern we started noticing in the masterminds we'd paid for.
Why we stopped calling ourselves coaches
Twenty years ago, the word coach used to mean something. Now it’s a marketing category full of 28 to 32 year-olds who’ve never run a company past a personal brand. We spent significant monies finding that out the hard way.
Here’s what the last 15 years in this industry taught us. There’s a pattern, a real one, that shows up on sales pages we’ve paid for, in masterminds we’ve sat in, and on coaching calls we’ve been on. It looks like this.
“Three-step cure.”
“Weekend intensive.”
“Exit your business in 90 days.”
“Scale to $1M in 6 months.”
“One simple framework.”
A Slack channel invite link that loads before the page does.
We’re not naming names. The pattern is the point. A lot of the people doing this aren’t bad people. Most of them started with good intentions and drifted into performance because that’s what the algorithm rewards. But the result is the same either way. Older business owners (your parents’ age, my age) are spending $10K, $30K, sometimes $50K on programs that deliver a workbook, a community, and very little else.
You can feel the anger on the page. That’s on purpose. We get angry at this because we’ve watched it happen to people we respect. Operators with 30 years in. People who built something real with their hands and their name. People who don’t deserve to hand over a quarter’s worth of margin to someone whose own business is a personal brand.
There’s another way. Melissa and I called ours Obsolete By Design™. We’ll get to what that means below. But first I want to put the standard on the page, because the standard matters more than the name.
We don’t call ourselves “coaches” anymore. We don’t call ourselves “consultants” either. Melissa and I are Business Growth Strategists. And more importantly, we’re Operators.
Three brick & mortar companies.
Around 50 employees.
Payroll every Friday.
Trucks that break down.
Vendors who call.
A marriage that has to survive the thing we teach other people to build.
That’s not a credential. That’s a standard.
Here’s the standard we hold ourselves to, and the standard we would tell you to look for in anyone you’d pay for advice in this space.
Don’t teach from a mountaintop you’ve never been on. If you’ve never made payroll, you don’t get to tell other people how to scale a business. That’s not gatekeeping. That’s respect for the reader.
The why comes first. Always. Anyone who skips the why and sells you a how is either lazy or in a hurry to close. Either way, walk.
A discovery conversation is a diagnosis, not a sales call. Sometimes the diagnosis is “this isn’t for you.” If the person on that call has never told anyone “this isn’t a fit, here’s a better resource,” they’re not doing advisory work. They’re doing commission work.
No countdown timers. No fake scarcity. No “only 3 spots left” when there’s always 3 spots left. You’ve been running a company for 30 years. You don’t fall for this stuff. Nobody should be aiming it at you.
Stay in the room after the hard part. When somebody signs up and it gets uncomfortable, which it will, because change always does, the person you paid should still be picking up the phone.
That’s the standard. It’s the standard we hold ourselves to, and it’s the standard we ask people to hold us to in return.
So here’s the another way part.
We named our methodology Obsolete By Design™. The concept is simple, and most owners hate it the first time they hear it: you haven’t finished building your business until it can succeed without you.
Most owners think a business that depends on them is a business that’s working. Our methodology argues the opposite. Owner-dependence is the failing grade. The test that matters is whether the business can grow, operate, or be sold without you in the room.
Some readers’ first reaction is: “Obsolete? I’ve spent 30 years making sure I’m needed. Why would I make myself disposable?”
It’s the right question. The answer is that needed and trapped are two words for the same thing when the business is built around your brain.
Obsolete by Design isn’t being discarded. It’s being architected out of the daily grind on purpose, on your timeline. The difference between strategic obsolescence (chosen) and forced obsolescence (a heart attack, a key employee walkout, a buyer’s lowball offer because you’re in every seat). Proactive versus reactive.
That’s the work. It’s slower than the three-step cure. It doesn’t produce a viral post. It does, eventually, produce a Saturday where your phone doesn’t ring.
If you’ve been burned by this industry, and a lot of you have, we’re not asking you to take our word for any of it. Watch how we show up for the next 90 days. Read the next eight or ten of these. Take the AI Readiness Check (free, three minutes; link inside the next email). Reply to one of these and see if a real person writes back.
If after that it still feels off, no hard feelings. There’s plenty of noise in this space and we’d rather you trust your gut than our pitch. You’ve been through enough.
Steve & Melissa
The free Skool community is where the work actually starts.
We’re not running it as a feeder for a paid program. We’re running it because the conversations that happen between owners who are doing this work, documenting, delegating, having the hard conversations, are more useful than anything we’d write.
It’s free. Always will be.
P.S.
If this one bothered you, that’s fine. Most of the people who push back on it are people who’ve sold the thing we are describing. The owners we wrote it for usually reply with one line: “Yeah.”