The Economics of Exhaustion: What the Coaching Industry Reveals About Burnout and Extraction

For a long time, I was a denier of the grift of the coaching industry. Maybe I’m still a little defensive, because if I admit grift lives here, I have to admit I profited from it, too. 

In my mind, grifting meant the snake-oil salesmen of old. You know the ones we got familiar with in pop culture: hawking miracle tonics from the back of a wagon and skipping town before the tonic ran out. And, obviously, the work we were doing was nothing like that. I worked hard. My teams worked hard. We built systems, communities, support, not scams. We were helping people change their lives.

It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot this year as I work through my Equity Centered Coaching Certification and reckon with the coaching industry in its entirety. Because when you look closely, even the well-intentioned parts of this industry hum under the surface with the same old code: the success formulas, the hierarchies of influence, the extraction of attention, labor, and loyalty masquerading as liberation.

And, to be clear, none of this is all that new. My first coaching certification came in 2012 through the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. I still remember the auditorium in Columbus Circle, hundreds of us on our feet, clapping, cheering, newly “certified” after paying a few thousand dollars, watching some videos, and passing a few online quizzes. It felt electric and completely inauthentic and unserious at the same time. There were a few “celebrity” graduates they promoted as proof of success… and even then, I wondered: Who benefits from this business model, and at whose expense?

For those of us who could afford to believe we were building something “different,” the grift was sanitized by whiteness, wellness, and the language of empowerment.

Maybe the problem isn’t that the coaching industry is full of grifters. Maybe the problem is that it’s built on extraction, and extraction looks an awful lot like grifting when the margins get tight.

Grifting, by definition, is deception for profit. Extraction, on the other hand, is exploitation by design. One hides the con; the other hides the cost.

And the modern coaching industry, like much of entrepreneurship, runs on both.

We call it “scaling,” “leveraging,” “creating freedom.”

But what it often means is that a founder wants to make more while working less… which requires someone else to work more while making less.

When we valorize personal brands as businesses, we normalize labor models where one person’s liberation is subsidized by another person’s exhaustion. The extractor calls it delegation, the team calls it burnout, and the market calls it success.

This is the math of extraction: profit margins are made in other people’s capacity.

And it’s expensive, both morally and operationally, to sustain a business that exists to protect one person’s lifestyle at the expense of everyone else’s livelihood.

Because the people doing the work get wise. They realize they can take their skills, their systems, and their sanity somewhere else. They stop accepting “the mission” as compensation. They remember they have options.

And the extractor starts calling it betrayal.

But this isn’t just the coaching industry. This is the model of Corporate America. Coaching is simply the microcosm with highly visible offenders. A stage where the offenders are easier to spot while the larger extractors hide behind media conglomerates and billion dollar industries.

Follow the Money

If you zoom out far enough, the pattern repeats: the same architecture that governs online businesses also governs the global economy.

A handful of asset managers (BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street) now collectively hold controlling stakes in more than half of all publicly listed U.S. companies. According to research from the London School of Economics, three firms now govern half the public market. It’s the same logic that governs your average business-coaching mastermind: what starts as a founder’s dream of efficiency becomes the architecture that lets three firms own half the market.

Meanwhile, the Brown University Costs of War project found that just five defense contractors (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics) account for over one-third of all Pentagon contracts. The same concentration shows up in tech, where Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta extract our data as efficiently as they extract warehouse labor.

This is the real grift machine:
Finance funds it.
Defense protects it.
Tech amplifies it.
And culture (entrepreneurship, coaching, “freedom work”) replicates it at the micro level.

Each layer depends on the labor and imagination of people it was never built to protect.

The system doesn’t need you to be a villain; it just needs you to keep playing your part without question.

The line between integrity and exploitation is clear, and it’s structural.

Extraction isn’t a personality flaw; it’s a business model. It’s the default architecture of capitalism, polished up with good branding and a few values statements. And when you build an empire on other people’s overextension, you can only call it “impact” for so long before it starts to falter under its own hypocrisy.

Most extractors aren’t villains. They’re just tired people repeating what supremacy culture and capitalism taught them survival looked like. They confuse sustainability with scalability, and they call their teams “ambitious” or “driven” to soften the edges of inequity. They don’t realize that every time they say “when I win, you win,” someone else is paying the price of admission.

That’s the cruel genius of extraction: it recruits even the well-intentioned.

Leaders often reproduce the same hierarchies they set out to escape, because those are the only templates they’ve been shown. The machine rewards whoever keeps it running.

But the BIG architects (the ones designing policy, shaping markets, and buying governments) know exactly what they’re doing.

That’s where complicity crosses into villainy.

So I’m personally less concerned about who’s grifting, though the moral implications matter. I’m more concerned about who’s extracting and why we keep accepting it as normal.

Because once you see extraction for what it is, you start to understand how moral language gets used to mask structural harm. You see how “integrity” becomes a marketing angle, how “authenticity” becomes a sales strategy, and how “freedom” becomes a product that someone else has to deliver.

Every efficiency has a cost.

The coaching industry doesn’t need fewer grifters, it needs fewer extractors.

It needs founders willing to ask: What does it cost, and who’s paying for my version of ease?

If you’ve been feeling the dis-ease… if your team’s tired and your energy’s shot, or your work suddenly feels performative instead of purposeful… it might not be you.
It might be the extraction model you inherited.

Freedom that depends on anyone else’s unfreedom was never freedom.

xo,
Brittany

P.S. The systems we inherit don’t have to be the systems we sustain.

If something in your business structure no longer feels true, let’s talk.

On our call, you can expect:

• A grounded, values-centered conversation about what’s working and what’s not

• Space to share what feels most alive or urgent in your business right now

• Clarity on whether a thought-partnership jam between us is the right fit for right now

Sound fun? Grab 30 minutes with me here. (You’ll fill out a quick application and then we’ll get time on the calendar!)

P.P.S. For those who like receipts: data cited here comes from the London School of Economics’ review of global asset managers, Brown University’s “Costs of War” project on defense contracting, and congressional research on the U.S. defense industrial base. All are publicly available and worth reading in full.

Receipts: The Architecture of Extraction

(Because every system has receipts.)

• How Asset Managers Like BlackRock Took Over the World — LSE Review of Books
  How the “Big Three” (BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street) became the quiet governors of global capitalism—controlling major stakes in most S&P 500 companies.

• BlackRock and Vanguard: Who Controls the Global Economy? — News.az
  Traces how overlapping ownership across industries concentrates power and blurs competition.

• BlackRock Corporate Sustainability & Low-Carbon Transition — BlackRock.com
  The company’s own narrative of “stewardship,” useful for reading how systems justify themselves.

• How BlackRock Wields Vast Influence Over Government and the Economy — GV Wire
  Outlines the firm’s advisory roles to U.S. governments and the blurred line between regulator and regulated.

• From Weapons to Fossil Fuels: Ten Firms Control $50 Trillion in Global Wealth — Truthout
  Connects asset management to militarization and fossil-fuel financing.

• The Military-Industrial Complex Revisited — Brown University – Costs of War Project
  Documents that five contractors—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics—receive over one-third of Pentagon contracts.

• Military-Industrial Complex Fact Sheet — Reaching Critical Will
  Snapshot of contractor lobbying, campaign donations, and influence networks.

• This Is Not Your Grandparents’ Military-Industrial Complex — Responsible Statecraft
  Shows how defense and tech industries have merged into one surveillance economy.

• The Economy of War: Why the Military-Industrial Complex Wins Every Election — The Indypendent
  Explains how defense spending and campaign financing reinforce each other every election cycle.

• Plantations Practiced Modern Management — Harvard Business Review (2013)
  Historian Caitlin Rosenthal found that the earliest management innovations didn’t emerge in northern factories at all—they were perfected on southern plantations, where enslaved people were literally depreciated as capital assets. The first business systems in America were designed to quantify Black life as capital. Every modern dashboard, every KPI, still echoes that logic.