Helping a Client Get Value Without Compromising on Quality

A premium health coach who had already built a successful 12-week course came to me, wanting to think bigger about her offering.

Her members were thrilled with the program she already offered but kept asking for a longer, more immersive experience to help them properly integrate the work.

The course itself was a powerhouse of knowledge that yielded life-transforming results.

She knew that turning it into a 12-month experience, couldn’t just be about stretching out the existing material. And she was really quick to realize that a run-of-the-mill solution simply wouldn’t be enough.

She asked for my help in tackling three main objectives:

1. To deliver an exceptional member experience that taught members how to heal and provided a safe space for them to walk through the journey. And we were going to do that while keeping community operations as low lift as possible for the internal team.
2. To remove the pressure on the leader as the only source of leadership within the community. The experience would be much richer if members embraced her accredited coaches, as well as the advice they received from peers.
3. To lessen the burden of the high-stress, high-budget product launches so that she could lessen her load and focus on serving her community in deeper ways.

Here’s how we tackled this community transformation.

Instead of looking at her offer as a 12-week course, we started viewing it as the first chapter in a 12-month transformational journey.

Through customer research, we carefully mapped out what members needed to learn and the efforts they’d have to invest for true life changes. We then used that to intentionally design a year-long experience that would support members at each critical milestone.

Now that the course has become a community experience, here’s what it looks like:

Members join the community and get immediate access to the course content, related resources, and forums where they can meet others and ask questions. They spend about 12 weeks studying weekly lessons, taking action, and getting support as they learn how to transform their lives using this coach’s methodology.

Once the learning period is over new opportunities unlock. Members continue to have access to the coaching calls and the course they just took, but they’re also invited to partake in other activities that help them continue to grow.

This can include attending masterclasses, tuning into private podcasts, getting matched for conversations with like-minded members, and access to one-on-one opportunities with the community coaches.

To keep the workload reasonable for everyone, we made the following operational updates:

1. We removed all features and activities that were not directly tied to the community’s mission and core member needs.
2. We hired an experienced community manager with a passion for the topic at hand. And we gave her some specific goals for her to achieve.
3. We re-delegated some of the work the leader was doing and revamped the coaching role to include more member presence and activities.
4. We introduced coaches much earlier in the member journey so that they felt like an intentional part of the experience rather than an afterthought.
5. We put systems and resources in place to support anyone with a role to play in the community. This included playbooks for the community team, resources for coaches, tutorials and FAQ’s for members.

While we’re still gathering success metrics for this launch. This newly minted community leader is poised to roll out a year-long (and beyond) experience that offers an engagement level she’s never seen in her industry before.

She’s both fulfilling her members’ desire for a longer-term engagement and extending the customer lifetime value for the students that were in her program. The best part is that she’s managed to extend the timeframe without bulking up her workload allowing her to help even more people.