How To Design Your First Group Coaching and Consulting Program In Your Digital Agency

In this episode, I want to talk about how to launch your first group coaching or group consulting program inside of your digital agency. Let’s get it going for three years. My agency built funnels and automation systems for the biggest names in marketing today since then have transformed that agency into a hyper profitable training and consulting business. While everyone is out there and talking about scale like it’s some sort of destination, we’ll be asking the real question, how do you transform your business into a more scalable model using the knowledge, skills and expertise that you already have? This podcast is here to give you the answer. Join me and follow along as I learn, apply and share the strategies I’m using to build my multimillion dollar business. My name is Greg Hickman and welcome to scalable, so I just got back from speaking at social media. Yeah, day Denver and I shared a whole presentation on how to prioritize and systemize your agency....These are topics that we’ve been talking about on, you know, our YouTube channel on our podcast now for over a year, but one of the pieces really stood out to the audience that I wanted to share with you today and that was [inaudible] how to package up your agency expertise, your agencies skill sets, your agency services and launch your first group coaching or group consulting program. Now this is something that we teach our clients and we go way deeper on. So if that’s something that you’re interested in and you want our help extracting your expertise and showing you step by step how to turn that into clients and really get your first five to 10 clients in the next 90 days, click the link below system.ly forward slash foundations schedule a call and we love to jam and see if we can help you out. Now, the key piece here is that might be different for some of you agency owners is right now you offer a wide variety of services likely to a wide variety of clients and the kind of process that you go through to figure out what it is you’re going to sell.

A current client might start with a paid audit or a free audit or you have a retainer and you offer a wide variety of services or you send a proposal that has you know, 10 deliverables on it with 10 service offerings and the prospect cherry picks that and tells you what they want and all of those things are reasons why you would have trouble launching your first group coaching and consulting program because a key to launching your first group con group coaching or a group consulting program is to sell an outcome. Very similar to productizing your service. The, the notion is that it is a fixed deliverable with a fixed time frame and you’re selling a specific outcome and in your agency might be selling recurring services, some sort of maybe Facebook ad management or ongoing creative services like social media marketing or maybe you’re, you’re actively building out automation and managing certain software that they use.

Whatever it is, the goal is you have to start packaging these things up into solving a specific problem. So I wanted to walk you through a very high level process that I think through and we take our clients through to start distilling down what your group coaching and group consulting program might look like and the problem that it’s actually going to solve. And then how do we reverse engineer that into what might the deliverables look like? Because so often you see as your agency, it’s a retainer and sometimes you don’t even know what you’re going to be working on the following month or six months down the road, let alone are you even gonna have that client around at that point. So let’s jump over to the iPad and jump right in. So the key narrative here is we have to sell an outcome. We have to sell a result that the prospect is looking for.

This is why I always mention that if you serve a wide variety of avatars or have a wide variety of the types of clients you serve, selling a specific outcome is usually a little bit more difficult. But when you saw when you serve a particular type of client, for example, we serve digital, digital agency, own digital agency owners. Um, we know what problems they have and we know what they need so we can create solutions for them. But if I serve digital agency owners and I served chiropractors and dentists and all of these nonprofits, it would get a little bit harder to sell a specific outcome that they would all care about. So what you need to ask yourself is think about your ideal client, right? Think about what they look like, um, what they think about when they go home at night, what keeps them up.

And you really want to identify the pain and or problem that they are suffering with. The first iteration of this as you start thinking through the pain or the problem might actually be a symptom and so you’re going to need to ask yourself, is this a symptom or is this the problem? Typically I keep trying to peel back the layers of the onion to uncover deep down what the pain or problem is. Then on the right side in the green, you would look at the result that they want. Now a a storyline or a narrative that might help you in this instance that I’ve heard from a handful of people but most recently a guy by the name of Zion Kim, he talked about a framework called escape versus arrival and so you have to look at your clients and think about what are they trying to escape from?

What situation are they trying to escape from? What problems or frustrations or pain are they trying to escape from and what is the arrival like? Where are they trying to arrive at? What does that look like? What does life look like there? What does business look like when they have arrived at the final destination that they are looking to arrive at? So it’s kind of looking at this escape versus arrival narrative. And once you figure out what those are for your clients, this is where you need to ask yourself and look at your, your knowledge, your expertise, all of that and say, what are the major milestones or major outcomes that one might experience escaping this existing pain or problem and arriving over here at the desired result. And you’d want to obviously Mark down those major milestones. And let’s just for the sake of the example, say that there are five.

So there’s five major milestones and those are things look, that might look like a specific deliverable or maybe a specific system as launched or a piece of the puzzle is now in place. That is getting them one step closer to achieving that result or arriving at that result. Now you understand that, okay, when I’m selling this result, I have kind of five major milestones that I need to focus on getting my client to before they’ve arrived at the final destination. So this should start compartmentalizing. What sort of activities do need to be helping them with? What resources might you need? What type of people might you need on your team in order to get them to these milestones? This also will start to lead you into the fact that there might be services and things that you offer right now that you don’t even need, which means you get to remove those and if there are specific people on your team or that you contract that are expensive, that typically deliver those things, there’s a good chance that you can now remove that from your overhead, which is going to simplify your business.

I mean it’s not complex anymore or a less complex, which is going to be easier for you to grow. So when you figured out the escape to arrival and you have these five major milestones, what you want to do is you want to zoom in and say, okay, if I were to get started with someone and they have this pain or problem, what are, let me pick a different color here. What are the steps that I would take? The sub milestones, the sub outcomes to get from zero to two milestone one and from milestone one to milestone three, two and so on and so forth. And now I’m just drawing three lines, assuming that there are three but there might be many more. And now you start to have these sub milestones and the sub milestones are going to be activities and things that you need to work on in order to get them to the first major milestone.

Hopefully this is all making sense. And so you’re gonna look at and say with, when I look at these, these three steps, what are the activities? Let me simplify my marker here. What are, you know, what are the activities, the checklist, the things that I need to do or that me and my client need to do together too. Hit the first major milestone. And if you do this all the way through from the place that they’re trying to escape from to where they are trying to arrive at, you will now have extracted your process that you’re going to go through to get your client that result. The next stage is selling that. So now we have this, this journey that we take our clients on and you need to package that up into one specific offering and put one specific price on it and you’re going to need to take clients through this process and figure out how long it takes for them to get through this entire thing.

And you’re going to want to do it as a a beta program. I highly recommend selling it before you building, before you build it. And that’s exactly what we teach our clients. So they go out there and they get five to 10 clients. We like the number of five to 10. Um, because it gives you enough variants to figure out what pieces of this process do you like, do you not like will you need help with are actually valuable to the ideal prospect. So just mapping this out is only the first piece. Getting clients through it is going to allow you to refine and simplify how you actually even get them there. Are there pieces missing that need to be added in order to get them to this result? Are there pieces that can be removed? Because now they’re getting overwhelmed. So there is a process of iteration and repetition in delivering some sort of pilot program or beta experience to get your clients through this result.

And that’s pretty much how you launched your first program. You’re going to take them live through this experience and you’re going to be asking them for feedback and figuring out exactly what steps need to be utilized and resources, et cetera, to get them from the pain or problem to the result that day or looking to get to. And that’s how we recommend selling your [inaudible] packaging and selling your first group coaching and group consulting program within your agency. Now, a key warning, okay. Ideally and highly recommend that the first program is complimentary to the existing services that you offer, possibly even helping people get to the exact same result that your existing service offers just in a more leverage done with you way versus you doing all of the labor. If you, for example, build funnels for dentists, right? And you then create this program that is targeting a different type of client, solving a different problem that’s essentially launching a new business.

We want to focus on launching this program, this, this end to end solution as a compliment, as an add on, a bolt on or it just a different wrapper to deliver the exact same result that you are already delivering within your agency that will make your agency way more profitable once you get it launched and start growing it and scaling it. And when, when you do it that way, what we end up doing is you have what your maybe agency revenue looks like at right now and over time you surpass and replace that revenue with the revenue from. So this is services and this is coaching and consulting and that’s the transition we’re trying to make. We’re not trying to just add on a bunch of little coaching and consulting programs that aren’t complimentary and allowing us to focus on growing this main source of revenue.

We really want it to be complimentary, right? That’s why I want you guys to focus on how do you either take the existing result that you deliver clients and take them through this process. Or maybe there’s a complimentary result that, um, is a supplement or again a compliment to existing services that you offer that you can use for your first group coaching or a group consulting program. I hope you found this helpful. If you are a digital agency owner and you want us to take you through our step-by-step proven process to do just this and get your next five to 10 clients in this offering in the next 90 days, then click the link below or visit system dot L Y forward slash foundations and you can learn a little bit more and schedule a call to talk to myself and or someone on the team to make sure it’s a good fit.

If it’s not, we will be the first one to tell you. And that’s pretty much all I got for you guys today. So I hope you enjoy this episode. If you’re enjoying, if you’re watching on YouTube, give us a thumbs up and a subscription. And if you’re on iTunes or wherever you listen to the audio, we would love a rating and review in iTunes helps us get in front of more digital agency owners just like yourself. So if you guys have a good one and talk soon, Hey, are you looking for that cool place to hang on the internet with all the people just like you? Well, I got it for you. If you want to learn the best strategies, tips, and tools to productize and automate your business, visit system dot L Y for slash community to join our free private community and continue the conversation. We’ll see you there.