HustleandHeart
The age of gurus is over

The age of gurus is over

Business coaching, Values-based business

When I was 18, I accidentally joined a cult.

Not the Netflix-documentary kind, this cult was largely benevolent – idealistic, meditation-teaching, purple-velvet-wearing, vegetarian, tantric yoga devotees. 

This was a largely positive experience, but it also left me with one indelible lesson that has shaped my entire career as a business coach: people are astonishingly quick to give away their power.

I was 18 years old, teaching meditation at Sydney University on behalf of said cult and students would hang back after class to ask me life advice.

“I’m thinking about leaving my husband. What do you think I should do?”
“I’m thinking about quitting my job.”
“I’m thinking about travelling the world.”

To reiterate: I was 18 years old, with limited life experience.

As I contemplated these people, who were often three times my age, I’d think, ‘Why on earth are you asking me?’

But that moment revealed something important about human psychology – we have a tendency to project authority onto people. To assume they possess wisdom, certainty, or special insight simply because they appear confident, knowledgeable, or perhaps, spiritually evolved.

And nowhere is this more visible today than in the coaching and online business world.

AI is making personality far more valuable

For a long time, gurus thrived on information asymmetry.

They knew something you didn’t. They had access to strategies, frameworks, or insider knowledge that felt mysterious or hard to obtain. Their power came from owning the playbook.

But that world is disappearing.

AI can generate business frameworks, marketing plans, and strategic insights in seconds. The “secret blueprint” economy is rapidly losing its value because information is no longer the commodity. Instead, it’s everywhere, in greater volumes every day.

What differentiates leaders now isn’t what they know; it’s how they think. It’s their life experience that informs their judgment, opinion, approach, values, and, as a coach, their ability to provoke insight in others.

Strong points of view matter more than ever, but don’t misunderstand me – more than ever, we still need substance, credentials, hard-won expertise.

Personality-driven businesses can easily slide into personality worship – this is not new. In the online business space, the big players have mostly been high on hype, thin on methodology. Their expertise in marketing has shielded them from the realities of running group programs touted as ‘high end’ and ‘high proximity’ that, in reality, have been paint-by-numbers affairs with little, if any, nuance.

Why we put people on pedestals

Pedestal-building isn’t about admiring someone, it’s about absconding your responsibility. Because when you elevate someone to extraordinary status, you create a loophole for yourself. 

You have effectively ‘othered’ the person, believing their success is the result of something special — talent, intuition, timing, luck, privilege, genius – things you don’t have.

And yes, absolutely, we are all different, none of us start with an equal playing field, and privilege absolutely gives an advantage, when you ‘other’ somebody through elevating them, you give yourself a ‘get out of gaol free’ card.

If they are extraordinary, then your lack of progress becomes understandable, even inevitable, which means that coaching becomes quite useless.

We are not the same. We don’t want the same things. We all have different opportunities and different hindrances. The whole point of coaching is to customise your response to the individual in front of you. 

You don’t have to take the same risks or pursue the same goals as your coach. 

But pedestal-building also has a darker side, because when you elevate someone too high, you stop thinking critically. You start accepting advice as gospel, rather than a perspective or opinion. You relinquish your own judgment in an unequal, infantalising relationship.

And the relationship shifts from mutual respect to hierarchical dependency.

The difference between a guru and a leader

Gurus and leaders often look similar from a distance.

Both speak confidently. Both may share strong opinions. Both attract loyal audiences.

But the similarities end there.

A guru positions themselves as infallible. Their authority depends on certainty. They hate being contradicted. Disagreement is treated as ignorance, disloyalty, or negativity.

Leaders operate differently.

Leaders understand that expertise is contextual. They acknowledge complexity and nuance. They evolve their thinking as new information emerges.

In fact, good leaders expect to contradict themselves over time, because this is what growth is all about. I like being a bit embarrassed by myself when I come across old articles I’ve written, and it also makes me proud to see the progress I’ve made in my thinking and approach.

The internet, particularly social media algorithms, often rewards guru behaviour. Certainty travels faster than nuance and bold declarations outperform thoughtful questions, drawing eyeballs into a fight where there wasn’t one.

But thoughtful leaders build influence by encouraging people to think more deeply for themselves, including refusing to put them on a pedestal.

There’s a fine line between accountability and dependency, between coaching and preaching. There’s a hell of a lot of responsibility that the coach can hold, and too many people have been burnt in the past to hopefully jump into a new coaching relationship without first doing their due diligence. 

The hidden risks of guru culture

Many coaching horror stories begin the same way: small boundary violations that slowly escalate. 

A coach who insists their method is the only way, who discourages questioning, or shames dissent. Over time, the environment becomes less about growth and more about control.

This isn’t unique to coaching; it’s a pattern visible in cults, corporations, religious movements, and political systems, where power concentrates around personalities rather than principles.

As a coach, the higher the pedestal rises by her followers, the more devastating the fall becomes when the followers realise their guru is human. Nobody is cancelled quite as brutally as someone once viewed as flawless.

A new vision of power

Many women in business have a complicated relationship with power, having witnessed or been subject to its abuse. Oftentimes, we’ve started our own business so as to escape workplace bullying or invisible power structures that keep us locked out of the modern workplace. 

We need a new approach to power – which doesn’t only exist in hierarchies.

Each of us has innate power. We have power between each other, in an equal, mutually respectful, mature relationship. 

Bad leaders seek to dominate and demonstrate their superiority. Mature leaders inspire leadership in others. Mature coaches create mutually flourishing relationships where both people retain agency, curiosity, and responsibility.

This is the kind of dynamic I want with my clients – a mutual admiration society.

Clients who respect my expertise but question my advice, or seek to understand the thinking behind what I teach or train. Clients who use our conversations to strengthen their own discernment and wisdom, rather than seek to outsource it.

Clients who leave our work together with greater self-trust, not less.

The age of gurus is ending because information is no longer scarce and character is worth more than ever.

What people need now isn’t someone to worship or emulate, but someone who challenges them to think more deeply, develop their innate talents, and lead themselves.

And that begins with stepping down from the pedestal — on both sides.

Listen to the accompanying podcast.

Are you Audacious? Join Audacious Mastermind – for ambitious women who want their business, their voice, and their life to finally match.

Call in your next-level clients: Raise your standards

Call in your next-level clients: Raise your standards

Business coaching, Grow your profits

It was our final coaching session in our agreement, and my client was late to the call. I sent her a quick email and she joined the Zoom call five minutes later, from a noisy café in Bali.

It quickly became clear that this wasn’t to be a coaching session instead, it was an extraction of value, from my head into hers.

I don’t gate-keep what I know and never give superficial answers to questions from clients, but it’s not helpful to do a ‘brain dump’ of insights and information, without context, strategy, or direction. I’d be amazed if she did anything different as a result.

This incident, which happened many many years ago, was a turning point in my coaching career. It made me realise that I needed to massively up level my standards if I was to avoid this happening. It led to a giant leap forward – in standards, boundaries, expectations, communication, clients and cash.

This is what I did to call in clients who were seeking a thought partner to co-create a bespoke strategy to get them where they wanted to go.

How to know when it’s time to raise your standards

Repeatedly feeling resentment, frustration, anger towards your clients means it’s time to raise your standards. When you’ve communicated expectations clearly and repeatedly, either through your proposal, your sales page, your contract, emails, or all of these, and clients continue to violate this – then it’s imperative you respect yourself enough to make change.

In other words, you’re mad as hell, and you’re not going to take it anymore.

(‘Not going to take it anymore’ is important, as there are plenty of business owners who’ve let their anger, resentment, or frustration morph into depression or anxiety, which generally doesn’t lead to proactive change.)

How to raise your standards, exactly

There are several practical ways to take a nebulous thing – raise your standards – and make it concrete:

1. Change your messaging

Your messaging works to call people in, and to repel others who are a bad fit. One of the quickest and easiest upgrades you can make with this is to stop talking to people’s problems and start talking to their desired transformation, or end state (through engaging your business). Stop focusing your marketing on fixing superficial problems and start talking to the complexity of your ideal client’s situation and the end point they’re after.

2. Raise your prices

Raising your prices is often a decision that’s postponed, but it’s a highly effective way to call in your next-level clients. There’s a keen difference between people who value time more than money, or money more than time. (Which also means that higher prices doesn’t mean over-stuffing your offers and working more hours.)

3. Seek higher commitment

If you’re going to do your best work with your best, ideal-fit clients, you’re going to need higher commitment from them, which might look like more structured sales calls, an application process, or turning down more clients who appear to have high expectations and limited follow-through.

4. Improve your onboarding process

So much of client satisfaction comes to setting expectations, under-promising and over-delivering, and making your communication as good as good as it possibly could be (and then some).

5. Modelling the behaviour you expect from clients

This one’s a biggun’ – YOU are the determining factor in your success, which includes modelling the behaviour that you expect from your clients. A lot of businesses talk about authenticity, but far fewer are walking their talk.

Mean what you say and say what you mean. Words are cheap. Actions speak volumes.

Embody the standards you seek to attract works not only to improve the quality of your clients, but it also improves the quality of your life, removing friction caused by incongruence, hypocrisy, shame, and the self-trust that this all undermines.

Standards and boundaries

It’s impossible to talk about standards if we don’t talk about boundaries. If you struggle with boundaries, if you’re a people pleaser, or if you derive a lot of your self-esteem from your productivity and the quality of your work, this is likely to be a struggle.

Raising your standards and reviewing your boundaries work hand-in-glove. Boundaries are one of the ways with which we model the behaviour we expect. It encourages us towards self-reflection and self-compassion as we examine what behaviours we allow from others, what behaviours we expect of others, and what we determine as ‘acceptable’, ‘unacceptable’, ‘classy’ or ‘in poor taste’.

Personally, I look for kind, classy leaders, courageous action-takers, and critical thinkers. I have deep respect for people who recognise that we are all interconnected, and bear the responsibility for the welfare of others.

This is the behaviour that I seek to imbue, and the standards that I set for my clients.

It is a pleasure and a privilege to work with clients. But we aren’t obligated to kowtow to others who squander our finite time and precious energy. Raising our standards, and following through with the behaviour we expect for others has another benefit. It encourages others around us to lift their game, too.

Ready to call in your next level clients? Check out Audacious Mastermind. 

Make better business decisions, faster

Make better business decisions, faster

Business coaching, Digital marketing

Running your own business comes with an endless stream of decisions. Some are exciting. Some are terrifying. Most are tiring.

And if you’re not careful, the mental weight of all these choices can slow you down, burn you out, and keep you busy being busy, with little to show for your efforts.
As an owner on a growth path, decision-making can become a massive bottleneck when teams are waiting to hear back from you. This can have a compounding effect of undermining your leadership, effectiveness, and confidence.

But, with a few shifts in how you think and work, you can make better decisions, faster – and with far less second-guessing. Let’s break it down.

Stop being overwhelmed

The words you use matter. If you keep saying “I’m overwhelmed!!!”, you’re telling your brain that you’re indecisive, drowning, and incapable of clarity.

Overwhelmed typically means you’ve lost the ability to distinguish between important and unimportant things – which is the basis of good decision making.
So if you ARE overwhelmed? Stop your energy leaking all over the place, by saying you’re overwhelmed, and start discerning between fast and slow decisions.

Know the difference between fast and slow decisions

Not all decisions deserve the same amount of energy.

Some are strategic, expensive, and benefit from pondering – these belong in your slow lane:

Others are low-risk – these are your fast lane:

  • Launching a paid live experiment
  • Firing someone
  • Choosing a new software
  • Picking a great headline
  • Deciding whether or not to reply to a DM or email

The key is to pre-sort: which decisions are meaningful and need space and marination? And which need speed?

Do it now

One of the simplest ways to move faster is to stop letting micro-decisions and their corresponding micro tasks pile up.

If something is important and will take you less than five minutes just do it now. No scheduling, no debating, no mental tabs left open. Respond to that email. Approve that design. Record that 30-second video. These tasks aren’t worth the time it takes to add these to your list or calendar.

The five-minute rule is a game changer because it:

  • Builds a bias toward action
  • Reduces background mental clutter
  • Makes you more productive.
  • ‘Just in time’ research

If you find yourself endlessly Googling – stop.

Research is only useful when it’s tied to an immediate decision. Otherwise, it becomes procrasti-research, trussed up as intelligence.
Ask yourself:

  • Am I actually making this decision now?
  • What’s the minimum I need to know to make this decision?
  • Is this research directly feeding my decision, or postponing it?

Don’t go down rabbit holes unless there’s a real decision happening imminently (like, today). You can always learn more later, but right now, focus on what matters now.

Carve out thinking time

For decisions that require time and pondering, these don’t happen while multitasking with 25 open browser tabs.
You need space to think. Time to plan. A date with your creative, expansive, brilliant brain.

Build this into your calendar:

  • Your weekly CEO date
  • Your weekly decision day (inside Audacious mastermind, we have ‘decision parlour’ for this)
  • A 20-minute solo walk with a question in mind.

The busier life becomes, the more important it is to carve out regular thinking time – focused, distraction-free, without media – to ponder, ruminate, and marinate.

Ask yourself:

  • What am I avoiding?
  • What’s a choice that would make everything else easier?
  • What am I ready to move forward on?

Make a list of all the open loops in your brain, set a 30-minute timer, and for each item, either: decide / defer (with a date) / delete.
This can free up a shocking amount of energy.
You don’t need to crowdsource every call. You don’t need more information or advice. Make the call.

Clarity is a byproduct of action

This part is critical: you have to decide. Which means you have to close off other options for now.

And here’s where the common misconception about clarity keeps you stuck – you’re waiting for clarity before you act. But you can think yourself into clarity and you can think yourself out of clarity (and into chaos, overwhelm, confusion, and self-loathing).

Clarity is an inevitable byproduct of taking action – it comes after the decision.

Clarity doesn’t come through delaying the decision. Business learning without application is just procrasti-learning. Real business learning happens when you enact the thing – get results – and then iterate and repeat.

So the next time you feel stuck between Option A and Option B, ask yourself:

“If I already trusted myself, what would I do?”

Then go do it. You’re closer to clarity than you think — it’s one decision away.

How to run a group coaching program

How to run a group coaching program

Business coaching, Grow your profits

If you’re a leader or expert who’s keen to create, launch and run a group program – perhaps your flagship program, the jewel in your offerings ecosystem – then welcome! You’re in the right place.

In this article, I cover:

What is group coaching?

Group coaching is facilitating a group of people who want to achieve similar goals. Typically this is done through live group coaching calls, and you might also have an online social group where the group meets in between calls. In addition, you can offer asynchronous online coaching, using apps such as WhatsApp, Telegram or Voxer.

So what are the benefits of group coaching?

What are the benefits of group coaching for you?

Starting your own group coaching program enables you to:

  • Leverage your expertise, working one-to-many, rather than one-to-one (and help more people)
  • Scale your business more easily
  • Systematise your thinking and process into an expert methodology, that you can then leverage further into assets such as a book, keynote, licensing program, or certification
  • Better position yourself as a leader, authority and expert in your field
  • Free up your time to invest in professional development, developing your thought leadership, creating strategic partnerships, and simply enjoying life…on a yacht, while cruising the Pacific Islands 🌴

If you already have a one-on-one coaching program, converting your process into a proprietary group coaching program enables you to leverage your time and expertise, while magnifying your impact.

My brain can only handle so many clients at any one time. From the very beginning, I’ve always limited the number of one one-on-one business coaching clients I work with at any one time, from four to six one-to-one coaching clients. This makes it very hard to grow my income without grouping up my clients.

When I’m working intensely with a business owner client, either through my masterminds, one-to-one business coaching, or through my group business coaching programs, they’re squatting in my head.

I’m thinking of people I need to introduce them to, partnerships that would be beneficial for them, positioning to help them nail their niche, or creative ideas to help them with their sales conversions. I’m thinking about them and their business while I’m making coffee, walking my hamster, or lying with my legs up the wall.

I can’t have too many one-to-one business coaching or mastermind clients at any one time. I am not the Buddha, and I haven’t yet figured out how NOT to be energetically invested in my clients.

What are the benefits of group coaching for your clients?

Group coaching programs are also a win-win for your clients. In fact, the benefits of group coaching for my clients are what led me to creating online group programs in the first place.

These benefits include:

  • Diverse perspectives of group members. There is copious evidence to suggest that diversity of thinking and being around people who are different from us, improves and benefits us.
  • Networking opportunities: as business owners, we need to recognise the value of our network, and our network’s network, and our network’s network’s network (and so on!). It’s not WHAT you know, it’s who you know – in short, your network enables you to reach your goals far more quickly and easily.
  • Faster self-insight: how we operate in groups will give us far deeper self-insight, far more quickly. In a group of diverse personalities, we can notice our particular tendencies, and how different personality types provoke different aspects of ourselves. This self-insight is invaluable for helping us develop our character, work to our strengths, and know our personal, particular charms.
  • Reach your goals faster: Research shows that group coaching is highly effective in helping you attain your goals more quickly. Perhaps this is due to accountability of the group? Or tapping into healthy competitiveness? Or having evidence of what’s possible for ourselves and our businesses, in our close relationships?

As a coach, you need to learn how to manage a larger group of people so that you don’t become overwhelmed. You’ll also need to give exceptional support so that your clients get great results (that’s what you’ll learn in this article).

As a business coach, I have invested heavily in other coaches group coaching programs and online courses for several years, so I’ve seen what works – and what doesn’t – from both sides.

Plus, I’ve worked closely with hundreds of business owner clients to help them to design, develop, launch and deliver their own group coaching programs.

So when is a good time to start your group program?

When should you start a group coaching program?

I suggest waiting until you’ve worked with at least 10 one-on-one coaching clients, and if you have corporate experience mentoring others, then this will be hugely relevant and beneficial too.

When business owners come to me wanting to start a group program having never worked closely with a client before, I consider this a red flag. Yes, I appreciate that not all clients are ideal, and that some clients turn out to be energy vampires, but nothing comes close to the understanding you’ll gain working one-to-one with clients.

The intimacy of a one-to-one coaching relationship gives you invaluable insights that you can use to design, deliver, market and sell your group program. Plus, you’ll be better equipped to anticipate your group coaching participants’ common obstacles and questions.

But how do you create a group coaching program? Here’s what you need to know.

How do you create a group coaching program?

To create a group coaching program, you need to a solid structure, you need to decide on your price, and decide on the number of people you want to enrol.

How to structure a group coaching program

As the business owner, YOU are ultimately in charge of all decisions relating to your group coaching program. You can design it in a way which plays to your strengths, fits your lifestyle, and meets your goals, while also (of course!) meeting your ideal clients’ needs and wants.

However, if you twisted my arm, and demanded, “Brook! Just tell me what to do!”, then I’d suggest making it 2-6 months duration, with either 1-4 live calls a week, though six months of weekly group coaching calls would likely be too much.

In between live coaching calls, you can create a group on WhatsApp, Facebook, Slack, Voxer, or Telegram, where your group gathers.

But far more important than the tech, the calls, the duration, is a solid group program structure.

This will greatly increase your chances of success. Further, if you’re seriously about scaling your group program, you can’t throw together a bunch of group calls without structure. You need to centre your participants’ experience and outcomes.

Fortunately, no matter your industry (whether you’re a writer or leadership coach) your coaching is going to have some type of proprietary process. Your work isn’t pure intuition – even your intuition has a pattern behind it – and understanding your particular patterns in your work is key to codifying your expert methodology, and scaling your group program.

Typically, you lead your clients through the exact same steps. Some of your clients may need more time to go through some steps, while others can move forward more quickly. But the particular steps remain the same.

If you’ve worked with a handful of coaching clients, you likely already know what your structure looks like. Some things need to be done first, in order for the next stage to be successful. Your structure does the heavy lifting for you.

I recommend a blend of live and pre-recorded content, which works out to be roughly 90% pre-recorded and 10% delivered live. I always recommend to every client that ANY program or course, no matter how large or tiny, is first delivered 100% live.

Delivering new content live to a group for the first time, enables you to get real life, real time feedback from paying clients (the only type of feedback that actually matters). The first time you deliver anything will be the worst time; this is unavoidable. You must do something the first time to do it the second time, which will be 87% better.

So what are the live elements of your group program, beyond the first time you deliver it?

I suggest you choose to deliver live lessons or topics that are:

  • Complex or easily misunderstood
  • Delicate, or typically provoke people (such as money or pricing)
  • Require higher-than-normal customisation to help people get the most value
  • Creative brainstorming, best done with a group.

How much to charge for your group coaching program

Most everyone over-thinks their price. Don’t do that. Remember, that you can (and should) always change your price – up! Not down.

If you are secretly wanting to price your group program at $5000, don’t start with $1000, as it’ll take you far too long, and be far too much work, to bridge this gap.

Remember, the marketing you do at a particular price point will solidify this in the minds’ of your audience. So investing time and effort into a $1000 value proposition, when you ultimately want to be at $5000, is ineffective.

You need to take control and responsibility of the price you charge but, if you twisted my arm, I’d tell you that $1,500 to $5,000 is a good price range for a group coaching program, and $2,000-$3,000 is the most common price. My flagship group program Hustle & Heart is $4,500.

Your price is arbitrary. Far more important than your price is your ability to communicate value. But even the most extraordinary of messaging specialists can’t turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse.

Simple problems attract lower price points. Complex problems need commensurate higher price points.

The more complex the problem, the more compellingly simple your messaging and marketing needs to be. As Einstein said, “if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough”.

How many people to enrol in your group coaching program

You decide how many people you want in your group coaching program. While I’m a fan of intimate programs (all my high-end group programs are 5-20 participants), remember that you’re limiting your ability to scale if all your group programs are deliberately kept intimate.

Generally, high-ticket programs ($5,000 upwards) will have a limit on participants, typically up to 20.

Many owners who I work with are concerned that the larger the group, the less valuable for participants this will be, and while there is an element of truth in that, it’s not a justification for a sloppy structure or messy program.

I’ve participated in large group programs that I’ve received a lot of value from, and intimate programs that under-delivered. It all comes back to your structure and the tiny details that make participants feel seen, heard, and understood.

But what if no-one buys your program? What do you do if you only get one or two buyers?

If it’s your first time selling your group coaching program, then one or two sales are amazing – these show that you’ve done a good enough job of communicating the value of your program. This isn’t a failure – this is you getting started (I’d far rather have done something than just thought about it forever).

If you’re wondering, “won’t people judge me if I only enrol one or a few people in my program?” then please know that they won’t. Participants will likely feel that they’re getting even more value because your group is so intimate. So take this opportunity to spoil your people!

The best days for group coaching calls

Choosing a time that works for everyone in your group is impossible. I used to run Doodle polls to determine the best time for the majority. But this was never 100% awesome for everyone, so now I just pick a time ahead of time, that works for most people.

So when should you hold your group coaching calls? I suggest holding these Monday-Friday when people are more focused. If your clients are full-time employees, you might do evenings around 7pm.

However, because my clients are all business owners, I almost never run group calls in the late afternoon or evening. I get sleepy, my clients get sleepy, and we need to protect our evening routines from the insidious creep of our businesses!

I wouldn’t be taking my own ‘analogue evenings’ advice if I ran group calls in the evenings, so generally I hold group calls from 9am to 1pm.

If you have a global audience, you’ll want to try to find a time that works for everyone, though you could offer the same call at two separate times, specifically for time zones that are incompatible. For example, a group coaching program with participants in Europe, Australasia, and the United States would likely require two call times, so that participants could choose one or the other (or both, if they were keen beans).

This year, I’ve had clients on group coaching calls with 12-hour differences – from Perth and Boston (as well as the Australian eastern seaboard). I’ve worked with clients across Australia, as well as Asia, the US, and Europe, though that pesky one-hour daylight savings time difference between where I am, in Sydney and Queensland still trips me up the most!

You can also increase the likelihood of success on live group calls with tactics such as sending a form that collect questions before the call, and making recordings available so that everyone gets the support they need.

How do you hold group coaching program sessions?

Next, we’ll look at how to run your group coaching program (how to organise, lead and scale your programs with the right support). Here’s the most essential information:

How to organise group coaching sessions

I like to open every group call with ice-breakers. Quick tip: create a collection of awesome ice-breakers so that you’re not resorting to the same-old-same-old. Get people engaged with you and the group right from the first moment they come on the call.

Next, I ask participants if they have questions, to please post these in the chat. This serves several purposes:

  • It centres the participants, not you and your agenda
  • It encourages participation
  • It means that people who have come to the call with questions or curly conundrums aren’t preoccupied and distracted, wondering whether they’re going to get the opportunity to have their question addresses
  • It gives you invaluable feedback into what your clients need help with – particularly when you get asked the same questions over and over again, which indicates that you need to strengthen your curriculum in that particular area, or devote more time to it.

As the coach, it’s your role to ensure there aren’t too many interruptions or oversharing of details. The ability to keep people focused and on track while also making them feel seen, heard and supported is complicated, but it’s important, and it can be developed with practice.

It’s also your responsibility to create a safe and supportive boundary, cultivating an environment that’s also open-minded and encourages vulnerability – again, a delicate line to balance.

If you’re leading a larger group, you can collect questions through a form beforehand, to make your time more efficient.

If you have had experience in facilitation, you’ll find it very similar to group coaching. While all coaches have a different style, group coaching is most similar to facilitation – where you, as the leader/facilitator, pose questions, provoke thinking, guide discussions, question assumptions, point out bias, and inspire diverse thinking.

Most importantly, you want participants to actually DO something differently as a result of your group coaching calls, not just feel good.

You can set up your calls with a tool like Zoom and send calendar invites. I use AddEvent and Zoom for my group coaching calls.

How to lead group coaching

You might be wondering how exactly, to move from your one-on-one coaching to group coaching. Here’s what you need to know about leading a group coaching program:

What’s the promise of your program?

You must get clear on one thing: What’s the big program promise of your group program? And how is the delivery of your group program going to match that promise?

A common mistake coaches make is to think that their group program is just them delivering one-on-one coaching in a group. If that’s what you want to do, then this is typically a mastermind, which has no curriculum.

But if you want to create a highly scalable, flagship group program, where everyone goes through the same modules, and can then access extra support in a group setting, then you need a strong structure, curriculum, and program promise.

What’s the depth of your support?

The next thing to get clear on is: What depth of customise support are you going to give?

I have tried all kinds of things since 2015, when I first launched online group programs. I have hired external experts to give detailed one-to-one feedback, I have delivered this myself, and I have included elements of done-for-you services, such as sales writing, website design, and building email funnels.

While offering intensive support is appealing to participants, it also has its downfalls:

  • Doing something for someone doesn’t teach them how to do it for themselves
  • Offering a lot of support, feedback and done-for-you can encourage dependency on you and your business, which isn’t great if you want empowered, independent clients
  • Your costs and time can balloon significantly, eroding your profit margin and eating into the time you were freeing up by creating a group program in the first place, yes?

Before you jump in to offer a lot of support, first ask yourself, “am I doing this because I need to be liked and admired?” Harsh, I know. But as a reformed people pleaser, I know from hard-won experience that taking too much responsibility for your program participants doesn’t help them, nor you.

Instead, think about:

  • Creating easy-to-follow tools and templates that have instructions baked in
  • Making it as easy as possible for participants to learn what they need to know in order to DO the thing they need to do
  • Coaching and guiding your program participants on how to ask better questions, and how to get the most out of group coaching, while providing you just enough context to enable you to answer these well.

Understanding the depth you’ll go into, and what’s possible, fair and appropriate will help you to avoid overpromising and under-delivering.

What’s the depth of your answers?

How in-depth will your answers be? One mistake I see new group coaches make is to go into too much detail in their answers, rather than provoking the client to answer their own questions.

Beginners or inexperienced coaches tend to overdeliver on their answers, to prove their value. A more experienced coach knows what key details are necessary to share, and how to ask the right questions or a group program participant which will inspire their own answer.

Remember, people know their own situations better than you’re ever going to know them. Your job is not to jump in and fix other people’s problems, as you see them. Your job is to equip and empower them to identify the most important problems, find the most effective solution, and inspire them to implement it now, not later.

Overdelivering is another reason why you need to clarify the promise of your program first, so there’s no mismatch in your delivery.

When clients join my group programs, I send them a welcome questionnaire, which solicits as much relevant detail as they’ll likely tolerate answering in my form! Then I review these questionnaires before and during each program so that I can better understand and cater to participants, while still keeping confidentiality.

When someone asks me a question, I’m able to answer their question far better because I know their situation through their questionnaire. I can also direct them to existing lesson that’s particularly relevant to them.

In this way, you can give customised support that’s leveraging your existing program content, as well as being scalable.

Questions to ask on your group coaching call

You, as the coach, are leading your group calls, which includes asking questions such as:

  • What’s one recent win you’ve had lately?
  • What’s one thing you’re currently working on?
  • What are you currently obsessed with?
  • What’s one thing you’d like help with today?
  • What’s waking you up at 2am?

By going through participants one by one, everyone can speak, so try your best to keep the allocated time similar for each participant so each gets the same support.

How to make time for supporting your students

So how are you going to set aside time to support your coaching students? A lot of coaches tend to struggle with this.

I suggest that you carve out regular time each week. Sometimes I have three different group programs running concurrently, which means I allocate different times of the week to each program, outside of the group call times. Typically, I do this on the same day of the week as the group call falls on.

If you’re focused, this can take as little as a few minutes a day. If you’re easily distracted (like I am), you can use tools such as the Forrest app, the Pomodoro technique, or even co-working, to keep you on track.

In this way, the structure you create for yourself gives you freedom, so that your group program doesn’t take over your life.

It’s also your responsibility to set expectations on how to make the most of your support, and what/when communication will happen. This prevents you falling into bad habits of checking in on program participants 24/7, which foster unrealistic expectations and dependency.

How to scale with program coaches

Many coaches struggle with having scalable support, so that they can service more program participants without becoming a bottleneck.

One solution is to hire other coaches so that your group program isn’t solely dependent on you. Hire coaches who you’ve personally worked with before and know are awesome. And hire them initially on a subcontracting basis, so that you can use them more or use them less, depending on your needs. You can choose to pay them either per client they support, per hour, or a set fee per program or month.

There are two approaches to using support coaches in your programs:

  1. Have program coaches who act as “mini yous” – representing your brand and methodology. This approach can be good for high-end group programs with more one-on-one support, with these coaches supporting smaller groups within your larger group program.
  2. The second approach is to have specialist program coaches, for example, in finance, law, copy writing, design, accountability, etc. My Audacious Mastermind has its own Accountability Coach, to support clients on a day-to-day or week-to-week level, between our calls.

Having support coaches enables you to focus on the particular things you really enjoy.

To implement this, first identify the people you want to work with so that you don’t have to scramble to find these specialists right when you need them.

How do you launch your group coaching program?

Planning and preparation only takes you so far! Sooner or later, you’ll need to launch and sell your group coaching program. How you do this depends on many things.

Let’s review the main elements:

How far in advance do you market an online group coaching program?

Ideally, you already have an audience, in which case, an eight-week runway is a good amount of time.

If you don’t have an audience, or have a very small audience, then you can start right away building your audience and using this audience to co-create your group program with (though they may not be aware you’re doing this).

How do you market your group coaching program?

There are are many marketing strategies as there are people in the world, and any expert you ask will tell you something different. The best way to market your group coaching program is using various different channels, working to your communication strengths and actually enacting your plan. My preference is always ‘minimum viable marketing’ rather than best-case bells-and-whistles marketing that is far too complicated and expensive to actually be used.

A long-time strategy that still works for group program is to build your email list, then run one more content events (layered one on top of the other), though which you directly sell your program.

Other strategies include:

  • Using other people’s audiences to grow your own, including affiliate marketing
  • Guest speaking, as above, you’re using other people’s audiences to grow your own
  • Actively seeking referrals from clients
  • Using your testimonials and case studies
  • Advertising
  • Search engine optimisation

This is not an exhaustive list! First and foremost, you need to build your email list and sell to your email list. Ideally, all other marketing strategies are helping you to build and nurture your email list.

Grow your own way

A well-structured and scalable program that offers the best support to your participants is right around the corner for you, I can feel it! Perhaps the most difficult thing about designing, launching, selling and delivering a group coaching program is the immense number of decisions to be made.

While there are definitely common mistakes that owners tend to make when moving from one-to-one to group coaching, there are many more decisions that simply comes down to, “what do YOU think?” and “what do YOU want?”

After all, there’s no point creating a group coaching program that you’ve gotten advice from experts on, as well as input from clients, but it makes you miserable. A sustainable business with a healthy, thriving owner at the centre is a business that simply WORKS, from all perspectives.

Perhaps your biggest hindrance to your group coaching program is perfectionism, which is actually self-sabotage trussed up conscientiousness. Good ideas are worthless. Implementation is everything.

Life is short. Sooner or later, you have to eject that squatter from your brain and LAUNCH already. It might be the best business decision you ever make.

How to choose the best business coach for you

How to choose the best business coach for you

Business coaching

I spend a lot of time gently undoing or revising the systems taught by other business coaches to my clients. One client bought a US $20,000 program, which taught a system of running Meta ads, that led to an email funnel, that led to booking sales calls, which led to selling one-to-one coaching.

Three months and US $5000 spent on running ads, hundreds of ad variations, plus investment in two ads experts, and the system wasn’t working. One sales call was booked, with no sales results.

Another client attended a three-day program with a big business ‘guru’ who taught a system of teaching a free webinar, leading to free half-day event, leading to paid full-day online event, leading to paid 5-day retreat.

Finding the right business coach for you and your business can feel like searching for a Blue Smurf in a room full of fairies.

We’ve all heard the promises of transformation, success, and breakthrough moments. But how do you actually find a coach who will genuinely help you take that big bold leap?

First understand what you need

Many owners indulge in magical thinking: “When I get my shit together, then I’ll join that coach’s group program.” But if you’re waiting to have everything perfectly aligned before seeking guidance, you’ll be waiting forever.

Personally, I’m aiming to grow my business while not having my shit together.

If I can build my business when I’m operating at half-capacity, then great! I’m building a resilient business that can operate without me needing to be always on my A-game.

The first step in choosing a business coach is radical self-awareness. This means taking an honest inventory of where you are right now, not where you wish you were.

  • Are you struggling with strategic planning?
  • Do you get stuck making decisions?
  • Are you taking too long to implement?
  • Or overthinking every little thing?
  • Do you self-sabotage because of imposter syndrome?
  • Do you need accountability?

Your coaching needs will be as unique as your fingerprint. Some owners need tactical, nuts-and-bolts guidance on scaling their business. Others require deep psychological and identity and energetic work to overcome internal barriers.

Most everyone needs a particular combination of both strategic and psychological coaching, as well as accountability to follow through.

Map your needs

It’s easy to get swept up in flashy marketing or get star-struck by a coach with a charm on social media. Instead, create a clear, unemotional assessment of your current business challenges.

Consider creating a simple matrix:

  • Your current business pain points
  • Specific skills you want to develop
  • Measurable outcomes you’re seeking
  • Your available cash flow (and desired cash flow)
  • Time you can realistically invest in coaching

This objective approach transforms coach selection from an emotional decision to a strategic one.

Understand the business coach’s methodology

As seen in the first couple of stories I shared, every coach and program has a particular methodology or system, and not all of these work for you or your particular business model.

A lot of regrets can be avoided by asking what their particular methodology or system is. For example, if you don’t use social media for philosophical or ethical reasons, it’s not going to be productive to invest in a coach’s program that centres social media marketing.

Far too many business coaches are teaching marketing or growth to soloists, having little to no experience working with their limitations, constraints and unique situation.

An impressive corporate career is only relevant if you’re running a corporate business, not a soloist or small business owner. Real-world experience often trumps academic certifications any day.

When evaluating a potential coach, dig deep into their methodology:

  • What methodology do they use?
  • Do they have evidence, case studies or testimonials, of working with clients from a similar industry as yours?
  • Do they have evidence, case studies or testimonials, of working with clients from a similar business model as yours?
  • Do they have a structured process, or is their approach more fluid?
  • What’s their background, and how does it align with your industry?

A credible coach will be transparent about their methodology and approach and happy to provide testimonials and case studies, with real names.

Vibe check your business coach

One of my clients invested in a mastermind with a coach, but there was a problem – she found the sound of her voice very grating. Which sounds petty, except when you need to listen to this voice for hours on end.

A vibe check is crucial — and a one-to-one sales call isn’t always necessary for this. The whole point of effective marketing is enabling thousands of people to get a sense of an owner. So watch the social media videos, download the free resources, read the blogs, and trust yourself.

Professional chemistry matters immensely. For coaching to be effective, you’ll need to be open and vulnerable, share your challenges, examine problematic thinking and beliefs, and potentially reshape significant aspects of your business and identity.

So trust your gut.

During initial conversations, pay attention to whether they listen more than they talk, whether you feel seen, heard, and understood, and whether they challenge your thinking or approach, without making you feel defensive.

A great coach should make you feel simultaneously challenged and supported. They’re not there to coddle you or inflate your ego, but they’re also not meant to undermine your self-trust. The relationship should feel like a collaborative, equal partnership based on respect and consent. Ideally, it’s a mutual admiration society.

What kind of business coach am I?

Choosing a business coach is a significant investment — not just financially, but in terms of time, energy, and emotional bandwidth. I expect clients to do a background check on me, and I’m hesitant when they don’t. I want to see evidence that they know my methodology, approach or opinions BEFORE they invest.

So what kind of business coach am I?

While my training courses teach a particular methodology, my mastermind, flagship group program, and one-to-one business coaching doesn’t. I like to say it’s a ‘choose your own adventure’, based on the particulars of a client’s goals, business model, strengths, opportunities, limitations and preferences.

For example, if a client has a small email list, and wants to build an online business, selling group programs, or digital downloads, or create other assets to leverage, our focus needs to be building their email list, as quickly and easily as possible. To do this, we have a variety of options, to get paid to grow our email list, or build our list for free in other ways.

If a client has a particular business model that doesn’t require a volume of leads, our focus might instead be on systematising service delivery, using automation better, or strategic business development, to move in their future, desired direction.

Ultimately, choosing a business coach is an investment in yourself and your future. It’s about finding a strategic thought partnership with an external perspective, who challenges your assumptions, and helps you see possibilities you might be blind to.

This is never a quick fix or magic solution. The most transformative coaching relationships are those where you’re an active, committed participant.

You’re not looking for a guru or a saviour — you’re seeking a strategic partner who can help you navigate specific challenges. Your coach can illuminate paths, but you must be willing to walk them.

So take your time. Be discerning. Take a thoughtful, strategic approach to find the best business coach for you, who deeply understands and wholeheartedly supports you.

Four ways coaches create consistent income

Four ways coaches create consistent income

Business coaching

I’ve worked with innumerable coaches over the last 12 years I’ve been a business coach. From other business coaches, to executive coaches, high performance coaches, life coaches, sobriety coaches, and coaches that go by different terms, such as mentor, strategist, teacher or consultant, but are coaching their clients, I’ve seen behind-the-scenes of how other coaches create consistent income.

I’m sharing this for the first time, while keeping confidentiality of course, from the coaches I’ve worked with through my one-to-one business coaching, group coaching programs, and masterminds.

Every coach I’ve worked with structures their coaching differently, charges at different price points, and delivers their services differently, too. Many of my coaching clients earn more than me, and some have been coaching for far more years than I have.

There’s no one method that’s better than the others. Like all things, there are pros and cons to each option. As the business owner, you get to choose what you want to do.

By laying out the four most common pricing structures that I’ve seen for creating consistent income in your coaching business, I hope that you can make more proactive decisions in your coaching business in order to avoid feast-or-famine cycles, and create more consistency in income.

Four key ways to create consistent income in coaching

Not only is consistent income essential for creating a sustainable business, it enables better coaching too. When a coach is under financial pressure to keep their lights on, it’s hard to bring upbeat attitude to each and every session.

Personally, I’ve never offered one-off coaching sessions because I want clients whose expectations of coaching are in alignment with mine, which is that nobody can solve all your problems in a single hour. Coaching isn’t magic, though it sometimes feels magical. The value of coaching is in the tiny, incremental habits, rituals, routines that you shift and adopt over time, which add up to a big effect.

The four key ways you can create consistent income as a coach are:

  1. Retainer relationships
  2. Payment plans
  3. Memberships
  4. Being rebookable

Let’s break these down.

Coaching retainers and payment plans

These are both similar, with slightly different positioning. A coaching retainer would typically involve a minimum commitment of time, such as six months or a year. The client pays monthly, likely on an automatic payment plan.

One of my clients, a business coach who specialised in manufacturing and engineering businesses, charged his clients per month, depending on whether they wanted one meeting or two. His point-of-difference was that these meetings were always face-to-face, which oftentimes necessitated significant amounts of travel.

A payment plan is the same except there is a set amount for a specified period, and the coach offers either payment upfront, or via an automatic payment plan, thus creating regular, consistent income.

This is what I offer, and it’s how a lot of my coaching clients work. One of my clients charged a set fee per outcome. She would have her client set a key goal for their coaching relationship in the first meeting, and then my client would quote them an amount to achieve that goal, no matter how long it took. This was her point-of-difference.

Coaching memberships

Coaching memberships are different from retainer relationships and payment plans, because they’re month-to-month. Confusingly, some coaching memberships require a minimum commitment of time (such as three months or one year), which brings these different things closer together.

A lot of pricing depends on positioning which is how your clients perceive your brand and work. For example, generally memberships are perceived as lower cost and masterminds are perceived as higher cost. But the particulars of what’s included, what’s not, and the value that clients receive, can be very similar.

I had a coaching client who was struggling to fill to fill her membership. We worked together to reposition the offer, change the name from ‘membership’ to ‘mastermind’, and better communicate the offer to call in her ideal clients, which meant she booked out within six weeks of relaunching it.

Another business coaching client – a business coach for financial advisors – found it far easier to sell a higher priced package to his clients, which incorporated a program of training and coaching for their team, than to sell his group program and lower-priced membership. This isn’t uncommon.

Be careful with costing memberships, as many owners make the common mistake of pricing these too low, and assume a higher volume than they’re able to sell. While $97 per month may seem like a steal to you, compared to the value your membership delivers, it’s hard to make a liveable income if you can only sell 20 spots.

Create a few financial forecast contingencies, based on your audience size, before you decide on your price. The online coach you admire may well have an audience that’s 10 times the size of yours.

Being rebookable

This is my least favourite type of consistent income because it’s hard for most owners to do. But some coaches don’t want to ask for the commitment from clients. Which means that they need to get great at being rebookable, and always ask for rebookings.

This is more common amongst professions such as hairdressers, therapists, and masseuses, but it’s also done by coaches. I employed a business coach for a period whose point-of-difference was that she didn’t lock people into a contract and instead told me that booking one-off sessions meant that she had to perform at the highest level possible to prove the value of her coaching, and have her clients book her again. Our relationship wasn’t very fruitful and, to her credit, she instigated the end of it.

To create consistent income with this business model, you need to be excellent at sales. Most people, if given the option to be flakey, will take it (I’m talking about myself here). I have excellent intentions, and high expectations of myself. But my follow-through is often lacking (much like many of my clients).

When a service provider, such as a coach, makes it too easy for me to postpone a decision, chances are I’ll do just that. It’s hard to create a deep trust with people, not to mention a structured program of work together, if sessions are sporadic.

Key questions to help you decide

Here are key questions to prompt you to decide which structure best suits you:

  1. How long a period of time do you believe your clients need to get the most out of coaching with you?
  2. What cadence of sessions do you think your clients need to get the most out of coaching with you?
  3. How many clients would you prefer to work with at any one time?
  4. How much would you like to earn from coaching?
  5. How much do your ideal client value the outcome achieved through coaching with you?

Are you a coach? If so, I’d love you to take five quick minutes to fill out this anonymous survey for me. Thanks in advance!