One of the most important decisions you’ll make as an entrepreneur is how you want to scale your revenue and when. For some business owners, the choice to scale up comes at a time when they’re expanding their streams of revenue. For others, they decide to scale up when their one on one services are booked out.
No matter which path you’re on, the questions that immediately follow are often…
How do I scale up?
What kind of program or revenue stream should I offer?
How do I deliver that?
How do I find people who actually need it?
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What to Create
Before we get into the how of it, let’s talk about what to actually create. I firmly believe that every type of business can have some type of recurring revenue program, so that is what I generally recommend when you’re creating that next level in your business.
If you’re a Pinterest strategy, create a course on how to use Pinterest for business.
If you’re a Virtual Assistant, create a training on setting up systems and processes for someone who is scaling up and hiring on team members.
If you’re a Personal Trainer, create a group coaching program where you teach on health, nutrition, and fitness.
The key is to create something that your existing audience needs.
This means that unless you’re starting a brand new business, I don’t recommend being a VA who now trains other VA’s or being a marketer who now teaches people how to become social media managers. Can you scale up your total revenue in that way? Yes! Will you be essentially starting a new business? Also, yes. It’s a great idea unless you’re looking to scale up your existing business with your existing audience… which is what I recommend.
Alright, off my soapbox.
You also want to create a program that either delivers the content automatically (as in the case of an ebook or a self-paced course) or that allows you to work with a group of people instead of one on one (as in the case of a group coaching program).
In this article, I’m going to focus mostly on the group program route, but these principles can be applied to any of the examples above.
Benefits of Creating a Program
The benefits of creating a group coaching program are immense! Personally, I’ve found that it allows me to reach more people with the same amount of effort, and I can focus on showing up for my audience rather than splitting my time between showing up and doing client work.
This means that I can have a bigger impact on the people who need me and grow my revenue more efficiently!
Other benefits include:
- A lower cost of doing business – I need less tools and less people to help me run a machine that scales so easily!
- Less time spent doing one on one tasks – This ties directly into impact and income! I spend less time doing one on one tasks so I can spend more time helping people and growing my income.
- Parts of my business are completely evergreen – While the coaching parts of my business are hands on, the program and many of the membership benefits are delivered automatically.
- High touch programs are easier – I find it’s much easier to deliver a high-touch experience in my program because I can support my students and bring in additional help without watering down my brand.
- Doesn’t cannibalize your other services – Programs fit perfectly into the value ladder offer structure I teach in the Skyrocket to Profit program. They don’t compete with it!
How to Create a High Converting Program
Now that we’ve talked about what to create and why, let’s talk about how to do it. This is where so many entrepreneurs get sucked into the idea that they need a complicated funnel or expensive programs in order to scale their revenue up.
But here’s the thing…
Most program creators all struggle with the same issue: getting people to use the program they’ve invested in.
Stop worrying about using the next big system or creating these elaborate funnels and focus on making your program easily accessible and high impact. You can always upgrade later.
My best advice for creating a high converting program is to keep it simple, go where your people are, and give them what they need.
Let’s break that down!
Create a No-brainer Program
Successful programs are the no-brainer solution for your ideal clients. They are the programs your people stumble across and think, “This is exactly what I need!”
You want your program to be that thing, and the best way to create something like that is to get inside the minds of your ideal client. I talk about this in depth in the Skyrocket to Profit, but I’ll touch on it a bit here. Essentially, you want to make a list of the life changing things your client’s need and the frustrating things they want to avoid.
Your program should help them avoid those pitfalls while moving them toward those life changing transformations. That transformation is key to creating a program that people want to enroll in—they’ll also be your biggest evangelists!
Keep Students Happy and Engaged
According to a study by the Temkin Group, 77% of customers would recommend or provide a referral to a company they had a good experience with.
That’s a huge number of happy students who could be dropping your name all over social media whenever they see someone in need of YOU!
One of the best ways to keep your program students happy and engaged is to simply be an authentic human. Show up for them, inspire them, connect genuinely with them, be a motivating force in their life, and share your vulnerable side.
You’ll also want to make sure that you’re available to them to teach, answer questions, and provide feedback and direction. As you grow and continue to scale up, you can bring on additional accountability coaches to help guide group dynamics and promote even more individual success.
You want to make sure you’re going all in on them!
Platforms to Run Your Program
For Skyrocket to Profit, I knew that I wanted to make it as easy as possible for my students to access the information and as easy as possible for me and my team to manage it on the backend.
That’s what I also recommend to you, as well.
Going low tech means that it’s super easy to set up and run, and you don’t have to invest the time (or money) to learn and set up an expensive platform!
Like I said, most program creators struggle to get people to actually utilize the program, so aim to put your program right in their fingertips and you’ll dramatically increase the chances of their success.
For courses, I recommend going with a Learning Management System (LMS) instead of trying to host it on your website. LMS’ can be huge amount of code that slow down your site and often don’t include many/any extra features. I use Teachable, but you can also go with something like a Google Drive folder initially.
Skyrocket to Profit is a hybrid coaching program, meaning there is a course and self-paced resources along with networking events and private group coaching events.
For the course, I prefer Teachable, and I highly recommend it. It’s not a huge investment each month, there is a free trial, and we get the added bonus of their running our affiliate program and dispersing payments.
For the additional member benefits like coaching and accountability and weekly content reviews, I opt to host that in a Facebook group, the Profitable Women Entrepreneur Network. It’s a fantastic way to encourage group learning and create a social community out of it! In Facebook groups, you can create the group as social learning group and enable Guides.
Each Guide is like a folder of posts. Simply share a video, photo, link, or post into the group and assign it to whatever Guide it falls under.
Guides in our member support group include:
- Coaching Corner
- Weekly Content Reviews
- Student Testimonials
- Office Hours and Q+A
- Mastermind Training
When you’re figuring out how you’ll deliver everything to your program members or students, think about what is included in your program, how your audience likes to consumer content, and what is the easiest way your students can get to your information!
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