In today’s #AskTaki, I’ve got a great question from Emily who asked…

“I need advice on how I can create a culture and understanding my hiring group program that’s a rolling community intended for them to stay a while like in Black Belt. This hasn’t historically been how my programs are being run, but I want to shift this…”

“…I know I can pre-frame this in future sales, but for the clients who are in the program now, they consider it a year-long. And it sounds like people are already starting to think about the year’s nearly up…”

“…How do I make sure that the people in my program know that we’re not just here for a short time, but we’re here for a long time to really get the results we’re after?”

For anyone who wants to keep their clients longer, this will be very helpful for you…

Start in sales

The first time to position people that it’s not a 12-month-and-done program but it’s an ongoing program is at the point of sale. And so, let’s just call this ‘at sales’.

What we do is we position that it’s a 3-year program with a 1-year commitment. And so, they know upfront that it’s designed to be three years plus, our journey. But right now, we’re just talking about our first year.

I know a couple of great coaches —shoutout to the one and only Alex from Aussie whose high-level program is, “This is how much it costs, but I’ll let you pay it off over three years.” And it’s positioned as three years upfront.

But I think the positioning should start at sales. Emily, I know that you want to know what to do with the people who already bought, but start there from now on. That’s number one, start in Sales.

Theme your years

Number two: theme your years. And so, instead of just saying, “Hey, it’s a 3-year program”, then what happens in year two? Well, it’s kind of the same again. What happens in year three? Well, it’s kind of the same again.

Let’s theme the years a little bit. If you theme your years so that there’s a clear difference between year one, and two, and three, let me think about the results in the program over time —with your one, and two, and three. Make sure that it’s positioned as their journey and that each year has a theme, a focus, a name. 

One of the ways we do this is we talk about year one as ‘foundation’, and then we repeat this conversation often through the program.

And in ‘foundation’, we’re going to stop doing some stuff that didn’t work, we’re going to add some new things, and you’re going to build a great foundation.

By the way, really important that you don’t just sell it as a foundation, doing lots of hard work and don’t get results because that’s not the case. But I want to set up that year one’s amazing, year two and three are even better. Okay?

Foundation, then acceleration. There’s a point where you really get some traction and things start to move. And then finally, multiplication or domination, or whatever you want. 

The Genius Model

Number three, and this might make more sense for Black Belt members than others but still useful, is to Genius Model out your curriculum. And Simon Bowen, and incredible client of ours and a great friend invented this cool tool called The Genius Model™.

And in essence, we’ve got a curriculum broken up into three core areas; Attract, and Convert, and Deliver. And each one of these three key areas has three accelerators —three things we do in Attract, three things we do to Convert clients, and three ways we Deliver leveraged group coaching.

What we do as we teach our curriculum through the months, is we walk through The Genius Model™. But in terms of the live intensives,  in year one, we’ll be focusing on one of the core Attract strategy.

In terms of at the workshop —the masterclass— in day one, Thursday; we’ll be doing Fill Funnel, or Audition Clients, Sell 1:1, and maybe Unpack IP.

Now, I’m not saying we don’t teach the other things, but at the live events, we have a one-day masterclass on that. Which means that in year two, we can focus on warming up prospects — the second Attract strategy. And here, we can focus on Selling with Webinars or Decide Business Model. 

In year three, we Build Authority. And I’m not saying this as you’ll have to wait till year three to do that, but you get the idea. We can focus on Rocking Sales Events or Leverage Coaching. And so, that way, each year has a focus and we’re not repeating the same content again and again.

By doing that, you’ve got a three-year curriculum easily that just goes deeper and deeper and deeper —the core drivers that really grow your client’s business.

Tell them what’s next

This sounds really simple but almost nobody does it. It’s to tell them what’s coming. If they feel like, “I’ve spent the money” and they don’t know what cool thing is coming up, then we need to let them know that something cool’s coming.

For example, there’s a great dude called Ari Meisel, who’s in Black Belt, who’s got a course for the Optimized Operator™. And so, one of the things, I haven’t shared to anyone yet is that we’ve bought the rights to Ari Meisel’s incredible Optimized Operator™ course.

Over the next week or two, we’re going to roll that out so that you have full access to this incredible course on how to optimize every part of your business —how to automate a ton of it, and then how to outsource the bits which can’t be automated. And so, that’s something that’s coming up.

Always let people know not just what’s new, but what’s next. And inside BlackBeltMembers.com, the Next tab is a really key piece of that for us. Linked to tell them what’s coming is showing them your calendar.

If you extend the calendar out, it is linked to show them what’s coming, but not just show them what’s cool that’s coming, but show them what’s planned that’s coming: what the topics are, what’s coming up like that, and you’ll do really well. 

Reset their vision

People stop coaching when they run out of vision. And one of your jobs —as coach— is to keep their vision big; to show them what’s possible and what’s next.

In Black Belt, every time we get together, we do The Momentum Gameplan™. We look back at all of the wins, we look at what you’re confident about right now, and we look into the future, and we set another set of future.

And so, we’re not saying, “Hey, stick with us.” but what we do is we ask people to see what’s possible and then making the commitment to themselves and their future that frankly, there’s a really good chance that will involve us.

But if they run out of future, they’ll run out of your program. That’s the case. Reset their vision often and early.

Sell an odd number of months

Next up. I’ve got a couple of clients who do this which I think is cool. Instead of selling a 12-month program, they sell 14 months. And the only way that they do that is if you will go, “I started in March. So March is when I finish.” but 14 months is kind of weird random terms.

I’m not going to say too much about that, but if they start March but May is when it rolls over or expires, I think that’s a cool thing.

This wasn’t part of my idea, but I think it’s probably worth saying. 

Recommitment

And so, we renew at events, but we also do a 1:1 session at the —about a 10-month mark— which, again, is about vision and it’s about recommitment. 

I know this is a big list. You don’t have to do all of them. If you pick three, you’re probably going to be super well positioned. Right?

Set a culture

I think the next thing to do is to set a culture of —in our world, it’s ‘BB for life’. 

In the moment that anyone says, “I’m a lifer”, then reinforce it. And part of your job is not just to teach content, but to teach people what to want.

And part your deal is to encourage this ‘Black Belt for life’ culture and ridicule anyone who thinks about quitting early.

Coach to outcome

Which leads me to the last idea which I think is the real key, is to coach to outcome. And so, people come to us —our business is called Million Dollar Coach. And our goal is to get 50 people this year to 1 million dollars. Right?

Well, here’s the most important thing…

If you joined a program and you’re not at a million dollars a year yet, then we still got work to do. And so, we just need to come back to outcome, “Hey, you came here because you have this challenge, and this challenge, and this challenge. And you really want to get to $84,000 a month. Where are we up to?”

“We’re at $50,000.”

“Okay. Well, $50,000 is really good. But we’re not at a million dollars a year yet. So, there’s still work to do.”

And just make sure that we are coaching to outcome, not to calendar. Because frankly, if somebody pulls out of our program we’ve had a million dollars a year —before they’ve got to a million dollars a year— then I feel like I’ve let them down.

And if somebody wants to leave early, then we’ve got this phrase that my friend Rohan Dredge told me that “If you let them off, you let them down.” 

That’s probably enough from me. Hopefully, that helps. Loads of ideas about how to make your mastermind members stick longer.

I’ll talk to you soon.

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