Welcome to today’s episode of GSDdaily. This is Create number 126, and we’re going to talk about continuity clients. So this entire week is going to be continuity clients. We’re going to talk through creating offers, automating the process, scaling continuity clients, and going from there. It’s also a holiday so happy labor day, which I shouldn’t be doing this, but it’s Monday. I’ve been doing this Monday through Friday forever. We’re just more of the same.
So continuity clients are something that we have been implementing for a lot of clients recently, or a lot of businesses because more and more of what’s going on in the world is business models are structuring around membership and it’s smart, so from a statistical standpoint, the average subscription vendor, so that might be a membership site. It might be a software offer like a SAS offering. It might be a coach or consultant. The average subscription vendor is growing 30 to 50% annually. So they are almost… 50% annually, if you’re going from a hundred to $150,000 in revenue a year or a million to 1.5 million a year in revenue by adding a subscription or by adding a membership site, it’s a, really, really big deal.
1. Make a Membership Site
Wishlist Member Plugin
There are lots and lots of ways to do it. If you look at it from a just kind of like a business landscape standpoint, there’s a guy by the name of Stu McLaren and had to be 10 years ago, Stu McLaren introduced a piece of software called the Wishlist Member. Now Wishlist Member is a WordPress plugin that we use, we still use for all of our membership sites, for a lot of our client membership sites.
Wishlist Member was the first real big piece of software that made kind of an impact on WordPress sites. Before you needed like this weird mix of using aMember plus, Moodle was the education platform. And then there was like three or four different kinds of pieces of software that you meshed together. And then it created this membership.
Stu McLaren came along and his partners, created this WordPress plugin that was just you dropped it in, you added your members, you protected your pages, and that was it. And they’ve had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people who have built membership sites from Wishlist Member.
Tribe Platform
Well, Stu McLaren went to create a training platform called TRIBE and TRIBE is it’s an education platform for creating membership sites. They have a very fascinating model. So they launched twice, I think it’s twice a month or twice a year, they do a big multi-video launch in a webinar. And then they open it up for a couple of weeks at a time and just jam a bunch of members through. So it’s an interesting model and their memberships are typical $1000, $2,000 a year.
Every membership has its pricing, but by and large, you have these like a Stu McLaren model, a TRIBE model that is being added to business models all around the world. It might be a coaching business that adds a subscription website. Might be an author who adds a membership for some continuity, might be a software offer that gives some accountability to its members through a Facebook group that they pay for. So there’s a lot of different ways subscription can work, continuity can work in your business.
2. What To Sell
Books or Courses
Now the first thing you need to think about in creating this continuity offer is what are you going to sell? And I think it’s probably important to start with figuring out what you have. So if you know what you have, you might have a book and you’re like, I sell a bunch of this book and I can put together a membership site that might be $49 a month or whatever. And I can put recordings of videos, or I can go through an outline chapter by chapter, and create a little video course that is this membership content. And maybe month one is chapter one and month two is chapter two and month three is chapter three.
So you can go through and just bullet out what are the different pieces of my book. And then you can map out what are some video content that I can pull out based on that. And there you get a membership site. So if you’re putting together an email list, you can sell this membership site to your email list or whatever.
Consultation and Coaching Services
Another way of thinking about continuity is let’s say you have a digital product. And you’re like… Well, some people, they’re sending in emails and support requests and asking, how can they get more me? So another great way of adding continuity to your business is by offering to consult or by offering to coach. And that’s very one-on-one. You’re charging X amount of money for access to you twice a month, or once a week, or once a month, however much time you want to be accountable to your clients.
Maybe it is a hundred percent scheduled, so it’s every other week you jump on a coaching call with them. Maybe it is only when they need you, so they send you a text and say, “Hey, I need you, let’s jump on in the next couple of days.” Okay, cool. So what is the fee associated with that? Some of our clients will charge $1000 a month, other ones will charge $2,500 a month. Some of them will charge $5,000 a month. It just depends on the transformative impact that they have.
Coaching Clients
The coaching clients, in creating the offer, the best fit’s your clients, the best fit’s the people who are coming to you. It is just about figuring out what kind of value you provide, how much is that worth to them? If it’s a business development, coaching let’s say, or business consulting, then that could be worth five or $10,000 a month. For life coaching, maybe it’s 1000 a month or 500 a month. Health and fitness coaching, maybe it’s 500 a month or 200 a month. It just depends on what impact you’re having in their life, how accountable they are to you. If it’s 100%, one-on-one weekly calls, you can’t charge 200 bucks for that. If you have 10, 15, or 20 clients, you are maxed out and you’re not making any money for it. You are on the phone all the time with your clients around clock.
However, if it’s 1000 a month or 2000 or 5,000 a month, you can have two clients or three clients or four clients, and you can be at their beck and call whenever you want. There’s a lot of different ways to kind of cut it up. Now, one thing I’ve talked about in a previous live stream was this idea of assisted, it was assistant coaching or assistant consulting. So that’s where you have a product as a baseline for your coaching. And then you coach on top of it.
They go through this weekly or monthly course where they watch some videos, they download reports, all that stuff. And they learn about what they want to learn about, they learn about the thing you teach and they are… They’re able to put it into practice in their life, then you provide the coaching or consulting element to it.
So they can ask you questions. They can be accountable to you, but you don’t necessarily need to teach them the whole thing right off the bat. It’s assistant coaching or assisted consulting. So it’s another nice offer that helps with that continuity play. Those are just some ways to throw a continuity aspect into your business. Now there’s something I think of whenever I think of like any kind of transformation or any kind of… Because really when somebody buys continuity, they’re buying the transformation, then they understand that the transformation isn’t going to take place right now, all in one shot, they’re buying a subscription, they’re buying a block of time with you generally.
There’s a story that, there’s not a story, but back in my Pepsi days. We used to every Sunday morning, it saves money, but every Sunday morning we’d have to build these huge displays. Whenever you’re walking out into like the vestibule of a grocery store, you see the big Pepsi displays. It is like the super bowl display or whatever.
Every Sunday morning we go in like four o’clock in the morning and we wheel our pallets of pop out into the lobby. And we start ripping apart, whatever was there and started building something back up. As you’re putting together this big super bowl design, with a goalpost in it, it looks like complete shit. You got pop everywhere, you got stacks of everything everywhere, but then a couple of hours later, you can step back from it after having lifted about 18 tons of pop and putting it where it needs to go, you can step back and say, that is a football display.
And then you clean up all your stuff and you wheel it to the back room. But what I mean is whenever you’re going through any kind of transformation or journey, the beginning is always going to be messy. So understanding that and coaching and teaching that and addressing that in the first couple of modules of your course is going to make all the difference between setting the stage for that transformation and not.
So it’s just something you want to think about when working through this continuity relationship with your clients. And if you have any questions at all, just go to dfy.com. There’s a little chat box in the lower right-hand corner. You can schedule a call with us and we’ll talk to you soon.
