Our Methodology

Evidence Based Research You Can Use

CoachingReports.com exists to help professional coaches make better business decisions with clearer information. This page explains how we gather, interpret and present that information so you can judge its usefulness for yourself.

Darrell James - Founder

Our Purpose

Professional coaches deal with a lot of noise: trends, tools, opinions and “best practices” that often conflict.

Our job is to cut through that noise and provide clear, evidence-informed reports that support decisions about pricing, positioning, client acquisition and the role of AI in your business.

We’re not promising certainty or crystal balls. We’re providing structured insight you can combine with your own experience and judgment as a coach.

Guiding Principles

Our research is built on four principles:

Coach-first

Everything we produce is designed for working, professional coaches (often ICF-aligned), not investors or general business readers. We focus on what affects your fees, clients, positioning and practice.

Evidence-informed

We draw on data, not just opinion. Where we make interpretations, we say so clearly. Where data is limited, we also say so clearly.

Practical

Reports are not academic papers. We always ask, “What does this imply for a coach’s next decision?” and include prompts, questions and tools to turn insight into action.

Transparent

We tell you what we looked at, how we looked at it and where the limits are. We’d rather be clear about uncertainty than pretend to be omniscient.

Industry and market data

- Publicly available research and surveys about the coaching industry
- Economic and labour-market data where relevant (e.g. sectors investing in coaching, organisational spend trends)
- Data from adjacent fields (consulting, L&D, HR, leadership development) where it meaningfully impacts coaching demand

Practitioner insight

- Conversations and qualitative input from practicing coaches
- Where possible, structured surveys or polls of coaches around specific questions (e.g. pricing, client acquisition channels, use of AI)
- Insights from experienced buyers of coaching (e.g. HR, L&D, business leaders) when available

Digital and market signals

- Observations from job boards, coaching platforms and public profiles (e.g. how coaches describe their offers, niches and fees)
- Trends in content topics and search interest around coaching-related themes
- Visible patterns in how coaching services are packaged and marketed online

Our data sources

We combine several types of information to build each report. The balance varies by topic, but broadly we draw from the following sources:

See inside the 2026 Coaching Intelligence Pack

Our research process

For each report, we follow a consistent process so you understand where the conclusions come from

1. Frame the key questions

We start by defining a small set of questions a professional coach would genuinely care about. For example:
“How are coaches actually pricing in 2026?”
“Which niches show signs of growing, stabilising or slowing?”
“Which client acquisition channels are delivering results for coaches right now?”

These questions guide what data we gather and what we ignore.

2. Gather and clean data

We then collect relevant information from the sources above and:
- Filter out obviously low-quality or sensationalist material
- Prioritise data that is transparent about method and sample
- Note where data is thin, contradictory or only applies to certain segments

We’d rather have less but cleaner data than a large pile of unreliable noise.

3. Analyse patterns and contradictions

We look for:
- Patterns that appear consistently across multiple sources
- Important differences by niche, region, client type or service format
- Contradictions that need to be explained or clearly flagged

Where we interpret patterns (e.g. “what this likely means for executive coaches in Europe”), we label those sections as Interpretation or Implication, not as hard facts.

4. Sense-check with practitioners

Where possible, we share preliminary findings with a small group of practicing coaches and ask:
- “Does this reflect what you’re seeing?” “Where does it feel off or incomplete?”
- “What would you want this section to help you decide?”

We adjust language and emphasis to reflect the reality on the ground, not just what a dataset says.

5. Turn findings into tools

Our goal is not to produce interesting reading material; it’s to support decisions. So for each major finding we ask:
- “What might a coach actually do with this?”
- “Is there a question, prompt, checklist or simple framework that could help?”

This is where we add: Reflection questions, Worksheets, checklists, Example scripts or positioning statements so that reports become working tools, not just reading material.

6. Review and update

Markets move. New tools (especially AI-related) appear. Coaching buyers change. We:
- Clearly date each report Periodically review key sections (e.g. pricing benchmarks, channel performance, AI tooling)
- Update or replace content when shifts are significant enough to affect decisions

When a report has been updated, we note the version and date.

How we use AI (and how we dont)

AI tools are part of the modern research toolkit, and we use them – carefully – in our process. Here’s what that means in practice.

We use AI to:
Speed up the collection and organisation of publicly available information
Help cluster themes and patterns across large volumes of text
Draft initial summaries that a human then reviews and edits
Generate alternative ways to phrase explanations and prompts so they’re clearer

We do not use AI to:
Fabricate data, case studies or survey results
Automatically accept whatever AI suggests without human review
Make guarantees about future income, client numbers or “hacks”
Every report has been reviewed, edited and structured by a human with a real understanding of the coaching context.

AI helps with speed and breadth; judgment and responsibility remain human.

Limitations (and how to use our reports responsibly)

No methodology is perfect. We want you to understand the limits of ours.

Our reports are directional, not predictive. They’re designed to highlight patterns and possibilities, not to guarantee individual results.

Data may be stronger in some regions or niches than others. Where this is the case, we say so.

Coaching is a diverse field. An insight that is highly relevant for one segment (e.g. corporate executive coaching) may be less relevant for another (e.g. youth or wellbeing coaching).

Your own context, ethics and values matter. Use our reports as input to your decisions, not as a replacement for your professional judgment.

If you ever feel a conclusion in one of our reports is too strong for the underlying data, we’d genuinely like to hear from you. We would rather refine our work than defend a weak claim.

Report Update Cadence

We aim to update our core reports on a quarterly basis, and specific sections (for example, on AI tooling or channel effectiveness) more frequently when things are moving quickly.

Each report includes a publication date and, where applicable, an update history. If you have questions about how current a specific figure or finding is, you can always contact us.

Questions or feedback?

If you’d like to know more about how a particular report was put together, or you want to challenge a finding based on your own experience, we’d genuinely welcome that. You can reach us at support@coachingreports.com or via the contact form.

High-quality, honest market insight for coaches is a collaborative effort.

Your perspective helps us improve.