How to Heal and Scale Your Coaching Business After Being Burned by an Agency

If you're a coach who's ever felt that cringe-inducing feeling at the mere mention of Facebook ads or marketing agencies, you're not alone. Many coaching business owners have experienced being ghosted, oversold, or flat-out disappointed by agencies that promised the world but delivered very little.

As someone who's worked with countless coaches who've been in this exact position, I've seen firsthand how this experience can create lingering trust issues that prevent you from leveraging the very strategies that could help your business grow.

The Real Cost of Agency Trauma

The damage goes beyond just wasted money (though losing four or five figures is painful enough). There's also the mental and physical labor you invested—weeks or months of preparation, strategy calls, and content creation—all for disappointing results or sometimes no results at all.

When you've been burned like this, it's natural to want to swear off paid advertising entirely. But here's the reality: if you want to break through that organic ceiling and truly scale your coaching business, you'll eventually need to reconcile with the world of paid traffic.

Taking Back Control Without Becoming an Expert

The path to healing starts with taking back a layer of control—and I don't mean this in a negative way. You don't need to become a Facebook ads expert, but you do need to understand the basics.

Can you log into Ads Manager? Do you know what metrics actually matter? At minimum, you should understand:

• What a good clickthrough rate looks like (industry standard is 1.8%, though many of our coaching clients achieve 2-5%)

• How to quickly identify if your cost per lead is reasonable for your business model

• Basic campaign structure and how to spot obvious problems

This foundation gives you the ability to know when something is off. If you launch a webinar and two days go by with only one signup, you'll immediately recognize that as a red flag. You can check your ads, see that your clickthrough rate is only 0.5%, and have an informed conversation with whoever is running your campaigns.

The Accountability Factor

One of the main reasons agencies and freelancers sometimes underperform is a lack of accountability. Without someone checking in and asking the hard questions, it's human nature to do the bare minimum.

When I run campaigns for clients—even if we're spending $60,000 on a launch—we're constantly communicating about conversion rates and making adjustments along the way. We don't set it up and wait until cart close to analyze what happened; we're optimizing in real-time.

Whoever you work with should be willing to:

• Show you what they're seeing in the accounts

• Explain their decision-making process

• Meet regularly to review performance

• Make data-driven adjustments quickly

Rebuilding Confidence Through Small Wins

After being burned, the idea of investing heavily in ads again can feel terrifying. That's why I recommend starting small to rebuild your confidence.

Begin with $5-20 daily ad spend to test the waters. See for yourself that it's possible to generate leads and sales through paid traffic. Once you've experienced these small wins, you'll feel more comfortable gradually increasing your budget.

For example, if you had success with a $1,000 ad spend, don't immediately jump to $10,000. Try $1,500 or maybe $2,000—an increase that feels manageable rather than scary.

Every Promotion Is Different

Even with my most experienced clients who are running their eighth launch in a row, I still approach each promotion as if it's the first time. The economy changes, platforms evolve, and audience behaviors shift.

The most successful coaches understand that every campaign requires fresh testing, optimization, and scaling strategies. Past performance gives you valuable data, but it doesn't guarantee future results.

The Path Forward

If you've been ghosted, oversold, or disappointed by marketing professionals in the past, don't let that experience prevent you from finding a strategy that allows you to scale. Everyone who's run ads successfully has also experienced campaigns that flopped—it's part of the journey.

The difference is learning from those experiences, building in proper accountability, and gradually developing the systems that work specifically for your coaching business.

Once you grasp these powerful strategies, you'll look back and be amazed at how far you've come. The coach who once hesitated to spend $10 a day on ads will confidently invest $100 or even $1,000 daily because you'll know exactly how the system works for your specific offers and messaging.