PODCAST: Season 7, Episode 28
What if the reason your content isn’t converting has nothing to do with how much you’re posting and everything to do with what you’re saying and who you’re saying it to? Mills sits down with former BBC correspondent, psychological thriller author, and messaging expert Colette McBeth for a conversation that covers expansive clients, dead-end offers, anti-selling, and why having genuine IP is the only real defence against an AI-saturated market.
From BBC Correspondent to Storytelling Coach: Colette’s Business Journey
Colette’s online business is five and a half years old and it started with an Instagram account, no followers, and a son who pointed out she had unread DMs from people who wanted to work with her. She had no idea people could even message her.
Before the online world, she’d trained leaders in pharma and worked with storytelling consultancies in big brands but networking at the Chamber of Commerce on a wet Wednesday wasn’t exactly her vibe. Going online felt like freedom.
Her first group offer, the Audience Accelerator, sold 16 spots in 24 hours from two Instagram lives and an email list of 80 people. She nearly refunded everyone out of fear. She didn’t. The rest is history.
Why Educational Content Made Coaches Invisible and What Works Instead
When everyone was pumping out tutorials and how-tos, Colette kept doing what she’d always done: storytelling and insight over information. Coaches who went all-in on education grew their accounts fast then came to Colette and said they weren’t selling anything.
“You’ve just turned yourself into a library.”
When AI hit and the backlash against educational content arrived, her business grew rather than took a knock. She’d never been doing that anyway.
- Insight creates desire. Information creates followers who don’t buy.
- Teaching people things doesn’t make them want to work with you it just answers their questions for free.
- The coaches who stayed visible through every algorithm shift were the ones with a distinct point of view, not the ones with the best carousel slides.
What Is an Expansive Client and Why “Ideal Client” Is the Wrong Question
This is Colette’s trademarked concept and possibly the most useful reframe in this episode. She stopped using “ideal client” after having a client who ticked every box on paper and turned out to be a nightmare. Meanwhile other clients were getting extraordinary results from almost nothing she said.
The difference was receptivity.
An expansive client isn’t defined by demographics or budget. She’s defined by how open her brain is to a new way of doing things, how willing she is to lean into discomfort, and how much she expands your belief in your own work when she’s in the room.
- Ten non-expansive clients make your work feel heavy.
- One expansive client makes you want to do this forever.
- Budget alone is not the filter. Mindset and momentum are.
The messaging shift that follows: stop writing to people who are “stuck.” Write to people who are 10 steps away from where they want to be and are desperate to close the gap.
The Countercurrent: Why Knowing Their 3am Thoughts Isn’t Enough
Most coaches are told to speak to what their client is thinking at 3am. Colette says that’s only half of it.
Yes, you need the specific micro-details what they’re thinking, doing, saying. That gets their attention. But attention isn’t desire.
What creates desire is the disruption: showing them the hidden current that’s been dragging them backward. The thing they can’t see from where they’re standing but you can see clearly as the expert. That’s the countercurrent.
When you combine the specific recognition moment with that layer of disruption, that’s what actually moves people to buy.
How to Build a Coaching Offer Suite That Creates Sales, Not Dead Ends
Colette runs multiple digital offers alongside Pioneer, her flagship messaging and offer programme. She started using low-cost digital products to offset her ad spend and realised that if her ads weren’t costing her anything, there was no ceiling on her growth.
But the product design matters as much as the price point.
A dead-end offer over-delivers, overwhelms, and actually becomes a reason people don’t buy the next thing. A well-designed offer gives a micro result something they’ve tried to get elsewhere and never achieved and opens a gap for more.
“When someone goes, my God, you’ve just blown my mind, now what — that sells your bigger offer more than any post ever will.”
- The front end offer doesn’t make you rich. The journey it starts is where the money is.
- One of Colette’s clients made £32k profit from a £27 offer in 10 months but that’s the exception, not the rule, and it only worked because the offer was hyper-specific.
- Two sisters bought a £27 and an £11 offer, grew their account from 600 to 6,000 followers with the right people, and ended up in Colette’s mastermind. She wasn’t even trying to sell them in.
AI, Authenticity and Why Your IP Is the Only Thing That Can’t Be Copied
Both Mills and Colette use AI. Both also think it’s making a lot of coaching content indistinguishable. The conversation gets honest here.
The problem isn’t AI. The problem is using AI before you’ve done the work of decoding what you actually think, see and do differently. If you haven’t got that, AI just produces more of the same faster.
Colette built Content Colette (her AI tool) after years of decoding her own methodology. The tool is only as good as the thinking behind it.
On people copying her exact ad phrasing two days after she ran it: “I really don’t think those people will prosper. When people come to work with you, there’s something substantial.”
And on the flood of “I built this in Claude, let me show you how” content: both agreed it’s a race to the bottom.
Connect with Mills:
Instagram: @mills_gray
Connect with Colette:
Instagram: @thecolettemcbeth