A founder reads the line on the Vistage brochure: “members grow revenue 2.2x faster than comparable non-members.” It’s a real number, well-cited, on the marketing materials of a credible organisation. They book a discovery call, like the chair, join.
Eighteen months in, they’re wondering quietly why their growth isn’t 2.2x faster than their friend Catherine’s, who never joined Vistage and is doing fine.
The number was real. It just didn’t apply to them.
This is the question that gets least asked in the founder coaching market: how do you read the published outcome numbers honestly? The headline numbers are real, in the sense that they’re not invented. They’re also not what most readers think they are. Knowing how to read them is basic literacy for anyone considering a five-figure annual investment in this category.
Why outcome data in this market is so thin
Almost nobody in the founder coaching and peer-advisory market publishes detailed outcome data. Vistage publishes the most. EOS implementers publish individual case studies. Strategic Coach publishes founder transformations. ActionCoach franchises occasionally publish anonymous client outcomes. None of them publish what would actually let you compare: percentage of members who achieved specific outcomes, attrition rates, cohort analysis by entry year, leaver interviews.
There are a few reasons for the thinness. The market is fragmented across many independent providers, franchises, and networks that don’t contribute to shared market data collection. Outcome tracking varies wildly by provider. And honestly, publishing leaver data and attrition rates isn’t in any vendor’s commercial interest, so it doesn’t get done. The ecosystem rewards selective reporting and there’s no countervailing force.
The result is that the data you see is the data the providers want you to see. That’s marketing. Read it as marketing, not as a controlled study.
What survivorship bias does to a published number
When Vistage’s marketing material says “average member reports revenue growth of 10 to 12% annually,” that average is calculated on members who are still members. Members who joined, didn’t get the result they wanted, and left aren’t in the survey. The average is calculated on the people for whom the format worked well enough to keep paying. That’s survivorship bias, and it inflates every published outcome number in this category.
This isn’t a Vistage-specific problem. Every Strategic Coach case study is from a founder still in Strategic Coach. Every EOS testimonial is from a business still running EOS. Every ActionCoach win is from a client whose engagement is still live or recently completed. The leavers aren’t represented anywhere. Without leaver data, the outcome distribution you’re reading is the right tail.
To read these numbers honestly, multiply them in your head by the unknown leaver rate. If 40% of members leave within three years (a plausible range, though no provider publishes the actual number), the headline outcome applies to roughly 60% of joiners. The other 40% had a different experience that doesn’t show up anywhere. You don’t know whether you’d be in the 60 or the 40 before you sign.
What’s actually driving the published outcomes
Even without survivorship bias, there’s a deeper question: are these formats producing the outcomes, or are they selecting for the founders who would produce the outcomes anyway? When Vistage members grow revenue 2.2x faster than “comparable non-members,” is that because of Vistage, or is it because faster-growing founders are more likely to invest in Vistage in the first place?
That’s selection bias, and the published data can’t distinguish it from causal effect. The Vistage member who grew 2.2x might have grown 2.2x without Vistage, because they’re the kind of founder who joins peer-advisory groups. The format gets credit for an outcome the founder was already going to produce.
Connected to this: founder readiness, willingness to implement, and belief in the process drive more outcome variance than format choice. Two founders in the same Vistage group with the same chair have completely different experiences and outcomes if one is ready and committed and the other is present but going through the motions. That isn’t measurable from a brochure. It’s also the variable that matters most.
The honest read: the format is part of the answer. The founder bringing themselves into it is the larger part. The published numbers conflate the two.
The aggregator and review-site trap
A founder researching coaching options will find a number of comparison sites and review aggregators that purport to be neutral. Most aren’t. Many earn referral fees from the providers they review, which creates an obvious incentive to rank certain providers favourably. Some are owned outright by adjacent businesses. Truly neutral comparative reviews of coaching and peer-advisory formats are difficult to find online.
This is how the affiliate economics work, and it applies across most categories with high-ticket buyers and fragmented vendors. A site that earns £500 for every Vistage referral and £200 for every EOS referral has a financial reason to position the higher-paying provider more favourably, regardless of the editorial framing.
The mitigation is to read every aggregator with the affiliate question in mind. Look at the site’s footer for affiliate disclosures. Look at how the comparison cards are structured. Look at which providers get whole-page treatments and which get a paragraph. The signal is usually visible if you look for it.
What to look for instead of the headline numbers
The headline numbers are not the data point that should drive your decision. Four other signals are far more useful: references from people in your stage of business (not the brochure-perfect outliers); honest conversations with people who left after eighteen to twenty-four months; specific pre-engagement-versus-post-engagement changes the person can name in plain language; and whether the format matches your own diagnostic of what you’re trying to fix.
Of these, the leaver interview is the most valuable and the most rarely done. Current members are incentivised to defend their investment. Recent leavers have nothing at stake and will tell you what didn’t work. Ask them what specifically they hoped for that the format didn’t deliver. Ask them what they’d do differently. Ask them whether the format was wrong, or whether their own readiness was wrong. The answer to that last question is one of the most useful pieces of information you can collect.
The pre-engagement-versus-post-engagement question is the second most valuable. Anyone can say they enjoyed Vistage. Far fewer can name a specific decision they made differently because of it, or a specific behaviour change in their team that they trace back to a particular forum session. If a current member can’t name the specific change, the format may be enjoyable without being effective for them.
The right number isn’t on the brochure
The right number for your decision isn’t the average outcome across all members. It’s the answer to four specific questions: is this format right for this founder, with this business, in this stage, right now. No published statistic answers that. The answer comes from your own diagnostic, references you do directly, leaver conversations you commission, and the chemistry of the specific group or coach you’d be working with.
Read the headline numbers as marketing. They tell you what the provider wants you to see, which is information about the provider’s positioning rather than about your likely outcome. The numbers that matter are the ones you collect yourself, in conversation with people who’ve been through the engagement and don’t have anything to defend.
The market is opaque on purpose. Doing the work to see past the opacity is itself the diligence. If the work feels like too much, that’s a useful signal too. The format you pick is going to demand more discipline than collecting four reference calls. If you can’t bring yourself to do the diligence, you probably aren’t ready for the engagement.
