Is Group Coaching The Key To Scaling Your Business? Interview with Gemma Gilbert
What do you do when you’re fully booked with one-on-one clients but you still want to keep growing?
First, you admit that you’re a greedy bastard who uses achievement to cover up your insecurities.
Just kidding.
Here are your options:
You can raise your rates, but eventually you reach the limit of what certain markets will pay.
You can hire a team coach, but that requires a whole new set of management skills.
You can build a monthly recurring membership or a course, but those require that you have a large audience and great copywriting skills.
Fortunately, there’s another option: group coaching.
Coaching groups has the dual benefit of leveraging your time while also justifying high prices. It’s a natural next step for many coaches and consultants. Imagine making the same amount you do now (or more) while only hosting one or two client calls per week.
I’ve run a few successful group programs in my day and I’ll say this: when you get it right, it can be a huge source of both revenue and client results. Problem is, it’s not always easy to get right. That’s why I wanted to interview my friend and former client Gemma Gilbert on the topic.
I was particularly interested to hear about Gemma’s transition from launching a group program in cohorts (everyone starting at the same time) to turning her group evergreen (clients enter into the group at different times). This is a transition I found challenging back when I ran group programs. Gemma offers some tips to make it easier.
In the interview, I asked Gemma:
How did you decide on coaching groups as your primary business model?
Who should start a monthly membership and who should start a group program?
Why can’t you do everything - courses, 1-1, membership sites, and coaching groups?
What mistakes do people make when they transition to coaching groups?
What’s the difference between a launch-based vs. an evergreen enrollment?
How do you enroll people in an ongoing group without the urgency of a launch?
How do you help people get momentum without the excitement of a cohort-based launch?
What can someone do this week to get started with coaching groups?
You can watch our interview below or scroll past the video to read the edited transcript:
How did you decide on coaching groups as your primary business model?
I went from one-on-one to a membership, a low end membership. I think I've always been drawn to group facilitation. I used to be a teacher. Getting to lead a group is where you start to step a little bit away from coaching in its purest form. You get to teach and motivate people in a different way. That initially took me towards the monthly membership route.
In the early days, I was serving a lot of people that weren't ready for one-on-one coaching. I just thought, “I bet if I put them in a low-cost container, loads of people would jump in.” And they did. I had about 50 people jump in when I started my membership. But there are just so many moving pieces involved in running a membership program. There’s the constant client attraction, churn (members leaving), etc. So soon after that, I went straight into coaching groups and I just reached out to five past Nos, potential clients that had said no based on cost. I knew they wanted to work with me so I said, “Do you wanna jump in a group program?”
It was super unstructured, super undefined. It shouldn't have been easy to sell, cuz it didn't even have a clear result, but I guess it's easy to sell when you have true fans. And they all jumped into a six month, unstructured program, and that was my first adventure into coaching groups. I just couldn't believe how easy it was to then serve five clients. It was just a small group, five clients for one hour a week and it just transformed their businesses in six months. I thought, “This is way better than one-on-one!”
Who should start a monthly membership and who should start a group program?
I would recommend a membership for someone who is more established and wants memberships to be their core business model. Someone who has an established audience of about 5,000-10,000 people.
The most successful memberships are very, very niche. So say you have a membership like the one I was in: they gave you a set of social media templates every month, it was super useful. What a lot of people do is they create a watered down version of their one-on-one program and people don't really get results because they're not really paying enough to show up. A lot of people think, “I'll just create this little passive income stream on the side and I'll just serve people.”
Because memberships often don't have a defined result by definition, they're like a subscription service. Like there's no result from Netflix. You just watch the TV shows you want until you don't want to watch them anymore. So I find they're actually way, way harder to sell and that there's a way bigger commitment people are making when they join a membership. In their mind, they're like, “You're gonna be taking this money from me every single month.” So I found it way easier to sell a £3,000 - £5000 program than I did like a £50 a month membership. And it used to blow my mind.
Memberships can work especially well in industries where it’s harder to charge really high ticket prices. I've seen personal trainers do amazing memberships with meal planning and stuff. People aren't necessarily going to be paying £10,000 for meal planning.
Coaching groups is the obvious middle ground. If you are full of one-on-one clients and you wanna work less hours, but still serve really, really deeply, then group programs give you that ability to offer a really specific transformation, but in a group environment, which for me has so many benefits that one-on-one is missing.
What do you like about the group coaching model?
What I love about groups, apart from the obvious business case of them being very scalable and you being able to make more money in less time, is the group dynamic. It’s magical.
What I noticed with my one-on-one clients is they would all be struggling with the same thing and I’d constantly be saying, “Yeah, my other client is struggling with this.” Each client is just in their own heads. And I’ve had this happen myself as well. I would be so in my head a lot of the time, and would have to be talked down off the cliff edge again and again. And that works, but in a group the client thinks, “Oh, everyone else is struggling with the exact same thing! So I'm not so alone. And therefore this seems less scary.”
Why can’t you do everything - courses, 1-1, membership sites, and coaching groups?
So many people teach this Ascension model, right. You know, you have the low ticket and then the medium and then you have the high…as if people just move harmoniously through them. But they all require enrollment and most people can't even master their marketing for one offer. So why would you introduce three?
What mistakes do people make when they transition to coaching groups?
1. Not niching down enough
You do have to get way more niche when you move to a group. With one-on-one you can basically sell whatever they need. You can't do that with a group. And I think that if you take that route, that's where you start letting your group members down, because you end up with such a mismatch of people in a group environment that it's impossible to help.
2. Moving to COACHING GROUPS too soon
Another mistake I see people make is just coaching groups too soon. They think, oh, it'll be easier to sell group coaching because it's cheaper. So I'll just coach groups early on. And then people will make it cheaper and they still can't sell it. Because 99% of the time it’s not about the actual cost. With coaching groups, you need more clients. So you have to get better at marketing and sales.
3. Scaling group size too quickly
With one-on-one, you can curate the client experience easily because it’s just you and the client. When you move to coaching groups, members become unhappy if they don't feel seen. So you have to build out a program and a structure where every single person feels seen. That’s why I think it's great to start small and then figure out how to grow. If you scale straight away to say 20, 30 people and you don't know how to make every single person feel seen, then you're gonna end up with really unhappy group members. One of my favorite things that somebody said to me, a coach called Carrie Wilkinson, is that “You have to learn how to scale empathy.”
When is the right time to transition to coach groups?
1. You’re fully booked with 1-1 clients
That's an obvious transition. When you can’t serve any more people. Figure out one -on-one. When you're ready for a group, your clients will tell you because you're going to have the lead flow for it. Instead of saying, “I better fill a group. It starts a month from now.” Then trying to fill this group and it has two people, but that's like an awkward amount. And everyone is stressed out.
2. You’re seeing patterns between clients
If you are not seeing regular patterns with clients, how can you turn that into a group experience? It’s not going to be niche enough. I haven't actually found any niche that hasn't worked in a group dynamic. Even those that tell me this won't work in a group because it's a really sensitive topic, they’re dealing with sexual trauma or something like that. It works in a group. You just have to carefully curate the experience and think about how you can make people feel safe.
3. You’re drained by 1-1 coaching
If you start to find one-on-one’s energetically draining and you dread the calls as I was, that's an obvious time to shift. And then if you see all of your clients getting in their heads, I think that's a really clear indication.
I started to dread my one-on-one calls because every call was a reminder of what I hadn't built out. So I'd show up and think, I'm not doing a service to these clients because I've repeated this a hundred times. I should have a resource for this. And I haven't bothered to create it. I am not an organized business owner, so I really have to be forced into any sort of structure. Being forced into creating a signature program because I was delivering it to a group and they needed it done.
What needs to shift in order to sell coaching groups?
1. Stop thinking of COACHING GROUPS as inferior to 1-1
A huge part of this is mindset. This is the biggest thing I see people trip up when they sell group coaching. They go into it deep down feeling like coaching groups is secondary to one-on-one and that comes across in their calls. Then they come back and they're like, “Everyone's just telling me they want one-on-one.” And it's like, yeah, “Would you believe one-on-one's better?” And they're like, “Well, yeah, it kind of is. They get more of me.”
As long as you believe that one-to-one is better than group, it's gonna be really hard to sell a group program. I used to believe that. And I used to have people ask for one-on-one coaching all the time. Now I rarely get people asking for it. And if people do ask for it, the story is, “Well, you can pay me way more money to do this one-on-one if you want, but I'm gonna get you to go and do the same content pathway over there.”
In my group, I offer unlimited one-on-one anyway. They get unlimited 30 minute one-on-one calls whenever they get stuck. So you can be super playful with group structure. Group doesn't just have to mean they only get group. We just have a support ladder whereby you ask for help in the community. Then you come on a group call and if you're still stuck, we hop on a 30 minute one-on-one. And that's another way you can deal with unhappy members, right? You have trigger points that identify where people might be unhappy.
2. Sell the result, not the structure
In terms of selling it, the first point is exactly the same with one-on-one: packaging it up based on the result. Because I feel like the second people start talking about coaching groups, they get in their heads that they're selling group coaching. No. You are just selling the result and the transformation exactly as you are in one-on-one. They don't even need to know it's a group program in your marketing. You're just inviting them to talk about the transformation that they want. And then when you're selling them the package, you say “Hey, this is the format we use and this is why it's awesome. And the more you get behind that and the less you start to see it as coaching groups, the easier it is to sell in the first place.
3. Start with a conversation, not a sales page
Where I see a lot of people go wrong is trying to sell it on a sales page. I don't know why people suddenly go, “I'm selling a group program and therefore need a sales page.” I teach two ways. Either sell it on a sales call or sell it by chat with a PDF. But keep it in a conversation, keep control of the sale. Typically if you're selling something under £1500 or £2,000, you could probably do it via PDF, but I would master the sale process via a strategy session or free consultation first.
Why did you stop using launches to fill your group program?
I just saw this really tiresome launch culture that people get sucked into as if the only way to sell is doing a five day challenge or a webinar. I got really burnt with launching. I enrolled all these clients into my membership and it resulted in a huge number of my members leaving. It disrupted the whole dynamic when I brought all these people in. If you run a cohort program, it starts on this date, ends on this date, then you kind of get trapped into needing to launch.
How do you generate 10 or 20 or 30 leads all at once for even a hundred, depending on the size of your business? All of these sales emails, countdown, timers, and fast acting bonuses. All these really icky marketing tactics that we just use because we see other people doing it and assume it's the norm. I started learning about a slower approach to marketing, which asked, “What if we just enrolled a few members or five or 10 members every single month and we didn't have to do this hard sell?” And so that led me down this whole path of a sustainable, slower paced business.
I used to get ill every single time I launched. I became a nightmare for my family to be around. It was just super intense. So now I have a program that's open all the time and you can still do launchy type stuff. I do a monthly workshop. I'm doing a big event later this month. But none of it is followed by a hard sell. It's just an invitation for people to come into a conversation when the time is right for them. So for me the evergreen model, it aligns with my values.
What’s the difference between a launch-based vs. an evergreen enrollment?
My definition of evergreen isn't the same as other people's. I don't think you should have it that people can drop into your program any time. I think you have to give them a powerful start. So I guess you could call mine a monthly mini launch. I can have a sales conversation anytime and give them a start date, which is in the next three weeks anytime. So I call it “rolling monthly enrollment.” I can have a month off, I won't enroll anyone in August because I take that off.
The opposite of evergreen is having a cohort of people that join at the same time and end at the same time. Evergreen is people being in the same program who had different start dates.
How do you enroll people in an ongoing group without the urgency of a launch?
The first thing is recognizing that everyone's on their own buyer's timeline and the right time will line up for them. Part of what good marketing is, in my books, is what Seth Godin says - that marketing these days is about hanging around for long enough that they know they can trust you enough to buy from you. And that's what so many people don't do.
Part of it is accepting that it's okay for it to take longer. And if you accept that, it's okay for it to take longer. Those people are such an easy sell. They're like “I've been following you for a year. I've watched everything you've done. I've come to three of your workshops. I'm now ready.” Look at all your clients, find out when they came into your world, find out when they bought from you. Create this average timeline and then be like, “Oh, okay. So it takes a year. So I need to slow down a bit and not think this is urgent.”
Each month is as simple as sending an email that says, “I'm starting a new group this month and we're starting next week.” There are very simple time phrases that bring urgency without there being an official deadline. When I turned my membership evergreen, as in, I didn't close the doors, our launch conversion didn't suffer. We still converted the same percentage of people without the deadline. You just give people a reason to join now, but let's not insult our buyers by thinking they only respond to a deadline. They do have internal urgency and they do have reason and logic that speaks to why now is the right time for them.
I'm also bought into how good my group program is. I think it comes across in a call.
How do you help people get momentum without the excitement of a cohort-based launch?
1. Hold a live kickoff call
The onboarding piece is super important. So for me, I hold a live kickoff call. This is something I got from Taki Moore. A live kickoff call every single month. That is where they join with four or five other people and we have a whole session on how to get the best out of their investment, how they're going to show up. They get inducted really powerfully and then set off on their own personal journey. You can bump that up with a one-on-one call if you want.
2. Get them a win in the first 30 days
You want your clients to win in the first 30 days just like in one-on-one coaching. So block out that first 30 days for them. If they're in action and they're succeeding quickly, they’re going to be thrilled.
3. Help them engage in the community
When you run a cohort program, you have to go through that awkward first two weeks where you're trying to get everyone to speak to each other.
People walk into my evergreen group and they're like, “Wow, people are shit hot in here. And they're taking action. And Gemma's told me how to show up and she's given me a quick win.” I always talk about how to show up as an introvert because I'm a big introvert and I struggle in group scenarios. There's some quick wins I give introverts and say, “Here's how you can get involved in the group without it sucking your energy.”
How should coaches structure their first group program?
1. Decide whether you’ll be using a curriculum
The first question to ask yourself is whether you are running a curriculum-based group program versus a pure coaching based group program. My first group program was just, “Hey, join me for six months. We'll meet every week. I'm just gonna coach you.” I can't believe anyone bought it, but it was awesome. Whereas now, I have two group programs and one is very curriculum based. They go through this pre-recorded content, which I love because of the teaching angle. Then they come to the live coaching session. Then they interact in the community. So I think there are two kinds of different models you can do.
I’ll say this: The curriculum is important in coaching groups. It can't be vague. I know I said I run this super unstructured program and I think masterminds do have their place, especially at a higher level. But the more you can have the steps laid out, the more your clients are going to win.
2. Don’t just do 1-1 coaching in a group context
One thing people tend to get wrong is how they do hot seats. They treat it like one-on-one coaching and they just go to each person one by one by one. I've been in coaching programs like this and you just wait for your turn and you are bored and you're not really listening. And it's made worse if the program isn't niche. I still do hot seating, but I think you can do it well. It can be as simple as having people share their wins. The second they get in there, ask them to share three wins in the chat. You have to step into a facilitator role instead of saying, “Hey guys, how's everyone today?” Starting the session that way doesn't really feel powerful.
The question is: How do you engage the whole group in the coaching session rather than one-on-one coaching? For every zoomed in issue, you zoom out and you contextualize the problem so that everyone can see how it's relevant for them and what they can learn from it.
You're also inviting people to use and leverage the chat to share their experiences or raise their hand and contribute. What I really remember from one of your sessions, Greg, was that you got everyone to say one line about what they wanted to contribute in the chat. And then the person got to pick who they wanted to hear more from. That was a lovely technique.
Have these questions in your back pocket: “What's been most useful so far for you?” and “What's your biggest takeaway at this point in the call?” so that people are constantly learning and not sitting back passively.
To move from single coaching to coaching groups is a skill because you need to keep everyone engaged. Otherwise the experience is going to fall flat and people are not going to look forward to your calls. In my calls, everyone just comes away buzzing like, “Oh my God, I just learned so much from that call.” And I know that it wasn't even me. It was what everyone else brought to the table.
3. Collect questions before the call
I really like to collect questions before the call. They have various ratings to tell us how they're doing, where they're struggling, and what they want help with. This allows me to structure and group the call around similar issues rather than just going person by person.
In one-on-one, you can develop this over-reliance on your coach. You kind of keep this problem close to your heart. We don't want people bringing super low level questions to a coaching call. It's not a good use of time. So there's coaching around that. I always encourage people to put it in the community first, before it's fully formed. That's the place to form the question.
The benefit of the process is people often come to the call and they've solved the problem. They say to me, “Every time I fill out the RSVP, I tell you the problem the night before, and by the next day I've solved it.” They give this Red, Amber, or Green rating for how much they're freaking out. And then we talk about it on the call. And then I reach out to them afterwards. We have a system of saying, “Hey, you were a Red. We just wanna check in and see if we were able to solve that problem on the call for you. Or do you still need help?” And if they still need help, we jump on a 30 minute one-on-one. We need to be careful that the system doesn’t only reward people who are struggling by also checking in with people that are moving quickly.
What can someone do this week to get started with coaching groups?
Just reach out to your one-on-one clients and say, “Hey, I have a bunch of you who are struggling with the same stuff. And I thought it would be super fun to add in a monthly group call. Are you open to testing that out with me for three months?”
If you want more structure, just write a PDF to summarize what the program's about. This is just to outline your thoughts. Then reach out to past Nos and invite people into a conversation about joining the group. Drop your ego and just invite people into a group program to help them get a specific result. You’ll have less pressure about the numbers and be more focused on getting results for those people. Then your group will grow naturally because you’ll have the right motives in mind.
