Coaches Watch The Wrong Warning Lights

A bridge never announces that it’s about to fail - it shows rust, has hairline cracks in the concrete. It might have a bit more vibration than it did the year before.

You could find it - It’s just that none of that is really dramatic, so nobody goes looking for it.

Now go and look at the numbers you use to tell you whether new business is coming -Reach, views, followers, saves, DMs, comments

Every single one of those counts attention, but doesn’t capture intent.

Two messages land in the same inbox on the same day

‘Love your stuff mate, this is exactly what I needed to hear’

And

‘I’ve been stuck at the same weight since March, I’m training four times a week and eating what I think is the right amount, and I honestly don’t know what I’m doing wrong - what would you do?’

They’d be scored identically, because they’re ‘engagement’

One notification each

But only one of them is a person who has already decided you might be able to tell them what’s actually wrong

And nobody has ever hired a coach they didn’t first believe could do that

So why does nobody track them?

A lot of coaches don’t have any way of tracking this - a dashboard, crm or even spreadsheet (and even if there is, it probably doesn’t score based on message intent)

The bigger issue is that reach is the number that moves - It moves this afternoon, it moves visibly, and it moves in response to what you write - So you write to move it

And writing to move reach means writing broader - Fewer specifics, fewer numbers, fewer of the ugly particular details that make one person feel seen and everybody else scroll past

Broad gets more people nodding - but it’s also exactly what stops anybody describing their situation to you

I’d be less concerned that metrics aren’t measuring the right thing, and more concerned that they devour it.

Every week you spend making that number go up is a week you spend writing the thing that makes the signal quieter

C. Thi Nguyen calls it value capture - you adopt a metric as a proxy for something you actually want, and then the metric takes that thing’s place

Reach was supposed to be a proxy for reaching the right people

At some point it just became reach

So here’s what I’d do

Go back through the last month

Count the messages where somebody told you about their own situation and asked what you’d do

Not the compliments, not the questions about your programme, not the ‘this is so true’

Just the ones where a person handed you their problem