Coaches: One-on-One to Group Coaching?

It's very much a different model. It would be similar to a mastermind group. The difference being your wife would likely be the only mastermind. It seems to me that your wife should transition from coaching to a system of product sales or membership access. One other possibility, if she's willing to divest a little control, is to manage her own team of coaches; this, of course, is not entirely easy to setup and comes with problems (poaching, for one). I'd stick with my first suggestion.

Tom

These people sound like they need babysitters. IDK what niche your in but it sounds a bit rough lol.

But, I personally like group coaching but you already listed why that would be an obstacle. It kind of sounds like the people don't want to be coached to begin with they just want a babysitter almost.

I hope you find your solution. Best of luck in 2015!!! May we ALL prosper!

Why don't you take the knowledge share, and create products around it..

So you can create passive income

And also,

Create products and maximize every client, using upsells etc

you need to look at replicating her...and/or you with materials and training. That would be my first step. I have done real consulting for a long time...not the bs thingy in my sig...thats me just passing the boredom of being retired now....lol

I cant image you are getting that many truly unique questions day after day after day that could not be answered to some degree with some videos, faq, pdfs....you get the idea. Even if they still need a little more help, the more you can automate the less time it takes you to do the 1-1 consulting part.

obviously with any consulting there is some degree of 1-1, but after doing it for many years, the truth is that every 1-1 session "for me" is very very similar to the last 1-1 session with the last client.

So the more i could "script" and replicate that, the less time i actually had to spend 1-1.

If you value your time, I would highly recommend group coaching

I think that group coaching is not as good as one-on-one coaching as you are getting less attention from your coach, which will cut your success you have with the program.

David makes some awesome comments there. I second every one. Perhaps the first step for your wife, mrdeflation, would be to see if any existing areas can be streamlined. I know, from experience, this is hard with coaching. Good coaching is original writing, not regurgitating old notes, but maybe your wife can streamline her approach (I find wives infinitely more intelligent that we mere mortals, so I bet she can).

I appreciate your reply to me. Though I'm likely not being very helpful. I was pondering the problem while having a coffee earlier, though. It's an interesting one. I'm wondering if having other coaches might be her best solution. Maybe it's not possible. But pehaps she could put a team of coaches together and take a little off the top for providing students, a web platform, structure, and overall management of activities. You'd just need people you can trust. That of course is the hard part.

I hope she gets it sorted out anyway.

Tom

I am extremely confused here. If you wife is maxed out on availability, that means she's in demand. If people are contacting her 10x daily, she is in demand. If those people refuse to pay more though, or refuse to talk to your wife's assistant, then that means she has spoiled them.

So I'd do one of two things-

1) Offer your wife's services at 150% more than her current rate to new customers. Then carefully let your existing customers know that as new members join, they will be removed from the program. Also, let new customers know that your wife works with an assistant that she's personally trained and certified, and that this assistant also has direct contact with your wife 24/7 for anything she doesn't know the answer to. If they want exclusive 24/7 access to your wife only, then the cost will be 450-600% more than the regular membership price.

With this option, you're placing a premium on your wife's time and making it known that her time is extremely valuable. On the other hand, you're also saying that the assistant is almost as equally skilled and she can answer anything either way. Most of your existing customers will not leave if they depend on your wife that much, and most will pay the 50% increase. A few will surprise you though and go with the 600%.

2) Inform them that you're no longer able to afford the 1:1 training at the current rate. They have two options- a group session for the same price or 1:1 training at 3x the price. Forget the assistant in this scenario, unless you want to bring someone on board solely for new clients.

A lot of good suggestions so far, and here is mine. (may overlap with some others)

Keep servicing these people since they are paying your bills (and then some hopefully)...

...BUT MOVING FORWARD

...work towards positioning her coaching and her content as evergreen and automated (streamlined as it was put earlier in the thread), raise your prices to what you think she's worth, and put enough people in the new automated/evergreen version of the coaching program so it replaces what you're making from these high touch clients and also so that you have some options such as:

a) Transition as many of the 40 customers over to the new format at their current pricing (tell them they are being grandfathered in to the new and improved coaching portal)

or

b) Make the ones who don't want to transition pay DOUBLE for what they are currently getting or get nothing

or

c) FIRE the ones who don't want to transition or pay double for the same high touch access

Another thing you can offer as an upsell or as part of the new format is 1 (yes - just 1) weekly Q&A call on Google Hangouts where you answer questions for a 2-3 hours and leave the recording in the members area for people to access in the future.

while i mostly agree about trying to bump the price to new clients, its rarely a good idea to piss off existing clients by raising rates. unless you are 100% certain you can replace those clients and get many many more with the new pricing and you can stand a little bad pr for bumping prices....its hard to gauge how much this price changes will induce a revolt sometimes.

normally, you just have to "eat those costs" until you can get a new pricing structure in place.

but new pricing structures are not always well received (or even accepted) by existing customers. many businesses have shot themselves in the proverbial foot by not realizing the only non-negotiable thing in their business is their customers. Even the big boys like netflix have blown this one a few times.

sometimes things sound good on paper or in the board rooms. but thats not what is important. customers are. if they aint happy, you have no business.

i have fired many clients in my day. but thats usually their fault. from the sound of things here, they have setup this business and been ok or at least somewhat ok providing this level of service to these clients for some time. they have trained these clients that this is the service they provide for the money they pay.

you certainly can just fire those clients, but if they did nothing wrong and just took advantage of the service you were providing at the time under the current agreement, you run a risk of backlash.

as i said, that can sometimes be hard to gauge how much that will affect or wont affect a business...until it happens and then its often times hard to adjust.

i think this is a case of a somewhat slow transition to a less hands on model as well as possible pricing structure changes (levels) and other income streams. it sounds like some of these clients need to be retrained to be less hand on with the coach.

he mentioned their clients not be willing to pay more....i wonder is that an issue for these specific clients, or something their industry is limited by for the most part? meaning is that a competition thing keeping the prices from rising, or what is preventing that? you would need to examine that before you just suggest a person raise their rates.

Are you tied up all weekend? Can you organise a free seminar to do a workshop? You may even want to do a workshop straight away without a free seminar. You will gather new clients this way and start to raise your price with the new ones. Did you say that your wife is maxed out with appointment times ? Maybe you need to think into the future of this type of gathering so that you can upscale. Otherwise you will just continue in the same direction. If you want to attract new clients in the future you have to decide what kind of people do I want to help and what kind of fee do I want to attract. With this knowledge you can change your new point of view and with time it is possible. Appreciate the people you are coaching now but reach for what you want until it becomes your reality. Definitely though a saturday once a month over a year could potentially change your business and the new people you attract.

IMHO it sounds like the clients are in total control here.

It seems that they are holding you guys to ransom for a service which they clearly receive amazing value from.

When it comes to replacing those clients and benefitting from more freedom I would 100% apply Pareto's Law and go 80/20 on them.

As with all areas of life, there is 20% of whatever causing 80% of the problems and equally there is 20% of clients providing 80% of the revenue. I coach clients daily and have introduced this to my business over the last few months. It has given me way more time to spend on the clients who value my service and has provided me with my "Avatar", my perfect client.

I now use the 20% who were giving me 80% of my reward, as a marketing model whom I target with all of my materials.

Give this a go.

Oh, and I have taken to more group coaching for the people who were happy to work this way (and cooperate more fully with my business model) it means that any issues are solved in a group instead of revisiting the same topics with each individual.

Hope this helps a little...

Thanks to everyone for offering such great thoughts and ideas.

YES 100% the clients are absolutely "spoiled" and "in control" unfortunately. That happened for a couple reasons:

#1) My wife believes in OVER delivering to her clients. So much so to a fault (good luck getting her to stop as stubborn as she is..lol)

#2) We ended up getting clients from other coaches who were sick of piss poor customer service and getting cookie cutter plans/coaching for the same price.

As such she started with 3 clients and would be hard pressed to get up to 8. However since underpromising and overdelivering she has worked up to 40 clients even after raising prices on a couple occasions. If these clients didnt need so much support and updating it we could easily manage 100+

That being said our pricing of $350mo is 2x what the average coach charges in the niche. There must be a better way other than to raise prices again?

Also most importantly we CANNOT raise prices on current clients as that will backfire beyond belief .. you have NO idea how upset these clients will be...we would never hear the end of it from them.

My wife is an online personal trainer, and bikini & figure competition coach.

Problem lies in the fact that two things happen. Women sign up with the intention of solely getting a diet/training program customized to their needs and we offer unlimited email support to ask questions but the questions evolve to everything but diet and training in addition to the most head hurting questions anyone could ask. Almost as if they are making stuff up to try and get their money's worth for some reason.

Example of the questions that we get are as follows (100's of these per day in LONG emails):

"when you said have 1 cup of oats for breakfast.. does that mean I should have 1 cup of oats?"

"when you said have 2 scoops of protein powder, should I have only 1 scoop because the serving size on the protein powder container says 1 scoop?"

"you know where you said I can have 6oz of any meat... would pasta be okay?"

or (literally) a 10,000 word email about their emotional issues, family, relationships and everything other than the program so we end up doing more life coaching than actual diet/training advice.

If those issues arent enough of a problem, our competitors need weekly updates/customization to their program which for what we provide takes the same time as writing a 10 page pdf ebook for each of them every week..lol

So the only thing I can think of is make a cookie cutter program, cut our pricing and piss off customers like everyone else.. but hey.. at least we arent working 24/7...lol

or

somehow hire trainers to work under my wife but in our experience the poaching rate was astronomical, client turnover was high and thus income fluctuated way too much as a result.

Feels good to get that off my chest..!!


Best wishes -

there is nothing wrong with over delivering. it turns out that usually results in a very profitable business when combined with an all encompassing plan.

from the sound of things, i would bet your "system" is not setup very well, or you dont have one at all. it seems like you just kinda grew into this business and never really set it up properly.

when you are a consultant, you are exchanging time for money. You better have systems in place to know how you are spending your time...what clients, what functions, what tasks..... you get the idea.

how many emails are you answering for each client? do you know...do they? a good rule of thumb in business is that any metric you track will improve...no matter what it is.

if you dont know the answers to those questions, that is a big problem and its going to result in a poorly managed business that may be profitable, but will require lots of un-necessary time, energy, and effort to keep running.

the more you track things like this and "understand" your business, the easier it might be to come up with different levels or to limit the on demand communication to xx emails a month or something.

you mentioned in your last post dealing with long winded emails... a web form that limits the size length of the emails is a 10 minute to implement solution to that problem that would help.

how are you handling and managing these clients...some sort of management system?

I kinda get the feeling yall seem to be in "firefighter" mode way to much...putting out fires. But it also seems like while yall are putting out fires you are dropping matches with the other hand....lol.

many businesses get into this trap. its hard to break free from sometimes.

if you are managing their diets, why not have a proactive system instead of a purely reactive system. setting up a database system for clients log their stuff on your site and an admin area for her to comment (on her time) more often than when the clients demand.

lots of solutions to this stuff.

Start a forum and let them talk to each other. If they are writing 10,000 word emails then they will read and respond to the same. A bunch of needy children are much easier supervised if you have them all in one room.