If you're a one-on-one coach who wants to scale, the question I get more than any other is what kind of group program should I build first? Because there are many different kinds, mainly three, and most coaches start with the wrong one. You're booked out, you can only raise rates so high, and every time you sit down to plan a group program, you're looking at memberships, group coaching, and self-paced courses with no clear way to decide which one is the right first move. After 17 years designing learning experiences for adults and now helping coaches turn their one-on-one methodologies into group programs, I see the same pattern all the time. Coaches will default to the format they think they're supposed to build instead of the one that actually fits where they're at. Today, I'm going to walk you through the main three kinds of group programs and which one you should build first. We'll look at what that actually looks like with a real example from my own client roster, and I'll give you the two questions that help you figure out what your first group program should look like. When most coaches think about group programs, they're usually picturing a specific thing. But there are actually three different formats, and the one most coaches picture in their head is not the one I tell you to build first. The three most common formats are a live class, group coaching, or a membership. A live class is where you teach a specific topic to a group of people in real time over a few weeks. Group coaching is where you're working with multiple people through a process, usually with calls and some self-paced material in between. And a membership is where people pay a recurring fee for ongoing access to content, community, or both. Now, these aren't hard categories, they're more of a scale. A lot of the best group programs end up mixing elements from all three. A live class might have a community component built in. A membership might include monthly group coaching calls. So when I talk about the three types, I really mean the three starting points that coaches usually choose between. But the starting point still matters because what you build first sets up everything that comes after. Here's the format you should build first. You don't need a membership platform. You don't need months of pre-recorded content. You don't need to design a community space and figure out how to keep it active. You need a topic, a structure, and a way to get a group of people on a call over a few weeks. That's it. It's a live class and the simplicity matters. If you're already feeling suffocated by your overflowing calendar, you don't have the time right now to build elaborate programs. You need something to help stop the overwhelm. And there's another reason I tell every coach to start with a live course, because what happens after the class is finished is where the magic is. Every live class you teach becomes a piece of content you can reuse and refine. Run a few different classes over the course of a year, and you've got a small content library. Once that library is big enough, you've got the foundation for a membership if you decide to build one later. So you're not just building one class. That's the first thing to know. Live class first, because of where it leads. But knowing the format is one thing. Figuring out what your first live class should be about is where most coaches get stuck. Because most coaches try to brainstorm the topic for their first live class from scratch. And that is making it so much harder than it needs to be. So I want to tell you an easier way to do this. I work with a book coach who ran into exactly this. Her one-on-one roster was full, and she was feeling really overwhelmed. She wanted to scale her business, but there are only so many hours in a day, and all of hers were used up. So I sat down with her, and instead of brainstorming a topic from scratch, we looked at all the problems that were coming up repeatedly with every new writer who came through her door. Things like, what's the message of your novel? What are the building blocks of storytelling? There's a whole vocabulary and set of concepts that experienced writers take for granted, and new writers just don't have it yet. She was spending the first few months with every client, covering that same foundation before the deeper coaching work could even begin. So we pulled that foundational material out and built her first live class around it. Instead of covering it one-on-one with every new client over the course of months, now she teaches it to up to 50 writers at a time. It's the same material, but now she's spending a fraction of the time on it and earning more income than she could with only one-on-one coaching. And here's the part that surprised her. Her one-on-one coaching got better because of it. The clients who come through the live class first already understand the basics. They were speaking the same language she was. So when they started their one-on-one work, they were further along and making faster progress. She wasn't spending those first few months getting people up to speed anymore. She could go straight into the deep work. So that's what it looks like for a book coach. She took the foundational material she was already covering with every new client and turned it into a class. So how do you actually do this for yourself? I do it with every coach the same way, and it comes down to two questions. These questions work because the topic isn't something you need to invent, it's a pattern already showing up in your one-on-one work. The questions just make the pattern visible. The first question is: what's the one thing that keeps coming up with every single client? The thing you have to help them through before the real work can start. For the book coach I just mentioned, it was foundational storytelling concepts. A business coach might say it's getting clear on their niche. Every coaching niche has some version of this, something you find yourself covering over and over with every new person who walks through the door. The second question is: what's a quick win you can give someone around that? Something where they walk away feeling like they made real progress instead of sitting through weeks of sessions wondering if anything is happening. Because when you're designing a live class, you want people to feel movement. That's what keeps them engaged, and that's what makes them want to keep working with you. You take the answers to those two questions, and you've got the foundation of your first live class. The thing all your clients need first, delivered in a way that gives them a clear win. If you're already thinking about what your version of this looks like, what a foundational topic might be, and who you'd fill a class with, that's a good sign. But the work doesn't end there because knowing your topic and your audience is only the first step in your group program development. That's why I'm offering free program roadmap calls this month, and I've got a few spots left. These are 60-minute calls where I look at your specific situation and help you figure out if a group program is right for you and what that might look like. Here's what happens on the call. You walk me through what you help people achieve and who your ideal clients are. From there, we figure out how to translate your one-on-one methodology into a group format. Then we work through which type of group program fits your situation best, whether that's live group classes, self-paced content with live coaching calls, or even a membership program. You walk away with a real picture of what you're building and what to do next. If it makes sense for us to keep working together after that, we can talk about it. Either way, you leave with a clear path for how to keep growing your business even when your calendar doesn't have room for another client. The link to book is in the show notes. You've been listening to Program Design for Coaches. I'm Dr. Curtis Satterfield, and if no one's told you lately, you've got what it takes to build your program. I'll talk to you in the next one.