Course Lab – Episode 117
The Subscription Model: More Clients & Recurring Revenue (Nancy Shanteau)
Abe Crystal: I honestly found that pretty surprising that that’s working. And so it’s very encouraging and could be a really interesting way for people to start in a specific niche where you don’t need to have a ton of clients. You can just build up a base of stable recurring revenue for yourself and then expand from there.
Ari Iny: Hello and welcome to Course Lab, the show that teaches creators like you how to make better online courses. I’m Ari Iny, the director 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’s doing something really interesting either with the architecture of their course, the business model behind it, or both. Today we welcome Nancy shanteau to the show. Her mission is to certify 10,000 cooperative communication trainers by 2031. Giving irreverent answers to life’s big questions is her jam and she does it weekly in her group coaching course, Wise Adulting. She co authored the book Access to Power a Radical Approach for Changing Your Life. Welcome, Nancy.
Nancy Shanteau: Hey, Ari.
Ari: So, Nancy, the way I like to kick off these interviews is by asking our guests, could you give us the 30,000 foot view of how you came to what it is that you do today as well as to the world of online courses?
Nancy: I was an early coach before coaching was a household word. I encountered it by having some trouble in my aikido class, which is a nonviolent martial art from Japan. I was having trouble using energy to throw somebody. My sensei at the time said, you should read my book list. And on the book list, my teacher read a book called the Warrior Spirit and he talked about how to become an embodied leader. It turned out he lived nearby. I decided I’d go to an aikido class with him. He had all these personal development and coaching workshops and I started a process of learning with him and eventually ended up becoming a coach as a result.
It was completely backwards. I got laid off from my job and then launched my practice as opposed to deciding that I was going to become a coach. One of the things my teacher taught me was that one in five coaches who get trained become successful. And I decided I was going to be the one. I never thought I’m going to be the four out of five that don’t become successful. And I think that’s really important because what it meant for me was that I would take any advice from a successful coach. If they said you need to niche, I would niche. If they said you need to write ethics and guidelines, I would write ethics and guidelines because that whole process was a process of me following successful coaches to a successful coaching practice. And it took about a year before I had a successful referral business where basically I wasn’t doing very much marketing at all.
Ari: So from there, how did your coaching practice– my understanding is you have online programs as well. Are those mainly coaching programs or are you also teaching courses?
Nancy: I started out with coaching programs, so I certified coaches starting in 2009 and then I started adding public programs in 2015. Actually I looked back to prepare for this and I found that my first course I offered was in 2006. It was a course called Shape Shifting. It was in person in my town right after I got certified. After that I did a course called Energy Hygiene. And I did it on the phone before there were online courses. My first online course was called Quiet Mind. That course is what I first brought to Ruzuku because trying to email out all the course content.
And at that time Google Drive wasn’t even as big of a thing. My students couldn’t find anything and they didn’t feel anchored and at home. I wanted them to have a place that just felt very secure, was easy to access. And I thought the framework and the way that Ruzuku works was very simple. My students almost never have any trouble at all, which is what I wanted.
Ari: Tell us more about the courses you’re running today.
Nancy: Right now I have a group coaching course. So I made 16 self paced coach courses, about four or five introductory webinars. Things that would help people enter my world. And in the course of making all of those courses, I created a subscription program that let everybody have unlimited access to my courses. And coaching hours with me became a bonus basically. In doing that, I over enrolled my coaching program. I was no longer able to deliver the number of hours that I had in my life to give. So I decided I wanted to consolidate and I put all of my 16 courses into a bundle in Ruzuku .
And I created a group coaching program that’s weekly. And I started answering questions instead of leading with curriculum. And I called that course Wise Adulting. So every week people get online with me on a Zoom call and they get to ask a question that takes about eight minutes to answer. And they can ask me almost anything. I’ll respond to it. I even started pulling tarot cards and throwing runes recently. They can ask about their life, their relationships, their work.
And I give them the answer that I have in me and help people figure out how to make their life work. They also have access to the 16 self paced courses. They get the classroom with all the recordings. So that as a bonus has helped me fill my enrollment in my coaching program as well. And I work with couples and individuals.
Ari: So just to clarify, the structure and kind of repeat back, making sure I understand the order of how things developed. So you were selling these courses the bundle with coaching hours included, or more accurately, coaching hours with the courses. That ended up being too much. There were too many coaching hours. So you made it into a group coaching program, bundled with the courses. It’s more enticing, easier for people to get answers between coaching sessions and you can point people to elements of the courses. Are you also doing one on one coaching or as you said, one on two coaching with individuals and couples?
Nancy: Yes.
Ari: So you have these different tiers essentially.
Nancy: The thing that I was really excited about when I started Wise Adulting was that I made it a subscription so that on a monthly basis people pay for a certain number of hours and they get all of the courses and the group coaching program as a bonus. They can also sign up for the group coaching program or the individual courses on their own. Most people are signing up as a bonus and it really helped me incentivize people signing up for the subscription.
Ari: So that’s really interesting, that model of a subscription of coaching plus could you tell us a little bit more about what is included in the subscription in addition to the courses and the group code? Like just give us a bit more of a breakdown of it.
Nancy: Sure. So look at a number of hours. They might get one hour or two hours a month. I made the group coaching program a lifetime membership. So once they pay a $2,500 cost to the group coaching program, they get to be lifetime members. The group coaching program they can accrue into, and then once they’ve met that minimum, they’re in for life. I wanted it to be something where it didn’t feel like people were going to lose support afterwards. And then every month they get to use their hours and they have access to the coaching.
The Ruzuku’s bundling makes it really easy for me to give them all of the courses. They can just click one button and then be enrolled in all of the courses and have full access. And what I do during Wise Adulting is I teach out of one of the courses every week. I’ll link in their notes about what we talked about. I created a private coaching classroom in Ruzuku for everyone and I can move modules from a library I’ve created of all of my resources into their private classroom. So it makes it very easy for them to have one place where they go and find all their information. They find their signup links, they’re able to get access to all of the recordings and resources that we discussed. So if I share a link during the call or they’re able to get those links very easily.
Ari: Very cool. And so you’re saying one to two hours per month. Is that just because it varies or those are different tiers of the subscription.
Nancy: They can choose either one or two hours a month and get access to Wise Adulting. Any less than that and they don’t get the program, the group coaching. So it’s kind of like a minimum entry. They can either sign up for one or two hours a month. I don’t change the price. You know, I charged for one hour or two hours.
Ari: Right.
Nancy: But they get the group coaching program with that and start accruing into the annual. They also get the 90 minute weekly call with me. That’s a group coaching call.
Ari: Do you mind sharing what you’re charging?
Nancy: I’ve charged $200 for one hour of coaching and $400 for two. And then I give discounts for more hours with people who are regular users of my work. Oftentimes couples use quite a bit more than that.
Ari: Very interesting.
Nancy: Then they can come to the group coaching program and ask their questions in that space as well. They can get lots of support quickly.
Ari: This is a really interesting model that I could see working for a lot of coaches, especially if they’re struggling to keep up with demand. Could you tell us a little bit more about why this specific structure? How did you land on this specifically? And is there anything that if someone is contemplating structure like this that you would want them to keep in mind?
Nancy: I had a 20 year practice. I started this program in 2023. I started my coaching business in 2004. So I think it would be hard to start a weekly group coaching program that felt satisfying without already having a little bit of a constituency. Sometimes I have three or four or five people on it. There’s 25 people enrolled in the program right now that are active. So sometimes I have 11, 12, 13, 14 people in it, but sometimes it’s a smaller group and if it got down to 1 or 0, it’d feel frustrating to be showing up. I’ve noticed that for myself with classes, when the classes start to decline in quantity.
This is a great way to get people to switch over to being ongoing subscribers. So I have monthly revenue and when I was running a drop in practice, my monthly revenue was very variable. It was hard to make sure I had enough money. I had to really manage cash flow. So this is a great kind of middle step for people. I think it would be hard as an early step. I do think subscriptions without the group coaching can really work for beginning coaches. One of the things I do is certified coaches and inviting them to set up a two hour monthly subscription will fill pretty quickly 10 clients and they’ve got a minimum amount of revenue to be able to start surviving on their practice. Ever since I started this model, my new coaches are much more turning into the one in five that have a successful coaching practice instead of people that end up getting a job.
Ari: And to what extent do you feel that when you were saying that early coaches who are early in their career don’t necessarily need to have the courses as part of it, how important do you think that is? Like, is your recommendation for coaches who are early in their career, yes, build their business with the subscription but then start adding in the courses or is it not even 100% necessary?
Nancy: I mean, I am a highly ambitious and create a lot as a teacher and a coach for my certification students. I decided to enroll as a university with Ruzuku so that I could give my certification students access to online courses without them having to make a big investment up front when they didn’t have revenue. When my coaches start becoming teachers, I give them the opportunity to copy my courses and teach them or give them as bonuses. That’s helped some of them enroll people into subscriptions.
I think the bonus helps the subscription just seem like a slam dunk for people in a way that they might be hesitant if they didn’t have something that incentivized them to say yes to a subscription. But I think it’s more your own boundaries as a practitioner that make how you offer your services work. I think the more that you’re asking people for a high ticket enrollment commitment, the more selling you have to do. What I’m doing is saying you can sign up for a subscription, you can cancel it at any time.
I’m giving you these incentives for long term participation because I love working with people for a long time. Support is ongoing, which I also wanted. I didn’t want people to end a six month program with nothing. I feel like what my programs are doing is really creating a very secure sense of people are walking into tons of resources and support and they’re not alone at the end of their investment.
Ari: That’s Awesome.
Nancy: I feel like my conversion rate is very high from first call to sign up. I’m usually running 85% ish. A little lower for couples.
Ari: More stakeholders there. One last thing that I want to point out just based on what you were talking about and Abe, if you have any questions. So you’ve mentioned a couple times that they accrue into keeping the courses and access to the group coaching. And you said $2,500. So it’s essentially at one hour a month. If they stick around for just over a year, then they’re in. I really like that as a way too. If they’re eight months in, it’s like, okay, better off, stay in. In addition to the value that I’m sure they’re getting from their one on one coaching with you, but it’s that additional incentive to stay in just a bit longer so that they have this long term support. That’s really cool.
Nancy: Well, and I wouldn’t take it away too. So if they’ve accrued to like $2,200, I would just say, you know, come back in a little while and you’ll accrue in. I don’t erase it and make them start over or anything like that.
Ari: Okay.
Nancy: I have a lot of business that stops and then starts again. So one of my principles is that people are always welcome back.
Abe: I mean, what we often find is that people find it difficult to enroll clients into any type of subscription model. Right. It’s more difficult to sell and depending on the context, retention can be difficult as well. So yeah, just curious, like how would you frame that or share that with people? What are you doing differently here? Is it the idea of having lifetime access that is the key or is it how the delivery of the program is structured?
Nancy: I’ve always thought that I was letting my programs kind of sit in relationship with my one on one work. And I’m a very strong seller of my one on one work. The programs for me fill in this space where oftentimes coaching is about the relevancy of people’s lives. How are they suffering, how are they struggling? I can become a resource that they use instead of learning. I wanted to make sure that people weren’t dependent on me. And so the course development was me constantly stretching. How can I make sure my clients know how to do this thing? I know how to do and I’m helping them do. How can I say to them, this is a course, this is a skill.
You can study and develop this skill. You don’t have to just wait for your next call. So it’s very much about my ambition as a teacher and a coach to make sure that people are not just signing up for something and then not finishing it, but that the coaching and relevancy of our work together, that I’m supporting the learning process. And I think my subscriptions sell because people are signed up by me. And then I see my students hit a level of mastery starting at about a year and then it deepens and deepens. And I have some people who have been with me since 2008, 2010. So I have very high longevity with my clients.
Abe: So what does the business model look like for those long term clients?
Nancy: They’re just paying their monthly cost of session and then they get all of the unlimited classes for free. Every once in a while I’ll do a webinar. I was thinking about doing one in the near future called Worst Case Scenario to help people with all of their catastrophic thinking. That’s something I’ve noticed a lot in my community. People are very scared and I wanted to to pair it with a course scenario planning and long term strategic thinking and help people actually figure out what to do with all of their fears. So I’m going to make those courses open courses. But you can get into all of those courses. If you sign up for coaching and or Wise Adulting, you won’t have to pay for these courses.
Yeah, I’ll do a whole marketing process with something like that. And then I will also have ongoing Wise Adulting support for people who just want to join the community and continue. And there really is a community building. People are engaging with each other and talking to each other. I love that about Inside Ruzuku. They can have conversations with each other.
Abe: That all makes sense. I’m just curious, have you ever faced the challenge of resource overload? Or people have so much to choose from that they get stuck or how do you address that I guess.
Nancy: Well, in Wise Adulting I’m covering curriculum every week. I’m listening to the world choosing something that makes sense and then linking them and guiding them into courses. The other thing that happens in the group coaching program, people create study groups and they go through a course together. I recently had a bunch of requests for one program. So I created it again and public offered it and ran it separately from the course. But everybody in the program gets to enroll for free. I’m listening to the world helping them choose what to pay attention to. I’m listening to their questions and helping them pick a course to support their learnings.
They’re asking me a lot of relationship questions. And I’m saying there’s an empowered boundaries course. They’re asking me about jealousy and I’m saying there’s an understanding jealousy course. They’re asking me about communication and they could start with cooperative communication, but they might actually want to work on their listening. I have a compassionate listening webinar. I find that people jump in based on the title what they need and some courses are much more obvious than others.
Abe: Makes sense. Yeah. Any other lessons learned or experiences, insights you’ve found along this journey that you think would be helpful for other course creators or other people considering a similar model?
Nancy: I have been trying to figure out how to create reliable monthly revenue as a coach most of my career. The wonderful thing about this is I usually boom during crisis because I’m that kind of person that helps people when they’re struggling. And so I’m expecting. I’ve already seen an uptick in my business since the crisis that people feel like is coming has started and expect my one on one coaching business to become closed. Everybody will still be able to get weekly access to me where they can ask me questions. So I’m excited about it. Making the longevity of my practice be something where people can just keep signing up instead of me turning people away or having to refer people out because I don’t have capacity anymore.
Abe: Yeah. Nice.
Ari: Let’s say you’re full up on one on one clients, meaning that you don’t have time for additional hours of coaching. Are you also selling the group coaching plus the courses, the bundle on its own?
Nancy: Yeah. And you know what? If I got to that place, I would probably let my students bundle with my program so that people who I’ve trained could get one on one hours through me and the people could be in Wise Adulting at the same time. I will only offer it to my Wise Adulting people first. So there’s this other benefit where I am no longer having to even wait.
Ari: For referrals because they’re built into the people who are in there. That’s great.
Nancy: There’s always churn and people cancel and stop doing one on one coaching. But I really feel like this is letting them come and go more easily.
Ari: Very cool.
Nancy: Yeah. I was thrilled when I figured this out. It made so much sense to me and I’ve had the best schedule of my life since I started this.
Ari: That’s awesome. Abe, any last questions before we wrap up?
Abe: No, this is great. Thank you.
Ari: Yeah. Thank you so much, Nancy. I really appreciate you being here and taking the time to speak with us.
Nancy: Yeah. Thank you. And I was so grateful to Ruzuku for being such an easy platform to use. And I figured this out in part working with Abe. So I just am really grateful for all the support I’ve received over the years.
Abe: It’s great to hear.
Ari: Awesome. Where can our audience go to learn more about you and Wise Adulting?
Nancy: I made a giveaway for folks. If anyone has a small business and they need help taking pictures of themselves, it’s not about the camera and the equipment. It’s about how you feel inside yourself when you have to look at yourself in the camera. And so I address both parts of that process in a giveaway. I created a landing page tinyurl.com/bizselfie. B I Z S E L F I E. And people would join my mailing list, and then I’ll give them more information as they follow along.
Abe: Awesome.
Ari: Perfect. Thank you so much.
Nancy: Thank you.
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: All right, Ari, it’s time for the debrief. Nancy has very interesting model for her offerings that I think could be of interest to a lot of people.
Ari: Yeah, absolutely. As she mentioned, recurring revenue for coaches is a hard nut to crack. And I really like what she proposed here. I mean, I think the episode speaks for itself. I don’t have a ton to add, but that model that she mapped out, having people subscribe to coaching, having the courses as a bonus that she’s also teaching through the group coaching, really interesting model that I think a lot of course creators who are also coaches could emulate.
Abe: Yeah. I thought it was especially interesting that she is finding success getting people to essentially launch with that to onboard initial clients into that model. I honestly found that pretty surprising that that’s working. And so it’s very encouraging and could be a really interesting way for people to start in a specific niche where you don’t need to have a ton of clients. You can just build up a base of stable recurring revenue for yourself and then expand from there. I mean, I do. I do think this model works best for people who are relatively prolific creators. It seems like that’s definitely her superpower.
I mean, yep. If you look at her site and all the things she talked about, she has tons of programs, tons of resources, and so she’s able to build all of that and then package it in a really interesting way. Whereas someone who they don’t lean into that as much, maybe they prefer the one on one interaction of coaching or speaking at an event. All of the resource creation that Nancy is doing in her model might not be as appealing, but for anyone who likes that, this is very powerful.
Ari: Absolutely. Because she was saying the starting point can be coming in just with coaching, having that subscription, low level recurring revenue from many different people. Through that process of doing that coaching, inevitably people need resources. Inevitably people need content that you’ll be creating for them anyway, which then can start becoming so even if you’re not a prolific content creator already, using what your clients are needing as a base for that can put you on that path. If you’re at the start of your journey or no idea what to create, get those clients and they will tell you what they need.
Abe: Yeah, good stuff. Anything else jumped out at you?
Ari: Nope, that’s it for me.
Abe: I mean, I guess that’s the challenge with concise and clear interviews is there’s there’s not a lot to add. You can find out more about nancyshanteau@nancyshanteau.com. That’s N A N C Y S H A N T E U A dot com and she’s also offering our listeners a free gift. It’s a cheat sheet called Biz Selfie How to take Easy Business Photos for Business Owners and you’ll find a link to that in the show notes.
Thanks again 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 Just Between Coaches and To Lead Is Human. If you’d like to hear more from Course Lab, you can follow us on YouTube or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. And of course, as always, if you enjoy the show, we do appreciate a review. It really does make a difference. Thank you and we’ll see you next time.
Ari, who do we have coming on the show next time?
Ari: Next time we have Dr. Irena Kyd. She is a mental performance and relationship success coach and she’ll talk to us about her future visioning and conflict resolution program and why she chose to go with one, not the other. Looking forward to it.
Abe: Yeah, very interesting to hear and unpack that.