Two Approaches to Group Coaching Programs
By Darla LeDoux, Founder of Sourced™ and Author of the books Shift The Field and Retreat and Grow Rich

Welcome to this conversation about the two schools of thought, when it comes to group coaching programs. Are you ready?

Many of my clients are magical, transformational human beings who also bring a lot of expertise to their work. Maybe you have a background in a certain modality or a certain area like health and wellness, or relationships, or sexuality or business, etc.

They really want to take their knowledge and transformational skills, and put that together into a group program. Something that is accessible for a lot of people to be able to purchase financially, and also leverages their time in a way that they are showing up once and able to impact a lot of different people.

 I’m guessing if you’re here, you probably relate to that. What happens a lot of times is people get into business and they see this happening. There’s a lot of marketing around how to create a course, how to offer courses, how to create group programs. A lot of people teach this, right? And yet, a lot of people who follow really good advice about this, and it doesn’t work. I’ve seen this happen so often.

And quite honestly, my very first group that I wanted to launch was a total flop there were like, no leads, no clicks, nothing, nothing happened. And I was so surprised. And yet really, there were a lot of very clear reasons that I see now why it went that way. So when you have this desire in your heart to work with groups, and particularly if you’re doing transformational work, which is our specialty at Sourced, group work is so potent for transformation, because a lot of times as a participant, we can see ourselves in someone else in the group, or they will think to ask the question, we never asked.

Okay, so there are two schools of thought: the school of thought of jumping in and creating a group program from nothing when you have no you know, history in your business and no email list and no sales experience. Not a good idea. Okay, I’ll just say that across the board. So how do you get there? Where do you invest your time and energy and how do you build?

So there is one school of thought, which is build a big audience, create a lot of small bite sized offers where people can get to know like and trust you. And then eventually you can offer them a higher investment offer. And eventually you can offer them a higher investment offer, right? So it’s like starting small, building slowly over time.

The other school of thought is: don’t mess with any kind of low ticket or courses or anything like that. Start directly with high end high touch one-to-one service, coaching, consulting, that you offer in an individual sales call and invite someone to work with you and invest at a high level.

Now, I am much more in this camp. Because for me, when I started my business, I needed cash flow, right. So I didn’t have the time and space and energy, or really the interest in know how to build all these little offers and build up to something bigger, I just didn’t have that. But I’m also not built that way.

This was definitely the path for me. Now, each of these has its own unique challenge, right? In this option, you need a big audience, you need to be really good at copy and offers and opt in pages and converting and you need to get in front of a lot of people. So that’s the work here. And that can seem overwhelming, right?

The work on this side is more inner transformational work, both sides, in my opinion, require inner transformational work. But on this side, you’re stepping in without a lot of track record or proven history in this work. And you’re having an intimate conversation with someone and you’re asking them to pay you, right, at a good value. So you can live on, you know, having a handful of clients having 10 clients can pay your bills. And you’re asking them, right, that is intimate.

You’re helping them to see what they need to transform in their life that you can help them with, that’s worth investing in. And these conversations for so many reasons are hard for people. We don’t like to ask for things. We don’t like to talk about money. We don’t like to make the other person uncomfortable. But guess what? To transform, they have to get uncomfortable.

And so there are so many reasons that this is challenging. Therefore people opt for this because it feels safer, right? It’s like I can keep my distance from my audience, and sell these little things. But, again, my school of thought is here, when we’re keeping our distance from our audience, how do we know them super well, right? And how do we really connect with them?

Now there are people who can help you with this, right? So here, you’re investing in learning your sales skills, transforming your own inner blocks, to intimacy with your clients. So you can have these transformational conversations, this is a lot of the work that we do at Sourced over here. You might be investing in paying people to write the copy and develop the lead pages and the marketing, right. And that’s great. And you can hire really great people who are really good at converting because right, you haven’t worked with clients. So you don’t necessarily really know intimately what they need. So you’ll need some help there.

The issue is, then as they get, you know, higher level, higher level, higher, higher level. Now, eventually you’re going to want to work with them privately, or they’re going to want to work with you privately. And so if whatever your marketing team developed isn’t an energetic match with what you actually want to deliver, eventually, you’re going to bump into some issues over here.

So how do you decide? How do you decide? There’s risks. There’s investment: emotional, energetic, and financial on both sides. How do you choose?

This is where my belief that your relationship to Source, which is your inner knowing, working through you is paramount. This is how you know where you’re being called, and how you are being called to show up. We’re dealing with inspiration on both sides, we’re dealing with resistance on both sides.

The more you can clear your energy field and create this connection with Source where you can ask for and receive your own personal truth in this situation, the easier this is going to be.

When I have a client who comes to me and they say, I really want this group program, I don’t want one-on-one clients, I want to do this, I want to do that. I like to really look, you know, is this a Sourced decision? Because for me, this is an easier path. At least easier path to cash. But we’ve got to look within.

So if you’re evaluating, you know, who do I work with? Who do I hire as a coach and a guide and a teacher? And I want you want to look at which school of thought are they coming from and what really resonates with you and your truth what really resonates with your Truth. We always go to truth first, right? So I’m never pushing someone toward my preference, right? We always go to their truth first.

The more you can go to your Truth first, you can hire the right people coming from the right place who can support exactly what it is you want to do. So get yourself some connection, right?

Let’s bring Source into the way we do business. Let’s bring that to God, Divine guidance in so you can choose the right path to begin with. And don’t do what I did, right, and go right for creating something that I didn’t have the background to really support. And it was crickets. And it wasn’t super fun. But I learned and I love it and I’m happy to share this with you.

What is your experience? Which school of thought are you from? What do you prefer in terms of if you’re a coach and a business coach helping your clients to build their high level practice? Where do you come from?

This is Darla LeDoux with Sourced, and we’ll see you soon!