We Don't All Need to be 7-Figure Coaches

‍Reading note: If you want skimmable bite-size content, this might not be for you. If you want a slower read, welcome—take your time.

“Become a 7-figure coach in seven days.”

We’ve all heard some version of this bullshit at least a hundred times. And what’s wild is that it’s not even aging out.

I entered the coaching space in 2018 and was immediately hit with the same storyline on repeat: If you’re not scaling, you’re failing. If you’re not hitting $50K months, you’re playing small. If you’re not a 7-figure coach you’re doing it wrong.

Eight years later, the bar hasn’t moved. If anything, it’s calcified into something harder and more immovable than before. And it’s not just annoying. It’s actively damaging. Because somewhere along the way, “7-figures” stopped being a possible outcome and became the default definition of success. The cultural scoreboard. The thing you’re supposed to want (even if you don’t know why).

Let me be really clear from the jump, I’m not anti-money.

If you want to make 7-figures, I get it. Honestly, I love the idea of a coach being so good at what they do—and running a business so effectively—that they generate that kind of income. Also, I’m a millennial. If I made 7-figures a year, I could do wild things like not be stressed about student loans, buy a home (or a farm, because of course), travel, take time off, and the most wild, fund a retirement account like an adult human.

I’m not here to shame ambition.

What I am here to challenge is the indoctrination. Because when a rare outcome becomes the baseline expectation, you don’t get motivation, you get an undercurrent of shame that permeates throughout an industry that’s meant to be of service to humanity.

The Illusion of 7-Figures

A “7-figure coach” usually means $1M+ in annual revenue, but revenue is not the flex people think it is. The part that gets conveniently (and constantly) left out is expenses: ad spend, team and contractors, refunds and churn, taxes, and the fact that someone can “make a million” and still feel like they’re sprinting on a treadmill that’s on fire. They reach the “ultimate peak” and they can be less fulfilled, experiencing more fear, and might even be secretly resentful towards their business.

This is where the industry gets dishonest. You’ll see “$1M” plastered everywhere while the actual picture looks something like this:

A million in revenue with $600K in expenses covering team, ops, tools, contractors, affiliates, and taxes
Or a million in revenue with $500K in paid ads and no mention of it anywhere in the pitch
Or a million in revenue that requires constant launches, constant pressure, and a fragile nervous system held together with adaptogenic lattes and mindfulness

And listen, I’m not saying no to $400K in my bank account, the number is sexy. And costs are always going to be part of business, that’s a given. But if you’re going to build an industry on “truth,” “transformation,” and “integrity,” then selective transparency is a problem.

Where the Illusion Breaks Down

So why does the 7-figure narrative persist? And more importantly, why is it so harmful?

The answer starts with understanding that this narrative doesn’t just set a financial goal—it turns a rare outcome into a moral scoreboard.

And this is the quiet violence of the hype economy: It doesn’t just sell you a strategy. It sells you a self-concept. It teaches you that your income equals your value, that your revenue equals your credibility, that your pace equals your worthiness, and that your results must look like someone else’s highlight reel, or you’re “behind.”

And worse, we know deep down that most coaches are not going to hit 7-figures in revenue. That’s not pessimism. That’s math.

So when the industry pushes 7-figures as normal, what it’s really doing is creating a system where most people feel like they’re failing, by design. And shame does what it always does: it makes people buy more, chase harder, and blame themselves when it doesn’t work.

The business model depends on it.

You don’t build a multi-million-dollar “teach coaches to coach” empire by telling people that $90K a year doing work you love is a beautiful life. You build it by making $90K feel like poverty, like you’re playing small, like you’re not serious enough or brave enough or “all in” enough.

How the Scoreboard Warps Everything

When you market coaching as “easy money,” you attract people who are here for money first, not service first. And yes, some of those people can become decent coaches over time. But a lot of them don’t.

So then the coaches who are actually skilled, ethical, and grounded have to fight through a hundred pounds of stigma just to be trusted. This is why so many potential clients are skeptical of coaching now. They’re not crazy. They’ve been burned. They’ve worked with someone who promised a very tangible, specific transformation, and didn’t come close to facilitating that transformation.

But the deeper distortion happens to the coaches themselves.

When the primary goal becomes “hit the number,” everything downstream gets warped. Messaging becomes more performative. Marketing becomes more manipulative. Clients become numbers. Pressure leaks into the container. Integrity becomes optional when the launch needs saving.

You can feel it when someone’s business is built on adrenaline. You can feel it in their copy, in their energy on sales calls, in the way they talk about their clients.

Here’s how it could show up in your business.

It’s Tuesday morning. You planned to write one email and do two client calls. But you wake up already braced, because your Stripe dashboard is now your mood regulator. Your nervous system is checking revenue the way it should be checking hunger.

You post content you don’t even like, because it’s “what performs.”

You rewrite your sales page for the 12th time, not because the offer is unclear, but because you’re trying to control an outcome that isn’t fully controllable.

You get on a sales call and you’re “present,” but there’s a second conversation happening underneath: *Please buy. Please buy. Please buy.*

And clients can feel that. Even if they can’t name it, they can feel it. That’s the cost of turning business into a proving ground. Not because you’re bad. Because the scoreboard is bad.

Because you’ve been taught that the number means something about you—about your worth, your capabilities, your right to be here. And when that’s the frame, every low week becomes an existential crisis. Every launch that doesn’t hit becomes evidence that you’re not enough. Every client who doesn’t buy becomes a referendum on your value as a human.

This is what happens when you let an industry define success for you. You end up building a business that looks good on paper and feels terrible in your body.

Why the Machine Keeps Running

Here’s one of the simplest truths about the Coaching Industrial Complex: honesty and reality isn’t as marketable as fantasy.

If a coach told the truth like “Most of my clients improve, some have big wins, some don’t. Results vary. It depends on execution, capacity, niche, offer, timing, skill, audience, and about 40 other things,” they’d be out-marketed by the person promising “$50K months in 90 days, and if you don’t get it, you’re the problem.”

Fantasy sells because it hits deep human wiring around safety, freedom, significance, belonging, and the desperate hope that maybe this time, finally, you’ll be enough.

That’s why this narrative is rampant. It’s not just business. It’s identity.

The promise isn’t really about money—it’s about becoming the kind of person who makes that money. It’s about crossing over into a club where you’re finally legitimate, where you’ve proven yourself, where you no longer have to carry the quiet shame of “not quite making it.”

And the industry knows this.

The best marketers in this space aren’t selling business strategy—they’re selling transformation of self. They’re selling the idea that on the other side of 7-figures, you’ll be different. More confident. More worthy. More safe.

And maybe you will be. Or maybe you’ll just be the same person with more money and a more sophisticated set of problems.

But that’s not the story that sells courses.

Your Why Is Your Fuel

I want to be careful here, because your why isn’t about “good reasons” and “bad reasons.”

You’re allowed to want 7-figures because it feels fun. Or powerful. Or like a personal challenge. Or because you want options. Or because you want to buy a damn farm, or a yacht. I’m not here to yuck anyone’s yum.

What I am saying is: your reason is fuel.

And some fuel steadies you when business gets hard. Some fuel turns the whole thing into a constant self-worth audit that eats your nervous system alive.

So the question isn’t, is your reason pure? The question is, when things get hard, does your reason support you or punish you?

If your come-from is service, craft, and stewardship, you can have a low week and still stay grounded. You adjust, you learn, you keep your marketing clean, and you don’t turn your clients into a pressure valve. You might be disappointed, even a little nervous, but you’re not in crisis. You’re still clear on what you’re building and why.

If your come-from is proving—proving you’re smart enough, successful enough, worthy enough—the same low week turns into panic.

You start tightening the screws. You add urgency you don’t believe in. You inflate outcomes. You add one-off offerings that you never intend to fully service. You talk about “collapse” and “quantum” and “low vibe” because you need the sale to feel okay about yourself. You make it sound like the only reason someone wouldn’t buy is fear, trauma, or a mindset defect.

And again, if that kind of marketing works for someone and they’re happy, amazing. This isn’t for you. I’m not trying to convert the hype merchants.

But if you care about doing this in integrity, you have to name this stuff. You have to be honest about what you’re chasing and why. Because if you don’t interrupt the pattern of tying your worth to the outcome, you can “win” financially and still lose your life.

Here are a few questions worth sitting with:

If nobody ever knew your revenue, would you still want this goal?
If this took three years instead of three months, would you still pursue it?
Are you chasing the number because you want the game, or because you want what you think the number will fix?
Does this goal feel like expansion, or like a threat?
When you imagine missing the goal, do you feel disappointed, or do you feel ashamed?

Because disappointment is normal. Shame is usually a signal you’ve tied your worth to the outcome. And that’s exactly what the Coaching Industrial Complex trains us to do: make the number mean something about you.

Building Something You Can Hold

Once your come-from is clear, you can actually build something real. Something that doesn’t require a constant adrenaline drip to survive.

And that starts with replacing the status quo metrics with truth-based metrics. We stop using revenue as the only scoreboard. We start building businesses we can actually hold—in our calendars, in our bodies, in our lives.

Lifestyle Math

Instead of asking “What number sounds impressive?” you ask “What does my life actually cost, and what do I want my money to do?”

Lifestyle Math includes:

Your baseline cost of living
Your desired comforts (travel, eating out, classes, experiences)
Savings and debt payoff
Support (therapy, coaching, bodywork, childcare)
Taxes (because surprise, they exist)

Then you ask: What income supports that life without my nervous system paying for it?

Some people can feel free at $80K. Some need $200K. Some want $500K. Some want $1M because they want to play that game. All valid. But the point is: make it yours. Not inherited. Not borrowed from someone else’s highlight reel. Yours.

Capacity Math

This is where people get real quiet, because it removes the fantasy.

You have to ask:

How many clients can I serve well, without resentment?
How many calls can I do per week and still feel like a human?
How much content can I create without becoming a content zombie?
How many launches per year can I do without turning into a shell of myself?

And then the real question: Do I want t

Because scaling volume changes the entire model. It requires more support, more systems, more management, more complexity, more overhead. None of that is “bad.” But it’s not “free.” It’s just honest.

And a lot of coaches skip this step entirely because they’ve been sold the fantasy that scale is always better, that more is always more, that if you’re not growing you’re dying. But sometimes, growing means collapsing under your own weight.

Truth-Based Metrics

If I could rewrite the industry’s scoreboard, it would include things like:

Profit, not just revenue (revenue is fun, but profit is the real flex)
Predictability (can you actually forecast income, or are you constantly surprised?)
Client retention (do people stay, or do they churn after one container?)
Client outcomes (for the average client, not just the highlight testimonial)
Referrals (do people rave about you, or do they quietly disappear?)
Hours worked (what does this business cost you in time and energy?)
Nervous system health (do you feel regulated, or constantly braced?)
Integrity (do you like who you are when you market?)

A business that makes $250K in profit with a regulated body and clean marketing is a better business than a $1M revenue business that needs constant adrenaline to survive.

One is sustainable. The other is a slow-motion breakdown with a good Instagram aesthetic.

Stay Curious: Questions to Ask the Hype Merchants

If you’re working with someone who’s selling you a big claim—”$50K months,” “I made 7-figures in the first year of launching my coaching business, you can too,” “effortless scale”—stay curious. Not cynical, but curiously discerning. Below are some questions to consider when looking for your next business coach.

The Revenue Questions:

Is that revenue or profit?
What were the expenses?
What was the take-home after taxes?
Was it a one-time spike or a consistent flow?
Was it a team effort or a solo effort?

The Ads / Traffic Questions:

How much was spent on ads to create that result?
If ads were used, what was your profit margin?
If no ads were used, what were the primary channels and how long did they take to build?
Did you already have access to a network, or did you build it from scratch?

The Denominator Questions (my favorite):

Out of all clients, what percentage achieved the promised result?
What does the average client outcome look like?
What support did the “top performers” already have (audience size, experience, niche, capital)?

The Time Horizon Questions:

In what time frame did these results happen?
How long were they coaching before it clicked?

The “What’s the tradeoff?” Questions:

What did it cost in time, stress, relationships, health?
What did they stop doing to make that happen?
What did they sacrifice?

If they get cagey, dodgy, defensive, or act like you’re “in a low frequency” for asking, move on. A real business can handle real questions. A real leader won’t perceive accountability and transparency as a threat. Powerful leaders can handle the arrows.

Your Permission Slip

You don’t need a million-dollar business to be successful. You need a business that supports the life you want to live. You get to declare what that means for you.

Maybe success is $90K and loving your work. Maybe it’s $150K and four days a week. Maybe it’s $250K with a small roster of dream clients. Maybe it’s $1M with a team, a system, and a genuine desire for that game. All valid.

So yes, make a million if you want to. Truly.

I urge you to reject the “7-figures” as the moral barometer for whether you’re worthy, whether you’re successful, or whether you’re a “real” coach.

Build the business you can actually hold. In your calendar. In your body. In your life.

That’s success.