How To Structure A $100k/Mo Online Coaching Program

Okay, so in this video, I'm going to explain exactly how I manage dozens of different high-ticket clients all at once. Now, if you don't know me, I'm Max Stoic. I run a full-stack marketing agency helping coaches and course sellers, and consultants, and people like that sell more products online and scale their businesses. And I also help agencies a little bit as well. So I run a full done-for-you agency service, and I also run a coaching program as well.

Something I see time and time again, though, is that about 99% of my clients, they need help with managing their time more efficiently, with being able to manage their coaching program and their coaching clients more effectively, so that they can scale, so they can get better results for their clients, and just make more money. So in this video, that's exactly what we're going to be talking about, and I'm going to run you through the methods and the techniques and the SOPs that I've built up to make this as easy as possible for myself, to help my business scale up to $80,000 a month.

Now, the first really important thing to note from all this is that most coaches suck when it comes to actually fulfilling for their clients their programs. Pretty much consist of, "Yeah, sure, I'll make a fancy landing page and do some good marketing," but once you buy my program, you're just going to hop on a couple calls with me, and nothing else is really going to happen. Maybe there's a course in the background, but in terms of SOPs and procedures and things that you've got set up to make that that system better, not only on a client's side but on your side as well, it just doesn't really exist right off the bat.

I just want to break down what you are actually selling as a coach because, as a coach, you are selling information at the end of the day, and there are essentially three separate ways to sell information. So we have the bare minimum here, right? We have do-it-yourself. Here's the information; you go and do it yourself. Most of the time, that's going to be considered a course. Then we have done-with-you. Here's the information, but I'll help you implement it along the way. If you have a problem and you need some specific one-on-one help, or you need some questions answered to get that information, you know, into action, then I'll help you with that. That is usually going to be seen as a coaching service. And then there is done-for-you. Here's the information that I have, but you don't actually need the information because I'm just going to implement it all for you. And that's essentially an agency service.

Now, unlike most coaches out there, I'm not just going to tell you that courses are stupid and that they're all scams and you should never sell one and you should never buy one. There are some benefits to buying courses and to selling them, but there are also some cons along the way as well. Now, the biggest benefit right off the bat is just there's a low time input and there's a low cost input when you are selling courses, which means they are very, very easy businesses to scale. The cons, though, is that you can never really cover 100% of the information that you need to be giving to your clients to get them the best success that they need. There's always going to be these tiny little bits of information that pop up that you just can't preempt and put into a course. And so without some at least done-with-you or done-for-you help alongside a course, that tiny issue is going to become a rather big problem, and it's going to prevent your clients from getting their desired result, from being successful, from paying you extra money if they want to renew their program or to buy your next course, or even just to give you a testimonial so that you can convince other people to join your program too.

Now, the other major issue I see with courses is one of the biggest problems that a lot of people buying coaching programs have is they lack accountability or motivation or just discipline to do things themselves. And so when you just throw information at them and then leave it all up to them to implement it, it's very unlikely that they're going to use that information to its fullest extent. So even though you might be giving them amazing information, they might still be getting crap results because they just aren't using it to its fullest extent. And that is the true reason that I don't really recommend most people just sell courses. It's why I almost always recommend selling a coaching program with a course embedded into it. Right, we can still use courses throughout our coaching programs; we can still take all of the benefits of that low time input and that low cost input and that easy, that ease to fulfill and that that scalable nature, but then we can use coaching and that done-with-you element to fill in the gaps and to keep our clients successful and our businesses efficient, highly profitable, and actually scaling.

So when it comes to you're trying to build out your fulfillment for your coaching program, you're trying to work out what you should be providing people in in what quantities and how you're actually going to deliver that information or help on over to them, we should always be starting with a course and then adding in those coaching elements later on. Well, that looks like from a point of view of building out a program is we want to build out that initial course to the degree where we can cover 90% of all the information that the client needs, questions they might have, how to use certain softwares, what they're supposed to be doing, what your commitments are, what their commitments are—all of that basic information which is repeatable across each client. No matter what the the small nuances or differences between each client, we can cover with a course and get about 90% of the information that they need down onto paper in a very, very efficient method.

Now, for that final 10%, the reason we don't bother trying to put that into the course is because that's always going to change. Every single person who comes into our program is going to have their own unique special set of circumstances, and that final 10% is the special set of circumstances. So it is not efficient for us to try and cover all 100 of our clients' 10% within the course because that's going to quadruple or even quintuple the length of the course without actually giving that much marginal increase in value for each individual client. Now, this is just a very efficient way of running it, and it's basically going to be the first point of contact for all of your clients once they join your program. This is the kind of stuff they should be going through right from the beginning.

Now, a question I do get a lot is, "How do I know what to add to the course, and how do I know when I should be adding extra things to the course?" If multiple people are asking about those questions or those specific topics. Now, the answer for this is really simple as well. If one person asks for some specific help that lies within that 10% outside of the course, we just help them; we just tell them the answer; we help them work out the answer, whatever it needs to be. We help give our clients that result. If, however, two people have now asked that very specific certain question, or they need that specific help, that's when it's time to add it to the course.

Now, this isn't something we should be trying to do all at the beginning; this is the ongoing iterative process of building out the course and making it as efficient as possible. Now, why do we only put it in once we've had two people? Well, because we've already solved that problem for the first person on a one-to-one basis. It's only going to take a little bit less time solving that problem by just adding it to the course and giving it to everyone else. But again, there are a million potential problems, so 99% of those one things in the 10% are still not going to be repeated across clients. When they are repeated across clients twice, there's a very high likelihood that actually they're going to be repeated across clients 3, 4, 5, 10, 100 times into the future, and then that's when it starts to make sense for us to add that to the course. The reason, again, we don't add everything to the course right from the beginning is if we have a 100-hour-long course with a thousand different lessons, that's going to be really, really difficult for our clients to consume. It's going to be hard for them to identify what they should be focusing on, and they actually going to end up getting less value because of cognitive capitulation when you're adding all these random things to the course that don't need to be there.

When it comes to then doing that first bit of given value, and we're not just adding things to the course, we're going to be looking at two real possibilities here: We have one-to-one coaching and we have group coaching, one-to-one or one-to-many. Now, most coaches are going to start with one-on-one coaching, and to be honest, I do agree with this. I think it's the right way to go, especially if you're sitting under $20,000 a month. However, there are some specific circumstances where, even if you are just getting started as a coach, it might still make sense to not go for one-on-ones and go straight to group.

Perfect example of this is one of my clients, Adrian. I'm running a full done-for-you coaching service for him, so I'm actually building out his coaching business for him and handling all the marketing and the paid advertising and the funnels and the sales and that kind of stuff. Anyway, he is already running a very, very successful multi-million dollar business, and he doesn't really need to be taking up his time with one-on-one coaching as well. We know we're going to be able to reach a lot of people straight from the get-go, so by doing group coaching, we are more efficient with his time, and for him to be charging one-on-one coaching prices, we're going to be looking at massive, massive ticket prices, which just makes it much more difficult for us to work out the kinks of building out his funnel, what works with our marketing, optimize and our offer, and things like that when we start with. So yes, if you are watching this, there's a good chance that we should be focusing on one-on-one coaching at the beginning. It's also just great for honing your craft and learning how best to help people because you get incredibly strong client feedback, and they get much better help. So if you are, you know, just starting off and you don't have testimonials or case studies, it's a great way to get some really good solid ones too.

The other reason then I like to focus on one-to-one coaching for those coaches just starting out is actually it isn't more efficient to do group coaching if you aren't at that sort of $20,000 per month or higher mark because you're going to have to provide multiple opportunities for group coaching so you can cater to different people's schedules and time zones and other things that might get in the way. And so you might end up running five hours of group coaching calls per week, whereas if you were just doing one-on-one coaching calls for 10 people and they were half an hour each, you would be able to give each person more one-on-one time; it would be more flexible for their schedule; they'd get better results; and you wouldn't actually be spending any less time fulfilling for your clients by running this group coaching. I think that's that's another good mark to think of. It less than 10 clients currently on your active roster, and unless you're doing, you know, hours and hours and hours of work for them every single week, we should probably be looking at one-on-one coaching there.

Now, I do also want to quickly mention that I am a very big fan of one-to-one monthly review calls or or coaching or contact with a coach, even if you're running group coaching as your main point of contact and your main source of value, but we'll talk about that a little bit more in a moment. That then, of course, takes us on to group coaching, and really this is the best way to start scaling to really big numbers with your coaching program, and you can actually still give a huge degree of value to your clients and charge a very, very high ticket price. And in fact, some people will get more value by joining a group coaching program than they would a one-on-one coaching program. I can't tell you how many times I've been on a group call with a bunch of my clients, speaking with all of them, and one person is just there asking 10, 15, 20 different questions over the course of our session, and everyone else is there intently listening, taking notes, and gathering value from the other person that happened to be on the coaching call with them because they just weren't able to be proactive enough and think up those questions to get the value from, you know, being on a call with me at that time. If they were on those one-on-one calls, those people, the 19 people in the background, would have got less value than they did get by being on the group coaching call because we were there with a set agenda, a bunch of topics that I specifically wanted to explain and cover with all of them, and then one person in the audience was picking up the slack and helping everyone else learn more too.

On top of that, it's much easier to build a community effect, and of course, that's going to add another degree of value to your program. If people are seeing other people succeed, they're more likely to work harder themselves, to to really trust the information that you're giving them, to throw themselves into the program. So getting them onto a Zoom call with each other, so everyone's seeing each other's faces and hearing each other's, you know, voices and speak and learning about them, that's going to help them absorb more value and put more work in and get better results as well. And of course, just because you're on a group call, that doesn't mean you can't answer someone's specific question and give them a little bit of one-on-one help in a one-to-many setting. So really, group coaching is a brilliant way to run this. A lot of people perceive it as lower value; if that is the case, then you really need to be taking a look at your offer and the way you're marketing your product. I've got previous videos out on YouTube talking about that.

But the final thing I do want to talk about with group coaching is the issue that some people have when they're selling in a very broad, internationally based market. If you are selling to someone in Thailand and Australia and then the UAE and Dubai and then Europe and then the United States East Coast and West Coast, you're basically going to have people on every single possible time zone, and it's be very difficult for a lot of people to make it to a live coaching session if you're setting it based on your schedule when you want to work. Now, again, there is a pretty simple solution for this, or in this case, there's actually two solutions. The first one is just have multiple group coaching opportunities and set them apart in different time zones at different days of the week. Maybe you have 10:00 a.m. your time, then 3:00 p.m. your time, then 7:00 p.m. your time. If you're happy working those hours on a on a Friday afternoon or on a Tuesday or something like that, that allows people who are up before you to attend the earlier ones and then who are up after you to attend the later ones, and they can still get on and get that value. But I actually think the better way of fixing this issue is just systemizing your group coaching a little bit, giving everyone who joins into your program an option and the ability to presubmit questions prior to your group coaching call. So you tell them if there's going to be a specific topic. That's one of the other ways I like to, you know, orient my group coaching call. Some are for sales, some are for marketing, some are for, you know, copywriting, learning how that works, some of just for organic content. If any has a load of questions or they have something in particular that they want me or one of my coaches to look at, we get them to submit a questionnaire form prior to the call. Then, even if they don't turn up to the call, we can review that question; we can review the information or the the help that they've asked for us, and we can give it to them live on that call. So everyone else who did manage to make it live, they get the the group call value of hearing from other people's ambition and and initiative to ask that particular question, but those who can't make it live, we just record the session and we send it to them afterward, so it's still like they were getting that one-on-one help.

Now, the final thing I really want to mention here when it comes to group coaching calls is whether you should be treating them as just drop-in sessions or whether you should be setting agendas and saying, "This is what we're going to talk about in particular." Now, when you're starting off, if you are running group coaching right from the get-go, you're probably best off just running drop-in sessions. But as you start to scale, as more people join your program, you're having to help more people. I really do think that setting some kind of agenda or even just a generic topic—for this call on Tuesday is going to be about running paid ads, and if you have paid ads help, you should be submitting your questions to that one or you should just be turning up to that one if you can—it just helps to keep your coaching more focused. It's not something you have to do, and again, it gets more important as you scale. When you're starting off, when you're fewer than 10 clients, when you're less than $20, $30k a month, it's not something that you really need to be implementing straight away.

Now, once you've planned out how you're actually going to be giving this information away to people, maybe you've even already sold a few of these coaching clients, it's time to start thinking about how you're going to manage the clients going forward, how you're going to make sure that they're getting the value they need, that they're having a good experience, that they they know when their next payment's coming up, and they're happy and willing and able to pay it. Now, in general, people are always going to push you towards a CRM, a client relationship management software. I personally do not think you need to be using one of these expensive softwares like Pipedrive or HubSpot or GoHighLevel. I've pretty much just got everything I need set up through automations and with custom Notion pages that we built out. The reason we use Notion instead of Pipedrive or GoHighLevel or anything else is just because it's so much simpler, and when you're using a software like GoHighLevel in particular, it kind of does everything you need to 80% satisfaction, but there's also going to be 30 or 50 different functions in there that you don't need and you're never going to need, and they just clutter the UI and make it very, very difficult for you and your team to navigate. When you're setting one up on Notion like I've done with my team, we only have on the Notion the automations and the databases and the the different, you know, graphs and all these little bits that integrate with each other; we only have the ones that we actually want, and so it's nice and simple for us to read. And if we want to start tracking a new data point or we want to start, you know, changing something or or changing a way we manage things, it's a really, really easy fix to make; we just add an extra tab, an extra table, an extra lead form, or anything like that.

Now, I do think if you're selling a lot, then a proper CRM software like Pipedrive is going to be brilliant for the sales side, but for just managing those who are already signed, I really am a firm believer that just a Notion page is going to do everything you need. But there are still a lot of similarities between how you go about signing a client and what you do once you've actually signed them. Now, just like we track how many people become a lead for our sales, how many people actually go on to be contacted, how many get through to a landing page, how many watch a webinar, how many book a call, and how many actually get sold, we really do want to be tracking that same sort of data, just not on the sales pipeline side, on the client management pipeline side. And other people are going to separate it out and track it in different ways, and depending on what result you're getting for your clients and how you're doing it, you're going to have to set this up your own way. But the way I run it for my business is really simple. Every one of our clients starts off in the onboarding phase, and we get them entirely set up with a program, understanding how it all works and carrying out those first few tasks that we need them to do. Then we move them on to Phase One. This is where we focus on a specific part of our delivery and getting them the first step of the way towards their desired result. Once they've completed Phase One and they've received an outcome, then we move on to Phase Two. We start optimizing and focus on on different things, and then Phase Three and so on until they've actually achieved their desired result. And what this allows us to to do is really, really simply see who is at what stage of the funnel just using this pipeline that we've set up on Notion, but we can also see the average success rates for our clients or how long it's taking them to succeed or or how quickly they're getting through Phase One, and then maybe there's a bit of a bottleneck at Phase Two, so maybe that's where me and my team need to be focusing on our delivery because Phase Two is where people are dropping out, and then we get them through that, and then we find out, "Oh, we've got brilliant results," or "there's still some improvements we can make at different stages of the the actual pipeline."

This is also a very important and useful thing for you to do if you are scaling and you're getting to the point where you're starting to think about your profit margins. When you are a small coach, you don't really need to worry about profit margins. No matter what you do, you're going to be sitting at like 80, 90% profit margins on the low end, to be honest. However, once you start scaling up, when you're breaking past $30k a month, $50k a month, $100k a month, and those sort of levels, suddenly you have to start taking care and thinking about, "Okay, I'm not the only coach anymore; I'm hiring other people, and we're using all these intensive softwares, and maybe we're giving away awards for people reaching specific results. How much does this all cost, not only in money but also in time, and at what stages of our client pipeline are we spending the most money?" For my business, when I take on my build-out clients where I build the entire funnel for them, we have a hell of a lot more time and money-based input costs throughout that first month, throughout that onboarding phase of our clients, and then when we get to Phase Two, suddenly our time and cost input drops off the cliff a little bit because we go on to just coaching them forward at that point, and then we move move into Phase Three, we're helping them get that final desired result and even going further than they had initially hoped for when they joined our program, and we end up sending out expensive awards and doing things like that, so our costs start to go up and our time input goes up a little bit too. This is really, really important for us because it means that I know what my margins are going to be at each stage of my clients. I know that this client is in Phase One; he's going to take up a lot of my time and a lot of my money over this first month, so maybe I should dial back on the marketing because I got 10 others just like him who I need to fulfill for right now, whereas when I've got everyone in Phase Two, the time input and cost input on me and my team is actually really low, so that's when we can start onboarding.

Loads more people are doing a big push for sales to get new people into the program. If we're not tracking this, and we just treat everyone as a monolith, as everyone as if they all use up the same amount of time and our resources at every point throughout the program, we're going to find ourselves on the back foot. We'll sign loads of people up in that first month and find ourselves without time, thinking, "Well, we've still only got 30 clients live. Why is this taking up so much more time than it did when we had 30 clients live 3 months ago?"

Now, the other massive advantage of tracking your client pipeline, just as you do your sales pipeline, is it's really important if you want to turn out from just being a consultant or just a freelancer into actually running a successful business. You need to be tracking your data; you need to know your numbers. Now, for most coaches who are just starting out, that's basically going to be: how much did I spend on ads, and how many clients did I sign? What was my ROAS? Or maybe, how many YouTube videos or Instagram posts did I put out, and how many leads did I get, and how many of those leads turned into clients? But what we also need to be tracking very distinctly is: how many of those clients turn into successes? How long is it taking them to turn into successes? How much of our booked revenue, when we actually sign a client, turns into actual cash in our bank account, and how long does that take us to do? How much are we spending in time and money per client sold, and at different points of their pipeline? And then we combine all of this information together, and we get a 10 times more accurate review of our business, knowing exactly where we need to improve, or where the problems are, or whether or not we are ready to start scaling, pushing that ad spend back up.

Now, when it comes to actually fulfilling with your clients and helping them out, I basically have three things I want to see when I'm running my businesses and when I'm helping my coaches scale: I want to see daily engagement, I want to see weekly contact, and I want to see a monthly review. Now, what do I mean by daily engagement? I don't mean that you need to be hopping on a one-on-one call with every single client every single day. I mean, I want your clients to engage with your program, or other clients, or other parts of your ecosystem on a daily basis. Now, that can be as simple as filling out like a special form where you count your calories if you're a fitness coach trying to help people lose weight or put on weight, or it can be a coach making a big post onto a group and encouraging other clients to engage with there and give an answer, or it can be going through a part of the course. This doesn't need to be a full-on conversation, but the key is just to get your client doing something directly, indiscriminately tied to your business and to your coaching program every single day. That's going to help keep your coaching program in their mind; it's going to help them keep their problems in their mind, their desired outcomes in their mind; it's going to make sure that they're putting in the work and getting the results that they want, so that both they get the most value out of their program and you get the higher success rate out of yours.

Next, we go on to contact, and actually weekly contact is a little bit on the low end for my personal taste, but in general, we want to make sure that we're having full-on contact with our clients each week. What's the difference between contact and engagement? Well, engagement can be one-directional; right, it can just be our client reading a piece of information that we've given them, or it can just be our client engaging with a post that we've made. Contact is going both ways. So this could be a direct messaging exchange between a coach and a client; it can be a coach asking them how their week went, or whether or not they have any questions about something you spoke about with them before; it can be a client filling out some information, some news, an update about what they're doing, how their program's going, and how they need help, and then a coach giving them a response or an answer or help in return; it can be a group call and a client coming on and asking a question or two; or it can be that format I mentioned earlier where a client pre-submits some information, a question to a group call, and then the coach answers it and helps to explain what's going on. But I do want to say here distinctly: once a week is a little bit low; we really should be targeting two to three times a week. Again, this contact doesn't have to be a full 1-hour Zoom call every single week; it can be as short as just dropping them a message saying, "Hey, do you have any problems that I can help with? Is there anything that you've just been feeling is lacking lately?" and then correcting that issue nice and quickly.

And then finally, I always like to see a monthly review as well. I want a dedicated full session interview, not just a 5-minute chat, but around 20 to 30 minutes or so. It's a great opportunity for your client to see what they've done well, what they haven't done well; are they on track to reach their goals? Are they falling behind, or why are they falling behind? Is it something they need to fix? Can we help them fix it? But it's also a great opportunity for you to give them more personalized help to make sure that they actually succeed, to make sure that you're building a strong relationship with them. Maybe they've had some successes, some wins, but you haven't been making that daily engagement or that weekly contact, and so they haven't told you about those successes and wins, and so you've let a testimonial slip through the gaps. Now, monthly I think is the sweet spot for 90% of programs out there. Usually, we're going to be dealing with clients anywhere from like 3 months through to 12 months, and just that one really, really dedicated session each month to making sure that they're happy with the service that you have given them, and that they're going to see the results that they came here for; that yes, they know that the next payment is coming up; they're happy to pay; they're excited because they want that next month of dedicated support that is really, really going to be very valuable.

Now, the final few things I want to mention when it comes to managing your clients: the first one is there needs to be a very, very clear and distinct path for them to follow. If it isn't clear, if it isn't distinct, one of two things is always going to happen. The first one is: you run an inefficient program. You're still dedicated to getting your clients the results that they came here for, but there isn't that clear path for them to follow, and so you end up having to fill in those one-on-one gaps, and that 90% of information that should be covered by the automated aspects of your program drops down to 50%, and the other 50% is taken up by your specific time input. You're going to be working far more hours than you need to, and you can't spend enough time on generating new leads or sales, and so you're not able to scale up your coaching program and make enough money. That's the first option. The second option is basically the same, but it just goes the other direction: you still aren't able to give people that help in an automated fashion, but you're just not committed to making sure they see that success. So many of your clients don't see the success, and you end up with a really, really high churn rate. Maybe people sign up for a six-month payment program, but they drop out after month one or two. You don't end up with loads of great wins and testimonials and success stories and referrals, and so it gets harder and harder to sell your clients and to get new people into the program going forward, and so again, it's difficult for you to scale and to make money.

Now, the next thing I want to mention really quickly here is that coaching is a very, very difficult business to match your revenue to the actual cash that you're able to collect with your business. Now, for those who don't know, revenue is a very simple term, but when it comes to actual bookkeeping, it's a little bit less simple. Revenue is supposed to just be the total sales in your business, but when we're talking about taxes and paying VAT or sales tax on top of our revenue, actually the government calculates revenue in a slightly different way. They say that if you have contracted income for the future that is due to come now, that has to be booked as revenue right now. That means if you're selling a $1,000 a month program for 12 months, and you sell someone on that payment plan, you have made $112,000 as revenue, but in reality, only $1,000 has actually dropped into your bank account. Cash, on the other hand, is a much more intuitive figure to be taken a look at; it's the actual physical amount of cash that gets dropped into your bank account when a client purchases. Now, with a lot of traditional businesses, when you're dealing with goods or with other very traditional businesses, usually you're going to see revenue to cash sit at about 95%, sometimes 98%, or even 100%. If someone is contracted to pay their mortgage for 25 years into the future, usually like a 98% likelihood that they're going to make all of their payments, and the bank can count on that cash coming in from that booked revenue. When we're talking about coaching programs though, we have a very, very different story, and it's very difficult for coaches to get revenue to equal cash collected. Even the best coaching programs out there in the world are not going to have it sit at a 1:1 ratio. The average coach sitting at under $10,000 a month in cash collected is probably collecting something like 50% of their total revenue. That means yes, someone may make that payment and that commitment to go forward, but over that 12-month period, the average person drops out at 6 months, and they don't make any more payments after that. A good coach is going to see something closer to 75% in revenue. So again, on that same payment plan, we're collecting at $9,000 on average per customer, not the full $12,000. And then those who are sitting at 90%, 95%, or even 100% in revenue to cash collected, they're either not running payment plans at all, which means that everyone has to make that full payment upfront, or they have incredibly high-intent clients; they have incredibly streamlined processes, and they get ridiculously good results for their clients.

Now, the reason this is so important to talk about is that if you are not collecting much of the revenue that you're booking, you have a major problem within your business, and it doesn't matter if you're able to triple the amount of leads you get in; you're still not going to be able to actually scale your business to where you want to go because clients will be leaving too early. Now, here's the big mistake that a lot of coaches make: they think that how much you collect in relation to how much you book is purely down to the success that your clients see, but that is not the case. Because clients are aware that there is a time frame to their success, and a ton of people will go into a program knowing full well that it's going to take them 6 months to get their result, or 12 months to get their result, or even longer than that, and yet they're dropping out at month one or month two or month three. They haven't been expecting that result at that point; maybe they've been expecting a partial result, but more often than not, clients drop out due to poor or a lack of communication, a perceived lack of value, not a lack of value in its entirety. If you've ever sold a payment program for a course, you know that the cash collected compared to revenue booked is going to be absolutely atrocious compared to a really, really boutique coaching program where you're giving each person a lot of personal attention, and you're making sure that not only are they on track to seeing their results, yes, but they are feeling like they're on track, and they're feeling heard and appreciated and valued, and they're not feeling like they paid you six months ago and they haven't spoken to anyone on your team since. If you set up your client management systems properly, you go through these systems on a daily, on a weekly, on a monthly basis; you make sure the onboarding is all clean that we're going to go over in a moment; you will probably increase your cash collected, the actual money that goes into your bank account every month, by 30% for the average coach on the low end, so it really, really is an important thing to focus on, and I don't want you to just gloss over this client management stuff as, "Oh, it doesn't really matter."

Now, onboarding. Onboarding is also incredibly relevant when it comes to client management because every single person, when they make a big purchase, when they make a big investment into their future or a big commitment, they're going to have elements of doubt; they're going to have at least a little bit of buyer's remorse. And so most of these people who do end up asking for refund policies, they're going to come before they've had anything delivered, within just a couple of days. If you haven't given them something tangible, there's a very high likelihood that that person, whether or not they say it, they are really, really questioning their choices; they're really, really questioning whether or not this was the right decision, and if it's a lot of money for them, there's a high chance that they're going to ask to back out and ask for a refund before you've even had a chance to get them started and to show them how great your program is. So what's the best way to make sure that our onboarding process is clean and swift, but most importantly, perceived in the right way? It's to automate it and to get it moving absolutely instantly. When you're on a sales call and you've just closed someone, don't just take their money and turn off the Zoom call. Obviously, they're going to be like, "What the just happened? Did I just get scammed?" What you need to be doing is really, really simple and intuitive; you just need to be talking to them and explaining what the next process is going to be, and then you're hopefully going to have your system set up to automate this onboarding process. They're going to get that first email that gives them that first set of instructions, and you give them a quick one-to-two-minute rundown of what they should be doing next once you hop off the call, and then the systems take care of the rest. Now, yes, you can do this manually, but why the hell would you want to? Because it is a process that can be, 99% of the time, fully automated. Do you have maybe a community or a course or some assets that your client needs to download? Maybe your client needs to watch a couple of videos; do they need to answer some questions so you can get some information on how to best help them? All of that can be automated incredibly easily. The simplest way is just by literally having an automatic email sent out with a receipt and just a list of instructions on what to do next. Now, look, if you've never signed a client before, then fine, I guess I can understand why you might not have automated this process yet, but if you've even sold one person in your life, then frankly, you've spent enough time on onboarding where you should have had it automated already. There's basically no reason why you can't just do it manually once and then turn that into an automated process from there.

Now, personally, I use, and I encourage my clients to use, a software called [Software Name] to manage communities and DMs and payments and everything like that, and so most of the onboarding for a program that I run or on my clients' run, it's going to be 90% automated from the get-go. All we're going to need to do is stick a video tutorial saying, "First Steps: watch this video first," and give them instructions on what to do next. Maybe we send them links to those Google Docs or those Google Forms where they fill out a bunch of questions so that we can get the information we need to help them. So with a little bit more specifics in mind, what exactly should we be trying to cover when we're talking about onboarding right off the bat? We want to be getting our clients to document themselves, to put it down onto paper so that we have that baseline information to fall back on should we ever need to know something about them. So we're going to start off by giving them an application form to fill out, or a list of questions on a Google Doc if you can't be bothered to set up an application form, and we're going to get to understand their circumstances, their preferences, and their history. Next, we're going to move on to their goals, setting those goals and tracking those goals right. So what are your explicit, your measurable goals? When do you want to reach them by? Where were you in regards to your goals 6 months ago? Where are you right now? Where do you want to be in 6 months? How likely do you think you're going to be there? What do you think you need to do to reach those goals? What are your preferences? Are there certain aspects of our program that you're looking forward to, that you hate? Do you work particularly well with people on phone calls? Do you hate Zoom calls? What are your preferences when it comes to being coached and learning? What are your strengths as well? If we're talking about, maybe we're training for a powerlifting competition, is bench press our best lift, and we want to be able to build on those strengths? How have we tried to build on those strengths in the past? Maybe we're awful at squatting; how have we tried to address those weaknesses in the past? We really just want to get a solid understanding of who our clients are and get it written down onto paper so that we can hold it for the future, and we can always fall back on it should we need to. And then the other really simple thing we want to be doing on onboarding is just getting them to understand how this program is going to work, right? Sending them access to a course, to some lessons, to a community; giving them those instructional videos; telling them what to do next, right? How do they get into contact with us if they have a question that they can't wait for a coaching call with? They DM in a software? Is it a WhatsApp group? Is it a Telegram chat or something like that? Let's get them access to everything they've just purchased and make sure they understand how to navigate it and how to use it.

So then everything here that we've just spoken about is going to culminate into our roadmap, which is exactly how our clients are going to go through our program and get the result that they're looking for. It's going to start off with the onboarding process, right? They're going to be filling out those questions on the questionnaire, watching a few videos explaining how the process will actually work, what to do next; they're going to log into all of their softwares or the tools or the spaces; they're going to introduce themselves to their community; they're going to meet the coaches who are going to help them one-on-one, and they're going to note down or work out how to contact people, or who their main point of contact is, who to ask for extra help. Now, for some programs, this is going to take less than a day; for some, like my build-out program, this is going to include my team building out an entire funnel for my clients, so which can actually take a couple of weeks. But then we move on to phase two, which is the automated, the pre-made aspects of the coaching, of the information we're giving people. So this is going to include going through a course and building a funnel or setting themselves up, you know, learning, doing things at the tasks that are set at the end of each lesson. Now, again, this course material, this pre-recorded stuff, is going to cover 90% of the information that our clients need, and for some coaching programs, it might take someone literally just a week to go through the entire program; it might take other people a lot longer if they're having to do a lot of work in between each bit of information that they're set. I have seen a bunch of coaching programs out there which will literally lock access to the actual coaching behind whether or not someone has completed and finished this first part of everything, the pre-made content. I don't recommend that whatsoever; I think it leads to an awful customer experience. We run a big copywriting coaching offer with my agency, and we've had multiple clients come to us from one of our biggest competitors who's doing about half a million dollars a month, and they basically said, "Yeah, we were lied to on the sales call; we were told we'd have a coach straight from the beginning, and it turns out we have to go through this entire course and wait two months and sign our first freelance copywriting client, and then they will give us a coach." But when those people need a coach is right at the beginning, not when they're already seeing success. So I don't recommend locking access to coaching behind whether or not they've completed a load of information and just gone through that pre-recorded stuff. Of course, some programs it'll only take you a couple of days to go through that pre-recorded stuff, so it can be all right, but with most, I think it's just much better off to give them access to the main thing they came here for: that accountability and the one-on-one help from a coach who knows what they're doing, an expert. I think it makes sense to give them access to that as quickly as possible. Then we give them the actual coaching, right? The one-on-one help; it might be attending those group calls; it might be DMing a coach and asking for assistance; it might be booking a one-on-one call if you're doing that; it might be partaking in accountability programs to help ensure that people are working towards their desired results; it might be updating coaches on their wins or their losses or the help that they need. It's that personalized, boutique help that separates a course from a coaching program. And finally, once we have gone through all those processes, we have our clients getting that desired result. We've done it in a really efficient way so that we're able to scale; we're not tied behind; we have to spend X amount of time on every single client, and it always has to be us. We're able to scale; we're able to charge more for our prices; we're able to actually get more clients in because they see this roadmap; they see the likelihood of getting that desired result; they see all these past testimonials; we make more money; they get better results; and it's all just happy families, happy days from there. Of course, if you want to learn more about working with me, I offer coaching programs and an agency done-for-you service and then a done-with-you service. I've got a load of different offerings, but if you're a coach or an agency, you're looking to grow in this info product, in this online education space, head on down to the description, check out the link in my bio, learn a little bit; we've got some free resources there as well, or you can book a call with myself or my team to see if we might be the right fit to help you scale your online education business.