Understanding the pattern that confuses outsiders and makes perfect sense from the inside
You’ve seen the meme. Coaches coaching coaches who coach other coaches. The pattern has become an inside joke, a source of genuine confusion, and for some people, it even looks like a pyramid scheme. When you see it from the outside, the suspicion makes sense.
But there’s a gap between what’s actually happening inside the coaching industry and how it reads to everyone else. The behaviour has clear reasons that make sense to coaches. The optics tell a different story. This article walks through both sides, showing you why coaches end up in this position and why it looks so strange to onlookers.
The pressure to hire staff comes from everywhere. Business advisors push it, online courses sell it, and successful coaches you admire seem to have done it. Understanding why this happens helps you see the trap before you walk into it.
You’ve experienced what coaching can do. That’s why you became a coach. Most professionals won’t buy their own service. Accountants don’t hire accountants. Dentists don’t pay other dentists. Coaches are different because you’ve watched it work, probably multiple times across different parts of your life.
When coaching helped you figure out your business direction, work through a confidence block, or navigate a major transition, you learned it’s worth paying for. Direct experience creates consistent demand. From the outside, this can look like a pyramid scheme where everyone’s selling to each other. From the inside, it’s just people investing in something they know works.
You already know this. Coaching is crowded, competitive, and getting harder to stand out in every year. You can be brilliant at transforming lives and still struggle to fill your calendar or price your services properly. The business side trips up capable coaches constantly.
Successful coaches end up coaching less experienced ones because they’ve solved the exact problems those coaches face. Client acquisition, sustainable pricing, market positioning… a coach who’s built a thriving practice has knowledge that directly addresses another coach’s biggest obstacles. The demand exists, the solution exists, the transaction makes logical sense.
Coaching does have experience and competency gradients. Organisations like the International Coaching Federation formalise this through credential levels that mark different stages of professional development. Someone with 5,000 client hours has knowledge and skills that someone with 50 hours doesn’t, and that difference matters.
In corporate environments, this guidance happens through management structures and internal mentorship. For self-employed coaches, there’s no built-in system. You don’t have a boss providing feedback, a team lead reviewing your approach, or a senior colleague you can shadow. If you want guidance, supervision, or help working through complex client situations, you need to seek it externally. Paying for that support replaces what organisational hierarchy provide for free.
The coaching category has expanded massively. It now includes consultants, educators, wellness professionals, content creators, and specialists who never would have used the term ten years ago. Anyone offering structured guidance often falls under this umbrella now.
Add influencers teaching their methods, online educators packaging their expertise, former corporate leaders turning their experience into programs. The market is huge and diverse. People who ten years ago would’ve called themselves consultants, trainers, or mentors now use “coach” because that’s the language clients understand and search for. When the tent is this big, coaches hiring coaches becomes inevitable.
Being good at coaching doesn’t mean you’re strong in every adjacent skill. Business strategy, ethical dilemmas, clinical supervision, identity shifts when you leave a corporate career to go solo… these all need different expertise. You wouldn’t expect a physiotherapist to also be brilliant at copywriting, marketing, and finance, just because they’re great with clients.
Coaches face the same reality. You might excel at helping executives navigate leadership challenges but struggle with Instagram. You might be phenomenal at trauma-informed coaching but have no idea how to structure a scalable group program. Seeking coaching in these specific areas is normal professional development, the same way a GP might consult a specialist or a lawyer might hire a business consultant.
Most people watching this pattern unfold don’t have the context you do. They see coaches hiring coaches who coach other coaches, and they just don’t get it. Here’s why they get the wrong idea:
When the uninitiated think about coaching, they picture a small group of life coaches and executive coaches. That’s the mental model most people carry. They don’t see the massive expansion that’s happened through online education, the creator economy, and professional rebranding over the past decade.
This creates a visibility problem. If you think there are 10,000 coaches and you see coaches constantly hiring each other, it looks weird. If you understand there are potentially millions of people now operating under the coaching umbrella globally, the math changes completely. The pattern looks exaggerated because people are working with a wildly inaccurate denominator.
Coaches market themselves online. They talk about their clients, share transformation stories, and mention who they work with. When those clients are other coaches who are also visible online, it creates a feedback loop of visibility that makes the pattern seem more common than it actually is.
Other professions do this quietly. Lawyers hire legal consultants. Therapists see therapists for supervision. Surgeons attend training led by other surgeons. Nobody posts about it on LinkedIn. Coaching happens in public, complete with testimonials, case studies, and social proof. You’re seeing a professional development pattern that exists across many industries, just played out where everyone can watch.
When people see hierarchy, money flowing upward, and high dropout rates, they grab the nearest mental model. Pyramid schemes are the pattern most people know for situations where newcomers pay established players, those established players recruit more newcomers, and most participants eventually leave.
The label makes sense as shorthand. The structure doesn’t match. Pyramid schemes collapse when recruitment slows because the only product is recruitment itself. Coaching has an actual service being delivered. Coaches can build sustainable practices without ever coaching another coach. The business model doesn’t require constant downstream recruitment to function. The comparison is understandable but technically inaccurate.
Coaches coaching coaches isn’t evidence of an industry eating itself. It shows people who believe in what they sell, professional levels that exist without formal structure, and the practical realities of building a business in a crowded market.
The behaviour only looks circular if you assume everyone’s doing the same work at the same level. A business coach helping new coaches build sustainable practices isn’t doing the same job as those coaches will do with their clients. A supervision specialist working with trauma coaches operates in a completely different domain than the coaches they supervise. The differentiation is real, just harder to spot from outside.
What looks like a pyramid from a distance is a profession trying to support itself without corporate infrastructure. The pattern is messy and public. It’s also what happens when a broad professional category grows fast without traditional institutional support.
Coaches coach other coaches because they understand the value of coaching and see a clear need they can help with. Many capable coaches struggle with sustainability, positioning, or confidence rather than coaching skill. Experienced coaches naturally support peers who are earlier in that journey.
Yes, it is normal for coaches to hire other coaches at different stages of their career. Coaching often addresses blind spots, decision-making, and accountability rather than technical skill alone. This makes external perspective valuable even for experienced practitioners.
Good coaches still benefit from coaching because expertise does not eliminate blind spots. Business growth, pricing, ethics, identity shifts, and leadership challenges create new contexts that require support. Coaching remains useful as the nature of the work changes.
Coaches invest in coaching because knowing the process does not replace experiencing it. Insight, commitment, and behavioural change are strengthened through being coached. Coaches tend to value outcomes over theoretical understanding.
Many coaching clients appear to be coaches because the category of “coach” has expanded significantly. Consultants, educators, wellness professionals, and creators now fall under this label. When the group is large, internal demand becomes more visible.
The coaching industry appears saturated because entry barriers are low and visibility is high. Many people can now describe themselves as coaches, but far fewer build sustainable practices. What looks like saturation is often a mix of growth, churn, and uneven success. There is plenty of room for talented coaches prepared to build a strong brand to be successful in the space.
Coaching is a legitimate business model when it is grounded in real outcomes and experience. Sustainability depends on positioning, trust, and demand rather than the title itself. Like consulting or therapy, results determine credibility over time.
The coaching industry looks like a pyramid scheme because hierarchy, money flow, and public marketing are easy to observe. People see coaches paying other coaches and assume circular dependency. In reality, there is no central recruitment structure or mandatory upstream payment model.
Coaching feels self-referential because practitioners openly discuss who they learn from and work with. Peer relationships are visible in ways they are not in most professions. This transparency amplifies patterns that would otherwise go unnoticed.
Coaches often seek business advice because coaching skill does not automatically translate into commercial success. Pricing, positioning, marketing, and boundaries require different expertise. More experienced coaches often provide guidance in these areas.
Many coaches focus on business skills when working with other coaches. The coaching process itself is often already understood. What is missing is structure around sustainability, growth, and decision-making.
Financial struggle is usually linked to unclear positioning and inconsistent demand rather than coaching ability. Many coaches underestimate the commercial side of self-employment. Support is often sought after these gaps become visible.
Credential levels matter because they signal experience and professional development. They help coaches understand who they can learn from and who they can reasonably support. While not a guarantee of quality, they create informal progression markers.
Credibility is reduced by unclear claims, not by who the client is. Professionals supporting peers is common across many industries. Transparency about role and outcomes maintains trust.
It signals belief in the process and a lack of formal career structure. Coaches seek guidance because development does not stop once competence is reached. The pattern reflects professional maturity rather than dysfunction.
