Great Circle

By Andy Brown | The Kajabi Guy · 3 min read Every summer, like clockwork, the same thought does the rounds among coaches who've knocked off for a well-earned break. They're a week in, far enough from work to hear themselves think, and somewhere in all that stillness, the same quiet voice starts up and won't leave them alone. I'm not sure I want to do this any more. Nobody really warns you about this part when you start out. Coaching is genuinely exhausting.

Open LinkedIn for five minutes right now. Count the contradictory pieces of advice that land in your feed before you've finished your coffee. By the time you're ten posts in, you've been told long-form is back and long-form is dead. That video is the only thing that works and that nobody watches video anymore. That you need to niche harder and broaden out. That newsletters are the future and that newsletters are dying.

I had a call last week with a coach who'd shut his membership down. When I asked him why, he told me Kajabi wasn't really fit for purpose. Hmm, tricky one. I work with some of the biggest coaches in the world running their entire businesses on Kajabi, and it works for them just fine. So if it isn't working for you, then something else is going on. Let's have a look. I spent an hour going through the build, and it wasn't pretty.

Twice in the last week, I've had near-identical discovery calls. Different people, different problems, same question buried in the conversation. "Can I build this thing without my name being attached to it?" One had a day job with a non-compete that would blow up if they were spotted teaching the same skill in public. The other had an existing professional brand that would conflict with the coaching offer they wanted to run on the side. Both wanted to build. Neither could be seen doing it.

Want help building or growing your coaching business? I'm Andy Brown. I work with coaches and course creators to build businesses that actually work. Strategy first, always. Whether you're starting from scratch or something isn't performing the way it should, that's the conversation we have first. I'm a Verified Kajabi Expert with 20 years of real business experience behind me.

Want help building or growing your coaching business? I'm Andy Brown. I work with coaches and course creators to build businesses that actually work. Strategy first, always. Whether you're starting from scratch or something isn't performing the way it should, that's the conversation we have first. I'm a Verified Kajabi Expert with 20 years of real business experience behind me.

I reviewed three Kajabi systems this week. Three different coaches, three different niches, three completely different businesses. And every single one of them was a maze. Modules stacked on modules. Resources nobody had opened in months. Automations firing in five directions at once. Onboarding sequences so long the client had probably quit before they reached the end. The coaches who built these systems are good at what they do. Genuinely good. They care about their clients.

I've lost count of how many coaches have told me lately that they've stopped doing discovery calls. Said with a kind of weary pride, like they've finally seen through the trick. So I ask them why. And it's almost always the same answer. The last few burned them. They got on the call, gave everything away, the prospect went quiet, and three weeks later they spotted their own framework being repeated back to them by someone who never paid them a penny. So they stopped doing the calls altogether.

You've seen the advert. The burger glistening under the lights, cheese folding over the edge like a slow wave, the kind of thing that makes you put your shoes on and head out the door. Twenty minutes later you're holding the real one that looks like it fell off the back of a lorry, and you wouldn't feed it to the dog. It's the same in business. If you've got traffic but no sales, the first thing most coaches do is rewrite the copy. New headline, punchier words, a few more testimonials.

Some of my best thinking used to happen at three thousand feet. When I had a plane, the routine was simple. I'd hit the wall on a Tuesday afternoon, grab the keys, drag the aircraft out of the hangar, and go up for an hour. Even with the chatter of air traffic and the occasional other aircraft to keep an eye on, something about being off the ground gave me clarity I couldn't find at the desk. The work I'd been staring at all morning would suddenly have a shape.