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Are coaches still going to be necessary? Are people still going to hire coaches? And how do you stay relevant with things changing at such a rapid pace?

In this episode, I’m sharing where I think the coaching and digital products industry is heading, why speed and ease are going to be more important than ever, and what this means for your offers.

I’m also taking you behind the scenes of what I’ve been building with AI inside my company, and why I believe we’re in a season where founders need to be building, creating, and inventing.

Key Takeaways

• Why you shouldn’t call yourself a coach
• The new AI-powered era for coaches (and what to do)
• The AI agents I’m using to run my company
• Why I don’t feel AI will replace your magic, but amplify it

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READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Emily Hirsh:

We need to be building, we need to be creating, we need to be inventing, we need to be visionaries because everything’s changing. And no one else is gonna lead the way for your company. Somebody else is gonna move faster. Somebody else is gonna come up with something. There is so much opportunity to come up with something that somebody has not created yet in your industry, even if it’s saturated, and come up with a different solution or a different way to solving a problem. But you have to spend the time on it, and it does take time.

Embodied CEOs don’t chase trends. They pave the way they lead from within. Move by purpose, unshaken by noise. When you are the source, you do not need permission.

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. I hope you guys are having an amazing week. I feel like this week I have been putting in a lot of work. I think I go through seasons in my business where I will work a lot on a project and then come up for air, and then kinda coast for a little bit, and then go deep into a project.

And I have been so deep in AI projects, and I feel slightly addicted to it because I don’t know if you guys experience this, but it’s like I have a vision for something, and then that vision evolves, and it grows, and it, it gets bigger, and then I can’t put it down until I’m done. And so I also have this, piece to me of once I have a direction of something that I want, I become a little obsessed with it, and I want it done as fast as possible.

And so I can’t stop until it’s done. I can’t be like, “Oh, this will be, you know, a month long, long project that we’ll just, like, do, you know? And we’ll just, like, slowly do pieces.” I’m like, “No. We’ll do this today, as much as possible today, so we can have it tomorrow.” I do want to be able to share more on here what I have built, but honestly, it’s like very customized things for our company to either streamline process save myself and the team time, speed things up, but also a lot of like dashboards and things either on the marketing side, the delivery side, that culls everything all into one place.

So to an extent, I feel like I have put in a lot of time, and I’m not sure it’s paid off yet. It will pay off. And also, it’s dope. Like everything I’ve built looks really cool. So anyways, I wanted to talk about today a couple of thoughts, not necessarily around AI, but kind of what I think this means for the direction of offers and selling support, especially in the coaching industry, which a lot of you guys are in one form and or the other in, you know, the coaching industry.

And also where I think founders right now should be spending their time. And I had this conversation with my mastermind this week, and I just think it’s an important thing to talk about here as we are in a crazy time of things changing at such a rapid pace. So number one, I think that, you know, what is the future of the coaching industry?

And are coaches still gonna be necessary? Are people still gonna hire coaches? Like, how do you, how do you stay relevant today with things changing at such a rapid pace? And I have talked about this before, but I’m gonna bring it back, and we’re gonna do a specific episode on it. First of all, I do think that the coaching industry in all niches, some more than others, is very saturated, and there is a lack of trust because the reality is there’s no requirement to be a coach.

Like, anyone can call themselves a coach. And unfortunately, a lot of people have probably had bad experiences with a coach, somebody who overpromised, under-delivered, and that has tainted everyone’s view of a coach. And so, I think that the word coach, in some cases, I won’t say every single one, but most cases, I would stop calling yourself that.

And I know some people are gonna be like, “What am I supposed to call myself?” I don’t know. But I do know, like, in the business world, I’ve switched to saying more like strategic advisor or strategist. In the health and wellness, it’s more like practitioner. Some it’s like there isn’t another word. And you do need to find a word that people will still resonate with.

But I just feel like the word coach, in a lot of cases, does not have a positive connotation. It doesn’t have a powerful connotation, right? If you come up to someone and you say, “I’m a business coach,” or you say, “I’m a strategic advisor for” It just has a more powerful energy behind it. Now, aside from the label, I think even more importantly is instead of needing to say the word coach, speak to the result that you get somebody.

So I help people XYZ. I get this result. That matters so much more than the title you give yourself. So I also think, you know, if someone were to ask me, like, what I am, I wouldn’t call myself a coach. I would call myself a business and marketing strategist, and then there’s multiple ways that I help people, but it all comes back to that, whether it’s my mastermind or working with our team, whatever.

I would not use the word coach, even in my mastermind. I don’t use that word. I mean, I’m a business strategist and partner for your business and collaborating for your business. But it’s focused on the result. So that’s the first thing is, like, if you are in the coaching industry, I would be cognizant of your language

And positioning yourself from a place of power, of strength, of results, of confidence, and In a lot of cases, I feel like coach does not do that anymore. So that’s kinda the first thing. Next, this is what I brought up on my, on my mastermind call is, like, the direction that I see the coaching and the digital products and programs industry going.

Are they still gonna work? Here’s the thing. Solving a specific problem and going, “I solve this problem, and I take you through step by step how to do XYZ. You know, how to go from where you’re at to here, and here’s the steps I take you through. Here’s the roadmap. Here’s the milestones,” whatever. Giving someone a specific result like that I believe is going to continue to be valuable.

I don’t think AI will be able to replace that because it is… It doesn’t have lived experience. It can’t go, “I know exactly where you’re at at this stage of your life, of your business, of your health, whatever, and here are the steps you need to take to get to where you wanna be.” Now, the most important thing to remember with your offers today is speed and ease.

How can you get someone to where they wanna go fast with as little mental, physical, time, energy investment on their part? Only having them do what they absolutely have to do Everything else, you’ve figured out a way to make it easy for them. Which means I think we’re heading in a direction where every company is going to either be a software company or a done-for-you implementation company with software in the background.

And I don’t mean, like, this complicated software product. But here’s the, the reality with what I see with AI right now, and what I am able to build for my, my own company and my clients right now, is it is extremely easy to build basically an app or a software. Like, in these different areas of my company, from our marketing tracking to our client dashboard and tracking everything happening internally, to my podcast now has a, a whole dashboard.

It’s… These are mini softwares. That is basically what you can build. And I think that every offer that is a digital product or is coaching is going to move in the direction where it has an element of software, but not as we think about software. Simple software. Tools, things that you plug in info and it spits it out for you, and implementation done for you, paired with coaching and support.

I do not think that people will stop hiring coaches, strategists, whatever you want to call it. I don’t. I think that the human connection, You know, a coach, strategic advisor, practitioner, whatever, has lived experience, has the ability to think not just, like, “Here’s a problem. Let’s think of A, B, C solutions,” and we’re robotic about it, but also asking questions that you may not have thought of, thinking of things you, you may not have even considered, and just the level of perspective because of lived experience and the art that you are, right?

As a person, as, as a coach, as someone who supports clients. I don’t think that’s going away. I think it has to be paired with implementation in the form of software tools and done for you. Because the reality is creating things that make it a lot easier for somebody to do something, to implement something, to get a result, is now easier than ever And so if you have a program or you are a coach, what you need to be thinking about is where are all the places that somebody either gets stuck, or it takes them a really long time to do something, or it takes them a lot of energy, a lot of resource, and how can I make that easier?

What this is likely gonna look like is tools that you make. Like, let’s say you are, a health and wellness coach. Now, instead of having someone track their food with your, you know, printout tracker or PDF tracker, it’s interactive. They put in their stuff. It automatically adds up their macros. It adds everything up.

It gives them feedback based on your lived experience. So it’s not the same as, you know, MyFitnessPal app because it has you infused in it. So the more you have your body of work, right? Like, everything I create today, I am pulling from the 800 and something podcast episodes I’ve done, the 100 plus webinars and trainings and workshops I’ve done.

Every call I have right now, every mastermind coaching call, every one-on-one call that I do that’s a bonus call, all that information is getting pulled and put into AI, basically, my own AI, my, proprietary AI, and then created into tools and into support, whether that’s internal, my team uses it to be able to support a client, or a tool external that we can give to clients.

So you have to start thinking about where all the places that I could infuse my knowledge in a way that is as fast and easy as possible for somebody to get the result. Because here’s the thing. Here’s my thinking with AI Because it’s gonna be able to do so much for us and it’s so fast, and I mean, things that it blows me away every week.

Like, things that would take me weeks, I can do in an hour. That is gonna create capacity. Now, most people, especially entrepreneurs, aren’t gonna go, “Great, I have more capacity. I’ll just work less.” Right? They’re still gonna work. So what are we gonna do? We’re gonna do things and spend more time doing the things only we can do.

Which means that the things only we can do need to get better. So now you’re putting more depth and more intention in, for example, content, in developing a webinar. It’s something I, I don’t think AI could do is write a webinar for you. Absolutely not. It would be terrible. Maybe one day, but I still doubt it.

And infuse you into it. Creating content, recording podcasts, connecting with your audience, contemplating, solving problems, being a visionary. AI is gonna free up people’s time to hopefully be put into the things only they can do. So when you look at that from the perspective of your ideal client, what would happen if you asked yourself, ” When a client works with me and goes through my offer or works with me one-on-one,” whatever it is, “how do I make sure they are only spending their time as it relates to solving the problem they’re trying to solve, that I help them solve with my offer, doing the things that only they can do?”

Like, truly allowing for more depth for them to do those things and then you’re taking the mental, physical, energetic load off of them on everything else. And that’s gonna give you your answer of what you should create. First of all, that’s my prediction for coaching and digital products. I still do actually think digital products will have a place, but they will have to be so specific, so easy to consume, and likely paired with tools that are a form of software.

I mean, I don’t know if you would officially call them software, but basically they are. And it’s so easy to make that today that it’s gonna become the standard So as you look at your offer, this brings me to my second point of how important I think it is for founders today, CEOs, you guys, to be making time to be thinking about this and working on this and building.

Like, we are in such a season of, I believe, of business right now where we need to be building, we need to be creating, we need to be inventing, we need to be visionaries because everything’s changing. And no one else is gonna lead the way for your company. And, and here’s what I have found with this. As I have, like, the last several weeks been…

And I’ve actually been creating with AI obviously for a very long time. Like, I created whole products. I was, like, kind of, quote, “ahead on this” by creating in vibe coding digital products turned into, like, mini softwares where you answered questions and it spit out the client’s sales page, or it would spit out their emails, or it would come up with their content ideas.

Like, all of that’s like mini software tools. So I did that, you know, a year and a half ago. Now I have been deep in our internal, but everything I, I create, there is no way that I could hire it out or that my team could do it. Because I’m telling you, it is such a process of I start with an idea, and then I start it, and then it evolves, and it evolves, and it evolves, and it grows.

And I get feedback from my team, right? But, the point is, this is work I have to do. This is setting a foundation for our company of the direction I wanna take it, of the way that we can support people. And it is taking my lived experience, my brain, my knowledge, my wisdom, all of that, and putting it into proprietary things, whether that’s a tool, whether that’s an internal resource or an app.

Like, it’s all different things. And I have a million more ideas. This is why I can’t stop working right now because it’s so much. Nobody else could do that for me right now. They can’t. It’s, it’s like the same as no one could really create your program that you sell to clients. Like, that is you infused in that.

And if you have somebody else create it, it’s probably not gonna sell and it’s probably not gonna be good. So what I am encouraging my mastermind members right now in this conversation is Get support and implement systems right now so that all of your free time, that you are only doing the things only you can do.

So recording podcasts, recording content, creating that, you know, webinar, whatever. And everything else is spent doing this. Because I will put my prediction out there that I think the founders that delay this are going to suffer because somebody else is gonna do it. Somebody else is gonna move faster.

Somebody else is gonna come up with something. And I personally feel we are in such an exciting time in a way, because there is so much opportunity. There is so much opportunity to come up with something that somebody has not created yet in your industry, even if it’s saturated, and come up with a different solution or a different way to solving a problem.

But you have to spend the time on it, and it does take time. And so, you know, take it from me, this is where I am spending majority of my time, majority of my free time. If I’m not recording content, you know, if I’m not meeting with my team or fulfilling different, you know, coaching calls, mastermind calls, whatever, if I’m not doing that, I am spending all my time doing this right now.

And it just keeps evolving, and I don’t think it’ll be like that forever, but it’s, it’s just we’re setting a whole new foundation. and I’m still figuring out… I- see, what I’m struggling with, to be honest with you, is like I wanna create something that is going to make this easier for you guys, whether that’s creating, you know, a marketing dashboard or something, or take, taking the marketing dashboard I created and giving you a version of that, or helping you create this in your offer.

But I just, I haven’t figured out how to do it In a way that it’s like saves you time, because in a lot of cases, the amount of time you’re gonna spend doing this with AI is the same amount of time you would spend telling somebody to do it, and that’s, that’s the thing.

but for our clients, for our elite and our VIP clients, and then I have to figure out how for our scale clients, but I am gonna take the dashboard I built. So I built the most epic like, I’m so obsessed with it, marketing dashboard, you guys. And, and this is the thing. It is my brain. I invented this.

So I built this marketing dashboard that is connected to our Facebook ad account, my CRM, Ontraport, GoHighLevel, where my landing pages are, Stripe, where we… And, and our other payment processor. It’s all connected, and it’s a single dashboard. And, and then also our sales team, so Calendly, their sales call recordings.

And basically it has these different views, but I can see on one view, I can see all of our sales stats. So every single call, you know, close rate, show up rate. I can go- I g- have a section that shows me every single sale we’ve made for the month, the first thing they did when they joined my list. Like, was it a webinar?

Was it a challenge? What was it? The last thing they did. Exact attribution to ads. So ROAS, like the top of it has total sales for the month, total calls, show up rate, ad spend, ROAS for the month, and then I can do different views. And then it has all of our sales, so let’s say we’ve got 20 sales, and it takes those sales and it att- attributes them, which we were doing this, but it was like manual, and it was in spreadsheets.

Now it’s just automated, and this thing is so intelligent how I’ve built it because it knows how to look at a contact record and critically think, “Oh, this is the tag they got, but 15 minutes before that, they opened an email, so we’re gonna attribute them here.” Right? There is no other software doing that.

I’m sorry, but, like, Highrise, all of- they’re not doing that to that level of how you then make the data create a story, right? Then for each one of my funnels, automatically pulling from Facebook, from our CRM, all the stats in the order of the funnel. So going ad spend, landing page view, landing page conversion, leads, cost per lead, webinar, show-up rate, live webinar close rate, how many calls booked on the webinar, and then sales attributed to that week’s webinar.

So I’ve got this grid where I can see… And I’m gonna do a podcast on our weekly webinar stats ’cause I have this single grid from the entire year when I started doing weekly webinars back in February. I can see in one spot every single webinar and every row, the spend, the sales, the ROAS, right? And then I have the same thing for our other funnels, our challenges.

And, and the fact, what it’s doing is, like, if somebody closes a sale, they close three months later, it’s going back and attributing it to the right spot. So anyways, it’s custom because it’s custom to my funnels, but that is the level of data. It’s like as a CEO, I just wanna be able to log in and have a single dashboard that tells me all this because it allows me to see, number one, how profitable, yes, everything is, but where we put more energy and attention, or are there gaps?

Like, oh, the show-up rate’s dropping. It’s really hard to do that well in a spreadsheet, to get it to a view where you can really take all this data and, and have it tell a story. So for our elite and our VIP clients, hopefully in the next 30 days I’ll be able to roll this out. I gotta do one at a time with the team because it’s custom.

So, like, for each client, I’m gonna create a custom dashboard because your funnel is different, and so it has to be custom. It’s gonna be connected to your CRM, your Facebook ad account, and all those places, and talk to it. So, like, that alone, that’s a software. If you guys remember, I went on a journey of building a software Three or four years ago, and it was just really expensive, and I ended up dropping it.

And I actually haven’t talked about that on here, but this was the software. It was to be able to track your marketing to this level because I do not know of another software out there. I mean, I would say Hyros is a good software, but it’s so overwhelming, like the way that you look at the data in there.

it attributes the ads correctly, but it doesn’t tell the story in a dashboard where somebody who’s not a marketing expert, who’s not an ads manager, but is just a CEO… Like this that I made is made for the CEO. And I have my own… I have my marketing dashboard, then I have a CEO dashboard that’s a live feed of my revenue, expenses, sales for the month.

And then it, it is pulling from my Slack and my email and giving me like what I need to know that day. So it… You know, I have it set up where it’s like, I start my day in the morning and my little agent, David Wallace from The Office, is like, “Here’s what you need. Like, here’s your cash. Here’s what you need to do.

Here’s the expenses from yesterday,” you know, whatever. And that is so valuable. So valuable. So anyways, I mean, that’s the type of stuff that I will be able to bring over to clients. And I mean, that, that’s a software product. Like years ago, being able to make… That’s what I wanted to make, is that marketing like tracking into a software product because the thing that I notice with, with all clients is in the digital space and in the high-ticket space, it’s hard to attribute exact sales from ads.

Because you might have somebody who came from an ad three or six months ago and then bought. And now, in a matter of filters, I can go, “Okay, how many people out of all of our sales this year from our weekly webinar attended more than one webinar?” Boom. Answer. Again, it’s so valuable. Okay, you can tell I’m freaking out because I’ve been like so deep in this.

And then I did the same thing for our client delivery. So I made a dashboard that has all of our clients, the delivery metrics of how long it takes us to deliver certain things. Did we hit deadlines? How long have they been on the roster? It’s like got a scorecard for each client that has everything in one place, all their links.

It’s culling from calls to emails to our backend school platform. Anywhere somebody says a client win, something that, like they made sales, whatever, it’s culling that, putting it in their client record, and then it also takes that and turns it into a case study or an example for my sales team. It’s so good.

Like, it is so… It is the most like amazing thing how I’ve made all these, these departments talk to each other All right, that’s it. But if you are an elite or a VIP client, and then I’m gonna figure out for scale, I gotta make it more templated. I can’t give you guys like a custom thing, and I can’t connect everything for you in scale.

You will be getting some seriously upgraded marketing dashboards, hopefully in the next 30 days. I’m gonna go one by one. I’m gonna start with our VIP clients, then I’m gonna go through elite with the team. and then, you know, who knows? maybe I can sell it like a little software, but that is my point.

Everything… It is so easy today to build a quote software and create tools for your clients or for your business, and the CEO has to be the visionary. And you have to think about the problems you’re solving and the transformation you’re trying to create. And again, back to speed and ease. What can you create?

What can you build to make it easier? We are in an era of building. It feels in a way, not like starting my business over, and I feel like I’ve ebbed and flowed with this the last two years because of AI. But I’m just currently in a season where I’ve like decided that I have a million ideas around this.

But when you first started your business, right, you had to build everything. And to an extent, I think CEOs have to go through this to like rebuild our foundation for the current era that we are in. So, hopefully that was helpful. If you are listening to this and you’re like, “I really want one of those dashboards, and my agency is not giving me that,” or, “We don’t have that,” we do have a couple of spots for elite.

We have one spot for a VIP client, and we have, I think, two spots for an elite client right now. So if you go to helpmystrategy.com, you can apply. Scale clients are next tier. I will bring a version of this. I’m like 80% sure what I can do there. But I want you guys… We’re– Right now we have a spreadsheet, right, that we give you for tracking.

But I want you to guys to have these like CEO dashboards and really set up your systems and your data to be in that spot of an informed CEO. And that’s the thing, because if we’re informed with our data, we can make better decisions, and that’s very important today. So, all right, guys, I will talk to you on Thursday.

Thanks so much for listening.