Coaching seems like a dream business.
You get paid to help people achieve their goals and solve big problems, all from the comfort of your own home office. What’s more, coaching can take any format that works for you and your clients. You set your own hours, work with only the people you love and care about, and—bonus!—it’s pretty lucrative, too.
But—you knew there was a but—coaching is not without its drawbacks.
A full calendar is one. For those of us who cherish long, uneventful days and the time freedom they bring, back-to-back coaching calls can be anxiety inducing.
That full calendar creates another issue: You will quickly run out of time, and no additional appointment slots means no additional clients and no increase in revenue.
Behold, the income ceiling.
What’s an ambitious coach to do?
Scale with courses, naturally.
In fact, coaching and courses are two sides of the same coin. With one, you serve a single client in a very personalized way. With the other, you reach a wider audience and can better leverage your time.
Courses mean a bigger reach and more impact
How many 1:1 clients can you serve in any given month? For me, that limit is about four. I’ve had as many as 10, and honestly, that was pretty overwhelming (see that calendar shot above if you need a reminder).
The thing is, it’s not just call time. It’s email updates and project reviews and accountability and lots of other commitments I make to my clients. Over the course of a week, those four hours start to look more like 12.
Now, you can arrange your coaching offers in any way you like. You don’t have to do calls (my friend and fellow business coach Angela Wills doesn’t), you don’t have to connect via email, you don’t even have to make a long-term commitment. You can offer one-off sessions or VIP days instead.
RELATED: Coaching Without Calls
Regardless of how you structure your coaching program though, you will have a cap on the number of clients you can successfully serve. That’s just math. With courses, there’s no cap.
Yes, you’ll spend some (not inconsiderable) time creating a course:
- Writing the lessons
- Recording and editing video
- Creating worksheets and other add-ons
- Producing transcripts
But those are one-and-done projects. Once your course is complete, you can sell it an infinite number of times without any more work on your part.
In other words, there’s no limit on your income or the number of clients you can serve.
A signature course multiplies your income without increasing your hours
Courses come in lots of different sizes and shapes. I’ve created tiny, bite-sized courses and larger, weeks-long cohorts. They also sell for a wide range of prices—everything from a single dollar (more on that in a minute) to $8,000 or $12,000 or more.
Let’s do a little math, shall we?
Imagine you have a coaching offer of $1,000 per month per client, and imagine that offer includes weekly calls. You have a limited number of clients you can serve. Let’s say your comfort-zone number is ten. That’s 10 x $1,000 = $10,000 per month.
Pretty sweet, right?
Now imagine you create a signature course based on your coaching program, and you sell it for $2,000. You’ll only need to sell five per month to reach the same $10,000. Here’s the kicker though: There is no extra time required to serve those clients.
You won’t have five calls on your calendar every week. You won’t have emails to respond to or projects to review. You could, in fact, sell 20 of your courses per month, or 30, or 100, all without impacting the number of hours you work.
As a coach, you can’t possibly impact that many lives in a single month. As a course creator, you can.
A tiny course makes a great low-cost lead magnet
I’ve long been a fan of tiny courses. These small, focused offers help solve a single problem quickly, which makes them an ideal introduction to you and your style of coaching.
Peter Boyle taught me that tiny courses also make fantastic list builders. His strategy is to offer a high-value, low-cost product instead of a more traditional lead magnet.
RELATED: $1 Product Challenge
Here’s why that’s a smart strategy: According to Rejoiner.com, existing customers are as much as 14 times more likely to buy again, versus a new prospect. That dramatically increases the value of your mailing list, and makes selling any other offer—whether it’s a 1:1 coaching program or a signature course or something entirely different—much easier.
You probably aren’t going to retire on $1 offers, but with a strong back-end, that tiny course can keep your courses filled and your calendar blissfully empty (if that’s what you want, of course).
Several tiny courses turn into a Tiny Course Empire
I started creating tiny courses in 2018. For several years, I created two courses each month. Pretty soon, I had a catalog of small courses, and I discovered something that changed my business:
That collection of courses had turned into an empire, with multiple streams of income and list-building leverage.
- A monthly membership (recurring revenue FTW!)
- Course bundles (three related, tiny courses = one signature course)
- Giveaways to build my mailing list
- Bonus offers to encourage sales
- Worksheets and videos as content upgrades
Is your coaching program a good fit for “courseifying”?
When I was a virtual assistant, I told myself that my services were so specialized, so personal, that I couldn’t possibly turn them into courses. I let that thinking hold me back for too long, and I have heard coaches make similar statements.
Here’s what it really takes to turn your coaching program into a course:
A repeatable process that achieves a predictable result.
That’s it. You’ll know you have a repeatable process if you:
- Have checklists or worksheets you use in your coaching
- Say the same things or offer the same advice to most clients
- Ask the same questions of most clients
- Offer the same or similar results to most clients
It’s true that some coaching is truly client led, and courseifying those types of coaching programs is more difficult (although still not impossible). But most coaches have developed those repeatable processes over time, even if you don’t recognize it as such.
This works in reverse, too
What if you’re not a coach? Maybe you’re a course creator wondering if coaching is something you should add to your business. I’ll talk about the pros and cons of pivoting in that direction in next week’s post.
Make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss it!
