The Fierce Business Babe Podcast 310: How to Audit Your Own Program

Today, I am diving into everything you need to know about auditing your programs in your business. We are going to chat about different reasons to conduct an audit of your program and how I audit my own programs. I am also going to share how you can learn to audit your programs.

How to Audit Your Own Program

By: Melissa Lin

Welcome to another episode of The Fierce Business Babe Podcast. We are here at the start of There's so much time left to create huge wins and play big in your business. This is your reminder today if you need to hear it, or maybe your business bestie needs to hear this. Things can shift so quickly in your business, this could be your biggest month in business yet, so start taking action and showing up as if it has already happened. Start being that version of you. So there's my little speech, my little sprinkle of inspiration, before we get started with today's episode. Let's get into today's episode. We are getting into how to audit your own program in your business. We're going to get into reasons to audit your programs, how I audit my programs in my business, data you can collect to measure the success of your program, and so much more. 

Reasons to Audit Your Program

First let’s get into reasons to audit your program. One of the many reasons why we have so many of our clients resigning to work with us and upgrade into our next level programs is because of all of the work that my team and I have put into the behind the scenes of improving our programs year after year. Something that I believe in is continuing to improve your client experience and your program experience. I think there is always an opportunity to improve something in those areas. We're human, we don't have the answers to everything and there's always something that we can improve. One thing that I absolutely love doing is having a pulse on how my clients are doing and how many programs are running. After years of collecting data for my programs and supporting clients, I know how to help my clients maximize their results in my programs. I actually share this with my clients in their orientation. I share how to maximize the results of my programs because I, of course, want them to win and succeed and want to give them the tools in order to do so. For example, I can say that based on all of the data I have collected over the years, clients that attend more calls in my programs will see higher results. You attend calls, you ask questions, and we can take a look at your business behind the scenes in terms of selling and how you're showing up and take a look at your content and all of those things. So again, clients that attend more calls in our programs will see higher results. 

Those clients are usually leaning in between calls as well. I can say that based on all of the data I have collected, clients that lean in and ask questions and go through the course material also see higher results. Something that I want you to be able to walk away from today's episode with is how to determine the pulse of one of your programs and the pulse of your business. You can definitely rinse and repeat this for any of your other programs in your business. You can also do this in other areas of your business too, it doesn't necessarily need to be just for your programs. However, I do recommend that you do it for your programs. 

One reason to audit your program is because it helps you see what gaps may be in your program and ways that you can continue to improve your client experience. It also helps show you whether the way that you're currently running your program needs to be tweaked. Something that we help a lot of our clients with, especially in our Six-Figure Mastermind and Fiercely Scale, is creating the scalability plan for their programs. How do you support your clients when you have 10 people in your program versus 30 people versus 50 people and so on. As you start to scale your program may need to be tweaked a little bit. Auditing your program can help you make some of those decisions on when those shifts or tweaks may need to happen. It can help show you whether it might be time for a revamp on some of your material inside of your program. 

Your programs are a big part of your business and we always want to continue to improve them as much as possible. I have a pretty big background in this and I did a lot of this type of work when I was a chemical engineer, which is continuous improvement. It's something that I deeply believe in. There is always an opportunity to do better and to improve. That is a big part of the Lean Six Sigma method that I used a lot in my engineering days. It’s really cool to be able to utilize some of the same tools now in my business. Anytime anyone hears that I was a chemical engineer and that I now own my business they ask me how much of my degree have I brought into my business and that is one big part of it. There are definitely some other tools and skills that I learned as well. Fun fact, I actually have my black belt in Lean Six Sigma and continuous improvement. Every single business that I've ever worked in has some type of continuous Improvement plan. No business out there is going to say, “no, I don't want to improve my products.” Every business wants to improve and do better, so you can definitely do audits in your business outside of just the programs, however, today's podcast episode will be more specifically about your program. Feel free to use any of this in other areas of your business as well. I actually have a podcast episode all about the different audits that I do my business each quarter. This is also something that I support my Mastermind clients with in their businesses. If it's something that you want to learn more about feel free to send me a message on Instagram and I can definitely send you details on how I support my clients with it. 

How I Audit My Programs

Now let's get into how I actually perform audits in my business and then we can start to brainstorm different ways for you to do it in your business as well. I mentioned that I love having a pulse on my business, my programs, and my clients. My team and I actually look at a lot of this information every single week. We track how our clients are doing and we can see a lot of this information on the back end of our coursehub. It really helps me as a business owner because I can see how much people are leaning into the course material. I can see how often clients are attending the live calls each week. As a business owner I know that as my clients attend more calls they will see higher results because I have that data. That's something that we really prioritize. My team and I do our best to let our clients know when calls are and remind them. We have a calendar that they can actually embed into their own personal calendar, which is so cool. I know how busy life can get in different seasons. There might be some weeks where you as a client aren't able to attend calls, I totally get it. This information helps my team and I because we know these live calls that we host for them are a huge benefit. We're able to send an email out to clients that we haven't seen in a few weeks on a group call and try and re-engage them into calls and the program and coaches so that we can support them as best as we can in the business. 

Before we go any further, I want to say that you as a business owner can put all of these systems and things in place and you may have clients not lean in and not do the work. It is not your job to chase your clients down. It is not your job to force them to do the work. I was chatting with my clients about this a few days ago. They were holding a lot of guilt and responsibility for the clients who weren't leaning in and not seeing results. Something I see happen from time to time is when clients don't lean in and don't take radical responsibility, they will sometimes blame the coach or the business owner. It's not something that happens often, but I do want to say that you can put everything in place and have the best programs out there, but you may have clients who don't lean it and do the work and it says nothing about you. It says nothing about your programs. That is not your responsibility as a coach or a mentor. We're here to guide, to educate , and to support our clients, not force them to lean into the container that they invested in. I know that there are coaches and business owners out there who attach to client results, or maybe lack of results. That does not equate to a bad program or a program that needs to be completely revamped. 

It's not your job to chase them down, however, it's easy to send out an email to try to re-engage with them or ask them to lean back in, so why not do it? I love sending clients notes and reminders in case they just went through a really busy season and needed a little nudge to lean back into the container. My take is that I want to hold my clients accountable as much as I can on my end, regardless if they lean in or not. Just know that it is not your responsibility for them to take action and do the work. Your program is not a magic spell. You are not here to do the work for them, unless your business is a done-for-you service of course. Your job is to mentor and guide. I'm hoping that today’s episode can help you figure out what to look at to really get that pulse on what's working and what's not. 

We audit our programs with a variety of metrics. A few of the things that we track include attendance to calls and the participation inside of our Slack channels or our community channels for each program via percentage. We also track material that our clients watch, how they show up on social media, and how much they're implementing. If a client comes to me and says, “I don't feel like this is working Melissa,” I want to be able to take a look at how much they are showing up on social media. Are we handling objections? What is actually happening? We won't actually know unless we're looking at some of this information. We also do check-ins and progress reports with clients. We do program feedback forms throughout our programs so that we can also see it to continue to improve. There are lots of things that we collect on our end so we can have a pulse on how our clients are doing, how they're showing up in our containers, and so on. 

Data to Measure Program Success

Let's chat for a few minutes about what you can collect to measure the success of your programs in your business. I want you to spend a moment and ask yourself, how do I currently review my programs? How do I determine if they're successful or not? How do I grab a pulse on if it's time to record new material or revamp some of it? These are all questions to ask yourself as you're thinking about what may or may not be important information to be collecting. If you're about to run a group program, do you need to put together a client tracking sheet or a client progress sheet so you know where your clients are as they go to the program? What does their attendance rate look like? Let's brainstorm a few things you can look at. 

So, what will tell you how your programs or your products are doing? Let's say, for example, that you have a membership. Something that you could be looking at is your retention rate or your turn rate. If your retention rate gets below your goal, you can dive deeper and take a look at what might be happening. Grab program feedback from clients to see what can be improved and how you can continue to bump up that retention. Another thing to look at is completion rate if you have a course with your program. If you are a business that is more project based, something you can look at to determine the success of your projects is how many open projects you have. What do your tasks look like? What is your completed task ratio? How do you track your client success? The way that we actually track client success is usually from income or how many leads they have or the conversion they have in sales. 

Some things to consider, again, attendance rate is a big thing that we take a look at. There are a lot of ways that you can collect this information, but I want you to look at your business. Every business is different, every program runs differently. What is going to be the thing to tell you whether your program is successful for your clients? What is going to tell you that the modules need to be revamped? If it's a social media course maybe it needs to be revamped and updated quarterly. So, what is going to tell you that information and ways to collect this info? You can send out client progress reports. You can have team members go in and audit some of the information as well. It's always helpful to have a second or third set of eyes on some of your program material. You can track attendance and then send out an automated email when it's time to lean in if you haven't heard from them or seen them in a group call in three or four weeks. It never hurts to grab this information more often. Maybe you have a report or feedback form halfway through your program and then another one at the end of your program. Feedback is feedback, it’s not good or bad, it’s information. I feel that information is so helpful. As a business owner, I'd rather have more of it than less of it. 

So ask for information and really take a look at your programs, your business, and what's going to help give you a great pulse on what's actually happening in the business. We have touched on reasons to audit your program, how we audit programs in my business, data you can collect to measure the success of your program, and so much more. We are already getting ready for next week's episode and cannot wait to share it with you. We will see you next week in another brand new episode of The Fierce Business Babe Podcast bright and early Monday morning.