When you do a thing for other people, you tend to make 100 teeny tiny little decisions on their behalf without really noticing. Because you're the expert in the thing. That's why they hired you to do it.
So if you're turning that experience into a course, you have to start handing those decisions over to them in a way that they can actually make the decision, right.
My last guest, Preshus Phifer, provides bookkeeping services through her company Phifer Bookkeeping. But there's only one of her, and so she wants a course to both lighten her load but also make it more accessible to get her help. She came in thinking this would walk them through setting up their bookkeeping system, keeping it maintained.
Listen for the full episode
AND the BS Breakthrough (where I break down how this all applies to you)
BSB Coming October 29th!
At the core, when you’re ready to scale services and you’re thinking about using courses to do that, start small.
The First Step In Scaling Your Services
When you’re at the point in your service based business when you feel like you’re ready to scale, you first want to make sure it’s the right fit for your business. I’ve got a quiz to help with that, and I always recommend asking the people you're already selling to.
So for Preshus, which one she was actually teaching really mattered to both her and the folks that she serves. She kept going back and forth between QuickBooks and Xero and a spreadsheet, and just couldn't pick.
Preshus did have to shift from “I’m going to teach the tool” to something smaller because the big massive course she kept making bigger was NOT it. She kept wanting to add more options, more tools, and was trying to build a whole ass degree.
Because when you’re trying to productize a service in order to scale, you need to focus on just one part of the service you provide.
Finding Your Focus Before Building Your Course
The focus of your course should always been at the crossroads of what YOU want to teach and what THEY want to buy. So to really find that happy place, you need to research your audience.
Preshus has been in my world for a little while, so she did the audience research. She did ask whether they wanted QuickBooks or a spreadsheet. The answer she got was that most people didn't even know what to look for. Right? Like how to pick a tool.
The process of thinking through what they need was overwhelming, and that's where they got to the point where they would just rather have somebody tell them right. I think that's why ‘What course platform should I use?’ is the number one question I get. And that bit of information was almost buried.
When Preshus asked her research question, she only gave two choices, which means only two things were coming back because she wrote the menu. The real answer that mattered (the “I don't know what I'm looking for”) actually only showed up in an open text box that she had, and a lot of people don't bother submitting that.
What we learned from this was that the big course on how to use the software could actually wait, because the thing that her people needed first was how to make that decision themselves. The software you track your money in shapes how you understand your money, which is exactly why the folks that Preshus works with freeze when they get to that decision.
So that became her first course.
Once you have an idea of what part of your service you’re going to pull into a course, you need to establish goals for it so you can stay grounded in EXACTLY what they’re going to do.
Three Things to Take Away if You’re Trying to Scale Your Service Based Business with Educational Services
These three are kind of all around the same thing this time. All three focus on stepping outside of your own expertise and remembering that we're building for people that are at a certain place. It can be hard to remember when we were in that place where choosing a tool made our brains bleed.
The Results are Only as Good as Your Questions
So the first breakthrough is your research can only hand you back the options you put in it. The way you craft your questions when you’re validating or getting feedback can guide the results, so you want to make sure that they’re written to get the best data.
So this goes back to the way that that question was phrased. It's not bad research. Giving options for one or the other is a good idea. It's just that the way that you ask a question and the potential responses that you give impact the kind of data that you get. Basically, it’s leads to bias.
In order to really find out what tool they want to learn, I recommend rewriting that question to say “what tool do you think you need?” For Preshus, we were deciding between QuickBooks Spreadsheets, Xero, and another, lesser-known tool. Listing out the ones that are well known, the ones that are little known, and then having that other spot, is a good option as long as you also account for the “I don’t know.”
That could have been “I don’t know” as an option or an “other” space.
That question needed an immediate followup with an open question that asks “why.”
People answer closed questions because they feel easy, but if we can get them to give us a useful closed response and then respond to it with “Why?” then we get a deeper idea. So let's say somebody selected QuickBooks, and in the “Why” section they said “Because that’s the only one I’ve heard of.”
That tells you that they really don't know what to pick. They just assumed that because QuickBooks is the one everybody throws around that that is what they should be using.
The way you write the questions is critical to getting the right information that can help you move forward and figure out the actual problem that people are having so that you can solve it.
Difficult Decisions are Learning Experiences
Okay. So breakthrough number two is that the decision that your people can't make is actually the product. That’s the place where you build your course.
In our call, that was the thing that kind of reframed everything for Preshus. It also made it easier for her. So one of the things that we talked about was the thought of creating an entire course around a single software, and then that piece not actually selling, or it being too difficult to teach the technology, or not having a place where they could actually click the buttons.
That made her not even want to start, even though she really knew that a course was her next step. So we spent our time outlining the shorter, more concrete, more concise piece that can actually guide that bigger step that she's going to take later. She's going to do a short email course. It's four steps.
Her course is going to walk clients through picking bookkeeping software for their own business. Part of it is figuring out what the business actually needs. It’s something that Preshus was doing automatically. Then, she’s going to have clients go ask peers in their industry what they use. Some industries have special software that make it easier for the different types of money scenarios that you run into.
The difference between a course and a homework assignment is the space to do it. So Preshus isn't just going to make a list and hand it over, and they check the boxes. She's going to hand them a document with the columns already in it, so they can do the tracking of who they're asking. What did they say, what did they like? What did they not like?
For this course, Precious needed the ability to share and track a workbook because her learners needed to:
Track when they talked to peers about the software (what they liked, didn’t like etc.)
Links to go explore tools and track the details like cost, customer service experiences, etc.
Tracking their experiences so they have their own data in front them and can make an informed choice.
This mean that workspace was more important than content delivery, which led to email being the easiest way to deliver this course.
The key is to have space to actually fill things in so that nobody's looking at a blank page and trying to figure out how to keep track of the things that you're asking them to actually do.
Your Default as a Service Provider Isn’t BEST for the DIYer
Breakthrough three is that the tool that you know the best isn't automatically the tool that's best for your buyer when you're switching, especially from one on one services to a course. That was one of the things that Preshus ran into. She kept kind of defaulting to QuickBooks because that's what she knew the best.
And that can be an easy trap to fall into when you're an expert in something and you've been doing this for people for a while.
Because it's easy for you, it feels like it's going to be easy for somebody else, but easier for you and right for them are two completely different things. QuickBooks is premium, and the people that were coming to her for help and couldn't hire her were already running their businesses scrappy, not crappy. Premium software didn’t make sense.
QuickBooks is also built to skip the fundamentals, which is exactly how someone sets it up wrong. Setting up QuickBooks incorrectly was the number one thing that Preshus was finding when she was finally brought in to fix someone’s books.
Choosing the tools that you're going to teach them has to come from the tools that they need and that fit their business.
How to Apply this if YOU’RE Shifting to Learning from Service Providing
Step one. You're going to go look at the last research question that you actually asked your people.
Did you give them a really narrow list that kind of came out of your own expertise, or did you kind of open the door for the thing that you don't know yet? You want to write research questions with curiosity, so make sure that you leave space for that in your questions.
Step two. Finding the decision that your buyers keep getting stuck on before they can even hire you. If it's the thing that they don't know how to choose. Or don't know where to start. Because that sticking point might be your first smaller offer that helps you shape everything else.
If you’re spinning your wheels and stopping and starting that shift to creating education when you’ve been a service provider, grab yourself a strategy session so I can help you get on your way.