In this People Magic episode, Gina Bianchini addresses the chronic burnout many consultants, coaches, and creators experience when juggling one‑on‑one high‑ticket coaching, constant social‑media output, and email list management. She argues that the root cause is an over‑reliance on high‑touch, low‑scale work and proposes a shift toward finite, small‑group cohorts and membership communities that generate peer‑to‑peer value. Bianchini outlines how to design a 4‑6‑week cohort with a clear beginning, middle, and end, choose pricing, and automate social channels to free energy for cohort creation. She shares a real‑world example of scaling a professional mastermind from 8‑12 members to thousands of groups worldwide, emphasizing monthly themes, weekly calendars, and daily actions. The episode warns against freemium communities as a burnout trap and explains the “feast‑or‑famine” cycles both for consultants who must constantly sell and for product‑launch‑based businesses that depend on periodic launches. To break these cycles, she suggests a weekend sprint to translate consulting expertise into a cohort or membership, focusing on identifying a compelling life transition, crafting a vivid “best‑year‑ever” vision, and mapping a community design plan. The ultimate goals are revenue diversification, a self‑sustaining membership that fuels itself through member referrals, and a more durable consulting business.
Chapters
Where do you get the most energy? I've observed, especially recently, that folks who are already trying to do all of these different platforms and have a following and build an email list and do high-ticket one-on-one coaching, they're tired. And I think there's a better way. As you are comparing coaching to community to small group coaching, one-on-one high-ticket coaching, I would just say the pros of one-on-one high-ticket coaching are that you just don't need very many people to do it. The flip side is if you are already feeling pretty spent, it's hard to get super excited about that kind of intensity of that one-on-one coaching. Here's the thing that I would encourage you to think about next. Number one, create a small group cohort. Okay. So a cohort that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Let's call it 4 to 6 weeks. Do something that is finite, that is about scale before just assuming you should do one-on-one coaching and do one-on-one coaching plus all your social media stuff, plus your email list, plus your community. And instead say, okay, can I put social on autopilot for a while? Can I utilize my subscribers for my newsletter into a sales engine for this? Let's call it a four-week cohort. And then can you charge a significant amount of money for that four-week cohort? Whether it is fifty-nine dollars, whether it's a thousand dollars, it depends on what is that transition. That you are tapping into. So what you might want to start to play with is how can you do this in a scalable way? Now, if you want to have one-on-one coaching, you could do that, but I wouldn't start there. I think that's the kind of thing that you can decide after you've got this engine running, whether or not you want to layer it on top of it versus starting with one-on-one coaching and then trying to add the community after. I think at that point you'll just be really, really tired. Start with something that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Use that beginning, middle, and end to then launch into a community where you are connecting people to each other so that they're actually the ones who are coming back for each other, not you and not your content and not your one-on-one coaching. Do that for 90 days and then Think about whether or not you want to layer on top of it one-on-one coaching. I'd also add, what could you do to focus on one, not 10 or even 5 social media channels at one time? That could save you a tremendous amount of energy that I would funnel into how can I create this cohort where I'm gonna actually help people make friends? And I've actually done this. I helped a friend of mine start a very successful professional mastermind of, you know, 8 to 12 people and scaled it to 30,000 of these groups around the world. And when you can do that in a self-service way such that they are finding value from each other, the, the quest that you set up for them, the Monthly themes, weekly calendar, daily actions that scales so much faster. So hopefully that's helpful. The only thing I will say that I would not do is don't do a freemium community, whatever you do. It's just you are, you are literally going to burn out as a creator if you try to scale a freemium community, whether your freemium is on a, you know, a Facebook group or, you know, Something else, and then you have these programs, and then you have, you know, one-on-one coaching. I personally think you can always add one-on-one coaching later after you understand or validate of your social media following. Can you get enough of them at a high enough ticket price to act? And then they're taking care of each other. It's actually much less work to run a community than it is to do one-on-one coaching. And then you can always add one-on-one coaching later. The feast or famine is one of the most challenging dynamics. So I just wanna acknowledge that. So there's the flavor of feast or famine where it's just like, where are my next clients coming from? Especially if you're doing project work or in the economy where people are like, oh, I can't afford you as a consultant anymore. You're constantly selling. Let's tackle that In this episode, but I also want to acknowledge a different feast or famine dynamic, which is if you're selling a course, a one-time course or a cohort where you're always doing what's called you know open or closed cart. You're like building towards a launch, and the launch happens on X date, and then whatever happened during that launch. You have like 6 months or 6 weeks or some set period of time, or even just a one-time course fee that becomes your entire business. So if you had a great launch, you're golden, you're feasting. And if you had a bad launch, you don't have another opportunity to create a feast for quite some time. So this is a dynamic. I'm gonna focus on the, I'm Constantly selling as a consultant. So there are a lot of amazing things about being a consultant. You get to work on really interesting projects. You're not beholden to any one company or any one boss. It's nice. You get to apply your expertise and your knowledge to new challenges and new interesting situations. But it also means that in this moment, especially where it's so dynamic, companies are coming, companies are going, opportunities are coming and opportunities are going, that even if you have built a consulting business where you have a couple of anchor clients, those anchor clients can go away. That sucks. And so not only are you constantly selling, you're, you're doing everything you can to have a longer sales cycle as well. So the benefit of thinking about just taking a beat with a consulting business and saying, okay, I am going to stop selling and networking and doing all the things to get proposals out and make sure that, that I'm able to sell. And instead, what if you took a weekend and thought about how you could translate your expertise? And you don't really even need expertise, but into a course or a membership. So let's talk about what that could look like. Like if you were my friend and you're like, Gina, I'm coming and I'm staying with you at your house because we're going to be up and running with a new idea after this weekend, what would I do? The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to listen for what in your consulting business could be translated into helping a group of people through a transition. So people pay attention to what they pay for. The most motivated people in the entire world are people who are going through a transition, whether that is that they just graduated from college and they're starting their first job, or they're becoming a manager for the first time, or they are getting married, they're getting divorced, they are tackling a new hobby or a new skill or the next level of that hobby or skill. So I'm going to be listening for what could your expertise translate into as a transition that you can help people through. The single most important thing that you can do to get out of feast or famine is to start with a really compelling transition and then understand how to articulate and paint a picture for people of their best year ever. What does it look like when they have made it through that transition, that they're on the other side and they have achieved results or a transformative experience that they would never have gotten on their own without you and the other members of the community or the membership or cohort that you've brought together? That is what you are listening for. Then we'll probably stop, have some cocktails, maybe even a pizza. And we'll get into what should we call it? What should we map out as what we call the community design plan? So that's what are the monthly themes? What's a weekly calendar? And then daily actions. And then we'll work on your offer as we pick a price. Then we'll lay out the launch plan. And then you're gonna sit there and instead of going through your network to think about how you're gonna sell consulting projects, You're gonna open your contacts and we are going to together craft your big purpose, which is you take I or we bring together and then who you're bringing together in which transition so that we can have our best year ever and what that looks like and what that means to have your best year ever. That's the promise. That's what you're building. And then we're going to launch it. You're going to do it first as like a one-time challenge or a one-time cohort. And what are you going to get out of all of this that is different from your business today? Number one, you're going to have revenue diversification. You're going to be creating a framework for people to go and do together in their lives. And the whole goal is that you are hosting this membership so that people are able to meet and build relationships with each other, to help each other build practices or change their habits in ways that only happens with them taking action, not consuming your videos, not consuming your content, but taking action. You're gonna have a stronger foundation because you have this revenue diversification. And number 2, you might also find yourself in a situation where you're going to learn so much more about how to provide value to people that you can now grow that revenue stream of a membership that essentially grows itself. And it's going to give you insights into how do you create a more durable and sustainable consulting business as well. So that is the best way to think about Feast or Famine. And I would say that what's really essential when you're running a membership and really looking for that ongoing revenue stream, the key thing to just remember is you're creating a party where you want your members to be inviting other members in versus a funnel that's like, I have to always be the person pouring people into and paying for people to get into the top of the funnel, and then I squeeze them out at the bottom. and no one else is expected to do anything, that's going to continue to be a tougher road. So with that, hopefully that's helpful. I'm Gina Bianchini. This is People Magic. If you want to know exactly how to build a $1 million community, click the link in the description to get access to our full free course.
