How to include 1-1 Coaching Into Your Membership – Episode 113

David: So I work with founders of packaged food companies. So small food companies that are developing a packaged food product, and I help them with their marketing. My question is how do I work in one-on-one consulting sessions with these founders in a, that are part of a membership. What's the best way to work that in. 

Paul: So to clarify, they are already in a membership? 

David: Yeah. So I'm currently, I currently have a founding member launch that I started that summer, just a few people in it, but in lieu of not having content, I offered hour long once a month consulting sessions with these folks.

And I found that I love it. And I really want to continue that as a service which I do promote that as a service, but it's you know, limited success is a one-off service. So I found that I love it. And the feedback from those members so far is they get a ton of value out of that. So knowing I can only handle so many one-on-one calls that would limit my membership.

So I think we'll do I just raise the price of my membership to make it a small group or do I provide some kind of discount to my hour-long give them maybe one hour when they're brand new and then offer them, you know, ongoing discounts as an incentive to stay in the group. 

Oftentimes, people would say, let's do group coaching calls in, in light of that. Well, these are competing companies a lot of times. And so they want to kind of keep some of that stuff, you know, under the radar and maybe share that with me personally. So how would you formulate a business plan model where the deliverable is a one-on-one call. 

Paul: Yeah. Yeah. 

Melissa: Great question. 

Paul: So does anybody want to jump in,

Meg: and we'll offer that as a bonus. Since I don't know, you seem like you really enjoy doing the one-on-ones, but then if that was like a bonus or like somebody participated a lot in the group where you could give that to them as a, as a bonus, and then somehow in the price, like. Is it, if it wasn't a bonus, wouldn't it get kind of complicated to be in a membership and giving it a lot of one-on-ones?

David: Yeah. My thought was, I've been noodling this through this whole week is have the intro level price the, you know, the, the level of price to get in is, is relatively priced. Well, but then let's say as a member you get my one-on-one hour-long coaching calls for half off, something like that.

Cause you're not in the membership, you pay full price. And maybe as a member, I'll give you one free. That's kinda what I was thinking of doing You know, or I could even just say, I periodically I could have some, you know, office hours. I've seen other people do that, where they provide so many hours a week and first come first serve, but then not everyone necessarily will get into that and not everyone's taking advantage of this once a month.

So I, you know, I don't have that issue, but I know I can't take a hundred members and there's no way I could do a hundred coaching calls a month. How do I, how do I format this 

Meg: kind of defeats the purpose of having a membership, right. It's like, 

David: and get away from membership. And do I just do a high price coaching program and not even have a membership.

Meg: I love the idea of the tier, you know, like you're, you're in it, this, but for this, you can see it right on your website that you charge. You know, I'm just gonna make up a number $397 an hour. You are only charging 197 or whatever, you know? And this is just for the members to say, thank you for being in the member.

And if you got overwhelmed, I mean, I guess there would be a way that you could then sprinkle it in or put it out there sparsely instead of like, oh boy, like everyone's really taken advantage of this then maybe indeed, that the price has to go up or, well, anyway, that would be a good problem to have.

Paul: I think Jason was next with his hand raised 

Jason: so a couple of things for me, the, the tier thing, I definitely like that element of exclusivity. Paul them, this'll talk to you about tiers all day long. I'm sure. From where they fit in and price points to the other things. I just thought I would tap into the one-to-one piece though. The two things that came to my mind were: ask great questions and look for the gaps and then look to laser coach on that for premium.

So I have a thing which I just call a power hour. People can book it as a one-off. They can be a regular client, not a regular client, but the idea is not that we solve all of the problems in all the world. We focus on one specific thing and that time. Is really about solving a particular issue.

So maybe for you around packaging, it might be I just can't get anybody who comes up with a font that I like, or my packaging. Okay. Let's do it with that. That's the issue that you're solving, but it carries a premium price tag because you are dealing with something that is highly specific when people are coming to you for a high level of expertise in your ability to help them solve that specific thing.

That, that for me is where I would normally look to develop that conversation and look at how would you become an ongoing recurring one-to-one client perhaps? Or is there something else you can take them into, which sits outside of the membership where you can do go much deeper with them, into their business?

High-level that kind of thing? 

Paul: Love it. Love it. It's we're going to go over to Cathy. Thank you.

Cathy: So something that I recently started doing in my membership was having like hot seat style coaching where at the beginning of every month, I open up a drawing where, of anybody who wants to have like a one-on-one spot can enter their name. And then I, you know, random drawing with preference to people who haven't had a chance to go before.

But like random drawing and then one person you know, maybe, maybe two, if I like have a bunch of time, but one person. Drawn out of the hat and then they have a one-on-one session that everybody can attend. So everybody's there and we kind of have like you know, like sometimes we'll, we'll bring somebody from the group in, if they have encountered a similar problem and they, you know, want to chime in with their ideas too.

 It's basically just a one-on-one session, but other people are there. And so they can benefit from hearing other people's questions. Not everybody puts their name in, cause not everybody wants to be that public with things, but you get the high touch of a one-on-one, but I don't have to do like a bajillion of them.

So that's something I recently started doing and I really like it so far. 

Paul: Thank you, Kathy. So we're going to go over to a Patty. 

Patty: So what occurred to me when you were talking is whether you can take the process you're using and your one-on-one sessions, and turn that into something of a teaching to use within your membership and possibly offer a higher level inner circle or whatever you want to call it, where they already know the concepts, but then you coach them on it as well.

So that would be a higher priced area, but that as you're going through, if you can see things that you can teach, start pulling those out as resources for your membership and being able to repurpose that. 

Paul: That's fantastic. 

Melissa: I mean, I'll share with you with kind of what we do, because we do have a one-on-one element in our membership with our "inner circle".

Patty: And I will say when you have that one-on-one element that you do have the ability to raise your rate with that, because that is a really, you are that those members are going to get that individualized time with you, and that is value there. So I loved all the ideas that were shared here. And I know you said one of the concerns was that if there can be competing companies, they might not necessarily want to share everything around. So totally hear that. 

The way we do with our one-on-ones is we offer them every quarter for our inner circle members. And we open up, open up the calendar and kind of like what Jason was saying. The call is very specific. So it is a, a specific call to really talk about, Hey, what are the next steps that are going to be for this upcoming quarter?

How was your last quarter? It's a 25 to 30 minute call one-on-one. We now just changed it where they can book the call. Anytime during that quarter, I used to do it during a certain period of time and it ended up, it didn't benefit the members as much because they might not have needed that during that time, that works well rather than spreading it out throughout the entire course. So every quarter they have that option to schedule a call. We have some members that book it every time, some members that don't use it at all, some members that book it sporadically depending on if they need it, but it's a very specific type of call, very laser focused.

So I think with kind of what Jason was saying is that you could have them fill out like a little questionnaire beforehand, say, I want to talk about this. And it's a very strategy focused call. I also like the ability to it with Cathy was saying where even though they might not want to share all their secrets with everyone, they can still learn from the group.

And knowing that, like, if there was an element there that that would be used for training, that you still could get a lot of value in that group coaching setting. But definitely if you raise your price, then you wouldn't need as many members because one-on-one coaching is it's an amazing opportunity and it's that time resource that you're juggling with that.

So it would just have to. Again, figure out from a numbers wise, what makes sense for you from a time and energy standpoint? But it just, that's what we do inside an inner circle. And it works really well. Our members like it because they're able to see those milestones every quarter and just like from quarter to quarter, it also helps us too, because then we know when they're coming on on the regular office hours, calls what they're working on that quarter.

We have some, you know, just touch points as far as, and contacts of what they're working on. So when they come on the call, it's like, oh, she's working on this, this, this quarter. Let's dig in on that because we had that one-on-one aspect there too. So that's how we incorporate it with our membership.

Paul: I'm going to talk about something totally different. Years ago, about six, seven years ago, we offered. Private one-on-one coaching within an existing membership that we had at the time. It was a very low price membership. And we just wanted to do research on what our members were willing to invest in.

And it also allowed us to get deeper. So we knew better, like what type of offers and things to do. And at that time, Our founding members were paying $97 a year. This is in the photographer niche, and this is, you know, 2015 or 14. And what we, what we found though, is we, these people were paying $8 and something cents a month to get access to us, right.

This whole, you know, initial launch beta launch thing, and we were blood, sweat, and tears giving a lot of energy, a lot of effort, like a lot of things we teach and talk about these days. Cause we've already been through the coals. We've already lived through this many years ago. And what was interesting is we, our confidence has shifted.

We put out an offer and really, we just got jammed up in a family situation and we needed some infusion of temporary money real quick. So we offered out private coaching, a bundle, I think it was 10, 10 sessions for a thousand bucks. So it was a hundred dollars. An hour, you know, and 10 people bought it.

We made 10 grand in a couple of days and we're like, wow. Our members that we think will only give us $8 a month are willing to give us a hundred dollars an hour. This is a very interesting shift. Now we're going to fast forward to today. Our private coaching is $4,000 a month and we only take three people.

Okay. So it's, it's something like there's been an evolution and the main evolution has been nothing really changed except our mindset and confidencel.. And that's the main shift. The main difference. 

Now the main reason why I want to share this with you is because right now, with what you're doing with his initial launch, and you having some of these one-on-one coaching opportunities, you're able to dig in deeper with these people, know their real pain points, get immediate feedback, be able to adjust the pivot.

You should be developing new systems that handle these pain points because one person has it. Another company is going to have it. Your membership could have generalized deliverables that are frameworks, checklist systems that are universally worked for all these clients.. That is not really proprietary, even though they all think they have a different, unique set of problems.

They all most likely have similar problems that you take them through certain things that makes it safe for them to pull off the virtual shelf in the membership. Because the membership could be leveraged in the future for you all the new people coming in, they might get introduced to different price structure.

They might get introduced to a different set of deliverables, you know? So just something that we call this, the dimmer switch, where you're actually over here and you really want to go over here now. Well, we decided that it was in 2019, early two, maybe it's 2018. We sunsetted our original membership.

We're like, you know what? We worked really hard here, blood, sweat, and tears. We're just not getting the return. And we, you know, within the same timeframe, we opened up our "inner circle" membership, which was a much incredible higher price point. You know, we were well beyond, you know getting what we were getting in fraction of what we were doing in that photography thing years ago.

So the interesting thing now is that we were able to take all the expertise, the knowledge and the things that we received through all those one-on-ones that made more clear to actually get a better one-on-one strategy. We developed a VIP day, you know, based on that feedback, we have all these other deliverables.

So these days we have a $10,000 VIP day. We have $4,000 a month private coaching, which is a minimum 6 months.. And then we have our inner circle, which currently, as I'm talking now is, is $997 a month. You know, our goal is we might increase it you know, going into the new year and make it even more exclusive.

But we only have 50 people that come into that. Now none of that would have happened if we weren't where you were a few years ago. So that's what I just, I want to give a blessing for all of us to allow ourselves to have stepping stones. Every decision that you're making right now is not permanent.

It's not permanent. It potentially is a stepping stone that allow you to get clarity for the next thing. So I just want you to, because private coaching is great. We love it because it gets people the fastest possible outcomes cause they make progress. The pain point of the financial commandment is large enough where it's like they show up and they do the things, right.

So w and what's great about that is you have this movement, you have success stories, but it's, it's energy sucking. It's it's time intensive. It, it pulls those resources. You can only do, like you said, you can't have a hundred private clients. Right. So what I would, rather you do is start off with what price point would you like to have.

And, you know, for a monthly membership, forget about the whole like, is, has to be inexpensive because it's new. Your people are spending way. There's just one product, you know, there's one piece of equipment is tens of thousands of dollars, you know, to, to buy one, one piece of equipment. Yeah. So you don't have to go cheap, like what, is it that you would like to receive and then build an offer around it that protects your time, your energy and your financial resources.

So you're very intentional with it and then go into the market with that promise because it's a higher level promise. Hey, this program also includes one-on-one coaching. You know, you get one call a month, but it's nine ninety seven or, you know, whatever, it's 2000 and I know your price points. So compared to what it is right now.

So, but also know is that two years from now, you might have that same price point and eliminate the one-on-one coaching element, all the new members that come in don't get that. And all the ones that were there. No, cause like you're at a great time of the year right now, you know? And whenever somebody listens to this, so this makes it in a podcast it's like wherever you're at, it's always a great time of the year.

So it doesn't really matter. So if you're in the fourth quarter, it's like, oh, I'm so excited. All of you came in and initial initial beta group and the beta program is actually ending at, you know, at the end of the year. And I'm really excited to be able to talk to a few of you to see if you want to continue forward in our new, you know, and say the year program.

And what did I just do? I tried to make this podcast evergreen. So, so what, what I want you to think of though, is that you could technically end cap the deliverable and just identify people that I'd like to move forward into a new offer. You know, you could reinvent the whole thing if you want it to, or you could just change the offer of what you're willing to do, knowing you have your base crowd right now that is like allowing you to eat type thing.

And I don't know, I'm just saying that, every new person that comes in comes in at your new offer that you create it that's really what you want for the deliverable. And then as the people that were already there before, as they churn out, they just disappear. You know, it's just like, you know, cause all of us, when you have a membership model or private coaching model, there's a natural ebb and flow that happens.

So just something new people come into your world. Some people, you know, leave your world. So it'll just, it'll a to. for you. But I just want to at least bring a different, different part of the conversation. And just because I think a lot of us get hung up on like, what we're creating, right.

The second is like this absolute, like in iron, like this is branded, this is what it is forever type thing. And we actually can get the little eraser out and start over, you know, 

David: I think that's so key and you spoke right into my concern in the back of my mind, and that's been a challenge problem that entire entrepreneurial life is trying to get things right at the beginning.

Patty: And here you've just given permission. It's okay. You know, it's more about getting, getting out there and going, it was hard enough just to launch this, you know, this initial founding member launch. And now I'm kind of stuck again, thinking about what is the new deliverable going to be at the newer price point.

So I appreciate that permission to move forward and know that, you know, I can adjust. No, I realize that, but you speaking that out, it makes a big difference. So I appreciate that. Thank you for everyone's suggested 

Paul: And real quick, if they're willing and allowing it, your, your initial founding members are your case studies and testimonials that allow you to get the new people in the future.

That'll come into the program that you really want to put together. There'll be the social proof. You know, just like we were talking on another question, you know, as far as like having 25,000 downloads of a podcast like that to your social proof element is just having that there's testimonials and case studies on the front end.

You can leverage those even if they're not a member in the future. Like that was a real transformation that you helped them with. 

Melissa: Sharon. Did you get your hands? You want to add too?

Sharon: Yeah. I just want to ask what percent increase would you do of your fees if you're now adding this extra one-on-one every quarter?

Cause I understand that would be a good thing to justify why your price is going up. So I started my membership at a low price, $200 a year, and I give tons and tons. And then every time I launch it goes up, but I'm trying to figure out what that, if I add this, it's sort of a justification for the increase in price and what percent would make sense.

Paul: All right. So can I answer, you don't have to justify your price over. And that's, that's where you'll get caught, because if you always do that, then you're going to burn out because you're going to, every time you incrementally move, you're going to be trying to add. 

And the irony, wherever we go in our life, that costs more money.

Typically it's a smaller menu of choices. So everything that actually rises up typically just has a higher perceived value, but in there actually, isn't a lot more things, you know? So, so 

Sharon: rephrase the question then what percent bump at every launch do you think is a good percent about 

Paul: whatever you can sell without getting into your head?

Because the moment you think it's too much, you're going to ruin the sale opportunity, but I'm going to tell you right now we have friends that are in the internet marketing space that all of us know that our big influencers, and it was one conversation that took them from charging like $3,000 for a day, daily consult to $30,000 daily consult.

And it's people that, you know, and it was just one conversation I had with one person that made them flip that switch and people bought at 3000 and then a different group of people bought at 30,000 for the VIP day. So it just something that for, for a lot of us. If you're bringing, if you're doing the same launch and don't bring new people into your world, they're the one that's going to do the comparison.

So they're the one that you're, a lot of people are worried about that, Hey, you were this yesterday and now you're this today. Well, those people didn't buy from you last time they missed out. So, so you can ethically say, Hey, during a launch, you know, this is this last opportunity. We're going to have it at this price.

I'm just letting you know, next time we launched, it's most likely going to be X amount of dollars. If you want to get in early, this is your great opportunity to be able to do it. You can leverage and use it in your messaging during that launch. But at least it tells all your existing audience. This is the last time they, they can come in on this offer.

Sharon: Last time I launched it was this. And now it's this. 

Paul: You don't say no, no, because if you do that, then you're reversing it and you're creating a pain point on it. Cause they're like, well, why would I buy now? I could have bought, you know, nevermind, I'll go find something else in the market because then it's more of a wound, you know, type type thing.

So what you want to do is understand for all of us pricing is very subjective and what's going to happen is a lot of us are going to get caught up on like, what is that percentage? What is, what is the right thing? And there honestly, there's no right thing. It's like, what do you feel comfortable and competent and putting into the market.

And the market will respond as far as how they perceive the transformation, like how important it is for them to get that transformation. And also how you've packaged yourself, like the perceived status of you in that marketplace. And the quick example I always give, I'm going to say two names and don't, I don't want anybody to have like an opinion about the names itself.

I just want you to understand, like the, you already know the perceived authority. And I say these two names, but if, if I, if I said that, if there was a sales page that Oprah put out today with just her face and said, I have a new program is $25,000 and I'm only taking a hundred people buy. And she said nothing else about it.

She would sell out in a matter of minutes, she would just sell out because people they just trust. They were just the authority, the perception, the status, they don't even know like, is it, what is it? I don't know. They don't know. They don't care. They just trust the authorities really high. If Tony Robbins did the same thing, there's a, just a large group of people that would do the exact same thing.

Now we're not positioned and packaged like these people are to our audience, most likely. So we just have to, you have to look at the opportunity to take the time and look at your branding and positioning how you perceive to your audience. And some of us need to do a rebrand. Some of us need to reposition ourselves every once in a while.

We need to reinvest in our business. Maybe it's a branding photo-shoot a better logo that professional did. Maybe our website, you know, we did ourselves. We need to outsource it and pay those thousands of dollars to get some else, to make it more professional looking. How do we look into the market? How has our packaging?

Yeah, cause that, that has a lot of the perceived value, but again, there's no, there's no hard rule of thumb that says you should increase every, every time, 25%, it's something like how much do you want to make rapidly offer around it? That's totally irresistible that protects your time, your energy and your, your financial resources.

And if you feel comfortable and competent own it and go out into the market and you'll attract the people that want that. 

Melissa: Awesome. Great. Now it's a good question. It was a good question. 

David: Thank you very much. 

Melissa: Excellent.