The Fierce Business Babe Podcast Ep 285: Scale Your Evergreen
Today, I am diving into evergreen programs and how to really scale them in your business. We are going to chat about your recent launches, evaluating your current business model, and how to plan and scale your evergreen program. I also have a few bonus tips that you’ll definitely want to check out!
Scale your evergreen program
BY: MELISSA LIN
Welcome back to another episode of The Fierce Business Babe Podcast! Today we're going to be diving into a topic that I love chatting about with my clients because so many of my clients really want to transition their business into a model like this. That’s not to say that it's for everybody, because I do have some clients that love launching quite a few times a year and love open-close programs. I also have some clients who really want to learn more about evergreen programs and the evergreen model so that doors are open 365 days a year and they can support clients all year round because they don't really enjoy launching and doing the big launches as an option, which is totally okay, right? This is your business, which means you are going to make up the rules and do what feels good to you. There is definitely not one better or one right or wrong way to develop your business and product suite.
When I first started my business, it was more launching and then we really moved and shifted more into evergreen. We still do big launches here and there, however we do have quite an expansive evergreen product suite as well. I really want to dive into that with you because I've had many come to me from my audience wanting to learn more about it and how to shift more of their business into that evergreen model so that it can be a little more hands-off for them in terms of the marketing aspect because it is rolling enrollment and will get more into the details of what that really looks like in today's episode. We're going to be getting all into evergreen programs, really scaling them, taking a look at your recent launches, your recent performance for improvement, how to evaluate your current model if you are currently running an evergreen program, how to start mapping out future scaling for your evergreen program, a few bonus tips for your evergreen program and so much more.
Even if you aren't running an evergreen program right now or a course or anything like that, this episode is still going to be helpful for you because some of the things that we talk about will support you even in the open-close model. For example, let's say that you're running a group coaching program right now and you can only support eight people per round. Okay, how can you really scale that? Even though it is open-close you can still scale. How can you bring in and support 30 people every time you open and close the doors, or 50 people, or 100 people? The more people you serve, the bigger impact you make, the more success comes your way. I definitely want to support you there as we've scaled so many of our programs and have helped so many of our clients scale their programs as well. So let's get into this episode!
WHAT IS AN EVERGREEN PROGRAM?
We're going to dive into evergreen programs and how to really scale them. Before we get into the strategy, I want to chat a little bit about mindset. Are you open to receiving more clients? Do you want to have more clients in your business? And if the answer is yes, then this is definitely something I would recommend doing in your business at some point. You get to really believe in yourself and your program first, right? If you fully, fully believe in your program and how big of an impact it can create it's going to be very easy for you to sell. You can most definitely turn into an evergreen model so the doors are open year-round. I've had many clients come to me in the past with programs, maybe it's a three-month program and they launched it four times a year and they’re just not sure how to transition into an evergreen model, and I'll give you a few tips on how you can do so. We definitely support our clients in our programs with this as well.
Before we really dive into the strategy I do want to go through some terminology. So I'm throwing out this word evergreen, you know, evergreen model, evergreen program, revolving door, open-close, so let’s go through some terminology. So when I mention open close, what this means is a program, or a group coaching program, or a course, anything where you open doors day one for people to enter and then maybe your launch is two weeks long and you close doors and then people are not able to enter that program or enroll in that program outside of that open. So, it's an open-close model where you launch your program a few times per year and it's only open and available for enrollment at certain periods throughout the year. So that's open-close, not evergreen. Evergreen is basically the opposite where you're open year round. It's open and available at all times. You can have people hop in at any time and start at any time. So when anyone hops into our Academy, they get started right away. Now in an open-close model everyone usually starts on the same day together and then goes through the program together. With an evergreen model you still can create that group aspect and really run the program very well and it still feels like a model where they're going through like step one, step two, step three and they have a step-by-step and all the tools they need with the few things we always add in. We always add a syllabus, a step-by-step of what to be working on, how to be going through the syllabus, and definitely having some type of area at the very beginning, whether it’s a welcome kit, or a syllabus, or an orientation for clients to go through so they do know what the flow of that program is. Anyways, so as I mentioned evergreen, same as rolling enrollment, some may even call it a revolving door. It means that the doors are open 365 days a year and people can hop in anytime. Your content is relevant no matter the season or the time frame. People can hop in anytime and get started right away. So that is what evergreen is and that's what we're going to really dive into today. Most of my programs at this point are evergreen, but not all of them. We still have a few that are not evergreen. We have transitioned most of our programs into evergreen as we continue to scale and support our clients because I want to be able to support anyone 365 days a year. If they are ready to hop in, amazing, let's get them started so they can get to where they want to go even faster.
TRACKING YOUR PERFORMANCE
So if you have a program, whether it's open-close or evergreen, I want you to think about the last time you launched it, the last time you opened doors. If it is evergreen already, how were the last few months? If you don't do any pushes mid-year or end of year, how have the past few months performed in terms of your conversions and in terms of your enrollment? I want you to actually write this out. Map it out whether it's in a Google Doc or in your notebook. Map out how your performance was. How many leads do you have coming in asking about your program? How many people opted into your freebie if you have a freebie that relates to that program that then funnels into apply to work with you or a wait-list, whatever that looks like for your program. How many leads are you generating on average each month or each week? What did that conversion look like, you know, out of everyone who hopped in last month, how many of those leads actually converted? I want you to start to get familiar with how to create and generate some of these numbers because it tells you so much about what is happening in the business, and it also supports you in figuring out what needs to shift ,or change, or be tweaked in order to make improvements. We need some kind of baseline.
So really figure out and spend some time with that because once you have that number and once you're able to duplicate and repeat, you can then really start to scale, right? If you want to double the amount of people inside of your program, okay, let's get double the amount of leads, or let's improve your conversion rate by 1%. Once we have that baseline we then know what can happen next and what some of those next steps can be.
So what happened last launch? What happened last time you pushed it, or did a mini push, or a flash-sale? What happened the launch before that? What are some of the patterns that you can see? We need to know what these patterns are before you can truly, truly scale. So where is the gap? What is your leverage point for your program? And what I mean by this term leverage point is, if you had this one thing in your business then everything else would grow, everything else would come together, everything else would just work so perfectly. And so for example, is this visibility? If you were in front of more people, the rest of your sales process would work out so perfectly. You have that support on the back end with your sales team. You have the support on the back end with client support, with on boarding, with off-boarding, with client retention. You have everything put together and ready to go, you just need to get in front of more people. Amazing, that's your leverage point.
Let's say that no matter how many leads you bring in, you're going to close the same amount of people and enroll the same amount of people. Then your leverage point may be conversion. If you improve your conversion, then everything else will work out, right? The leads come in and go and everything else is fully ready to go and flows smoothly, such as your onboarding, your offboarding, your client retention, some of those other things. And then one more example, let's say that lead generation is easy, conversion is great, however, maybe you just can't support the number of clients in your program at this time. If you were to scale, if I were to hand you 30 new clients today, where would your business break? That is where we want to start to focus on, those weaker points. So maybe you need more team members to support you, whether that's team members in your sales process, or team members on the backend to help you with your onboarding and offboarding, maybe an additional support coach in your business. Where would your business break? Where's the Gap? I want you to really start to focus on what your leverage point would be. What’s that one thing? Then start to really focus on that. I hope this is a new perspective for you on different things you can take a look at in your business.
EVALUATING YOUR BUSINESS
We’ve started to really get into how you can take a look at your past launches or your past few months in business and evaluate where you are now. Let’s evaluate where you're at now. Now I want you to take a look at your programs and ask yourself, okay, how many clients can I actually support in this program? So I can remember when I first launched one of my group coaching programs, my very first group coaching program I ever launched, I could truly only support eight people at a time by myself. There was one-on-one coaching involved and there was group coaching, it was a hybrid program. I personally did not have the space to support more than eight people in that program. So how many clients can you actually support in your current model with the way that it is currently built? This is going to be important when we start to chat about your scalability plan and how you can really scale this one program. If you can only support 10 people in this group right now, amazing. That’s 10 people you get to support, so, so, so amazing. How can we double that? How can we triple that? Quadruple that? We want to really scale, and that means being able to bring in more clients and support more clients at a time.
So how many can you actually support right now? And again, there is no right or wrong. It's really more so about how you want your model to run. If you want to scale an evergreen model, then again, if I were to hand you 30 new clients today, 50 new clients today, you want your model to be able to run seamlessly. Can you onboard all of them on the same day? That is how you're going to be able to scale. Really start to ask yourself some of these questions. Let's say you have an evergreen coaching program and it's open year-round, 365 days a year, however, you can only support 20 clients at a time. That's totally fine if that's what you want in your program. Some of my programs, for example, are capped at 10, because it's a very intimate program, it's very high-level, there's a lot of one-on-one access with me. My highest level programs are like this intentionally, however, our lowest level programs won't be. That's not going to be capped at 10 people or 20 people. If you want to really grow your programs, then I want you to ask yourself, how many can I support and how can I start to tweak things so that I can support more people? I'm going to chat a little about this when we get into starting to map out your scaling plan so that you can start to get into the mindset and just the frame of, okay, for me to serve 30 people per month, or even 50 people per month, or have 100 people in this program at a time, these are some of the changes I need to make.
I remember when I had my first coaching program, and I want to share this with you because it was a really tough moment for me. When I first started my coaching business I was so attached to time and I felt that when my clients got more time with me they would see better results, and that isn't necessarily true. I now have clients who get X amount of time with me and less time than that and see incredible results because it's an incredible program and it has tons of support, and it doesn't necessarily need to be support from me directly at all times. You still can run an amazing program without you physically being in it as often as maybe you are at the moment. So if you have a course that has no access to you, that alone right there is so scalable. If there's no access to you it’s so scalable. However, there definitely are going to be some coaching programs with me for example, I will always have coaching programs where I am involved. Even in my beginner coaching program, my Academy, I am still involved to a point. I still run group coaching calls inside of that program. I'm in the Slack community, however, there's no private access to me directly. That's more so involved in my higher-level Masterminds, which is the next step for my Academy clients once they graduate. Really ask yourself some of these questions. How much time am I spending in this program right now? Is this scalable? Is this doable? If Melissa were to hand me 30 clients for this program right now, would I pull my hair out to support 30 clients one-on-one? Maybe it's a group program where one-on-one access is included, what would happen at that 30 client mark if I handed you 30 clients today. And again, you may have some programs that are definitely more intimate. My higher-level Masterminds are much more intimate, 8 to 10 people where they get private coaching calls with me and private Voxer access throughout the week with me as well. It's much more hands-on, which is why that is capped.
MAKING YOUR PROGRAM MORE SCALABLE
So I want to give you some ideas and examples on ways that you can tweak your programs so that they're a little more scalable for you and ideas on how you can start to actually work towards your scaling plan. So I know I had made a mention of how I was so hands-on in this one group program that I launched as my first group coaching program and I was worried about removing myself from it. I know that can definitely be a story a lot of us create. A lot of us have that same attachment to your first program and you were so involved in it and you want to continue to keep that incredible client experience, which you definitely can as you continue to grow, and I'll share a few different ways we do this as well in some of the bonus tips as we continue chatting through this.
So I want you to, again, take a look at your paper or your Google Doc that you've got in front of you from when we were taking notes and ask yourself how you can either remove yourself a little bit or what can be added in place of your time, especially if it's one of your group programs that is maybe on the lower or middle ticket. Your highest ticket is usually going to be the most access to you and take the most of your time. So for example, let's say that you have a good coaching program right now and you give daily support, that may be daily Voxer and a private coaching call. Is there anything that you could replace with? Maybe some bonus videos or some more training modules. Instead of teaching all of this one-on-one can you teach it in a group model so you are able to cut down some of your call times? And as crazy as this sounds, the minute that I've made adjustments to any of my call times, for example, initially my one-on-one private calls were 60 minutes, and then we transitioned to 50 minutes, and then some are now 30 or 45, whatever that time period is. In my experience, usually less is actually more because you're more intentional on the call. You're able to get so much done so quickly and even have left over time as crazy as that sounds. So, let's say that you are running a group coaching program and you provide weekly group coaching calls and a private call every single month as well. Do your clients need a 60-minute call once per month with the group coaching calls? Can that be reduced to maybe 45 minutes, or 30 minutes, or even add in three 30 minute calls over the time of your program, the 12 weeks, 16 weeks, 6 months, whatever that looks like. What can be swapped? More time isn't necessarily going to bring in more results. You can still continue to support your clients without you being in the program at your computer so much.
Can you bring in support coaches to help answer some of those questions between some of the calls throughout the week? Can you add in more videos? Can you bring in guest experts to support and run some of these calls? There are definitely some things you can add in so that you can remove yourself a little bit. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being very involved in your programs, you most definitely and can be, however, do keep in mind that there's only 24 hours in a day and so you yourself can only support X number people. To really scale you get to either remove some of the one-on-one access, bring in additional support, or add in even more modules and things like that. There's definitely things that you can make tweaks on. I wanted to just do that quick brainstorm with you so that you can start to think about what it is that you could tweak or what transitions you could make in your business as you start to scale.
YOUR SCALING PLAN FOR THE FUTURE
So that brings us into how to start thinking about your scaling plan for the future. Let's say right now you've got 10 people in your group coaching program and you have one-on-one calls with every client and everyone’s in a group Voxer chat. For you to transition and scale into 30 or 50 people in that group program, maybe move the group Voxer chat over to Slack so that you can support more people and it’s more organized. It’s still creating a great client experience and you can still create that intimacy in the program as well. Maybe you remove some of the one-on-one calls and add in more group calls and group support or bring in a support coach to support some of those private calls. There are a few ideas. The things to definitely think about are the number of calls in your program and how much one-on-one access your clients receive. Do you have additional guest experts? What does that look like?
These are things to start to think about so that when I ask you that question next time and say I'm going to hand you 30 clients, what happens in your business? If you are still running the model that can only support eight clients then you know that you can't bring 30 in there. If you do want to bring 30 in, okay, we get to make some tweaks. As you start to make those tweaks you can then start to support more people. You really need that support in the back end as you continue to grow.
I want to get into a few tips so that you can start to actually grow and scale your evergreen model as you get it put together. Again, if you already have an evergreen program, amazing. If you have a program that runs a few times a year and you want to transition into evergreen, it’s definitely possible. I do have another podcast episode where I go into the differences between live launching and evergreen and in that episode I do recommend live launching a few times first so that you can see what happens organically before moving something into evergreen. It's much easier to make tweaks and changes to a program once it is in that live launch model versus evergreen. Some things to think about as you start to actually scale your evergreen model, you're going to need a few things that you're going to be bringing in. You need to have a scaling plan to bring in lead generation basically on autopilot. How can you be bringing in leads or a team member be bringing in leads for you? Maybe Facebook ads or Pinterest ads. What does that look like? How can you be bringing in more leads on autopilot so that more and more can see and learn about your evergreen program? You definitely want a proven model, and that's why the live launching first is a great test for you. Always test things live and organically. So for example, maybe you have a model where you host a webinar, a free webinar. Somebody goes to the webinar and then they book a call with you to see if they're fit to work with you, so a sales call, and then they enroll on that call.
So that's one example, but there are so many different models out there that you can create for your business and really amplify your evergreen system in the model that you have. So again, a webinar to book a call is a great example. You also could host a three-day training series that then pushes into applying to work with you. You also could do a webinar that goes into a payment button. Tons of options, but you want to have some type of sales process for your evergreen program and you want it to be as hands off as possible. The more hands-off it is, the more it truly is scalable. The more things are automated, the more it’s truly scalable. I made that quick mention of continuing to create that incredible client experience as you scale, and you can definitely do so. There are things that you can do like sending out welcome gifts to clients and little touchpoints throughout your programs as well.
I'm so happy that we started to get into this topic more and more on this podcast episode. It was something that I was supporting some of my higher-level Mastermind clients with last week and the week before as we were working on some of their big, big evergreen programs and really scaling. And yes, we do tons of behind-the-scenes work with our clients and really supporting them in the step-by-step on how to scale their programs to 50, to 100, to 200 or more clients at a time that they’re able to support. Because again, the more you can support the bigger the impact you get to create as well. We’re very hands-on, especially when those higher-level clients who are there. So if you're looking to get started, or if you're looking to make your first group coaching program, or it's hard to really scale, we have something for everybody. I have spent so much time on our product suite so that we do have something available for you no matter what business stage you're at. So definitely take a look at our show notes, there’s so much for you on our website.
We’ve touched on so many fun things today starting with what evergreen programs are, how to take a look at the performance of your past few launches or past few months and evaluating your current model, and how you can really scale. What happens if your clients double today or triple today? How would your business be running? What does that look like? What changes would need to be made? We’ve also touched on how to map out your scaling plan for the future, some bonus tips for your evergreen programs, starting to scale it, and so much more! We'll definitely be getting into even more and more material around this and what that really looks like, and even case studies of our business and clients’ businesses and things like that because I know you absolutely love, at least this is what I've heard from a few of you, is that it’s very, very helpful. Let us know of course in the reviews if there's more that you want to hear about, or feel free to send me a message over on Instagram as well. And you know that we've already started and we're so excited for next week's episode as we roll into the new year. I 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 next Monday morning.