Should you REALLY stop trading time for money?
I’m sure you’re familiar with that very common piece of advice that if you want a successful business you have to stop “trading time for money”.
Well, as it happens I disagree. And in fact, depending on your goals for your income and lifestyle a 121 business is probably the EASIER option for many of the clients I work with.
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A very common piece of advice that is often given to business owners like coaches, therapists and healers is that to create a truly successful business, you must stop “trading time for money.”
What’s meant by this is to stop working 121 with your client and instead sell group courses or programmes.
The theory goes that by working with a larger number of clients at any one time you are reducing your client delivery down. So instead of spending say 15 hours per week with your 121 clients, you could spend just 1-2 hours working with your clients in a group – and the rest of your time is your own!
Sounds very attractive doesn’t it? And of course it is – when it works
The problem is that up to a certain level it’s not actually true and leads to many heart-centred business owners creating businesses that are way too complex and that they don’t actually enjoy running.
Now, of course creating a business based on group programmes and courses is GREAT, if that is really where your heart is and and really lights you up, and I support many of my clients to do just that.
But what if it doesn’t?
I see far too many people believe that they *have to* switch to working with groups and then lose all the energy, joy and meaning from their work.
Before I go any further:
I just want to make clear that my own business is a 6 figure business and is based entirely on selling an 8 week group course, a business membership, and occasionally a group mastermind. I do very little 121 work.
I tell you that up front because I want to be clear that I’m not “dissing” group programmes at all… it’s the model my own business is built on.
What I’m disagreeing with is the idea that group programmes are somehow easier or better than a 121 business model.
One isn’t better or easier than the other – they are just different.
And to tell you otherwise is actually really bad advice, particularly if your income goal for your business is somewhere between £40,000 and £200,000 per year.
2 reasons why this advice is so problematic:
- Many people just LOVE working 121 with their clients! This is why they started their business in the first place! They love working intimately with clients and doing that really deep transformational work. And when they buy into this very convincing message that this isn’t going to “work” and that if they just switch to working one-to-many instead everything is going to get easier and they’ll make more money, they risk giving up the very thing that makes their work feel fulfilling and meaningful.
- The truth is that selling and delivering one-to-many through group programmes and memberships is just as hard – it’s just hard in a different way.
If you work 121 with clients, and you have an effective sales process and healthy pricing, you only need to attract a very small number of interested potential clients for every client who signs up to work with you.
However if you are selling lower cost group programmes or a membership two things change in your business.
- You now need to reach much larger numbers of people – so you need to become someone who is capable of and also enjoys marketing and attracting people in larger volumes.
- You now need systems to convert those people into clients. You won’t have time now to enrol that number of people 121. So now you need to run launches, invest time and money in creating a great sales page, and build sales funnels
In other words. And here is the important bit:
You haven’t really stopped trading your time for money at all
All you’ve done is you’ve EXCHANGED your 121 client delivery time for a lot more marketing activity to reach people in higher volumes and for time spent running launches and online sales campaigns.
And of those things are much harder for just one person to do alone than with a purely 121 business.
So now you need at least one person to help you, maybe even a small team, and you need more software to help you run these one-to-many marketing and sales campaigns, so now your business overheads are higher, and then that software glitches or goes wrong or doesn’t speak to that other bit of software so you need help fixing it. And now the pressure is on to bring in even more money to pay for all this extra software and extra team support.
As I said at the beginning, I do have an almost exclusively group business myself. I do have the fancy software, the small team, the higher overheads and the higher volume marketing, and this model works for me on the whole – though the wheels do get a bit wobbly when I have health challenges.
My business model is not better, it’s just different.
In fact – don’t tell anyone – but I actually believe that a 121 business with healthy pricing a clear customer journey and effective sales process is actually easier and more profitable than a business based on needing to attract and enrol large numbers of people to make the same amount of revenue. Up to a certain level.
But I’ve seen so many people fall for the convincing message that “trading time for money”, i.e. working 121 with clients, is wrong. This means that they have given up their 121 practice and become miserable because they just don’t enjoy doing that level of marketing, and they miss working more closely with their clients.
Because after all, you’ve probably gone into business because you want to work with your clients, not because you want to do sales and marketing full time.
When DOES stopping “trading time for money” make sense?
Where this advice differs is if you are setting out to create a revenue of multiple 6 or 7 figures, because your 121 business WILL hit a revenue ceiling at a certain point. So if you do want to grow past low 6 figures you will either need to increase your delivery capacity by taking on associates or other practitioners to deliver on your behalf, or move into group programmes that are infinitely scalable
Because to look on the other side of the coin – the advantage of group programmes is that once you have a process that converts people into buyers, you can scale infinitely based on increasing the numbers of new people you can reach with your marketing.
So the message today is that neither model is better or worse, it’s about what suits you. I teach and support my clients with both, just don’t buy into the advice that one approach is inherently easier or better – like with all things in business you get to choose what works for you
These are the sorts of conversations I’m having all the time within my business membership.
How do you feel having read this article? Do you still feel genuinely excited about running group programmes – in which case go for it! Or has this article helped you feel a huge sense of relief that you don’t have to move away from 121 work if that’s not what you feel called to do? Do let me know in the comments!
Create a Business you can Fall in Love with
If you’d like to learn more about creating a business you can stay in love with for the long term because you are burning out trying to keep up with everything, get started with my free guide:
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Or you can watch the workshop on the same topic here.
