Gill Moakes (00:02.186)
Welcome, welcome to the Heads Together podcast. I'm your host, Jormoaks, and I am so grateful you're here with me again this week. So I'm freshly back from the North Norfolk coast. Just had the loveliest long weekend. Bit cold, bit breezy, but my goodness, you know, if you're in the UK and you haven't stood on a North Norfolk beach,
and seeing just the huge skies, this uninterrupted clear skies, it's amazing. If you're abroad you probably see this all the time because you've probably got a bit more ruralness but yeah I highly recommend even my friends across the pond if you come over to the UK
don't neglect Norfolk, it's a fabulous county, it's just a bit hard to get to, it's on that bulge at the side of the island of England, it's like, yeah, bit of a bulge. But it was a lovely, lovely weekend, it was a good break, we did some walking, we did some sampling of local cuisine, and we went to a fabulous Beatles tribute at the end of...
Chrome appear, which was jolly good fun. Loved it. But now I'm back and I am all set up, ready to record a couple of solo episodes for you. And this first one that I want to record today, this is a talk I gave recently to the Institute of Coaching Studies. Now, the Institute is where I got my
ICF accreditation from. It's a fantastic coach training program. And honestly, if you're listening to this, and either you would like to become a coach, as I know, a lot of my listeners would, or if you are a coach, and again, as I know a lot of my listeners are, but you haven't yet decided to get that accreditation, I cannot.
Gill Moakes (02:19.178)
recommend the Institute of Coaching Studies enough, it is fantastic. Run by Marion Tilley, who is just an amazing coach herself. And I think for anyone who, and this is what I want to come on to talk about today, but for anyone who really wants to set themselves apart as a transformational coach. And I'm not talking about this, you know, this
absolute huge influx of anyone and everyone calling themselves a coach. I'm talking about if you want to learn the skill of coaching and if you want to work with incredible clients and charge high ticket fees for transformational coaching, which you should, then I highly recommend you pay the website a visit and get in touch with one of Marion or her team at
Institute because it's fabulous. So I did this talk recently for them as part of the Business Webinar series which you might want to check out and I thought actually you know what this is a good lesson and it's something that I feel I can talk to you about on the podcast albeit there are slides to this one.
And this is just an audio only podcast that I'm doing today. So what I'll probably do is redo it at some point and pop it onto the YouTube channel or something like that. But for the moment, we're going to dive in. This is all about the coaches often pyramid. So let's go.
Okay, so what exactly is an offer pyramid? I mean, I'm guessing you're picturing in your mind the pyramid shape. So I'm going to fill in a little bit what I mean about an offer pyramid and my take on that. And it's that as coaches, there are a lot of ways that we can add value for clients. The top of the pyramid.
Gill Moakes (04:24.202)
me, which is always where you will charge your highest fees. It's where the results that your clients get are the most transformational. And that is at the top of the peak of the pyramid, that is your one to one coaching. So as coaches, coaching is different to teaching is different to consulting, it's different to mentorship, okay, coaching is a very specific skill in its own right.
And if you train well, practice well, and become really good at getting transformational results for your clients, then your one to one coaching offer is always going to be at the top of your pyramid. Because once coaching I think is in your blood, it's kind of the thing you want to be spending your time doing. I think this is something that triggers me a little bit is when...
coaches finish their training and straight away want to go into becoming almost mini marketers and launching these, you know, huge group coaching programs where, you know, there's not a lot of actual coaching going on. It's much more about teaching or training or, you know, mentorship. And I think as coaches, there is something so special about the one to one.
coaching relationships that we have with our high ticket clients. I know that I am now at a point in my business where I've fleshed out more of the pyramid. So I absolutely do have these different offers as we go down the pyramid. But certainly for the first couple of years, I was just coaching one to one, I was really refining how I work with my clients. And I was building my reputation, I was building a business by referral. So
90 % of my clients come to me via word of mouth. And as coaches, I honestly feel that's how it should be. We didn't go into coaching to become marketers. Now that said, once you are consistently hitting those 10k months as a coach, and we use that 10k month, that's like, it's whatever it looks like for you. Whatever you get to a point where you're earning,
Gill Moakes (06:47.146)
enough money for you to be able to experiment with other things. Because experimenting with other offers takes money, it takes investment. Okay, and I'm going to come on to that. But until you're at that point, I would urge you to focus really hard on your one to one coaching engagements. That is where the real magic of coaching happens. And it's that period of
getting very good at getting coaching clients, being really good at serving your coaching clients, honing all of the business aspect of your coaching practice, then by all means, then start filling out the lower tiers of your pyramid. But at the beginning, there are only two tiers that should have something in it. So if you can picture a triangle,
that's kind of got horizontal lines going across dividing it into maybe like six or seven segments, right? The only ones at the beginning that should be filled are your one -to -one coaching packages, which are at the top of the pyramid and your free offers, which are at the bottom of the pyramid.
So free offers are things like your discovery calls, your lead magnets. It might be a free event that you host. It might be a free course that you offer webinars, all of that kind of thing. It might be a Facebook group, you know, however you help people for free, that sits at the bottom of the coaching pyramid, right? And your one -to -one coaching sits at the top. Now, in between, as we work down,
The way I look at it is that I think underneath your one -to -one offers sits things like high level masterminds. Now these are intimate groups, small numbers, and a mastermind group has a flat hierarchy. And what I mean by that is that, so I run a mastermind group, which is exclusively for my one -to -one clients. So my private clients automatically,
Gill Moakes (09:02.858)
come into my rise together mastermind. And it's an intimate group. It's where I'm not the teacher at the head of the class. It's where the members of a mastermind group are learning together and lifting each other. Okay. Now if you run a paid mastermind, you can absolutely charge a high ticket price because there is
one on one access to you, you are inside that group, it's a small number of people, and therefore you'll be able to give one on one attention to each member. But also they are there is an added dimension of peer learning within a mastermind group. So that can be a really effective offer for a coach to have. The next one down that I talk about a lot, and obviously, as you know, I
co founded with Lauren Jones, my partner, unapologetic retreats. And retreats are fantastic containers for coaches to do great work. So who wouldn't love to be coached in an amazing environment, you know, whether that's abroad, whether it's in some beautiful countryside. It's just there's something very special about receiving coaching.
or training or mentorship or consulting. So any of those other things that coaches will sometimes offer, coaches will often put different hats on depending on how they are working with their clients. So for me as a coach, there's a lot of mindset coaching absolutely that I do with my clients. But then I also swap that out and put on my consultant hat when we're talking about.
business strategy and marketing and that kind of thing. So there's definitely some fluidity between coaching and other services. Retreats are a brilliant way to offer us, again, it's an intimate small group. So it's high ticket. The smaller the group, the more one -on -one attention you can lavish on your clients, the higher ticket.
Gill Moakes (11:22.09)
the higher price you can charge for what you do. And there's a very good reason for that because price, as I always say, price is absolutely and directly linked to the value you're providing. Nothing else, nothing else. It's not to do with if you offer a program, it's nothing to do with the number of modules in it, the number of videos, the number of this, that and the other, it's all about the value for your clients.
What is the transformation that they're getting? If it's monetary, are they able to earn much more money once they've gone through your program or your coaching, your one -to -one, whatever it is, your retreat, your mastermind? If it's their health that you're transforming, are you promising an incredible transformation with one -to -one work and very, very intimate, close support?
then you can charge the high ticket price and only then. So coming down that pyramid after retreats, we're looking things like speaking gigs, hosting events. Now, speaking is a really interesting one. I think this is quite Marmite, really. I think it's what some people just their goal would be to speak on a big stage in front of a big audience. You know, that would be
absolute, their idea of heaven. And then there's other people for whom that would be their idea of hell. They couldn't think of anything worse than having to speak in front of a big audience. So wherever you are on that spectrum, you know, it's really important to think about it. This is your coach's offer pyramid. No two coaches are going to have the exact same or very few are going to have the exact same model.
right, where every single offer they have is identical. No, this is about finding out what is right. And it's not necessarily about just about what's right for you. It's about what's right for your ideal clients. And we'll come on to that. So the next thing down would be like a small group coaching program.
Gill Moakes (13:41.962)
And this is very popular now with coaches is to get a group program. And that's because we were all sold this amazing mirage of the blessed passive income. Right. And unfortunately, I mean, and I am going to come onto passive income, but it's, um, you know, spoiler alert, not passive first thing, but group programs, you know, small group programs. Great. Really, really good.
for providing training, for getting sort of some theory across. So for example, I have a program coming out in June, which is all about how to create market and sell your signature high ticket offer. Well, that program will have an
element of coaching in it. But actually, what I'm doing in that program is a lot of teaching. And I think that group programs are really good for teaching elements. So if you're a fitness coach, it there's going to be you know, you can really teach the theory behind what you do in a small group environment. Right?
If you are, for example, a life coach, relationship coach, something like that, you know, you can absolutely be sharing with a small group some fundamentals around what you coach around. What I don't think happens in a group is true coaching. Controversial, and I know people will probably come at me for that. But the reason I say that is...
The inner group environment with the best will in the world, even if you have created curated the perfect group of people, which is absolutely essential in my mind, if you're running a mastermind, a retreat or a small group program, it is so important that you bring together the right people. So important. One bad apple will ruin the experience for everyone else.
Gill Moakes (16:01.418)
So you need to make sure that with those offers, when I'm teaching how to create these kind of higher ticket offers, it's absolutely all about applications. It's about interviews. It's about going deep into making sure you're bringing the right group together. And with small group programs,
However well you've done that, I think there is a reticence from people to be completely open in front of a group of people that they don't know that well. And I think that's completely natural. I don't think you could expect it to be any different. And it doesn't mean that your clients aren't going to get a great result if they are looking for training, teaching.
how to do something, then I think small group programs are perfect for that.
The next tier down is the large group program. So with a large group program, it's a lot less about the interaction of the group really. It's very much reflected in the price, so it's going to be a lower cost because there is less value able to be delivered in a really large group program. You know, one of the ones where you've got, you know, the entire Zoom screen is full of little faces and...
You could scroll and there's loads and loads of them. And I think these absolutely have their place. And one place where I think these are really good is if you have this really accessible price -wise program, and then you have this option to add back in some one -on -one coaching with coaches. I love that model. I think that's a really great model. But can you see how straight away where my mind goes to, how do you add back in?
Gill Moakes (17:54.378)
the transformational piece, the one -on -one, the, you know, how can we do it? Could we break it into smaller groups? Could there be accountability hubs within a large group program? And I think as a coach, that needs to be our default all the time. However low down this pyramid you go with your offers, you need to keep coming back to that question of how do I best serve the client in this environment?
How do I make sure the client is still getting a transformational result? How do I make sure they're still making progress, being accountable? Because coming on to passive income, which is really the next one in between your free offers and the larger group programs, passive income is that layer at the bottom, which like I say is number one, it's never passive. It might be that a lot of the effort.
to create a passive income offer like a digital course or writing a book that would be a passive income. It's not that there is no effort required, so it's just passive, it's just that the effort is front loaded. It's absolutely kind of at the front end when you're building out a course, when you are...
you know, writing that book, creating the audio series, whatever it is that you're creating as something that you want to have passive income from, i .e. be able to just set it on some kind of sales funnel that works while your eyes are closed and you're, you know, working on the beach in Thailand. If that's what you're looking for,
then just know this, there is a ton of work upfront for it. And the other thing is that large group programs, so lower, lower price, large group programs, passive income offers incredibly hard to sell. Not impossible to sell by any means, but they require one of two things, generally speaking, either a generous Facebook ad budget or LinkedIn ad budget or Google ads budget.
Gill Moakes (20:17.898)
So some kind of generous paid advertising budget, or unless you already have like a 10 ,000 plus email list. If you've got those, if you've got one or preferably both of those two things, like some of the gurus we can think about, like the Amy Ford Porterfields and the Jenna Kutches and those people.
those people have been in the game a long time and been able to grow these huge email lists, where for them making money from passive income, so just selling courses and things like that is actually really easy for them. Because they've got this captive list of people they've they've got to that level where they can just, you know, work their email list. But it should also be said all of those people are also also spending.
thousands and thousands of pounds or dollars on advertising too. So when I see people who have just completed their training, and then they want to just put something out there that's completely passive income, that's a red flag for me, particularly if it's something reasonably generic. So it's gonna be difficult to stand out or you haven't got a very, very specific niche.
going to be very tricky to sell. Okay. And that's why it's further down that pyramid, it should be coming later. It should be coming once you have already you're hitting those consistent 10k months, and therefore are able to invest in advertising to sell an offer like that. So it doesn't mean none of these offers are wrong. None of them are wrong. Are some of them better than others? In my opinion, yes, because I just judge via
the client transformation. So I know myself that in terms of courses and particularly where there is no coaching support with that course, I've got a ton of those sitting in my email inbox that are gathering dust, right? Completion rates on those are very, very low.
Gill Moakes (22:29.322)
Whereas I think if as a coach, you can just keep coming back to how is this serving the client? What can I add in or sometimes take away to make this the most transformational experience it can be? So if you have decided to go for a large pro group program, could you
make the price a little higher and then bring in other coaches if you don't want to be filling your calendar with one on one coaching, bring in some other coaches that you that you trust to perhaps add a little bit of one to one support and accountability to that large group program. If it's a small group program, how could you make sure that
people are getting enough one on one time. Is there an opportunity for everyone to have some kind of check in call? Could you run office hours where they have some voxel access to you? If you're running a retreat even, and that's a high ticket intimate experience, Lauren and I are always really, you know, one thing that's very much on our mind is, okay, where are we giving our guests one on one support to?
as well as the group experience, which is amazing, just like a mastermind learning from each other. But where can we also build in one to one time with us?
So that's really the offer pyramid. And I'll, what I'll do is I'll pop some graphics in the show notes. I'll put something you can download that's just going to give you a better picture of this, which I think you will find helpful just to get this clear in your mind.
Gill Moakes (24:25.898)
So how do you decide which offers are right for you? How do you decide how many of the tears in that pyramid you're going to fill with offers? The truth is, it's like most things in business, it's not all about you. And if you have invested the time and effort that I recommend in understanding your ideal clients so deeply, then you're going to know.
you're gonna know instinctively what they want and need, and you will be able to package that up for them. Because clients shouldn't be this nebulous kind of... Like, you know the client avatar, I offer a client avatar. Oh, sorry, Lena, just delete that bit.
Gill Moakes (25:20.682)
If we go back to like, like most things in business, right? So, like most things in business, it's not all about you. It's about your clients and what they want. And if you have invested time and effort in understanding your ideal clients as deeply as I really urge you to, then you know that what they want and need is paramount.
And you're going to know what those things are. And you're going to be able to instinctively package that up for them. Absolutely take into account the way you love to work, but you have to meet your clients expectations first and foremost, if you want to be successful. And generally speaking, when we're starting out as coaches, that is our one -to -one coaching. That's the most transformational thing that we have to offer. And I don't like the current...
kind of almost judgment passed on people. Oh, you're still offering one to one as if it's like as if it's a secondary thing, as if we're somehow missing a trick by not leveraging our time from the outset. Well, I'm going to be honest with you, you could waste a whole lot of time trying to leverage your time straight out of the gate. But until you've put in that legwork and genuinely built your reputation,
as a transformational coach, which is intimate conversations, whites of the eyes, you to your client coaching together deeply, then you will struggle to fill in the rest of the tears in that pyramid. Okay, so this is super important to understand, I think.
In terms of what makes your offer irresistible, because obviously your service could be one -to -one coaching, but there's a lot of offers you can build around that, you know? And certainly when you think about those offers as you come down, the masterminds, the retreats, the group programs, that kind of thing, what makes it irresistible is when we really create an offer or an experience that is exactly what our clients want and need.
Gill Moakes (27:34.826)
And what makes it actually resistible to them is us communicating the value to them in that way. So they understand that, so that they understand that this is exactly what they want to need. This is why messaging is so incredibly important. And if you get this right, if you if you know that you deliver absolutely transformational coaching, then you have
to get good at communicating the value of that to your clients, because then, and only then do you get the chance to convert them into clients, right? And only then do you get to deliver this exceptional experience so that those private clients become your ambassadors. They are the people who are selling what you do for you. They are the ones having conversations with their friends, their colleagues.
when someone is saying that, you know, I think it's time I find a coach, your name is the one that they're offering as a recommendation.
Gill Moakes (28:44.97)
It's about really being in demand as a coach because you're that good.
There's nothing as irresistible as a coach with a wait list.
That's what I want every coach's goal to be. I would love it if every single coach, when they completed their training, had one goal and one goal only, and that is to get to the point where they have a wait list. So that means just coaching, transformationally, client after client, until they really can't take on more one -to -one clients. Then,
You have all the fun of the fair of building out that offer pyramid with all of the different offers. And it will be so worth the wait because you will have the budget to be able to put advertising behind your offers. If that's appropriate, you're going to be able to bring in other coaches to offer some one -on -one accountability without it all being on your shoulders.
Gill Moakes (29:48.138)
So my own offer pyramids has, I still work one -to -one absolutely with my clients at the top of that pyramid. I have my mastermind that's exclusively for my private clients. I co -host retreats. I speak at events. I give keynote speak, speeches about rewilding your business. I have a small group program coming out.
And I'm going to be publishing my book next year, which will be my passive income, my nod to passive income. Right. But I also have lots of free ways that I help clients and potential clients. So I offer a free 60 minute breakthrough session with me. Right. I offer this podcast, this podcast, week in week out, I hope is a useful resource for growing.
your coaching practice for growing whatever business you're doing.
I have PDF guides like my Money Mindset guide that you can download, the Vision and Goal Setting bundle. And every Tuesday and Thursday, we run Writet Club, which is our free writing accountability. So you can see there's the most offers we have are actually free offers at the bottom of that pyramid.
But everything in between the one to one at the top and the free offers at the bottom has taken time to get to. It's been an evolution since I started as a coach. It's been an absolute evolution to get to this point of being able to really flesh out the different tiers. So I hope this has been helpful and just put a little bit of perspective around.
Gill Moakes (31:46.762)
What is...
a coaching offer pyramid and when to start thinking about each of those offers. So I was hesitating because I was just thinking what I'm going to do, what I think will be useful. I'm going to pop a PDF download into the show notes and I'll set out basically what the pyramid looks like and some of the pros and cons.
of the different offers, because trust me, every single one has pros and cons, even one to one coaching, you know, you could say, well, if you're giving clients one to one coaching, they're not benefiting from a community around their coaching. So, you know, that's something you might think about, I address that by making my mastermind group part of my one to one offer. So any private client automatically becomes part of the mastermind, because I wanted to introduce that bit of community into.
my offer. So I'll pop that, I'll put a link in the show notes for you. I think that might be quite helpful actually, just for you to have a visual to be able to see what I've been talking about. Okay, I really hope that that has been helpful. Do go and download that freebie because I think that would be a good one. I think you'll be able to maybe start mapping out in your mind what you want your own.
coaches off a pyramid to look like. In the meantime, I will be back here again, same time, same place next week. And thank you so much for joining me today. If you do get a chance, could you please click on the five stars and write a little review for me on iTunes, not iTunes, Apple podcasts. I'd be so grateful. It just, it really helps with the dreaded algorithm and getting the episode out there. Okay.
Gill Moakes (33:47.114)
Alright, have a great week everyone and I will speak to you next week. Bye!
