The #1 Mistake Coaches Make (And How to Fix It!)

My prediction, for the next 12 months, groups are going to become significantly more valuable. Group coaching should be at the top of your offering, not the bottom. And while it may not be today, in the near future, the faster you can move to curating people, offering your frameworks to a group as opposed to one on one individual consulting or coaching, the faster you're going to grow, the more value you're going to provide. And candidly, the more rewarding it's going to be. Hey, I'm Gina Bianchini and this is People Magic, where I show you the absolute easiest way to create a $1 million community. Let's go ahead and dive in.

You've said that group coaching programs should be more expensive than individual coaching and consulting, but that feels wrong to me and different from every experience I've had thus far.

Yes. So first of all, this is controversial. This is controversial. We have been taught through social media, through the kind of worship of the individual, that the way to create successful businesses is to be the hero, to be the teacher, to be the person who has the expertise or all of the answers. So what happens in this world where you're a creator and you are an expert in X topic is that there is essentially the sense that you're creating a pyramid with you at the very top having all of the answers, you being the expert. Which means that somebody who GETs to have one on one coaching or consulting with you would pay the most for that because they're going to get your full undivided attention. Well, if your attention and your focus on them is the most valuable thing, how do you actually have a less expensive offering or a less expensive plan that is for more people? Well, by definition, it's my partial attention. Again, if we think about this in terms of a pyramid, my partial attention is still very valuable, but you should get less of it. And then you have to share my attention with other people in a group coaching program. So you've got, you know, consulting or one on one experience with that expert, and then underneath it, at a less expensive level, you have got group coaching. There's one flaw in this. There's a couple flaws in this. But what we know about people is that a pyramid's the wrong way to think about it. Pyramid is just wrong because I might have an expertise. I have an expertise in how to build a community. But where my expertise becomes so much more valuable is when I can use it to bring together people on the same path who are each building their own community and learning from each other in how they're applying the basic principles that for example, I've offered with People Magic and People Magic Prophet. So now all of a sudden the person who is participating in a more active network or a more active community is getting not just my expertise, but how 10 or 20 or 30 people are applying it, where they're running into problems, how they're overcoming solutions, how they're applying it to all of these paid memberships or paid courses or paid challenges or events. That is so much more valuable. You've gone from one person and one person's ideas to being able to cherry pick things that you can learn from more people. So this idea that creators need to live at the top of the pyramid and have all the answers, I think is fundamentally wrong. And it's fundamentally wrong as clients or customers or members, just as it is in terms of the offer that you're putting out there in the world as that creator. While it may feel like having my undivided attention or a creator or expert's undivided attention on your specific business or your specific challenge, you could lean on them more and it's more valuable. I don't actually think that that's true. Just take the example of the concept of a mastermind group. These are incredibly lucrative. They're incredibly important. Again, talk about people paying attention to what they pay for. Masterminds are very expensive. Or there's organizations that have small groups of professionals like something called YPO or Young Presidents Organization. These are people who have businesses that are worth over $10 million. And once a month they get together with 8 to 10, 8 to 12 fellow CEOs and talk about what they are navigating at this point in time. Those are examples not of group coaching, but of elevating the stories, experiences and ideas of other members as the value proposition. So instead of thinking about one on one is the most expensive. I gotta do one on one. And then I'm gonna have group coaching that I'm going to tell everybody is less expensive and therefore less valuable. I'm going to think about it in a different way which says, okay, my value proposition is the framework that I can create and the people that I can bring together who are applying that framework. And maybe I have a baseline membership that isn't very expensive because I am offering a larger group of people that you can meet and more self service if you think about it. So I think what's going to happen in more and more communities or networks, we're certainly building this out on Mighty networks. Software is going to do a Fantastic job of connecting the most relevant members to each other in that kind of membership. So that I will still kind of offer the framework as the creator, as the host, but more people are going to be able to find each other and apply those concepts or that framework to what they're trying to build. And that's going to be really valuable. So I'll be able to charge a premium. I get asked this a lot. Do you ever do one on one coaching or can I hire you as a consultant? And my response is, I'm more valuable to you as the curator of five other people who are exactly at your point navigating the exact same transition. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you some time for us to be able to have one on one conversations. But what I'm really going to do is make sure that even in the cases where I offer one on one time and one on one coaching, it's going to be in the context of five or six or eight other people who you can also lean on, that you can also learn from. And I'm going to charge a premium to anything that I would do one on one. Now I know somebody just jumped to the conclusion of like, well, that doesn't make any sense. Nobody's going to buy my group program. That's more if they can get me for a lower price, here would be my answer to that. Don't offer one on one time. Don't offer one on one coaching. Sometimes it feels like that's the right thing to do because you want to get started right away. Fine, start with that. But as quickly as you can, move to a model where you are highlighting that the value is not just you. The value is you as someone who can unlock a framework for a group of people. And that being a member of that group means you're sharing your stories, your experiences, your ideas with each other so that that group can get better results. And then guess what happens? That group can get better results. They're probably going to bring more people in and I now have a much more scalable business because my one on one time that I was using for one on one consulting or one on one coaching is now much more scalable. I'm able to learn and be more hands on with that smaller curated group. Curated being the value, that's really the value. And I'll get to one thought on that in a moment. But curation is the value. So if I could invest more of my time in the curation and being able to Teach five people at one time and having them apply and learn these things together, the whole group is going to be more successful, myself included. Now compare that to what one on one means. One on one means I'm probably answering the same questions over and over again. I'm getting paid more money to do it. But is that really the way that I'm going to be able to build a scalable network business? A scalable business that puts at its core this concept of people magic, which provides that kind of momentum or flywheel, or network effect, whatever you want to call it. The point is that by unlocking people, every member of that group is going to get more value than anything that I can offer them. One on one. That is a very different way of thinking than that pyramid that exists for many creators and many experts today. One scales, one does not scale. One can be invigorating and rewarding and interesting and where you're going to learn, watching how people are applying it. And the other will be deadening because you are just answering the same question over and over and over and over and over again. Hopefully you're sitting here at this point and you're saying, okay, Gina, I get it, I'm in. I'm going to create that kind of mastermind. I'm going to create those kinds of connections at the membership level. You know, where are the gotchas? This is really important, how you curate a group, whether that's a mastermind, whether that's a small group, whether that's even self organizing groups within your larger membership. You want to make sure that you are finding with great precision who can help each other. And it may not just be, oh, they're in the same geography or they're the same level of business. It might also be stylistically. And there are ways that we can help you with software get to and uncover those things so you don't have to actually interview every single last person. Now today, you might still want to interview every person. If you're charging $17,000 or $27,000 for that kind of very high end mastermind. And by the way, if you hear those numbers and you're like, Gina, what are you talking about? No one should be paying that. Well, if you're running a half a million dollar business and you are ready to level up to a million dollars, you're probably really happy to invest 17 or $27,000 in a mastermind where you will be able to accelerate that goal, accelerate that result, because you're learning from the stories, experiences and ideas of that Creator or expert and the people that they have brought together who are on the same path. So the precision of grouping people or clustering people, that is a place where software, software, like what we're building at Mighty Networks, is going to increasingly get more and more compelling. It's going to make it easier and easier to bring a curated group of people together who have the same intentions, who are at the same level of activation, activity, intention, motivation. And also software is going to be able to increasingly help play the role of building the culture that hopefully is going to take some of those people that talk all the time and dial them back and take some of the people who probably have a phenomenal story to tell, but are a little bit more of a lurker or a little shyer and bring them in. This is all research and development and things that are happening behind the scenes in our R and D lab at Mighty Networks. And it's going to get better and better, which means creating a membership, investing your energy as a creator, not in the same one on one coaching, answering the same exact questions, but rather looking at yourself as a host or a curator who is bringing people to results in transformation that they cannot get on their own over the course of time, because you are bringing them together with allies and people who are again on that same path, navigating that same transition. It is night and day what you're going to be able to charge, how you're going to be able to grow, and ultimately the testimonials that you are going to have from your members who are getting results in transformation that they would never get, never get from the same one on one sessions with you, practicing curation, having events, being able to curate a group of people and really think about what makes a group tick. How does a group go together to higher and higher heights and what are the things that can get in its way? I'll finish on this last point, which is in the world of social media there is this sense because we look at people from the outside on an individual by individual basis. We see somebody who is a, you know, creator is a singular. They have an account for a person. And we talk regularly about, oh, people want to follow people, people want to hear from people. It creates the facade, creates the sense that everybody is just producing content and the quality of their content is what elevates them to the highest heights of followers. The truth. Every single person that you see with more than call it 20,000 followers, has gotten there because they are on a group text thread with other people who are on the same path with the same goal, the same transition of not having a social media following to having a massive social media following. Nobody is getting there by themselves. They are getting there because they are coordinating with, with a small group of people behind the scenes who are relatively at the same level. And they're all figuring out together how they can create a network of comments of wow, that's a great point. Wow, that's really interesting. So that their followers can see this other person and that other person's followers can see this person. It is coordinated. It is community. So when you start with community, you also have more and more people to be able to create a bigger and bigger footprint. That's why I got a lot of people following me on at least one social media platform. But that same concept of curating people and giving and asking that we're talking about as it relates to creating a network, creating momentum, creating a business that grows itself through the power of this type of people magic, that is something each and every one of us who is seeking results and transformation can take to heart and think first about how to create a small group or a network of people on the same path. So my prediction for the next 12 months, groups are going to become significantly more valuable. Group coaching should be at the at the top of your offering, not the bottom. And while it may not be today, in the near future, the faster you can move to curating people, offering your frameworks to a group as opposed to one on one individual consulting or coaching, the faster you're going to grow, the more value you're going to provide and candidly, the more rewarding it's going to be. So with that, I'm Gina Bianchini. This is People Magic and I will see you next time. Thank you for being a part of People Magic. If you want more of a deep dive in any of these topics, but certainly having the framework of People Magic profit, head on over to the website. The link is in the show notes. Have your own burning question about creating People Magic? Well, I want to answer it. So here's what you're going to do. You're going to just drop your question in the review section, wherever you're listening to this podcast and keep tuning in.