Should You Start a Group Coaching Program? Here’s How to Know If You’re Ready

We’re not going to try to convince you one way or another if you should or should not create a group program. Rather, we want to help you recognize when the timing is right, if this is something you do want to add.

Why One-on-One Coaching Must Come First

We really, truly believe that one-on-one coaching must come first, and this is because one-on-one coaching is the foundation for all of your other programs.

The Practice Factor

The number one reason we recommend one-on-one coaching first is because of the practice factor. It’s really where you’re going to develop your actual coaching skills in real time. You’re going to learn how to ask the right questions, how to handle difficult conversations, how to navigate all sorts of financial situations, and in a much easier setting compared to working with a group.

What happens in those one-on-one sessions you really can’t replicate anywhere else. You’re forced to think on your feet and to adapt your approach based on what each individual client needs, and to develop your intuition about when to push and when to pull back.

Learning What Actually Works

Working with individuals is really how you figure out what actually works versus what you think should work. Just because you have a beautiful framework or flow inside of your head, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to translate well into how things are actually going to go working with your clients.

When you’re working one-on-one, you’re going to be able to start recognizing common stumbling blocks that nearly every client is going to face, that you simply don’t recognize until you’ve seen it in practice. Some things are going to take longer than you anticipate. Some things people won’t even be interested in at all that you thought were going to be earth-shattering and amazing for them.

Pattern Recognition

As you’re working with individuals, you’re really going to see that there are so many patterns, and that’s really what you’re starting to look for. You need to have that pattern recognition in order to formulate and create an effective group coaching program.

You’re looking for the common challenges that keep coming up, the same resistance points, the same breakthrough points, or places where people really get a big aha or area of growth. This pattern recognition becomes the foundation for effective group programming.

The Problems with Jumping Straight to Groups

Jumping straight into group coaching can actually be pretty problematic. If you haven’t developed your coaching skills individually, you’re going to wind up trying to manage group dynamics while also figuring out how to coach at the exact same time. It’s like trying to conduct an orchestra before you’ve ever learned to play a single instrument.

What’s most likely to happen in a group setting is that you are going to become a financial educator and not a financial coach. It’s going to be very easy for you to create content and to lecture on that content and call it a day. This is totally different than being a coach and guiding people to their own realizations, helping to get them engaged in conversation, drawing them to their own ahas or recognition of places where they’re finding themselves stuck.

Three Signs You’re Ready for Group Coaching

Maybe you’re thinking, “I’ve been coaching for a year or two years, I’ve helped a whole bunch of people. I see some of the trends. I feel pretty confident as a coach, so maybe now’s the time.”

Let’s talk about how you can recognize some of the signs that maybe a group coaching program is going to be the next step. We’ve pulled these from helping dozens of other financial coaches, observing when it’s been successful for those who have launched group programs or memberships, and why it worked so well for them compared to those that tried and flopped.

Sign #1: You’re Tapped on Time and Volume

A group program might be right for you if you are very tapped on time and volume of people that you can support. This doesn’t mean tapped on time in the sense of you only have four hours a week to work on your business. I mean tapped on time in that you are fully booked out with clients. You’ve got demand from them. You’ve got people reaching out, and you’re having to tell them no or put them on a wait list.

This is a very good sign that it might be an appropriate time to launch a group program. You want to be able to better leverage your time, and you’ve proven that there’s demand for your services. So many people think upfront, “I want to leverage my time” simply because they want to have more free time, which makes sense, but if you don’t have proven demand for your services, it’s probably not going to work.

Sign #2: You Have a Large, Engaged Audience

The second instance where it seems to work quite well to launch a group program or membership is that you have a large audience already. Maybe you have a very large online presence. Maybe you’ve got a podcast, a YouTube channel, a social media following. You’ve got people out there who are watching you, who are learning from you. You maybe have a large email list who’s opening and engaging with your emails.

But we want to make sure that this audience is engaged. It is very hard to fill a group program when you only have a few dozen people on your email list or 100 or 200 followers on your social media. You really want to have thousands of people in your audience, and you want them to be engaged.

So people are commenting on your posts, they’re engaging in your stories, they’re opening your emails or responding to them. They’re consistently downloading your podcasts or engaging with the podcast or YouTube and leaving comments. These are all signs that you may have the necessary volume of eyes on you, that a group or membership offering is going to be viable.

Sign #3: You Have a Unique Niche That Services the Masses

The third thing is that you have a unique niche that services the masses. This means that you are someone who works with large groups as your niche. This can work really well with coaches who have specifically built their group program or membership to be marketed to the large congregations of people that they go around and speak to.

We’ve got a couple of coaches in the mastermind right now, and that is their niche. They mentor pastors and churches and they travel around and they speak and they can offer their group membership program to the entire congregation who was there to listen to them. They’ve got hundreds of people who are listening to them speak, and are all primed to take action. And this doesn’t necessarily have to mean church congregations either. Any niche that has a group of people in a similar situation or of a similar mindset. Think: community groups, parenting groups, etc.

The Demand Must Already Be There

What we really want you to see here is that with all of these instances, the demand is already there. This is one of the biggest things that coaches get wrong. They believe that if they build a group program, it will attract the masses, but instead, you really want to focus on attracting people first and then providing the offering for them once you have people there to fill it.

There is nothing more disheartening than building a group program and then only having one person join it. I made that very mistake when I started out. Almost a decade ago, when I first started out as a financial coach, I saw other online group programs, and I thought this was totally the way to do it. I spent weeks creating content, a landing page, marketing, running a seven-day challenge to wind up with one person in my group program, someone who paid me $397 for three months of coaching. My hourly rate for this probably wound up being something like five dollars or maybe less for all of the work that I put into it.

Don’t be like me.

Build the audience first, build the coaching skills first, learn what people actually want and need, and create a program that’s going to align with what they want.

Benefits of Group Programs

If you do meet the criteria above, let’s talk about some of the benefits of a group program, because it’s really good for you to wrap your mind around why this is actually valuable.

People Feel Less Alone

There can be something really magical that happens when your clients realize that they’re not the only one that’s having trouble with their money. Hearing from someone else in the group share the exact fear or limiting belief or problem that they’re having with their money creates this instant connection and relief that cannot be created in individual sessions.

We’ve certainly seen over the years where we’ve had clients that show up and say, “Is anyone else having trouble like this? Is this happening for anyone else?” And the cool thing about a group program is that people instantly get that answer.

The Hive Mind Effect

Group settings can create an amazing learning opportunity, where members can start to learn from each other. They learn from each other’s questions, each other’s breakthroughs. We’ve seen where one person might ask a question, and then it unlocks something for three other people in the group. People will often say, “Oh my gosh, I didn’t even think of that” or “I’ve been wondering the same thing too, but I just didn’t want to be the one to ask it.”

Natural Accountability

There’s more accountability that happens oftentimes in a group setting. Members start holding one another accountable. Friendships develop. People see others committing to their goals, and they want to do the same thing. So it’s sort of this very positive peer pressure, where other people see those in the group doing positive things with their money, and then they also want to do positive things with their money so they can sort of be part of the fun and the celebration.

We’ve consistently seen that people implement faster in group settings, because there is this natural motivation that comes from not wanting to be left behind, or not wanting to be the only one that didn’t do the work.

Structured Content Delivery

You can really structure your content in delivery in a more strategic flow. In one-on-one coaching, things can definitely get thrown off track by what’s happening in that individual person’s life. In a group setting, it typically is a lot easier to stick to the plan and to the structure and guide people through a specific concept or framework that you want to be delivering.

Leverage and Scalability

From a business perspective, a group program or membership is definitely a way to serve more people without trading hours for dollars. It opens up the possibility of lowering the price point, serving people who may not be able to afford one-on-one coaching. It’s not about making less money, but it’s about making your expertise more accessible.

Once you’ve created an effective group program, you can maybe run it multiple times, you can refine it based on what you learn, and potentially even create different levels or specializations.

Elevated Expertise

Successfully running a group program positions you as someone who can guide multiple people through a transformation, which enhances your credibility in the market in a way that’s different from one-on-one success stories. Group programs can become a really incredible source of content for social media, email newsletters, other marketing efforts, because you’re constantly creating valuable insights through your group work.

Action Steps If You’re Ready

If you’ve listened to all of this and you’re thinking, “Yep, this sounds great. I can see that I’m in a good place where I’m ready for a group program,” here’s what we want to do next.

Assess Your Current Situation

First, we want you to really honestly assess what you’re doing right now. Count how many one-to-one clients you’ve worked with, and really evaluate whether you see clear patterns in their challenges and breakthroughs, because this is what’s going to really help you to create that foundation or format for your group coaching.

Take time to document that process. Write it down. Think about the typical client journey, the common obstacles you help them overcome, the frameworks that you use most frequently, and put this all in a list form. This documentation is really going to be the foundation for that group program.

Ensure Your Foundation is Solid

You also really want to look at your current business and just make sure that your one-on-one practice is consistent, it’s profitable, and you’ve got systems in place for your client management, because adding group work is only going to make things feel a bit more complicated.

We don’t want to shift focus to working with a group and let everything else fall apart with one-on-one clients. They are your foundation. They are the thing that creates the steady revenue that’s coming in, that creates the referrals, the word of mouth that keeps you going.

Start Small

Instead of starting right away with a full-blown group program, you might want to consider starting with a small workshop, a mini program, like something that gives you a taste of the group dynamic before you’ve made a major investment of time and energy marketing something that is much more long term.

Try doing some workshops. Try doing a seven-day challenge, try a one-month something, but start a little bit smaller to bite it off and just see:

How do I like this? Do I enjoy working with the group? What things didn’t I like about it? What did I learn along the way?

Build Based on Your Strengths

When you do get around to designing your group program, you want to make sure that you are building it based on your strengths and the things that you love to help people with the most, not copying what other people are doing.

Think about what you love helping people with the most, and what gets the biggest transformation and biggest aha from your clients. Build your program around that. If you love helping people get out of debt, make your group program specific towards tackling debt. If you love helping people figure out how to reach financial independence, make it specific about that.

Set Clear Boundaries

You want to be very explicit about creating clear boundaries and expectations within the group. You actually need to spell out what’s included in the group program, what level of individual or one-on-one support is available or not, and what results people can realistically expect, because the results people get one-on-one are probably going to be a little bit different than what they would be in a group setting.

Consider Your Capacity

Make sure that you can maintain both your one-on-one work and the group work. We want to make sure that you’re doing this in a way that isn’t going to burn you out. Take some time to really think about your bandwidth, how often you might want to roll out a group program, so that you can continue doing the work that you love.

Your Next Steps

Here’s my challenge for you. If you have been thinking about launching a group program, but maybe you’re feeling like you’re not quite there yet, just commit to working with five to ten more people. Put it on your calendar and then revisit this idea once you’ve got a bit more one-on-one experience under your belt.

And if you do think that you’re ready, pick one specific challenge that your clients are consistently facing, and design a short program around solving that very specific problem.

Remember, the goal is not to create a group program just for the sake of having one, but we want to have it to serve more people effectively while maintaining the quality of transformation that you’re known for.

The key is getting the timing right. Build your skills first, create demand, then serve that demand with something amazing.