The Fastest Way to Shrink Your Caseload
9 times out of 10…
clinicians come to me wanting to shrink their caseload.
While a side hustle that brings in a little extra income to pay down student loans or put toward a mortgage is great, the truth is, most clinicians are teetering on the edge of burnout.
Like all the time…
We know, though we might not say it outright, that this burnout is directly tied to the fact that therapists are overworked and underpaid.
But we also know that the only ways to increase our income the within the therapy room are to raise our rates or take on more clients.
Neither of which are sustainable.
Moving to an online business and moving to 1:many blows this wide open.
An online income stream means more income, more impact, less stress and less burnout.
So in today’s episode, I’m going to dive into the easiest way to get out of one-on-one work, the easiest way to shrink your caseload, to take fewer direct hours and to find a way to have that hour go for many people at a time. And also for that hour to be much more lucrative for you. We’ll explore my favorite online income stream: Group Programs.
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Full Show Notes (Transcript)…
Hey, Risers, welcome to episode 83 of Empathy Rising. I'm feeling such a relief because temperatures have finally dropped around here, down in the South. And also, when temperatures drop, humidity drops, and being from out West, that is something that I will never, ever, ever, ever, ever get used to is humidity.
So now that I feel like I can walk outside again and not be sweating and gross and it's hard to breathe and all of that stuff, we've been spending a lot of time outside. We've been taking advantage of some self-care time.
I, a few weeks ago, had the Side Hustle schedule challenge. Many of you might've participated in that. One of the things that we identify, before we even start getting our schedule together, before we even start putting time blocks on paper, is our values and our non-negotiable values. One of them for me is, one of my values is nature. It's just something that I feel, regardless of the type of self-care that I do—I like to go to the nail salon, I like to do that kind of stuff too—but nature is my ultimate restorative. It's the thing that really grounds me and gets me back to where I need to be.
So, I pick the girls up. Well, I get in the car line at 1:45, but we leave school at about three o'clock and between three and four, three and 4:30, depending on what we're doing, that has become a new time block in my family's schedule. Josh meets us after work and we go to a park or we go for a little mini hike, or even if we come back to the house we play in the front yard or the backyard for a while before even going inside. It's been a nice change of pace for our family. It's been a nice way to get that non-negotiable family time in, and also combine it with my value of being outside in nature.
I'm really liking it. I'm liking this slight adjustment. I'm hoping all of you guys are getting some of that restorative, peace grounding back in your lives as we're kind of going toward the end of 2020, which is going to bring us to the topic today of shrinking your caseload a little bit.
I would say 9 times out of 10, the clinicians that come to me for adding on a side hustle, that's one of their biggest goals. Sometimes the goal is to leave the field altogether or to have one or two clients, three or five clients that maybe they hang on to. But for the most part, there is some sense of wanting to shrink the caseload.
Even if that's just going from 28 to 20 or from 20 to 15, being able to reduce the caseload a little bit, so that you can not only have more freedom, more flexibility, but it allows you to show up for those people who are clients of yours in a better way. You can show up for 15 people way more in a way higher quality at a different level than you can show up for 25 people.
I know that this is something a lot of you are thinking about and talking about: "How can I shrink my caseload?" That's what this episode is going to cover, the way that I think is the easiest. The way that I think is, even though I don't like to talk about time and pace on here, the way that I do think is the fastest.
I'm also going to talk about how I did it because this is the exact way that I stopped one-on-one. My one-on-one was coaching when I was taking individual coaching clients, and now I don't do that anymore. I don't work one-on-one at all. So it's going to be from a logistical standpoint, but also a bit of an anecdotal standpoint as well.
I think that we can all agree with the idea that therapists are overworked and underpaid, right? That is just a hands-down universal statement when we're thinking about clinicians. Even in private practice where we have the benefits of entrepreneurship, right? The freedom of scheduling, the marketing to a niche, there's still constant debates over insurance versus/private pay, which goes back to this notion of overworked and underpaid. Even when you are private pay, then you get the dialogue of raising your rates, right? You have to increase your fees if you're private pay. So it still goes to that notion of getting paid more for the work that you do, getting paid more for the hour that you are trading.
There is a ton of merit to therapists charging the hourly rate that they deserve. We should all be compensated for the work that we do and we should be compensated well. I did a quick Google search before I sat down with this episode and the average attorney fee in the United States came back with around $225 an hour. If you're in Manhattan, that's crazy different. If you're in rural Alabama, like I am, then that's different as well. But the average that came back was $225, which actually might not be that far off from your hourly rate, from a clinical hourly rate. But these attorneys are billing way more than one hour per week.
They don't bill one hour per week per case. They probably bill 10, 20, 50. I'm not an attorney, so I'm just guessing, but they bill multiple hours a week for multiple cases. And that's the reality, right? That's what it is.
When we get down to it in a clinical capacity, our hourly rate might not be that far off from $225. It might be significantly off, but it might not be that far off. But the only way for us to make more when we're working clinically is to raise our rates or to bill more hours, which means in our case to take on more clients in a traditional therapy setting. And that's the exact opposite of what we want to do.
We're talking about shrinking our caseloads, we're talking about working less and yet still maintaining our income, if not making more. So unless we decide to branch out of that traditional setting, it's not going to happen. And we can branch out.
We can scale in a traditional setting. We can bring on clinicians underneath us and we can form a group practice, and that increases our income. It does, but it also adds some headaches, like becoming a manager and stepping out of a solo practitioner role into a clinical director role, which we might've left the agency for in the first place because we didn't want to climb that ladder, so to speak. So we don't necessarily want to recreate it in our own business.
Moving to an online business and moving to one to many blows this wide open. This is nothing new. This is the message I've been sharing for a long time. I think breaking it down in these terms illustrates that unless we raise our rates or unless we take on more clients, our income cannot grow. I said earlier today, we're going to talk about the easiest way to get out of one-on-one work, the easiest way to shrink your caseload, to take fewer direct hours and to find a way to have that hour go for many people at a time. And also for that hour to be much more lucrative for you, and we're going to be talking about my favorite type of offer, which is group programs.
The reason that group programs are my favorite is they're the easiest to market and the easiest to deliver. As I said, I don't like to play up speed because I do think that slow growth, steady, methodical growth, sustainable growth is the way to go. But group programs are also the fastest way out of one-on-one.
It's the quickest way to drop clients from your caseload, but it's also in line with what we already do. I'm going to explore this in much, much more detail, but, you know that I practice what I preach over here. So I want to remind you that applications to my group program, which is Side Hustle Support Group, are open.
Side Hustle is the most comprehensive program on the market to help therapists evolve beyond the couch. The whole goal of this, the whole shrinking the caseload, the whole income coming from another source, diversifying, adding stability, adding in something more fun and enlightened like an enlightened type of career, something that feels freer, all of those are the goal of Side Hustle.
You can head on over to marissalawton.com/side-hustle. That's where you can apply for my group program because I think it's important to point out what we're giving up. We don't expand if we don't evolve. And a couple of these are just really obvious, right? If you don't step outside of the therapy room, you have an income cap. You can only make so much. Yes, you can raise your rates. But if every clinician around you in private practice is charging $175 and then you're charging $380/$400 people are going to look at that and be like, "What's the justification?"
I'm not saying that you might not deserve $380 or $400, but the consumer is going to question that. So can you have high fees? Sure. But can you be such an outlier in your market that the people don't understand why you're charging that much? I don't think so.
Eventually, you are going to have a cap on the income unless the entire industry in your area is rising at the same rate. The other thing to point out is that you are going to max out your time. You could see 30 clients a week. You could. None of us want that. And your clients don't want that either because are your clients getting the best of you when you're seeing 30 clients a week? They're not. You don't want that because you don't want the lifestyle of where you're seeing 30 clients a week. Nobody wants that.
If you don't step beyond the therapy room, you're going to have this income cap, you're going to have this time cap. But I think the things that are even more important are when we start talking about being burnt out and stagnating skills because you're a being, I'm getting a little woo here, but you are a being who is meant to evolve, who is meant to expand and maxing out your caseload and maxing out the time you're spending in one area, it's restrictive. It's limiting your potential. It's limiting the possibility. It's closing off doors to all other opportunities, right?
If you are focused so hard here and you are maxed out and burnt out, you're stagnating yourself. And ultimately, you know what I feel like you're doing is playing a bit small. Right. And this is coming across a little harsh. This is a harsher delivery than I normally give, but you know that it's always from love.
I want to see everybody in the world reach their maximum potential. I want to see everybody in the world living out their truest purpose. I don't have an everybody-in-the-world platform. I have a small, teeny little platform that speaks to therapists. So I want you guys to be maxing out your potential.
I want you guys to be living in your true purpose, and it just really means the world to me to encourage that, to inspire that, to motivate that.
I do think there's something unique that happens when you branch outside the therapy room. When you branch out with one-to-many programs, meaning a course, a membership site, a group program, we're going to focus a lot on group programs today, but all of these are one-to-many programs.
You shrink your caseload, right? You can serve fewer people better. If you have 15 people on your caseload instead of 25, you can serve those 15 people better, but you've lost the income from 10 clients, right? We need to at least make that up, if not expand past that, because, with one-to-many programs, you're creating something scalable, meaning your output doesn't change, but your income goes up.
You get to decide what the output is. With a course, it's one kind of output. With a membership site, it's one kind of output. With a group program, it's one kind of output, and you get to match that output with your unique lifestyle, your unique desires, but that output stays the same, regardless of if you have four people in a program, regardless of if you have 400 people in the program, your output stays the same.
That is how we make up for those 10 clients that have left that we've kept off the caseload. It's also how we surpass them. When you step outside of the therapy room, you can expand your reach. You're expanding your market rather than being in one state, one state's local market. Even if you're licensed in multiple states, you might be into multi-state local markets, right? If you're licensed in New York and Florida, you are not in the whole East Coast market. You're in a New York market and you're in a Florida market.
Now let's say you get licensed in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania. You are maybe in a regional market, but you're not in a national or a global market. Right? And so when you step out of the therapy room into online income, you're in a global market. If anybody who speaks your language or languages, if you're bilingual, oh my God, or trilingual, you've got an even bigger market. So your reach just expands and so does your ability to help people on a much more profound level. It's just so much bigger, right? With a bigger market, you have more potential sales. This speaks to that scalability again, because you can reach four people, 40 people, 400 people, 4,000 people—it's unlimited. Your potential sales are unlimited now that you are in a global market.
You also get to take advantage of more money by spending less time. I think I made that point already, but talking about the fact that your output doesn't change, but your income can replace the clients that have left but can also surpass the clients that have left. It's really about deciding what that output looks like for you so that you can make the decision that works the best.
It could be four hours a month. You've dropped 10 clinical clients, you've added four nonclinical hours. Now you've gained six hours and a net gain of six hours, but in those four hours, you're making three times as much as you made from the 10 clinical clients.
It does start to balance back out and not even balance out, it starts to go in your favor because you've added six hours. You've netted six hours, yet you are making more money from those four hours than you did when you were spending 10. You also get more freedom and more flexibility because you get to choose those four hours.
Those four hours could be at two in the morning if you want. Or they could still be during regular working hours when maybe you were seeing those 10 clients, but they could be from a coffee shop or they could be from your bed. I've worked from bed more times in 2020 than I care to admit.
You get more freedom, more flexibility.
You could be like Amber Lyda, one of my good friends. She works from her hammock in her gorgeous backyard a lot of the time. You have these four hours, you've gained yourself six hours to do nothing. You're working in four of the hours, but the way you're spending those four hours, the way you're working in those four hours is totally different.
As I said, I think the biggest point of stepping outside of the therapy room, the biggest point of adding on an online income stream is that you get to grow beyond your clinical skills. You could go get another clinical certification, you could go get EMDR, you could go get brainspotting.
You could go get all these trendy things. You totally could they still keep you in the therapy room, right?
You have a chance to grow beyond your clinical skills. You get to experience helping people in a different capacity. What else I think is cool about this is you get to get creative again.
I feel like when I first started working with clients clinically, I would try all kinds of cool fun interventions. There was just a zest to it. There was an experimental fun element to working with clients. Over time that kind of went away. You could bring that back to the therapy room, but you could also find it outside of the therapy room. You have a chance to get creative again in a new or a different environment. You could also bring things back to the therapy room. You could be inspired through coaching or a course or a membership site or your group program.
You could be inspired here and take that back to the clinical room as well.
I think it's really important to mention one of the biggest criticisms that the online income industry gets, especially coaching, is the lack of regulation, but wouldn't it be cool if therapists flooded the coaching industry and brought legitimacy to it? Brought a positive impact on that industry where people could see what it means to be ethical and what it means to act from integrity? We have a lot more freedom, but we also bring a level of professionalism that a lot of coaches might not have. And I think that's cool. I think it's cool to have not only an impact on people on a global scale but also to have an impact on an industry.
I don't know. I just think these things are neat, just sharing, and I think you'd get to reach potential. I think you get to play a bigger game. And if you guys are listening to this, because I know there is something about expansion, something about evolution, something about having a voice, telling you there's something bigger out there, something different out there, and I think stepping outside of the comfort zone and stepping into the growth zone a little bit, I think that is what's going to help you reach this potential.
The therapy room is the comfort zone. Online income is a growth zone. When you step out, that's when you're going to evolve and that's when you're going to level up.
Now you've heard me mention other income streams a few times, right? I've mentioned courses. I've mentioned membership sites. I've mentioned even coaching. Any online income stream is going to help you do these things. It's going to help you reach your potential. It's going to help you expand.
It's going to help you replace those clinical hours with fewer online income hours. You're going to have a net gain of time when you do this.
The reason that I want to highlight group programs in this episode is that they're the easiest way to make this happen there, the easiest way to shrink your caseload. I'm going to expand on what I mean by that.
The first thing is that group programs are a high price, low volume type of product. Higher price, lower volume. What that means is that you get to charge more for a group program than you do for a course than you do for a membership site than you do for most offers out there. One-on-one coaching can be more than a group program because it's one-on-one versus group. But again, one-on-one coaching, you are not working one to many. So even though you charge more for coaching than therapy, you're still going to have an income ceiling, eventually. You're still going to have a time cap, eventually. The group program is lucrative and it is one to many.
That's what I think is one of the best things about it, because it is a high price. It is a low volume. To put that in words that are probably more appealing is low volume means a small audience. You do not need to be building this giant audience to get a group program off the ground.
You can get a group program filled with an audience of 250 people. And the high price, low volume means you can get started so much faster because you don't have to spend months and months and months waiting until you have a big waitlist or months, and months and months waiting until you have a big following.
You can spend two or three months building your list, and then you can go to a small waitlist and still end up filling your group program. That's why they're also faster. Okay, so you make one of the most amounts of money from that type of offer with the smallest audience, that right there I think is the biggest benefit of a group program.
One objection that comes up is premium pricing. Well, no one's going to pay me $3,000 for a group program, no one's gonna pay me $2,500 for a group program. The answer that I always have to that is nobody has to pay in one lump sum. You solve a pricing objection. Whether it's your money mindset coming up saying, "Oh, there's no way I can charge $3000" or whether it's coming from your ideal customer, "There's no way they can pay $3000." Can they pay $300 over 10 months? Can they pay $500 over six months? That busts that objection right away, you can feel good about collecting $300 or $500 a month from somebody. You do it all the time if you're private pay, but that works for the customer too, to break it down for a payment plan.
The other huge benefit of payment plans is this creates recurring revenue. If it's a $3,000 program, And they pay for it over six months and it's $500 a month, it's manageable for them, it's manageable for you, and you get to count on $500 a month from, let's say, 10 people. That's $5,000 a month for six months.
It's the best of both worlds when it comes to online income, because you're not doing these big crash launches where you make $10,000 in two weeks, and then you make nothing until you launch again, three or four months later. You get recurring revenue.
The other types of offers that have recurring revenue are membership sites.
Think about it. A membership site, someone's paying you $30 a month. They're paying you $30 in perpetuity, right? So eventually you might recoup the same cost from that person that it would have cost to be in your program or like in a group program, but you get to charge $300 a month or $500 a month for your group program versus $30 a month, because that's the volume game.
If you were charging $30 a month, you'd need how many more people to hit the same amount that you're charging. If you were charging $500 a month, so premium-priced, hot, higher price, lower volume, you defuse the objection of premium price with payment plans. So the fact that there's no way I can charge this, or there's no way they could pay this, then come up with a payment plan that makes sense for them and makes sense for you.
Going back to this idea of the smallest audience, because you're in a high price category, you also are in a low volume category. I've made this point already, but I just want to reiterate that that means you need much fewer sales for a group program than obviously a membership site, or even for a course, it's one thing to sell five copies of your course. Can you sell five copies of your course every month so that you have recurring revenue, so that you have something sustainable, or would you rather go in with a group program and have payment plans so that you have recurring revenue?
An example of this with me is I started seeing one-on-one clients.
So actually what I used to do, some of you might remember what I used to do, is I used to write blogs and websites for therapists. That's what I started doing three years ago. In August it was three years. So three years ago in August, I started writing blog posts and websites for therapists, then I knew I couldn't do done-for-you anymore.
I couldn't be the one doing it. I was literally—Logan was a baby, she was, what? March to August. That's three to eight. She was five months old. I had to do the math. Logan was five months old. And so I would nurse her and then put her to bed and I'd be like writing until the time she woke up for her next nurse.
Then I would go down or then I would go to sleep. It wasn't working. It just wasn't working. So I had to switch from done-for-you. And so I switched to coaching where I co-created blogs and websites with therapists. They would write their website with my templates and my guidance, and we would do it together live.
They'd write a sentence and I'd be like, let's change this word. It was fun. But again, it was still one to one. So I quickly hit an income gap and a time gap because back then, Sawyer was still only in preschool, three hours a day, only three days a week. And so all of my hours, my nine hours a week were spent on these coaching calls.
Any marketing I had to do for my business was happening after, like during nap times or after bed. So again, it wasn't working for my schedule.
From there, I created a course called Cathartic Marketing. Many of you might remember it. Cathartic Marketing took what I was doing one-to-one—the templates, the blog, writing the website, writing—and put it into a course.
And with a course, I was priced under a thousand dollars. I did two versions. We could do Cathartic Marketing live together, or you could buy the self-study. Both of them were under a thousand dollars, so it was not quite at a premium price. I was still at a low price, high volume.
So it was becoming my whole time and effort was in marketing this course, I still had to get so many sales a month, so many sales on a recurring basis to make a sustainable income, to grow to scale, and it was just more effort than it was worth.
Was it nice to have a self-study program? Was it nice to have, very, very low touch? It was. And so if that is valuable to you having all of your time back and not having any time with your students or not facilitating any coaching client calls, then just know that you trade that delivery time.
You trade that for marketing time. So what I missed with Cathartic Marketing was I didn't like being all in the marketing time. I missed some touch. I like being higher in touch with my students. I wanted to add that back in and I didn't want to have to market so much.
So what does that mean?
I needed to be in a higher touch, higher price category, lower volume category. And that's how Side Hustle came to be. Side Hustle came to be a true group program where it's premium-priced for a lower number of people. There are payment plans over a longer period.
The other point to make is that it is much easier to market.
When you're making this decision, is your time going to be spent delivering, or is your time going to be spent marketing? With a group program, you get to spend a heck of a lot less time marketing because you need a smaller audience. You need fewer sales. So what you're doing at that point is you are spending your time nurturing an audience rather than building an audience, because people are paying for a more premium price product. They need to be more invested in you. They need to be more invested in the relationship with you than if they're buying something cheap, if they're buying something less expensive. It's a lot easier for them to throw $50 bucks a month or a couple of hundred dollars at a course and be like, eh, if it sucks, oh, it was just a couple of hundred bucks.
With a premium investment, there needs to be much more relationship there, much more trust, much more investment. The good thing is, as a clinician, you're already really good at this. You're probably not as good at lead generation. You're probably not as good as getting in front of hundreds and thousands of people, but you're a lot better at having a relationship with a few people.
Marketing, not only from a number standpoint, is easier and better because you need fewer people, but from a delivery standpoint of marketing, it's about creating relationships. It's about building rapport and trust rather than getting in front of as many people as you possibly can.
It's not so much about visibility as it is a relationship. So that type of marketing just feels better for us. It feels more natural for us. It feels like it's already within our wheelhouse.
The delivery of the program is easier too because most of us are familiar with therapy groups. The notion is what I used to do in individual therapy I do with group therapy. I charge less for the group hour, but I'm making more because there's more than one person, it's the same type of thing.
I have individual coaching. I have this package that I walk people through one-to-one coaching. And now I've developed group coaching where the curriculum or the package or the, you know, walk that they walk through, the path that they go through is the same. But again, you charge a little bit less for it because it's done in a group, but you make more because it's one to many.
So a group coaching program feels a lot like a group therapy program in delivery. In the sense of, we understand how to work in a group dynamic, we understand forming, storming, norming, adjourning, we get that. We're just doing it again. Instead of doing it for a clinical client, we're doing it with a nonclinical customer, just like we'd make this delineation with coaching where we're working with a nonclinical person in our coaching.
We're working with a nonclinical person and solving a nonclinical problem in our group program. But the feel is the same. It's no different, it's not a different skill set. It's just a different setting. So this is another reason why I like group coaching programs or group programs because we already are very familiar with group therapy.
It's not like we have to reinvent the wheel here. We don't have to go back to square one. We get to repurpose and repackage a clinical skill into just a different setting. It feels very natural for us.
I think the other part of this to mention, about why I think group programs are the best way to leave one-on-one behind is because they create a simpler business. Because usually when you have one course, a lot of people are like, oh, I want to make two or three or four different courses. Or even if you have one course or one membership site, again, you're in the volume game. So you've got to make so many more sales and you've got to make so many more sales consistently with a group program. You get to create a simpler business because you're selling one premium product to fewer people and you get to get known for one thing.
It's called what you'll hear in online income circles as a signature offer, like Side Hustle Support Group is my signature offer. I have other programs. I have Space Holder, and then I have the Mastermind that happens after Side Hustle. I have other programs, but I am known for Side Hustle Support Group, which makes me ultimately known for helping clinicians create an online income stream. So selling one program puts you on the map, you get known for something you get referred to, people send people your way. You have to do less marketing because there are people sending people to you. It all just folds into one.
It all comes together. Everything is related. I guess what I'm trying to say is that marketing is easier. The delivery is easier. You need a smaller audience.
I think it also allows you to make the sales process more efficient. Eventually, you can start automating a lot of this because you're only selling one product and it makes it more effective.
The more you sell the thing, the more you get better at it. You get better at talking about your program. You get better at answering questions about your product. You get better at anticipating questions about your product. So you can answer them before the customer even asks them. And then they feel like you're reading their mind.
This isn't magic. It isn't magic. It's just like logistics. It's just, it's more science than it is magic. And you get more effective and you get more efficient. Going back to my business is, my business took off the year before I started Cathartic Marketing, when, as I said, I started in August, so it was August to December.
I made like $12,000. That's when I was writing blogs and writing websites for therapists. So that was four months of the year, $12,000. Let's just assume that things stayed the same. And we times that by four by three by three. So that would be, that would have been $36,000 a year for me. The next year, when I added in Cathartic Marketing, I had $68,000 a year.
Doubled that year. Adding a course got me out of doing the work for you, I was still doing one-on-one so that 68 was with one-on-one work and it was with my program, but it wasn't enough being a course and being low price. It wasn't enough for me to be able to drop the one-on-one altogether, which was my ultimate goal.
I needed a way to get out of one-on-one.
When I switched to a group program model, I sold nine in the first round of Side Hustle and I sold 13 in the second round of side hustle. So that's 22 sales altogether. It's all I did for the whole year. And I more than doubled the year before and more than doubled that $68,000 with only 22.
So it just puts it into perspective. Then I got to focus on only selling Side Hustle again. So the first round we had nine. In the second round we had 13, the third round we had 22, the fourth round we had 28 and it's only growing from there. My output has not changed. I still run the same program.
Now you guys have heard about the nine-month version things are gonna look a little bit different and I don't have the numbers of how many are coming in for the new year in 2021. When I do, I will share them with you. You guys know I'm always transparent about that, but. Some things are changing.
My output is going to change. It's going to go from six months to nine months. You've heard all of the reasons for that. You've heard all the justification for that, but again, I'm doing less because I was doing two rounds of six months and I got two weeks off in July or in June. And I got two weeks off in December.
Now I'm doing one round of nine months. So I'm not necessarily going to get time off in the summer. I'm still going to take a vacation and I can work from the beach or I can work from Airbnb. So that's that freedom, that flexibility piece. But I'm going to get three months off at the end of the year now, and that's huge for me. So instead of four weeks split up I'm getting three months straight.
My output is it's changing, but it's not going up. It's going down and my income is going up. I do believe that is the group programs are where it's at.
I 100% believe they're where you should start, especially if you have a small audience or no audience because you can get started with so many less, so much fewer. Whatever's grammatically correct. You can get started with a smaller audience. You can get started faster, even though I'm not about speed around here, you can get started faster because you can start with 200 people in your audience and you can from 250 people, you can get five people into a group program, five people at $3,000. That's 15 grand. How many clients can you cut with 15 grand? You can do the math, but I'm sure you could probably cut for three or four clients if you made 15 grand from a program.
And that's only running it once.
What if you ran it twice a year and it was 30 grand? How many clients could you replace then? It's simple math. Group programs are the easiest to market. They're the easiest to deliver. They're the most natural for us because they mimic what we already do in the therapy world.
It's taking the clinical skills and repackaging them in a different setting. I just love group programs. I can talk about them all day, but I just feel like they're a great alternative. They're the easiest way to shrink your caseload. And they're also the easiest program to deliver and to market.
Also, they're easy to reformat. So this is the last point that I want to make. Let's say you do want that course down the road. You do want to not have any touchpoints or very few touchpoints. You don't want to be doing group coaching for the long term. You can take the curriculum that you created, all of the recordings of the coaching calls, all of the work that you did over, let's say two, three, four rounds of your group program.
You can then package that as a self-study. By then your audience will be bigger. By then your marketing will be efficient. You could probably even turn it into a passive or an evergreen funnel at that point. This kind of ties all the episodes we've been talking about the last few weeks, right?
Progress over perfection. Start with a group program when your audience is small and it's more lucrative. Then after you run it a few times, you work out all the kinks, your students get results, it works, you have recordings for people. When they go through self-study, they can watch recordings of coaching so they feel like they're still getting that benefit. Repackage it again into a self-study, the price drops, but your audience is bigger and you can now sustain recurring course sales. You can now sustain an evergreen funnel. And that's the way to go.
You guys know, I meet you where you're at, and if you tell me from the get-go, I want a course, or if you tell me from the get-go, I want a membership site, we'll build that strategy. But if I were to tell people what to do, which I don't, but if I were, this is what I would tell them. I would tell them to start with a group program. All right now I am a little biased because group programs are my favourite for all of the reasons above, but they aren't the only ones that work online.
You've heard me say that. You've heard me talk about membership sites. You've heard me talk about courses. They're all legitimate. They are. They just have different paths. I think the easiest path, I think the shortest path is a group program. Side Hustle has helped people put coaching packages, courses, and membership sites in the world.
Don't knock group programs until you have tried them. Yes, they're higher touch. Yes, they require a bit more time than some of these other programs might, but they also have a much faster return and they have a much better return.
Now, remember if you want to see behind the scenes of my group program, you get to see what mine looks like, you get to see all of the lessons, you get to see the curriculum, you get to see the templates, you get to talk to alumni, you get to talk to our graphic designer (she's going to be sharing all of the templates that she's designed inside the program), remember to RSVP for our Side Hustle open house. It's happening this week on the 19th There will be a replay, so even if you can't stay the whole time or if something comes up and you can't attend, you can still watch the replay.
I think one of the biggest things is to be able to not only ask me all the questions that you have but to be able to talk to students who are enrolled for the upcoming round, and just get to ask them, "What made you decide to join?" "What made you, go ahead and you know, pull the trigger and jump in?" You also get to talk to alumni and hear honest feedback. I've told all of the alumni who are coming, I want you guys to share the good and the bad, the challenging and the fun, all of it. So you're going to get transparent and honest opinions from me, from the alumni, and even from people who are about to join. So I think it's really exciting.
I've never put on an open house before, but it's just something that I think is fun to get that kind of sneak peek feeling. So if you're going to hang out with us later this week, go ahead and go over to marissalawton.com/hangout.
That's where you can register. You'll get to see my group program, the inner workings of it and how I've designed everything and how it's facilitated, and the people who helped me facilitate it as well as the people who have gone through it. We can't wait to share the time with you and help you decide if Side Hustle feels like the right fit for you and if it's going to be the program that helps you bring your online income stream to life in 2021.
All right, guys, I will talk to you next time and until then, keep on rising.
