You want to build a group program because you're a fully booked coach and you're out of hours. But the truth is, in order for a group program to save you time, you have to spend more time first. It's like the old adage: if you want to make money, you have to spend money. You have to burn time up front so that you get more of it back later. And right now, all of your time is already accounted for. I've watched this happen up close. I watched my partner Heather go through it as she built her business over the past seven years, until she finally got to the point where she could go full-time with coaching and then got so busy she just didn't have another second of time. Helping her build her program out to get past that issue of trading time for dollars one client at a time is a big part of why I do this. And I was able to help her because I have 17 years of college teaching experience where it's a group of people all at once and not one-on-one. So, in this episode, I'm going to share three things with you. Why being fully booked makes you the most qualified to build a group program, why it takes much less time than you think, and how you can find or create time so you can start building. Because if you don't find those hours now, you'll never save them. You'll always keep putting it off and you'll always be stuck at one-to-one. Being a fully booked coach means all of your time is accounted for. You've got the one-on-one calls and then the emails in between answering clients. Depending on the coaching you do, you've got work between sessions too. For example, if you're a book coach, maybe you're editing pages or reading and reviewing pages for a client. And on top of that, you've still got the marketing. You're still putting yourself out there, still generating podcast episodes, or posting on LinkedIn or Instagram, and making sure your website is still up to date. All of that has to happen alongside the one-on-one meetings you're having with your clients. So on a Sunday, you might look at your calendar and feel a little dread about Monday coming because there's so much on there and there's just no more room. And for some coaches, you don't even get the weekend off because you're so busy working in this business that was supposed to give you your time back. You might have the financial freedom you were after, but you don't have the time freedom. And that starts to feel more like a trap than the freedom you were promised. And maybe, as I'm describing all this, you're not totally sure this is you yet. Maybe you're not fully booked, but you're starting to feel that pressure building. If that's you, I put together a quick quiz to help you figure out whether you're ready to build a group program. The link's in the show notes, and I'll tell you more about it later. Think back to the beginning, when you were trying to get your first clients. You didn't have one-on-one sessions filling your calendar yet, so that time was free. You could spend it on your marketing, on finding those new clients, and getting better at your craft, on building out your website and putting yourself out there. You had the hours. Then you started getting clients, and those hours in your week start getting consumed by your one-on-one meetings. And eventually, once you're fully booked, so much of your time is taken up by client work that all that space you used to have for marketing and outreach, it gets compressed. You just don't have it anymore. Now let me show you the paradox. Back at the beginning, when you didn't have clients, you had all the time you'd need to build a group program. But you weren't ready to build one then because you needed those clients. Being fully booked is proof that you have a working method, one that actually gets people the results they want. Because if your clients weren't getting results, you wouldn't keep getting clients and you'd never have filled up in the first place. A full calendar is the evidence that what you do works. And that's what the paradox was hiding. You had to lose that time. You had to take on more one-on-one clients so you could nail down your process, get it working, and make it repeatable. That's also how you built up your social proof, the testimonials and the clients who've actually gone through the transformation. And it's how you figured out the things you can't build a group program without. What the ultimate transformation is, who your ideal client is, and where they're starting from when they come to you. You only get those things by doing the one-on-one work first, which means being fully booked isn't what's stopping you from building a group program. It's the exact thing that makes you ready to build one. The problem is the paradox we've been talking about. Being fully booked is what qualifies you to build a group program, but it's also the very thing keeping you from building one. The good news is that it takes much less time than you think to build your first group program. Let me show you what that looks like. Most coaches, when they think about creating a group program, sit down and start to panic. And usually it's because they're picturing group programs they've been a part of or ones they've seen from other coaches who are much further along in their journey. So you start thinking about everything you need: a content library full of courses, a place for the group to meet, group coaching calls and weekly meetings, a community running on Facebook or some separate platform, and somewhere to host all of it. Then you layer all of that infrastructure on top of the actual transformation you take people through, it becomes overwhelming, and you think, there's no way I have the time to build a group program. So let me tell you about my partner Heather. About seven years ago, she got certified as a book coach and started going after her first clients. She was learning the ins and outs all at once. How you get paid, how you advertise yourself, how you set up your lead magnets and your funnels, writing all the welcome emails, just figuring out how to operate as a coach for the first time. She was doing all of it while still working her full-time job. She didn't quit and jump into coaching, she built the whole thing alongside a full-time job, so she didn't have much time to begin with. Then about a year ago, she hit the decision point. She was so strapped for time that she had to choose between trying to keep growing the business or scaling it back so she could stay at her full-time job. She decided to quit her full-time job, go all in, and become a full-time coach. And she ended up with even less time than before because she brought on more clients to make up the income. She was actually making more than she had at her full-time job, but more clients meant more one-on-one hours. Because she's a book coach, she's not just showing up for an hour to talk. She's editing pages between sessions. Her calendar got so full there was no room for anything else. And it started to break her down. There were many nights she only got a couple hours sleep, or no sleep at all, because she was up working on her business all night. There were nights she was in tears over it, wondering what she was going to do and how she was going to make this work. Because she'd looked everywhere and there just weren't any more hours in the day. That's when we started looking at turning her one-on-one work into a group program. We started working on it one piece at a time. She built up those individual pieces while she still had her one-on-one clients. So at first it did not save her any time at all. But she kept stacking those pieces. Now, a year later, she's got several of those pieces built and she's folded them into a membership we built together. When I say we built it together, I want to be clear. I guided her through the process, but she did all the actual work because she's the expert in her craft. Most of her one-on-one clients, she's moved into the membership. She's still got a couple she sees one-on-one, but most of them are in the group now. They get several coaching call dates through the month where they hop on a call as a group, they get access to all of her classes, and when she runs her yearly writing conference, they get in for free. She soft launched this membership this month as this podcast is going live. No big hard launch, and she got 30 signups right away. She's not fully getting her time back yet because, like I said, you have to burn the hours first, but she can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. Instead of her saying, I don't know if I can keep doing this, now it's I know where this is going, it's gonna suck a little while longer, but soon I'll have my time back and I'll be making more than I ever did one-on-one. So what did Heather actually do? Remember those pieces she kept stacking? Those were individual live courses. She built one course at a time and taught it to a live group. Now, if you just went, wait, what course? I thought we were talking about group programs. Let me clear that up because when I say group program, I'm talking about a whole range. A group program can be as simple as a single live course. And when I say live course, I specifically mean you are live on the call with a group of people. I don't mean an asynchronous course. I say that because in the current market, clients are looking for high touch. They're not as willing to buy an asynchronous course anymore, which is exactly why I recommend live courses. So it's a course you teach live to a group where you walk them through a transformation. Even if that course only runs an hour or two, it still counts. And it goes all the way up from there. From that one live course to a full membership with a content library, weekly calls, all the bells and whistles, it's all group programs to me. The reason you start with one small piece is the time problem we started with. Nobody builds the whole program all at once, and you don't need to. It makes no sense to spend hours and hours building some giant membership when you haven't sold a single seat yet. So instead, you build one small piece and you sell that piece. Then you build the next one and you sell that. Over time, those pieces compound, they stack up into a content library, and that library is what becomes your group program or your membership whenever you're ready for it. And that's the whole reason it takes less time than you fear. You are picturing that giant all-at-on build, the one that made you think there's no way I have the hours for this. But you're never building that giant thing in one go. You're building one sellable piece at a time around the clients you've already got. Some coaches never even go past that. They're happy teaching a group course every month or two, and that alone lets them serve several clients at once instead of one at a time, which is how they start getting their time back. So the build is smaller than you feared. You're only ever making one piece at a time. But you're probably thinking, look, I'm still fully booked, and even one piece takes many hours, and I don't have any to spare. So where do those hours actually come from? That's the last thing I want to talk about. And I've got to be real with you, the answer is simple, it's just not easy, and it's going to ask something of you. Finding the hours is hard because it means you're going to have to sacrifice something. Maybe it's some of your free time outside of the business. Maybe it's the evening you'd rather spend on the couch watching TV. Maybe it's social time, going out with friends, grabbing drinks. It might even cost you a little sleep. Something has to give because you don't have any more hours left in your business day. Those hours have to come from somewhere. Or, here's the one most coaches don't want to hear. It might mean dropping a client or two on purpose, taking a small hit to your revenue right now, so you actually have the hours to build. And I know how that sounds when you've worked this hard to get fully booked, but that dip is temporary. You take a little less now and you make it back and then some once the program is built and you're serving people in groups instead of one at a time. And if you don't go take those hours, they are never going to magically appear. You are a fully booked coach. You are never going to wake up one day and suddenly find a big block of free time sitting there waiting for you to build your group program. That day does not come on its own. Think back to Heather. Those pieces didn't build themselves in some free time that opened up, because there wasn't any. She built them in the hours that she took. The early mornings, the late nights, the sleep she gave up while she was still carrying a full client load. It was hard and it cost her something real for a while. But that's where the pieces came from. Not from a gap in her calendar that magically appeared, but from hours she decided to go and claim. So here's how you actually get the time to build your first group program. It's not enough to say fine, I'll give up some TV time. That's not a real decision. And nothing gets built off of it. You have to do three things together. First, you pick the sacrifice, the actual thing you're giving up. Second, you put that time on your calendar. And third, then you protect it as a small recurring window, just like you would a client appointment that you can't move. And it doesn't have to be much. So be honest with yourself about how much you can really give. But even a couple hours a week get you there. A couple hours a week is eight hours a month, and with the right prep, the right feedback, and a little guidance on what to actually build in those hours, you can have your first program built over the next couple months. That's what you need to commit to because free time is not coming on its own. You need a couple of protected hours a week where you intentionally work on building your program. Now, the one thing I can't tell you from here is whether you personally are ready to start. That's why I put together the program readiness quiz. It'll help you figure out whether you're at the right place to start building your group program. And even if you're not fully booked yet, this quiz can still help you figure out where you stand. So go take the program readiness quiz. You'll find the link in the show notes for this episode. By the end, you'll know where to focus your efforts for a group program, and then go claim your first couple of hours. 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.