My advice on creating pre-requisites for your courses

One of my clients had created two trainings. One was a shorter, more fundamental course, and the other was longer, and more in-depth.

Then she set it up so that her clients needed to take the first one before the second. Err…. definitely a yellow flag of concern there.

But why? We see it in the world of education all the time, where you need to take the level 1 course before you take the level 2 course.

Sure, yet for you, for us as small business owners there’s a real problem with it, especially if you’re in earlier stages of business development.

The numbers problem

I’ve written about the problem with running a business based on workshops alone. Pre-requisites just make it worse.

If you have, let’s say, a potential audience of 500 people, it can be work to get even 5% (15) to an offering where they all have to need the same topic, and be free on the same dates and times,.

Then, your level two class only has those 15 folks to draw from. It’s very likely that if you had a great connection with your participants that you’ll get a much higher enrollment rate than 5%, but even a 50% enrollment rate leave you with only 8 participants.

You can see the problem.

If you do that over years, you can build up a large pool of first level graduates. But then you’ll be running two levels of enrollment, promoting the first level to your general audience, and your second level to your graduate audience, complicating your marketing structure.

We don’t have pre-requisites.

Even though we have thousands of people on our email list, and have been working with clients for 19 years, we don’t have pre-requisites. We do have two intro courses, The Heart of Money Transformational Journey, and the one we’ve just started enrolling, The Heart of Your Business. But you don’t have to take either of those to do other things with us.

What I suggest instead.

There are a few things I recommend to help avoid what can be a very complicated marketing issue.

First, what’s the minimum they need? Look hard at your material, and be (lovingly) ruthless in identify what is the absolute minimum someone needs to know before taking on certain kinds of learning.

In many instances, I daresay most, there will be a certain amount of basic material that people need to be able to work with what you’re teaching, and that can be assigned as pre-work.

For instance, our Unveiling Your Jewel class is an important piece of understanding how we work with spirituality, and it’s also something that bears repetition. So we include it as pre-work with most, if not all, of our courses.

Second, if you must, create the advanced group as rolling admissions. Meaning, instead of a big launch, create a small, premium-priced group that cycles through advanced topics, structured so that a new member can join at nearly any time, or the beginning of any month.

This way, if an advanced student/client pops up as ready, they can be brought into the ongoing, advanced group without needing to wait until it’s launched, or if they aren’t quite ready, they can join in a month or two.

My advanced small group coaching mentoring group is run somewhat similarly to this.

Please make it easy on yourself.

Too many small business owners, and self-employed practitioners are modeling their businesses are much larger organizations, like universities or other educational institutions.

Don’t do this! You don’t have to mimic those folks. With some forethought, you can make it much easier on yourself and on your clients.

I want you to fly! Often, the easiest step forward is what will help you catch the wind of momentum in your business.

With love,
Mark Silver, M.Div.
Heart of Business, Inc.
Every act of business can be an act of love.

P.S. The Heart of Your Business

Yes! It’s that time of year again. Our 9 week course, The Heart of Your Business, is now open for enrollment!

It’s intended to help you have a healthy, heart-centered, and effective relationship with business general, and with your business in specific.

So often folks like you are trying to make a business fly by piecing things together, without real, in-your-bones clarity about what’s needed to make it work, and what healing your heart needs to allow your business to fly.

Please join us.It runs late June through August, it’s priced at pay-from-the-heart. And there’s a special bonus class for those who register in May.

Hundreds of previous participants have raved about it.

Take a look: The Heart of Your Business 2019

And ask any questions you have.