MBA2423 Q&A Wednesday: Why did you stop your coaching program?

0:09Heyo! Welcome to the$100 MBA show, pumping you and your business up with our practical business lessons. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zinhome. And today's episode is Q &A Wednesday, where we answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you've got a question you want to ask, go ahead and email me over at Omar at 100mba.net. Today's question is from Valerie. And Valerie asks, I noticed that you do not mention your coaching program that you were promoting last year. I would be interested to hear how it went and or why you decided to not offer it again. Thank you and best wishes, Valerie.

0:47This is a fair question, Valerie. Why did I stop offering my coaching program, Mission Control? I'm going to share with you why. Open and honestly, why I stopped doing it. And why it's okay to stop doing something that you don't want to do anymore. That's the beauty of owning your own business. You get to do what you want to do. So in today's list, I'm going to share with you the decision-making process I went through to decide to stop doing something in my business, to stop offering a product or service? And what are some things you need to consider if you're thinking about doing the same? Let's get into it.

1:23Let's get down to business. Yes, I did offer a coaching program called Mission Control, which was a 52-week coaching and accountability program. I loved it. It was actually pretty cool. What I loved most about it was helping others get results, but I did decide to stop offering the program. I'm going to share with you why and go through the rationale today and help you decide if you need to stop doing something in your business or stop offering a product or service. I want to start with money, okay? When you stop offering a product or service, obviously you're going to stop making money from that product or service.

1:57This is obviously something you have to consider. Now, I have to say that I'm grateful and fortunate enough that I didn't need to make the money from the program to sustain my business, to keep things going. It was nice to have. It was nice extra revenue. And I'm not saying this to beat on my chest. I'm saying this because it's something to consider. If you need the money, if you need to make that cash to keep your business going, don't stop doing it without replacing it with another income source that's equivalent or more. I was in that position for many, many years, especially in the beginning of my journey of the$100 MBA, which I did coaching programs of different formats, and I needed that cash to keep the business going.

2:41And I didn't stop doing it until I was able to pivot, change, or replace that income in some way. So I like to start with brass tacks, the reality of business, because at the end of the day, whatever you're doing, whatever you're producing or offering, it's an exchange of value. You're offering value to somebody in exchange for money, and there has to be something that allows you to sustain your business. Because if you're not making money or making enough money, then you're not going to be able to continue to offer this to your customers or continue to offer the value that you do. You have expenses.

3:15You have personal salary expenses. I just wanted to address the reality of cutting off a product or service means cutting off that revenue. Don't do it unless you can. or of course you can predictably replace it with another product or service. The next thing you need to consider is the cost of doing this service or offering this product. So when it comes to coaching, in my case, I'm doing the coaching, that means the cost is quite high. My time is my biggest asset. It's also your biggest asset. But when you're coaching, you're using a lot of your own time. And remember, there's only 24 hours in the day.

3:53So if you're spending an hour on coaching somebody, then that means that you're not spending that hour on something else. Recruiting, hiring, training your team, coming up with other products or services, marketing, sales, other areas where you can grow your business. And as much as I love helping business owners one-on-one, it was just not the best use of my time. I wasn't leveraging my time as much as I'd like to. And I'll talk a little bit more about how I'll be doing that in the future and what I'm doing instead. but I just didn't want to use my time in that way. I feel like I could be more effective in different ways in serving my audience, which I'll talk about a little bit more later.

4:30So you have to consider this when you're doing something like coaching or you're fulfilling a service yourself. Your time is being used that's really expensive. That leads me to the next point, which is the willingness to pay for the customer and the audience you're serving. So the audience I serve at the$100 MBA are people that are looking to transition from their full-time job to a full-time entrepreneurship and go beyond and scale their business. Usually to the million dollar mark is really the sweet spot of what I do here at the$100 MBA. So knowing that audience, they're not swimming in dough constantly, especially if you are running a business and working in your full-time job, you're probably spending a lot of your income on building this business.

5:12So there's a limit. There's a cap of how much I can actually charge this audience member. I can't charge$50 ,000,$60 ,000 a year. Most of my audience would be disqualified if I charge that much. And I would need to charge that much if I felt like that was a good use of my time. So I'll have to charge less. And the program was$5 ,000 a year, which was a good sweet spot for not the time I was spending, but the results I was able to get them and for what they can actually afford, which they can see, okay, I see this as an investment, but at the same time, it's not astronomical and something I can't pay.

5:47So knowing your audience and their willingness to pay, my only way to continue this program and make it worth my while was to charge more. And charging more would exclude a lot of people. And yes, I can probably take on less clients, but it just would lose its impact. The next thing that I considered and what you should consider is something very pure and very honest. It's what do you want? How do you want to live? How do you want to do work? What gets you excited? What kind of demotivates you? What makes you feel trapped? So I've been doing entrepreneurship over 20 years. My last nine, 10 years was focused on growing our software company, Webinar Ninja.

6:25We recently exited that company. And it's kind of a new chapter was around the horizon where I can just go all in and focus on the$100 MBA and the podcast and everything that's going to happen in the future with this brand. But one thing I really wanted that I didn't have for a very long time is flexibility, autonomy. me. I want to be able to work what I want, how I want. And when you're running a significant software company, you just can't. You got meetings, you got people to hire, you got interviews, you got sales calls, you got all these time obligations. You got things on your calendar that you have to do on those days.

7:04And one of those things on the calendar was my coaching program. I had to get back to my clients and help them out on a weekly basis by a certain time every single week. Now that I had this opportunity to rethink everything and do things my way, I decided, hey, what do I actually want? I want to have the autonomy. I want to be able to help people on my own schedule, not be tied down and say, oh, I got to be on my computer by this day or on these days. This is something that I didn't get to experience for much of my entrepreneurial career because I had businesses and obligations that made me stick to certain times, schedules, meetings, things on the calendar.

7:44So that leads me to what I really want to do. The coaching program was fantastic. I learned a ton as the coach actually from about different challenges, different businesses. And this is not the first time I ran a coaching program, but this last one was very, very interesting. I love helping people out, but what I want to do is have a greater impact on a wider audience. Very much like what I'm doing here on the podcast. I love this format where I get to offer the best thing I have, my experiences, my knowledge, my skills to my audience for free. I wanna be able to give it to as many people as possible with the lowest barrier of entry possible.

8:24So it's there for those who want it. And I wanna do this at a bigger scale. So the podcast will still be here and I'm gonna continue to improve the podcast and give it all I got every single day. But we're gonna do this type of content and teach and help aspiring and growing entrepreneurs in different ways through long format video, short format video, a deeper, more intentional training program, and much more. So I'm really gonna go wide in 2024 and beyond. And that is my goal. I don't wanna be restricted by price points and all kinds of stuff that you have to do in coaching. And to be quite honest, I'm in a fortunate position where I don't have to charge thousands of dollars to offer my help.

9:09I'm going to offer it in an autonomous way by offering great content to as many people as possible and lower the barrier of entry as much as possible. I'm doing this for several reasons. One, like I said, to impact as many people as possible. But two, there's too many people stealing people's money, scamming people out of their hard-earned cash on lousy courses, on lousy training, on despicable promises, on horribly produced programs that don't get results. This gets me angry. And I want to show an alternative where somebody has some experience in business like myself, is offering it purely because I want other people to win.

9:52I want people to have an easier path than I did. And I'm taking the business of courses and all that kind of stuff out of the equation. The$100 base is still going to be there. It's a very low barrier entry. It's going to get revamped and you should watch this space. Very excited about that in 2024. But we're going to offer beyond that for free as well. And to be honest, we are making enough money to run the business through the model of giving you great, valuable content through podcasts and through other means and earning revenue through our sponsorships. So please support the sponsors on the show.

10:30That's actually how you can support us, as well as, of course, by subscribing and reviewing. But that's basically it. I stopped doing something because I just wanted to do something different. I wanted to make a bigger impact. I want to take it to the next level. And frankly, I just didn't need to do it anymore. So when it comes to your product, your business, your services, sometimes you got to kill your darlings. They call this killing your darlings in the SaaS world, in the software world. Sometimes you got to kill off features that you built and worked hard on because they're not serving the audience anymore.

11:03They're not serving your business anymore. It's okay to do that if you have an alternative way to make revenue. And it's an easy choice when it's not making revenue. You're killing off something that's just not making you money or helping you grow your business. But above all that, if you do enjoy it, if you don't love it, then find something that you do enjoy and love and make it a part of your business. Monetize it. Will I never offer coaching again? I never like to say never, but for the time being, I can't see it happening in the near future. It's a business model that really doesn't fit my lifestyle at the moment.

11:37And I'm an all-in kind of person. I want to do things 100%. I want to do them right. I want to do them at the highest level, whether it's the podcast or anything else I create. So if I can't go all in, then I don't want to do it. I want to be able to be the best at what I do, strive for that, because otherwise it's hard to compete. If you're not going to be great at what you do and be all in, it's simply just not worth doing it. Choose something that you are committed to. Thanks, Valerie, for asking your question today on Q &A Wednesday. If you've got a question you want to ask, go ahead and email me over at omar at 100mba.net.

12:14I'll make sure to answer it right here on Q &A Wednesday. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. David Packard, one of the founders of Hewlett Packard Computers, has a great quote. And he says, most businesses die of indigestion and not starvation. I love this because it reminds you that we have choices in business. There's a lot of things you can do. There's a lot of ways you can go and most of the businesses die because you try to do it all. We have this kind of feast or famine mentality. Instead, choose what you really want to do. Choose what you can commit to for 5, 10, 20 years and do it well.

12:53Focus on that and it's going to be really hard for people to compete with you because you're going to be so laser focused, so dedicated and becoming a master at what you do. That's really the cheat code of business is focus. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in Friday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.