Course Lab – Episode 106
How to Boost Course Revenue with Savvy Event Strategies (Michael Sheridan)
Abe Crytal: But it also seems like there’s something a little unique or different about his approach where he’s able to sell very high end offers on a very esoteric topic. Not many other people are able to do that successfully.
Ari Iny: Hello and welcome to Course Lab, the show that teaches creators like you how to make better online courses. Hi, I’m Ari Iny, the director of growth at Mirasee, and I’m here with my co-host, Abe Crystal, the co-founder of Ruzuku.
Abe: Hey there, Ari.
Ari: In each episode of Course Lab, we showcase a course and creator who is doing something really interesting, either with the architecture of their course, the business model behind it, or both.
Today, we welcome Michael Sheridan back to the show. Michael is a dream expert and radio talk show host and the creator of the Aisling School of Dream Interpretation. Last time he talked to us on Course Lab, he talked about how he settled into a successful hybrid model for his course. Now he’s back and we want to dive into what has happened since. Thanks for joining us again, Michael.
Michael Sheridan: Thank you for having me.
Ari: So the question that I like to kick things off with, especially for people who maybe haven’t heard your previous episode, can you give us just a quick overview of who you are, what you do and kind of how you help people with online courses?
Michael: Absolutely. I am the founder of Aisling School of Dream Interpretation. We help spiritual seekers understand themselves through understanding their dreams. And through that understanding, we help them heal childhood trauma, activate their gifts, work with clients and so much more. And I’ve been doing this for 33 years.
Ari: Amazing. And how do online courses fit into that?
Michael: They are a totally pivotal, integral part of what we do. Everything is done through courses. We don’t really do one to one calls with people or anything like that. It’s all packaged with a goal at the end. Like here’s what we’re aiming for, here’s what we’re trying to do with this particular program. And we also do it in cohorts. So everybody in a group will start at the same time. They’ll all meet in community, so well have group classes. We have a community as well where people can talk to each other and then we have private classes. So we try to have a very white glove feel to what we do. So a lot of personal, private time with coaches or with me as well as the group work.
Ari: And we talked about a bunch of that in our previous episode. So anyone wants to listen to that, they absolutely can. In the past year, since we last spoke, I know that there have been some changes for you in your business. Could you kind of tell us a little bit more about that.
Michael: Absolutely. So we bumped the level of coaching that we’re getting up a few notches. And so basically, Mirasee looked at everything we’re doing and said, okay, here’s where you have some white space. It didn’t look like white space to me, but it did to the business coaches. So they’re like, you can do something else here, and you can do something else here. And so before last year, we had a major event every year, a three-day event, which was really our breadwinner.
You know, people would show up to a free event, stay with us for three days, learn about us, learn about what we do, and we would pitch one particular course, a long one nine-month program at that event, and that would basically sustain us for most of the rest of the year. And now, to stabilize income, we’ve added a second event, but we’ve added several webinars or workshops that lead into that other three-day event.
And then we’ve also taken one of the components of our flagship program. We teach channeling and dream interpretation. So we took the channeling and made a separate course out of that, and we’re promoting that now. We’ve always had it as a separate course, but we’ve never promoted it. So that’s new. Those things have just been astronomical in impact for us, like the scale of revenue growth, and we’ve hired six extra people that work in the school with us just in the last year.
Ari: Oh, wow. That’s awesome. So it sounds like, from what you’re saying, I mean, you’ve added a lot in, but nothing is brand new to you, so it’s not brand-new content. It sounds like you taking the content you already had and repurposing, using it in different ways, promoting in different ways. Is that right?
Michael: Well, the content for the three-day event is new. So we met as a team and said what would be the top topics people would want to hear about when it comes to dream interpretation? And we created our first event based on those, and that took a long time to do, many months to put that content together, but we had several other things that never made it into the cut. And so when we were toying with the idea of having a second event, we already had a lot of topics that we knew we could add into it. But then we met again and said, okay, what would be even better based on the reaction to our other event?
And so we made a very much a woo event. All our other stuff is very down to earth. Here’s how to analyze a dream. These are the rules, this is the framework. But we do attract a lot of people who are into spiritual things and subjects like that. And so our dreams cover those too, but we never actually publicly cover them at any of our public events. We do it in our courses. So we made this one all about that. So it was quite an interesting one for people to come to and then ask questions because we have years of experience. We just never really shared it.
Ari: It’s interesting to me that it sounds like you are essentially tailoring this new event to a new audience to a certain degree. So it’s the same audience but slightly different angle. Do you find that you’re attracting new people? Like, is this a brand-new audience or is this really same audience, different slant.
Michael: So it’s like, okay, anybody who comes into our courses, they already get this part of us, but you wouldn’t know unless you came into our courses. So by doing this, we give people that have been lurking on the outside for a long time, but haven’t purchased another reason to jump on board. And so, same audience. But we’ve started doing JV partnerships this year and we’re still trying to figure out how to do that properly. But we think we have it now. And so we are getting a lot of new people all the time, and we will look for people for our early year event is going to be our woo event, let’s say spiritual event.
So we will look for JV partners that are in that space, and then later on it’s tailored for how to help heal traumas and that direction. And so we would look for JV partners that are more aligned with that space. But either one will work for us. We can take people in any space and we always have a cross section in the audience. We find that a lot of people that come to us follow specific other people, and we’ve gotten used to the types of things their audience asks.
Ari: Really interesting how there is definitely cross pollination. People are going to come to multiple events, so it’s not that they’re only interested in one piece or the other, but you are essentially taking two separate, distinct marketing messages to the same audience in order to capture as many people as possible from within that audience.
Michael: Absolutely. And the idea is that we have people on our list maybe for four years before they purchase. And so if they can see a broader scope of what we do in our programs, then they’re more likely to say, that is, for me, you’re not always going to be aligned with everything, but if I’m aligned with 85% and this is really something essential. And I see that in a different event, then I’m going to be much more comfortable making the purchase.
Ari: So this kind of activity kind of runs contrary to a lot of the marketing advice out there to a certain degree, just in the, you know, always niche down, niche down, niche down. And now here you’re saying the course is the same that is being sold at each of these events, even though the topics of the events are different. I guess I’m curious as to your thoughts on do you wish that you did this sooner or do you feel like you needed to get to where you are now before you were able to start separating out this new message?
Michael: I wouldn’t have been ready to do it sooner. Yeah, that wouldn’t have been possible. We have enough of an audience now where I knew there would be a demand for this and it would have, it would be worth it. But we’re still niche because it’s all dreams, dreams, dreams. The whole weekend is dreams, dreams, dreams and dream interpretation, specifically within dreams. I don’t think we’ve lost focus of where we’re at. And we do cover these topics within our larger courses. We just never really said it publicly.
I mean, we have the radio show, we have the podcast that we do, and we will occasionally do these things, but even then, we’re very careful about it. So there’s still topics that we don’t do in our public events that we cover in our courses. But the message is really that our dreams cover everything about our lives. And so therefore we go in the direction of whatever way the dreams go. So if you have ten different people, the topics that are going to come up are going to be quite varied. And so our courses are very varied. But until now, I’ve always presented it as like, this is clear as a bell. It’s really scientific almost in the approach you can take to understanding your dreams and seeing how traumas show up in your dreams.
But that’s just one piece. The traumas show up, but there’s always a positive side to everything as well. And so you might end up with a special ability because of how you were treated early on in childhood. It causes you to lean in a particular direction or recover in some particular direction, and then you can become very good. For instance, if you don’t receive love and affection from mom, you can end up looking at life from the outside and acting like a chameleon, pretending to fit in everywhere, but really feeling like you don’t belong.
But that gives you a skill to be able to look at people and see what’s going wrong in people’s lives and help people in those ways. So I think the two events kind of merge. They have more in common than it seems. But it’s almost like, okay, we gave ourselves permission to use a different terminology to talk about the same subject.
Ari: Awesome. I have some questions potentially we can go to about the other things that you were talking about earlier in the new course. But Abe.
Abe: I don’t really have anything specific, but I’ve been just interested to hear if you have other lessons learned or things you would like to share, I’d be interested to hear them. And we can go from there.
Michael: Oh, yeah. Scaling is scary. At every point in our business, we had no idea what was ahead of us. And we thought we did, but the problems we hit were always different as we started getting more people into our programs. We ran the three-day event, and we had lots of sales calls afterwards. We thought, okay, we’ll have a team, we’ll do the sales calls. But everybody wanted to talk to me because I was the one that was on the stage all weekend. So we learned big mistake there. Fix that fast. And so I ended up talking to everybody and closing those sales after the first course.
And so what we had to do then was anybody that we wanted to be on the phone talking to people about making the commitment. And it’s a high-level commitment. It’s $15,000. They had to have presence on the stage. And so we structured the event, and indeed, things that we did throughout the year to elevate the profile of the people that were going to be on those calls. But, like, when you get that wrong, it’s crickets, you know? So it’s like, it’s a very costly mistake, but that’s just one. There was many things we discovered we had to do, but I think that was a big one.
Abe: Anything in terms of how you’ve been running the program or interacting with your participants?
Michael: Yeah, we’ve been playing around with how much of me, because I’m the bottleneck in the business, how much of me do people need and are happy with within the programs? And we think we’ve got the formula right. We’ve kind of oscillated a little bit. If it’s too much of me, then the things that we’re planning further down the road take a hit. And if it’s too little of me, then we take a hit immediately because people aren’t satisfied in the courses. So we just have to watch that. And at least we’re able to adjust it in real time. And so because we’ve elevated other people within the business, now people are happy. they’re like, oh, I’m happy I’ve got this person or that person.
And so that’s mitigated against that for us, too. So not just in the sales like we elevated people in other places. And just recently on our podcast, we brought one of those people in to be a regular feature in every single podcast. Her names April Angel. We say, April, over to you. She’s going to talk about an interesting dream that we received into the show from somebody randomly during the week. And it’s a small little segment and obviously it has two benefits. It makes people excited because she could cover their dream, but it also elevates her within the portfolio of the school.
Abe: That’s cool. Thank you.
Ari: Michael, something you said, scaling is scary and it sounds like you’ve scaled quite a bit in the last year. Things have changed. You said you hired six people, the courses being a main thing that you’re doing. So you just gave some examples of how you’re bringing more people in, that you need to build them up so that people will be happy with them as well as their instructors, I’m guessing, and, you know, so that they’re okay with having less of you. What other lessons did you learn as part of this scaling journey that you think other course creators should be aware of?
Michael: Scaling is slow in the beginning. At least for us, it was slow. The increase in revenue didn’t match the extra cost for hiring people in anticipation. And even in our case, we hire people on a contract basis. We have one employee and then everybody else is on contract. And even though it was on that basis, we know we have to give them a certain amount of business or they’re not going to want to work for us. And so there was a point early on in the scaling where we were looking at it, and it was almost tempting to say, let’s just scale back. Let’s go back and I will just deliver the service.
It’ll be a lot less hassle. We won’t have as much demand, but we will have this level of income. And are we comfortable with that? Neither of us wanted to do it, but I think it’s an important thing to look at when you do want to scale. And we were getting help, so we were lucky at least that we were getting help. Very good business coaching in how to do it and how to do it right. Another one is if you have a manual step between somebody purchasing and they have to get registered in a course or maybe multiple manual steps. You want to get rid of them. You want to make them as streamlined as possible.
So every single thing that’s done is automated to a degree. And then you’re monitoring to make sure if you send somebody the link to say, register here, and they don’t, something has to tell you. These are the three people who haven’t registered. So we found, as we scaled up, there’s people that will just do that. They’re like, oh, the course is until August 6, so I didn’t register yet. Other people are pulling their hair out, though, because, like, not everybody’s on board, not everybody has the links. And you couldn’t possibly deal with tech issues on day one of the start of the course. You want to try to get all of that ironed out.
So, yeah, we learned a few things, mostly the streamlining and the cost. And so we went through a period where we were doing well. We had done really well one year, and then the next year it was like, this is going to be better. And it was. But our take home revenue was much, much less because we were paying for contractors. And that was kind of scary because is this going to sort itself out? And it did. And then our revenue went to multiples of what it was. But you have to be prepared for the ramp.
Ari: So could you talk a little bit more about that? And in what way did it sort itself out? And what do you think maybe you could have done differently to make it happen faster? Or is it just a matter of this is part of the process as far as, you know, that, you know, people need to be aware of as they’re scaling?
Michael: No, I think it was the way we did it. I don’t think it’s necessarily part of the process. We had a really good year. Like when I started the business, this was me switching from software engineering to doing dreamwork. And I absolutely love it. And so I said to my wife, I want to do this, but I make $250,000 a year plus doing software engineering. And if I drop that, I think the most I could probably make doing this is $125,000. And so it was okay.
We decided to do it. We dropped back and we were looking at how much of a ramp have we got to start this business off? And we didn’t have a long enough ramp, and I didn’t know how to do anything in business. And eventually I found you guys. That solved my sales problem. But when we started making money, then we had a really good year, exceeded our expectations. Like I said, the original was $125. That was our goal. We had a year where our revenue was $339,000, something like that.
And I just thought, it’s going to keep going up from there. Like this is just going to be easy. But our next year was 100,000 less, and that was still okay. We could afford to do it, but I hadn’t expected that. And so I was like, okay, what way does this go? And I mean, it happened for a number of reasons. And one of the things that had happened in that period was, I think we had mined our existing list to the fullest depth we could and we needed to pivot and find another way to get people into our courses.
And so that’s when we came up with the three-day event to promote something that we already had, but we had a different value ladder that people came in and joined that course. They joined at the bottom, they went up through a few courses and then they joined this one, the three-day event, changed it to where they do the three-day event, and then they join us at the top almost. So we had that bad year, but it allowed us to create a strategy that was far better and far scalable for us in the business.
And so we had a bad year. Our next year was half a million, and this year is going to be probably 1.2 million. Compared to some of the businesses that were in masterminds with. That’s nothing. But we’re past the really scary part of scaling, I would say. We now have the finances to address issues if we need to address them. Whereas before it just was extra work on my plate or somebody else’s plate to try address them.
Abe: What do you attribute that growth to? Because most people that are offering courses, and especially people in the area of the year in more like personal development or spirituality, like they rarely do even a fraction of those type of sales.
Michael: But they’re not getting the business coaching. We realized once we got business coaching, we realized the value of it. We have a business coach always look at every offer before we ever make it. Like this is the slight deck. Somebody was even asking me today, how much of the webinar is the offer? And I said its all the offer. Every single slide in that webinar has to be leading to the case of you should buy this offer at the end of it. And my understanding of placement of the offer and how to make it to the person has changed profoundly.
And I think one of the things that goes hand in hand with that though is understanding your own value. I think there’s growth for you in your business. Like to get to the point you need to get to, to be able to do what you do. And then there was also the understanding of, you can have this naive idea that, oh, I’m not in it for the money, and here’s why I’m doing all these things. I want to make an impact in the world. That sounds good and altruistic and everything like that.
But if you want to make an impact in the world and nobody ever hears of you, because you don’t make any money and can’t put on any events that people find you at, you’re saying two different things. You’re contradicting yourself. So it behooves you really to make the biggest splash. If you really feel what you’re doing is so important, make the biggest splash you can. And that necessitates earning money in order to make that splash. But for us, the focus has never been on the money itself.
But I understand now I have a much healthier relationship with what we do requires money, requires getting in front of the right audiences and understanding what they’re looking for and what we offer and how they all align and everything like that. So there’s an enormous amount of fun in understanding yourself and your own growth on the path to getting, like, into the point of being a very successful business. We feel now really successful. We feel like there’s a momentum that is almost unstoppable. I say almost.
I think like in another couple of years I’d look at it and say, like, we’ve arrived, but it feels at this stage, we’re looking at the plateau like, and I don’t mean like we’ve stopped here, but we’ve reached a place where we can say we’ve scaled the mountain and now we’re just going to move forward.
Abe: Anything else you want to go over?
Ari: So, first of all, often in these conversations, we’re talking to people who are at earlier stages in their business. And so I think it’s great to have you here talking about the next stages and where people can get to. So if you have kind of any last thoughts for people who are building up their course business dream of scaling, want to start thinking in that direction. If there’s kind of any last advice or anything like that that you’d want to share that you haven’t already.
Michael: I think the most important thing is just don’t do it without advice. Like, even though I said we understand the offer and the placement of the offer, to get that understanding, we paid for somebody, a business coach, to watch our three-day events and tell us what we’re doing wrong in real time, what do we need to fix? So if I made enough around the stage, I would talk to them during the break and they would say, you didn’t do this, you didn’t do this. Get back in there and make sure you cover this or put on this extra event tomorrow morning because you botched that and fix it.
It becomes natural. But I don’t think it’s natural in the beginning. And you understand it when you do it a few times and then it’s like, okay, I got it. I think, don’t get mad at yourself when you make mistakes because you’re going to make mistakes. I always put a few outcomes that I want for everything that I’m doing. So I started a membership, a business coach and Danny told us, it’s not going to work. You don’t have what you need to start that membership. But I had two reasons for doing it.
One was I wanted to change the way I was interpreting dreams. I wanted to look at the dream, give the interpretation, but then I wanted to channel past that and say, here’s why you had this dream and this is what’s going on in your life outside the dream, and here’s what it’s trying to address and here’s what you’re to do going forward. And so I did that in the membership all the way through for two years that we ran it, and it changed how I was able to do other work on stages.
And so it super enhanced my ability to come across very convincingly on the stage because I can just take dreams that people throw at me and tell them about their life in a way that they’re like, oh, my God, you nailed it. And I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I didn’t do the membership. It wasn’t a financial success. My original thinking was, this will stabilize our income. It didn’t do it, but I got the second thing and I’m really happy for the second thing.
But putting the second event in stabilized our income. So I think, remember why you’re doing it. Is it your passion and it’s not about the money. And I’ve had many times where I’ve looked at all the things that are on my plate and just said, okay, wait a second, close my eyes. What would I rather be doing? And it always has to be this. I would rather be doing this. And I think as long as you’re able to say that, then you’re going in the right direction.
Ari: Awesome. Thank you. So before we wrap up. Where can our audience go to learn more about you and the Aisling school?
Michael: Dream-Analysis.com. That’s where you’ll find out about us, including all our free events.
Ari: Awesome. Michael, thank you so, so much for taking the time and for meeting with us again. We really appreciate it.
Michael: Thank you.
Abe: Michael is a dream expert, radio talk show host and author, and the creator of the Aisling School of Dream Interpretation. His passion is to see people become all they came here to be and to live their lives to their fullest potential.
Danny Iny: Now stick around for my favorite part of the show, where Abe and Ari will pull out the best takeaways for you to apply to your course.
Abe: Ari, it is time for the debrief of Michael’s experiences. Definitely one of the most experienced and successful course creators we have talked to.
Ari: Yeah, it was really great to hear from him. Both his lessons learned from scaling, but also his experience doing it in some of the pitfalls. And I appreciated him saying scaling is scary, which I’m sure a lot of course creators agree with even as they’re excited to do it.
Abe: Most people never get anywhere close to these kind of scaling challenges. Right? To what do you attribute Michael’s growth?
Ari: Well, I think it’s a few different things. And one thing that he mentioned was that I think is very valuable is, of course, getting help because there are a lot of challenges that come with scaling, from figuring out the different ways in which to extricate yourself from the business so that you’re not actually doing everything, you’re not always presenting, you’re not always delivering, and so on. Being able to hire people, being able to integrate people, being able to automate things, all those things can be hard to do at times. But it sounds like Michael got the help that he needed in order to figure those things out.
Abe: But it also seems like there’s something a little unique or different about his approach. Wherever he’s able to sell very high end offers on a very esoteric topic, not many other people are able to do that successfully.
Ari: It has a lot to do with his understanding of marketing. While he is absolutely a subject matter expert, he’s really become a marketer and really understood the importance of good marketing and positioning in ways that most people don’t. It’s not about the money, it’s about how do I communicate in the best way possible to create the biggest impact. Marketing is a bit of a dirty word for a lot of course creators. So the fact that he’s not shying away from it and done a deep dive into it and how to get better at it, I think is the most important piece of it.
Abe: Yeah. That’s not a new message that you can’t make your biggest contribution to the world by trying to be entirely altruistic and giving everything away. You have to build a sustainable business model for your courses or other offerings that you have, or you’ll never be able to keep doing them. You’ll never be able to teach anyone because you’ll be out of business.
Ari: Yep. And so scaling is scary, but I think that Michael’s message, or what I’m taking from it, is if you really care about getting your message out to as many people as possible and having this impact on the world, you got to do it anyway.
Abe: Yeah.
Ari: And do it in a concerted way, of course. Think it through and figure out the best path forward. And don’t just hire people and spend a lot of money on Facebook ads or whatever without proper consideration and making sure that you’re doing it the right way. But still, if you really want to continue putting your message out there, it’s something you need to be keeping in mind.
Abe: I think part of what I took away from Michael’s experience, it’s not about outsourcing per se, or like, there aren’t just like plug and play solutions that you can write a check and then get the result. There’s this concept in the startup world of like, you need to do things that don’t scale. Like, you need to do a lot of things yourself and like, get your hands really dirty, you know, to understand and get things working.
And part of what he talked about was just that, right? It was like, oh, he had to like, go in and do all the sales calls himself. He had to have all those personal interactions. He had to do all the teaching himself. He had to coach people himself. All that non scalable, very hands on personal work was what allowed him to get the insights and build the foundation to something that could scale up from there.
Ari: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, he was saying that he was attempting to scale as he was doing that, and that was scaling gone wrong for him.
Michael: Yeah.
Ari: So, yeah, 100%. Getting to a place where you have that clarity first so that you know how to replace yourself and how to take yourself out of the equation.
Abe: Alrighty. That’s all I have.
Ari: Yeah, that’s all I have as well.
Abe: Michael is a dream expert, radio talk show host, and the creator of the Aisling School of Dream Interpretation. Learn more about him Dream-Analysis.com. That’s dream dash analysis dot com. And you’ll find a link to his website in the show notes.
Thank you for listening to Course Lab. I’m Abe Crystal, co-founder and CEO of Ruzuku, here with my co-host, Ari Iny. Course Lab is part of the Mirasee FM podcast network, which also includes such shows as Once Upon a Business and Neuroscience of Coaching. If you don’t want to miss the excellent episodes coming up on Course Lab, you can follow us on YouTube or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. And if you’re enjoying the show, go ahead and leave us a star review. It really does make a difference. Thank you, and we’ll see you next time.
All right, Ari, who do we have coming on the show next week?
Ari: Next time, we have someone who I’m very close to, Ross O’Lochlainn. He’s a member of the family, actually, and he’s also an online sales expert and the founder and CEO of Conversion Engineering with two levels of core programs, the chamber and open every day, that I’m really looking forward to discussing with him.
Abe: I’ve always found Ross to have a very interesting perspective on things.
Ari: He does. Yeah, it’s going to be a great conversation.