How to Scale Your Online Business From 1:1 Coaching to Online Courses

How do you scale your online business to 10K, 20K or even 100K months? The first step is to stop selling your time.

If you are fully booked already, you have to carve out time to create a scalable business. I suggest you start with 1 day a week, or 2 days a week, or a couple of hours every day.

Why I Stopped Selling My Time

I started off selling my time, like most other coaches. Then I reached a limit to how much I could earn. I did not want to be a high-ticket coach, and I was already charging pretty high prices.

I realised I did not want to sell my time. I did not want to sit on calls back to back, fully booked day after day. I wanted space in my calendar. I wanted to take a break in the middle of the day, go for a walk or train with my personal trainer. And I wanted to reduce my coaching to only a couple of hours a week, or even a month.

So the first thing is to stop selling your time and sell value.

Start With the Kickstart Method

How do you do that? I suggest you start with the Kickstart method. It is our signature method for creating a free 4-week online course. From that free course you scale up and sell the next thing, typically a group coaching program.

Build a Group Coaching Program That Gives You Time

Your first group coaching program needs to give you enough revenue and enough time between sessions.

I started by coaching 6 people in a group, because I saw someone else do it and thought that was the way to go. But I want to challenge that. You can have 6 people, 8, 10, 12, 13, 14 or 15.

I ended up coaching 18 people in a group, alone and without any help. It became my most successful group coaching program. The women in my first group of 18 stayed with me for 2 more years, so almost 3 years in total.

Think about how you can have 18 people and still coach every person individually. I had 2 calls a month, with group A and group B, and everyone got their hot seat slot once a month. This was a great way for me to run a group coaching program completely on my own.

How to Scale a Group Coaching Program

The next step is to scale up the group. You no longer promise that you coach each person individually. Then you can have 25 or 50 people in a group coaching program. But you have to be clear on the expectations, so they do not think they get 1:1 time with you.

When I wanted to grow my group coaching program from 18 people, I was thinking 30, 50 or 100 people. That is when I started to hire coaches. You can make group programs with 50, 100 or 200 people, as long as you add support. But that is a completely different business model, and not everyone wants it.

Online Courses Are Endlessly Scalable

That is why you want to learn how to create a truly scalable online course.

A group coaching program is not endlessly scalable. The more people you have, the more support you need, either more of your time or coaches you hire.

With an online course you can have 5 people, 50, 500 or 5,000, and it does not take more of your time to deliver the content. Of course more people means more admin and more customer service. But it is not more work for you as the person who creates the content.

Take a weekly Q&A coaching call. With 50 people or with 500, your weekly call is still 1 hour. You are not suddenly going to have a 5-hour call because you have 5 times more students. With more people you get the same questions. So a 1-hour coaching call is still enough. There may be more activity in a Facebook group, more admin and more customer service. But for you as the course creator, coach, trainer, teacher or consultant, it is not more time.

That is what I call endlessly scalable. And that is how you scale to 6 figures, multiple 6 figures and 7 figures much faster than with group coaching programs alone.

Where you truly scale is with online courses, and maybe even memberships.

I explain the Kickstart method step by step in my book, Kickstart Your Online Business.