Here’s What the Celebrity CEOs and Online Business Gurus Don’t Want You to Know

Get ready for some real talk and truth bombs.

You know them. Their ads pop up on social media, asking if you’re working too much (uh, aren’t we all?), promising to share the model that helped their business leap to seven figures. In their sleep.

More likely in their dreams.

I’ve seen them, I’ve signed up, and all I got were three emails a day and a template that was so generic that it was useless.

Now before I go further, I want to preface that I don’t have a problem with growth, people reaching seven-figure income levels and even the idea of a celebrity CEO. Elon Musk is a celebrity CEO, as is Melanie Perkins (Canva) and Ryan Reynolds. All of whom are epic business leaders and legitimate experts.

I have a problem with the outrageous promises and false narratives fed to small business owners and founders on social media from the online marketing ‘gurus’.

Claims like make ‘money in your sleep’, ‘sell-high-end courses on autopilot’, ‘earn seven figures while working 10 hours a week’, not to mention the, ‘I’ll give you a marketing strategy in one hour’, and, ‘launch a plan in a day’.

Sorry, what? I’m a professional marketer, and I’ve worked for some of the biggest brands in the world in brand management roles, including Maybelline, Kraft and BIC. A marketing strategy takes me around 20 hours, and after two decades of creating launch campaigns, I can tell you that the minimum amount of time it takes to create a marketing campaign is six weeks.

Shitty templates lead to shitty marketing.

 

As for making money in your sleep, passive income and autopilot, I call BS on all of it. These gurus have slugged it for years like the rest of us to get to a stage where they can now sell out their programs. While they talk a lot, it’s what they don’t talk about that irks me.

The nitty-gritty of guru tactics

There is more to the story than the gurus will have us believe, so let’s take a look at some of the all-too-common tactics the gurus use to grow their “empires”.

Growth for them usually involves:

• Aggressive sales funnels: daily, sometimes twice daily emails, false authority, false scarcity, predatory language, inflated value, income claims, worthless bonuses and a false sense of urgency. They will say that you don’t need a big email list to sell your program, but the truth is that they have huge emails lists, and this is the only way they sell out theirs.
• HUGE expenditure (like tens of thousands of dollars) on Facebook and Instagram ads. While they may earn six or seven figures, their costs are very high.
• A business model of evergreen online courses and digital products, which is now a saturated market. They often have hundreds if not thousands of people doing their programs at once and therefore cannot offer tailored feedback and advice. As a result, they have tragically low course completion rates that they never talk about.
• Creating a personal brand akin to celebrity status, which is by no means an easy undertaking. Most celebrity CEOs and gurus have spent years establishing their personal brands, launching podcasts, penning “best selling” books, showing up on social media daily, being prolific on Clubhouse, and appearing on each other’s platforms.

The stuff they don’t want you to know

I haven’t even got into the downright shady part of the guru model. Often you’ll see one or all of these tactics used by the online business gurus:

• Reliance on cheap offshore labour while presenting an image that they do everything themselves and work only four hours a week. Meanwhile, they have a team of VAs in the Philippines that they never acknowledge.
• Passing paid advertorials off as earned publicity. Every couple of days, I receive a DM from someone telling me they would like to include me in a “Top 10 entrepreneurs” feature, but the catch is that it's a paid “opportunity”. I unleash fury at the sender for intentionally misleading readers that this title is earned when it is, in fact, paid. The next minute, I see a guru featured in the same advertorial, and I recoil as they gush over being “chosen” to be published.

Supplied by author

I understand that we may all have different ethics but surely we can agree that deception crosses a line?

• Recommending expensive funnel and LMS software for which they receive an affiliate kick back and don’t always disclose. First, you sign up for their program, and then you’re told you “absolutely need” Kajabi, which starts at $149 per month.
• Heavy reliance on plug-and-play templates, copy-paste formulas, and one-size-fits-all advice, which is the opposite of tailored advice. It’s also a losing marketing strategy because all it does is guarantee you blend in when the end goal is to stand out. This approach does not consider your specific industry, location, skills set, budget or market factors.
• Shame-provocation leading us to believe that the only issue is us, our mindset, and our limiting beliefs so they can sell us coaching and mentoring that takes no consideration for real-world market economics. Sometimes, our limiting beliefs hold us back; others, it's just that’s there no market need for what we’re selling. 

• Self-loathing: they erode our self-trust, make us feel like we’re failing and create problems that we didn’t even have in the first place. All so they can sell us the cure. 

If you’ve been sucked in by one of these gurus, I’m sorry — that sucks. Jump off that sinking ship now, and don’t throw any more money at these people. ⠀

Just because it may have worked for them provides absolutely no guarantee that it will work for you. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. There is no secret recipe, and if there were, we’d all be killing it. You’re in complete control of who you do and don’t listen to and where you invest your precious funds, and when it comes down to it, we all get the gurus we deserve.

Save your pennies for a real investment in your marketing — either upskill or pay a bona fide expert to get to know your business and deliver an informed opinion.

Because as Mark Pollard says: “A strategy is an informed opinion about how to win.” And these offerings aren’t informed by anything except greed.