HustleandHeart
Strippers guide to competition

Strippers guide to competition

Building your reputation, Grow your profits

It’s a slow night. Your competitors are right there, in their underwear, competing for the few punters who are wandering through. Your ‘pick me’ vibe is seeping out your pores. You know your attitude isn’t where it needs to be, and you know it’ll cost you if you don’t lift your mood.

If you’ve ever thought, “there are so many competitors! How can I possibly compete?!” then welcome to the strippers guide to competition.

So as not to sound like a total middle class nit wit, I interviewed a stripper, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, on how they play the psychological game of dealing with their competitors, when they’re almost naked, competing for clients, in the same room.

Own who you are

“People want what they want – they want your look and vibe, or they prefer the girl sitting next to you,” she tells me.

“It’s pointless wishing you were otherwise. You can’t change their tastes and you can’t change yourself.”

When you’ve fallen hard and fast for a new competitor’s brand this is easy to forget.

You’re stalking their socials, lurking on their sales pages, and trying to reverse engineer their funnel.

Stop. There’s only one you-shaped you. Your ideal clients and you form a mutual admiration society – so there’s ideal clients lurking on your sales pages right now, too.

“You’ve got to keep your regulars happy, and not get distracted by new conquests all the time,” she tells me. “Your regulars need to feel seen and appreciated. When you make people feel seen and heard, they’ll stay longer, spend more, and come back, with friends.”

Render your competitors irrelevant

The job of branding is not to look expensive or aspirational. Nor is it to look safe and relatable. The job of branding is to emphasise that unfair advantage that you have, by virtue of being you.

You’re not competing with brands that look drastically different because you’re not attracting the same clients.

It’s when your brand looks and feels the same, with pricing that’s plagiarising and offerings which look almost identical. This is dangerous territory.

The most crowded market is mid-range because the middle feels safe. But when your pricing is more-or-less what most are charging and your deliverables are almost indistinguishable – this is when you have a problem.

You render your competitors irrelevant by having a one-of-a-kind brand that can’t be compared.

And the only thing beyond replication is YOU. So don’t outsource your power to AI. Your creative and critical thinking is one of the most important assets you have. Your branding and messaging needs to be owned by you.

A shitty attitude is expensive

“I often felt not good enough,” she tells me. “On nights when my negative self-talk spiralled, I’d make no money as my attitude would repel clients.”

Spiralling into negativity is understandable. It’s easy (and cheap) to indulge in cynicism or scepticism. A full-blown existential crisis can be provoked when your ‘but who am I, really?!’ branding process has gone too far.

After 17 years in business, I’ve indulged in many a shitty attitude – and I can map my mental health over the years in my profit and loss statements.

The 18 months when I lost my business mojo after the birth of my second baby was one giant shitty attitude that cost me a lot.

Nowadays, I work hard on my attitude – including the foundations of good sleep, exercise, good food, and proper weekends. Nowadays, I cannot afford the luxury of a negative thought, especially when I know how much more fun and profitable being upbeat is.

“Some people will like your look, and some won’t,” she tells me. “You can’t change that. Rejection is part of the gig, but there are always plenty more fish in the sea.”

Collaboration over competition

“The nights I made the most money were nights when I’d team up with another girl,” she tells me. “I was the young, fun blonde, with that crazy attitude that’s really attractive to some men. I’d partner with the brunette in her 30s who’s interested in politics.

“We’d bounce off each other and give a way better vibe. The energy we’d create together would be magnetic, and men would be lining up.”

In 2025, collaboration has been essential in my business, as social media algorithms bring diminishing returns, the ‘trust recession’ means prospective clients need a far higher number of touchpoints, and way more trust signals than ever before.

When we collaborate, we’re not just sharing each other’s audiences, we’re also extending our credibility and trust, which means that the people who come to us through others are already warmed up.

Borrowing other people’s audiences has always been my preferred way of building my audience, growing my email list and finding new clients – rather than through reaching cold audience with ads.

Of course, not all competitors make great collaborators. But business owners who don’t even entertain the idea of collaborating with their competitors are letting their low self-confidence take the lead.

Confidence sells

“Confidence is a big turn on,” she tells me. “The most confident girls in the club didn’t have the best bodies or the most skills on the pole. They were simply confident – and they earned far more money as a result.”

You know this already. You’ve likely seen your competitors who have far less expertise, experience and accolades than you do, scoop up great opportunities because they’re more confident.

But there’s a difference between integrity and confidence – too many people confuse these and bundle them together.

Having high integrity and not wanting to compromise on your values doesn’t need to undermine your confidence. Questioning the status quo doesn’t need to undermine your confidence. Appreciating nuance and complexity doesn’t need to undermine your confidence.

When it comes to selling your offerings, you need to be your own hype girl. If you aren’t hyping up your offerings, who is? The value is not self-evident. “If your work is good, it sells itself” isn’t reliable. And you can’t sell a secret.

The good news is that confidence can be taught and courage is contagious. {LINK}

Overthrowing the scarcity mindset

“Women are taught that there’s only one spot at the top, that there’s not enough to go around,” she tells me. “But when we pit ourselves against each other, it’s a turn-off for clients, as well as our own experience on the job.”

We’ve been sold a myth that resources are scarce, and we need to fiercely fight and compete so we can survive. But there are more than enough resources to feed the world.

When women work together, we don’t just make far more money while having way more fun, but we also unpick the ill effects of white patriarchal capitalism.

When you appreciate there’s enough to go around, and realise that power doesn’t need to be hierarchical, but can be power within and between, too, then you’re undoing thousands of years of socialisation that have kept the worst of our society intact.

Our conditioning – our beliefs, opinions, thoughts, and attitude – is one of the last vestiges of control, and arguably the most effective because our conditioning becomes a cage that polices our own thoughts.

Competition is real, yes. But our attitude towards it doesn’t need to be self-defeating any longer.

Ready to change your attitude towards selling, promoting, and competition as collaborators? Time for Momentum Mastermind.

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. 

23 profitable ideas for recurring revenue in your business

23 profitable ideas for recurring revenue in your business

Grow your profits

Be warned! Now that you have 23 solid ideas to create recurring revenue as a service provider – whether you’re a consultant, expert, coach, creative, trainer or freelancer – it’ll be harder to pretend that you don’t know how to do this.

I hope it’ll also be far harder to convince yourself that it’s impossible in your sector, with your business model, and your target market, in this economy!

Remember, you don’t have to do what everyone else in your industry is doing – you can borrow ideas from other industries, or combine different ideas to create something unique. There are many many business just like yours who are evolving how they deliver value. It’s not always easy, but it starts by deciding.

  1. Mastermind groups – Monthly peer coaching with facilitation, structure, accountability and support. (I have two! Audacious for owners who are further ahead with their business, and Momentum for owners who want to better prioritise launches, marketing campaigns and promotions.)
  2. In-person local events – Create a subscription for regular meetups or immersions (we have one Sydney and online immersion every quarter inside of Momentum mastermind).
  3. Annual planning retreats – Take your one payment and spread this across a monthly automated payment plan.
  4. Accountability Pods – Offer small-group accountability with regular check-ins (we do this inside both my Audacious mastermind as well as my Momentum mastermind).
  5. Office Hours Access – Clients can access live drop-in sessions to seek feedback or get their questions answered (we do this inside my Momentum mastermind. The Audacious crew can seek feedback from me anytime they wish).
  6. Online or IRL Membership Community – Bring together a niche group who are either from the same sector, or have a shared goal, with regular interaction.
  7. Group coaching programs – Either you can offer an automated payment plan on your set fee, or you can charge monthly for ongoing live coaching in a group setting.
  8. Retainers – Ongoing coaching or consulting for an ongoing monthly fee, for a minimum amount of time (for example, six months commitment or twelve months commitment). This is what I offered way back when I began, in 2008.
  9. VIP Days and Recurring Intensives – Turn one-off VIP Days into Recurring Intensives, either weekly, monthly, or quarterly. These are similar to retainers, but are far more structured, with tight boundaries.
  10. Licensed curriculum – Let other practitioners use your course or workshop materials for a monthly or annual fee.
  11. Certification programs – Certify people in your proprietary method, with annual renewal fees.
  12. White-Label solutions – Provide done-for-you packages other service providers can brand as their own.
  13. Paid newsletters – Offer exclusive insights, training, or behind-the-scenes for a monthly fee (have you seen? I have a Substack – free, not paid).
  14. Template library – Create editable templates (emails, spreadsheets, designs) for clients to subscribe to.
  15. Toolkits & resource hubs – Bundle your favourite tools, checklists, or swipe files into a subscription.
  16. Premium content membership – Videos, guides, masterclasses, and recordings gated behind a paywall. (Think Masterclass.com.)
  17. Microlearning subscription – Bite-sized lessons or videos delivered weekly/monthly on a specific topic (this could be combined with the paid newsletters).
  18. Website care packages or tech maintenance plans – Offer ongoing support, updates, and backups.
  19. Content management services – Upload, format, publish, and schedule content monthly (could be combined with retainers or recurring intensives).
  20. Virtual Assistant or OBM packages – Monthly admin, inbox, calendar, or launch support.
  21. Ongoing strategy reviews – Quarterly or monthly performance reviews and advice.
  22. Priority access subscriptions – Offer clients guaranteed priority support for a fee.
  23. Affiliate membership programs – Curate tools or products with affiliate links and a recurring commission, and gate access via a paid hub.

Creating recurring revenue in your business starts with asking for commitment from clients, defining your offer well, and powerfully communicating its value so that clients can’t help but buy.

The right message at the right moment: know your trigger events

The right message at the right moment: know your trigger events

Digital marketing, Grow your profits

My client took her family on an overseas holiday – which is all well and wonderful, except that they were on a payment plan with me – which I’d introduced to help them pay off the multiple thousands in invoices that they’d accrued for my company’s marketing support.

This was a trigger event for me – “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

This trigger event instigated another massive round of changes to my business.

A trigger moment is really important in sales – as well as in marketing. Unique to each business and their ideal client group, it’s the key events when your prospective client is actively deciding to do business with you – or your competitors.

Once we know what our ideal clients’ particular trigger events are, then we use these to drastically increase our sales. Here’s how.

My business’s trigger events

Marketers love talking about funnels, and trigger events are often related to these. For example, someone opens your emails, clicks on a link, visits your sales page, visits this page multiple times, and then clicks through to the checkout, but doesn’t buy.

All these things can be tracked and – ideally – should be tracked. But these are not what I’m talking about.

Instead, I’m talking about the key events in someone’s life which form a pattern in many of your clients.

Let me explain by way of illustration of what my prospective clients’ trigger events are:

  • Business owner is given a ‘hard talking to’ by their business partner, accountant, financial advisor or spouse that they’re not earning enough money in their business
  • Business owner realises that they need to raise their prices – but they’re scared to do so
  • Business owner is experiencing ‘out of control’ growth without enough support and systems around them, and is having trouble sleeping
  • Business owner has had a big life event – such as a divorce, the death of a spouse, children starting school or moving out, etc – and decided it’s ‘now or never’ with going after their big business goals.

How do I know this? Because I always ask prospective clients and new clients – whether in conversation or through a form. These trigger events are recurring patterns from a lot of data I’ve collected over time.

Trigger events in marketing

More talk on funnels! (Excuse my marketing speak.)

Marketers love to talk about ‘top of funnel’ marketing (that attracts new people to you), ‘middle of funnel’ marketing (that builds trust, rapport, and consideration) and ‘bottom of funnel’ marketing (that converts people from browsers to buyers).

While trigger events are more suited to ‘bottom of funnel’, they can be used in all three. For example, ‘identifier content’ is a type of content that asks people to call themselves in. (I teach this as one piece of my Storyflow Framework, inside my Ignite Visibility Accelerator.)

Examples of identifier content hooks

  • “Raise your hand if _____ has ever made you feel _____.”
  • “If you’ve ever been told ____, but knew deep down that ____ was your thing, you’re in the right place.”
  • “If you’ve ever struggled with ____ while trying to ____ , then keep reading.”
  • “If you’re ready to stop ____ and start ____, then let’s be friends.”
  • “You’re not alone if you’ve ever felt ____ about _____.”
  • “If _____ is your superpower, welcome! This account is for you.”

Identifier content can be used to ‘call people in’ at the top of your funnel – by describing your trigger events in surprising or insightful ways. (The easiest way to be insightful? Stop overthinking things and tell the truth.)

But using trigger events in your marketing is most effective for ‘bottom of funnel’ content – when people are about to make a buying decision.

Content that converts

First, a warning. Focusing solely on creating marketing content that ‘converts’ people tends to be the most expensive and ineffective method, if you haven’t already done the hard yards of growing an audience online and building trust and rapport. That’s because it’s most crowded, with lots of competition.

For example, running digital ads to book sales calls is expensive if your audience doesn’t already know you, like you and trust you, through digital content that’s designed to nurture these relationships.

Anyone can claim to be “Australia’s best” or “Sydney’s favourite”, but few are believable.

If you’re bidding on ads for “lawyer Los Angeles”, then expect to pay through the nose for the privilege – as these Google searches signify ‘buyer intent’ (apologies again for the marketing jargon).

But for the sake of argument, let’s imagine you’ve done the hard yards of creating educational, inspirational, relevant ‘top of funnel’ content that’s useful and valuable to your specific target market.

Let’s imagine you’ve built trust and rapport with behind-the-scenes content, skilful storytelling, and sharing your vision, values, mission, purpose. People know who you are and they’re listening and watching. They may have opted into your emails, or be lurking your socials.

So, you create a marketing campaign that focuses on provoking people to take action. Alongside key ‘bottom of funnel’ content such as reviews, FAQs and addressing barriers to purchase, you describe your prospective clients’ trigger events, in great depth and detail.

It’s so scaringly specific, the colour and detail you paint in other people’s mind, that they can’t help thinking you’re some kind of a witch, seeing as how you appear to be telepathic. This specificity is what, ultimately, makes you the best choice for them.

Specific is genius

The more specific your marketing and communications are, the more powerful. The more uncertain you are, the more you tend to default to vague, generic marketing that becomes the elevator music of the internet.

Trigger events are a powerful opportunity to harness this specificity. So much about effective marketing is about timing – the right message at the right moment to the right person.

Knowing and describing your clients’ trigger events is a powerful tool to call in prospective clients and dramatically increase your sales, while making people feel seen, heard, and understood.

Want to learn how? Join us inside Ignite Visibility Accelerator.

Client case study: 30% growth

Client case study: 30% growth

Building your reputation, Client case studies, Grow your profits

Meeting Sonia van de Haar over a group discussion on ‘women, money, identity, power’ was a good way to gauge a feminist founder. I was leading this discussion at a female entrepreneur circle at the University of Technology Sydney in late 2018 and Sonia and I got on like wildfire.

We’ve been working together, and trading feminist memes on Instagram, ever since.

Sonia is an architectural colour specialist – an occupation I would have loved to do myself, if only I’d known such a thing existed! Sonia’s unique cross-disciplinary approach to colour is sought out by architects, designers and private clients who want to use colour thoughtfully and for maximum impact.

Here’s Sonia’s story.

Launching architectural colour design workshop

Lymesmith Crows Nest muralI joined the Hustle & Heart program in March 2019 followed by Brook’s Momentum membership in December 2019, just as I was transitioning my business base from Sydney to Canberra. 2020 was a crazy year and it was great having Brook’s insight and leadership in my inbox and on calls during this time.

I decided to join Brook’s Leverage mastermind in September 2023 because I was keen to start teaching my architectural colour design methodology to architects and spatial designers. Leverage supported me throughout the process of setting up my flagship group program, and in November 2023, I ran my first ‘test’ workshop in Tasmania, for the Australian Institute of Architects.

By March 2024 I was promoting workshops to the email list I had grown during the Leverage program. By the end of 2024 I had delivered 13 CPD workshops around the country.

Sonia van de Haar teaching

It was an absolute joy talking shop with talented colleagues, and the feedback has been amazing, with ⁠96% of survey respondents giving 4/5 or 5/5 stars to their course experience.⁠

Too many architects rely on the same limited colour palette for every project. They’re not thinking of colour in terms of its spatial effects and its interaction with the environment.

Designers are hungry for the tools to design effectively with colour, and need the language to powerfully communicate context-driven colour concepts with their clients.⁠

30 per cent growth

After completing Leverage mid 2024, I joined Brook’s Audacious mastermind because I was growing rapidly and wanted to have Brook’s coaching and support, and a community of female solo business owners to help me navigate these changes, while continuing to make bold decisions.

In 2024, both revenue and profit margins increased by 30 per cent. I was running courses across Australia, and I needed to build my team and support structures to pick up the slack. I had hired an office admin in 2020, thanks to Brook’s coaching, and in 2024, I have brought on a junior designer to help with client work.

Brook and I identified the stress points in my business, one of which was dealing with inquiries, which was taking up a lot of time, energy and stress. We turned this into a paid endeavour; clients now pay $1500 for a site visit, scope and quotation. If they proceed with the quote, this amount is applied as credit against their fee.

This has successfully turned a time suck into a revenue earner. More than 80% of these paid quotations turn into new jobs.

Another thing I wasn’t adequately charging for is project management, which can be significant for mural projects involving multiple people, intensive planning, additional insurances, and other incidentals. I’ve changed my approach to project management, and having more support has freed up my time to make better decisions and budget more accurately.

”A completely different way of being”

Joining the Audacious mastermind has changed my day to day experience of being in business. The constant stress of making decisions is now shared. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by a never ending to-do list and to clearly see what the priorities are when you’re doing everything solo.

As much as I love my family, they’re often the worst people to talk to for support – a sentiment that’s echoed by other Audacious masterminders! Family and friends may be well meaning, but they often express doubts and advise caution, when what you need is support and a cheer squad, in order to take bold action.

After a massive 2024, this year is about consolidating and leaning into what it’s like to not be constantly stressed or struggling to cope – what does that even look like!?

The Audacious community is about supporting each of us to excel at what we do, and have a damn good time while we do it. Our shared goals are to work the way we want to work, to keep ourselves in excellent health, to stimulate our curiosity and creativity and to own our ambitions.

I’ve done everything on my own for far too long and I’m over it! It’s extremely uplifting to be amongst like-minded owners, swapping book and music recommendations, meeting Brook at the spa when I visit Sydney, and actually enjoying the freedom that working for myself provides.

I’ve travelled to far north Queensland with another Audacious masterminder, to attend Allison’s yoga retreat and Allison is now my yoga teacher, leading me through her online classes; her in Townsville, me in Canberra, or wherever I happen to be working, the yoga comes with me.

My next best step

I started my business Lymesmith in 2011 and I sometimes laugh at myself about being a slow learner, because I still feel I need coaching and support.

If you just sign up for a course, it has a start and a finish date. You implement some of the things you learn, until the next crisis shows the gaps in your business. It’s impossible to implement all that you want to do, all at once.

The accountability and community inside of Audacious keeps me on track to continually implement, experiment and commit to working on my business.

At each stage of business, there are new challenges. With regular coaching support it’s easier to spot patterns of self-sabotage and with Brook’s guidance, to unpick these tendencies and move forward.

The regular check-ins from Brook, our accountability coach Kate, and the Audacious members make this far easier.

I hesitated resigning Audacious after my first six months because of the lingering feeling that I ‘should’ be able to do this all on my own. But fuck that! I juggle a million things every day; I work on multiple projects at a time, I teach, travel, market, manage staff and there’s so many creative projects I want to pursue. I don’t want to simplify or ‘give up’ any of the work I enjoy.

Audacious and Brook allow me to carry my ambitions more lightly and not ‘grind it out’. Audacious is about doing everything I want to do, but as consciously, joyfully and vibrantly as possible. Building my team, and having Audacious as my support crew has grown my capacity to take on more ambitious projects.

Creativity and business

Sonia van de Haar LymesmithThe most difficult thing in running a ‘creative business’ is safeguarding my own creative time. It’s a constant goal, trying to get into a flow state so that I can do the design work I love most, and not get bogged down with admin, emails and to-do lists.

The work of running a business is challenging for a lot of creative people. I hate planning, schedules, Gantt charts, spreadsheets, financial reports, and as an introvert, I really do not enjoy marketing or social media, even though I am competent at all of the above and know that it’s necessary!

The ‘unstructured’ structure of Audacious helps me to prioritise creative work every day and to make good decisions – for example, what’s the best thing I can do right now?’

There’s a lot of noise on the internet and many coaches touting their wares. Brook is different! She’s genuine and unique in what she offers.

She’s also a ball of enthusiasm, and great fun to be with. Her keen intelligence and huge passion for helping female business owners to earn good money doing what they love is infectious.

Brook is continually developing and expanding her thinking and what she offers her clients. Her marketing communication gets better and better as she truly walks her talk.

While she’s witnessed my growth, I’m honoured that I’ve also witnessed her growth as a coach. We’ll be on the wild ride of business together for a while yet, and damn it if she isn’t always just up ahead, gesticulating wildly for me to catch up.

Get in touch with Sonia to discuss an in-house workshop for your design team.

Audacious Mastermind currently has two spots open. Join by March 31 to nab yourself a free spot in Ignite Visibility Accelerator. Apply now.

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.