You want to make more money and spend less time in your coaching business. And you figured out the answer is a group program. And you can start building it fast and getting paid fast without losing years of your life to a project that just drags on and on. Today, I'm covering three things. The trap that keeps coaches stuck before they begin, the one move that saves you time while earning you more, and how that move turns into the full group program you're picturing. The thing that stops most coaches is that the moment you commit to building a group program, you start trying to build the wrong thing. When you picture a program, you start imagining a library of courses, live coaching calls, and a community for all the members, just like you see so many big name coaches and programs doing. So you set out to build that version you envisioned. You open a document, start mapping out the entire program, outlining courses, and planning a community for members who don't exist yet. And because what you're trying to build is so big, the work never ends. The months and sometimes years go by, and in all that time, you still haven't made a single dollar from your group program. Your weeks are just as full as ever, and the group program that was supposed to buy back your time has ended up eating more of it. So here's how to avoid the trap. The group program you envisioned or you think you need to build, it's the finish line. It is not the thing you have to build before you're allowed to start enrolling people or saying you have a group program. The trap is treating the finish line as the starting line. And the belief sitting underneath it that you have to build the whole program before you can run a group program is the single biggest reason coaches stall out before they ever get going. You just need one piece to start making money and saving time. But that brings up an obvious question. If you're not building the whole thing, which single piece do you start with and how is one piece supposed to make you more money and save time? We start with a single course and we run it live. That's the move. You get a group of people on a call with you for a couple of hours, and in that time you solve one problem or deliver one transformation. Not the whole journey you take a one-on-one client through, just one piece of it. One clear result they can walk away with after finishing that course. Oh, a quick note on the word course, because I'm going to use it for the rest of this episode. When I say course, I do mean a group course or a group program. If you've listened to me before, you know I talk about this. A group program is really a whole range of different things. At the simple end, it's a single group call where you teach one specific thing and get people one specific transformation. At the other end, it's the big, fully built group program we're working toward in this episode. I'm not calling each small one a group program because that's going to get confusing really fast when the big thing at the end is also a group program. So for this episode, the small building blocks, I'm calling them courses, and the group program is what they all add up to. And that word raises a fair question. What should that first course be about? There's a specific way to figure that out, and I'll share the process with you later. For now, just know your first course should solve one clear problem for the people in the room. Because the course is live, people can ask questions in real time, and you can answer them on the spot. If you want to fold a little group coaching in while you're there, do it. Structure it however fits the way you already work with clients. The format can be flexible, but the important thing is the scope. Just one result in a couple of hours. Don't fall into the trap of thinking you need to give them more and more to have a legitimate course. And here's the part most coaches miss. Running that course once is not the finish. The first time through, you do two things when it's over. You ask the group for honest feedback and you ask them for testimonials. The feedback tells you how to make it even better for the next cohort. The testimonials give you social proof for your marketing and help fill the next round. You make your edits to the course, and then you run that same course again for a brand new group. And this is where it starts to pay off. The first time you build the course, you will pay for it in hours. Real hours that you don't necessarily have. But every time after that, the building is already done. Running it again costs you the couple of hours you spend on the call, and that's it. So look at what those couple of hours are worth now. One-on-one, a couple of hours gets one client, one result. As a live course, those same couple of hours have multiple people in them, and every person in your course is now paying you. Same time on your calendar as a couple of one-on-one clients, but it's worth more income than that same client. And you can run that course again and again across the year as many times as it makes sense for you and your marketing. That is how a couple of hours start making you more money while taking less of your time. And you can have it running inside of a month. That's the move. One live course, built one time and run on repeat. But a single course still isn't the group program you set out to make. So how do you get from one course to the real thing, the version with the membership in the community? And here's the part that feels like a trick. You're going to end up with that full group program, the elaborate one you pictured on day one, but you're never going to sit down and build it as one big project. Here's how it works. Your first course is running now and paying off, which means you finally have something you didn't have before. A little extra free time. So you use some of that free time to build your second course. Then you build a third and maybe a fourth and a fifth. However many it takes to cover the full transformation you deliver for your clients. There's no magic number here, it's whatever the result you promise actually requires. And it works. And it's already earning you more money and saving you time while you build the next course. So walk forward a year. You've got four or five of these courses, every one of them tested and earning money. Add them up, and now you have a content library. Now you've got the hardest and most time-consuming part done. And that library is the core of your group program. The membership is really just your courses and group coaching calls. Then the community just gets added gradually. None of it is a big scary project because you're building it one small piece at a time. And underneath all of it, a cycle has started. Your income climbs while your one-on-one load shrinks. The one-on-one clients you do keep tend to come to you further along because a lot of them have already been through one of your courses. That makes them better clients to work with, and they get their transformation faster. Those faster transformations turn into better testimonials, and better testimonials make the next round of courses easier to fill. The whole thing has started to feed itself. The big group program gets built one live course at a time, not all at once. You run each course until it's solid, you stack the next one on top, and the big program you pictured is built while making you more money and saving you time. Now, earlier, I said that picking what your first course is about is its own big decision. It's actually a really important decision, and I made a whole episode on how to get it right and turn it into your first course. It's called How to Scale Beyond One on One Coaching, the First Group Program to Build. Go listen to that one next wherever you're hearing this. You've been listening to Program Design for Coaches. I'm Dr. Curtis Satterfield, and if nobody's told you lately, you've got what it takes to build your program. I'll talk to you in the next one.