Making your online business thrive
Co-creators of the Embodied Business Institute
You’re ready (maybe yearning) to crack the code on hybridising your amazing teaching practice so you can make more impact on more people WHILE making more money. Oh, and do it without crushing your soul, sucking your time, or breaking the bank — that, of course, is non-negotiable. However, it’s too often what happens. But we’re about to change all that nonsense!
If you raise your hand to any of the following, we see you:
You’re a movement teacher and…
…you’re a creator.
…Pilates is one of your tools, but you have lots of tools in your arsenal.
…you know that what you do could change so many more people than you would ever be able to see in your studio.
…you have a body of work inside of you because you’ve been changing people’s lives and bodies.
…you’ve already taken the first hard steps toward putting your work online in some capacity and likely with some success.
BUT…it’s not quite working out the way you had thought or hoped it would. Your students aren’t logging onto your online videos consistently. Or they don’t get the same results with our online education as when they work with you in-studio. Or even though you now have an online component to your business everyone still only wants to work with you in-person or on zoom, and you’re still as busy as ever.
Teaching the ‘whole person’
In Pilates we don’t just teach the body in front of us; we teach the whole person in front us. When we neglect teaching to the whole person — whether because we’re not sure how or we’ve lost sight of how — our students suffer and our career can stagnate. One of the primary challenges we face is taking our powerful in-person work into the online space without believing that it won’t translate. The truth is designing whole-person driven offers and curriculum is, in fact, more conducive to the online space in many ways if we just learn a few critical skills.
The reality of taking your work online
To unravel this puzzle thoroughly, let’s first look at some of the most common challenges educators face when taking their work online:
The Desire: Create ‘passive income’ by putting DIY content in the online space via a video library
The Challenge: Video libraries don’t transform people. Video libraries are the same as YOUTUBE and that’s free
The Reality: There’s no such thing as passive income because it takes a lot of time, money, and effort as well as a team to build the platform, systems, and marketing to make this model work. (Welcome to the high-volume model.)
The Desire: Serve more people and make your work more accessible i.e. affordable via a subscription-based offer
The Challenge: It takes lots and lots of time and energy to create new recurring content that makes you feel good about the offer and satisfies your students
The Reality: Building a subscription model not only requires you to constantly be creating content, it also demands that you SELL A LOT of subscriptions to make it worth your while (high-volume model). And it typically attracts students/customers that are unwilling or unable to convert into future investments
The Desire: Create something bigger with all of your knowledge: a specialised teacher training or mentorship; an entirely new method; write a book and launch a supporting online training.
The Challenge: You’re not sure where to start and holding the vision for something so big is both exhilarating and exhausting
Or… you get a great running start and launch your work, but you’re afraid to charge enough so enrolment still has to be high to make a profit and for you to be motivated to keep building
The Reality: Most teachers give up before they even get a formula in place that works and they can repeat and scale. The bottom line with all high-volume models is that they take a lot of work and a lot of resources before you see the payoff.
Building for Transformation
Designing low-volume, high-value offers that transform not only allows you to leverage your expertise and reach more people, it increases your ability to transition your students into the next offer — because they want to continue to be transformed…by you — keeping them in your sphere longer. This decreases your work while increasing your revenue over time and it’s the key to a hybrid ecosystem that can sustain and fulfill you.
Here’s how:
Creating for transformation means using powerful curriculum design that can be applied to the online or in-person space, can take shape as a workshop, multi-week course, retreat or training and is scalable over time without losing the meaning or lowering the integrity of what you do.
For our clients who come to us having already created or perhaps launched an online offer, but are struggling to get traction, here are the top three strategies we focus on:
#1 WHAT IS THE TRANSFORMATION? Identifying, clarifying, and designing from a powerful transformation.
Each offer or program must have a clear and potent transformation that can be achieved through a strategic formula. The formula is a process of curriculum design that’s based on how the brain learns and how long-term behaviour change happens from a nervous system perspective.
A transformation statement will not only guide your students in the process and make selling your program easier, it also helps you edit down superfluous information or content that will overwhelm your students in the online space.
Here’s an example: Within the 10-week Pilates Pelvic Power Program (PPPP) you will stop worrying and cross your legs when you sneeze and be thrilled to freely laugh until you cry and even jump on a trampoline again.
This transformation statement normalises the challenge of pelvic floor strength and flexibility loss while clearly defining activities lost through weakness and gained through the program.
The transformation statement speaks to the mindset of worry and freedom while also speaking to actual physical activities.
Transformation statements support engagement in your online programs. It serves as the WHY of your program when your students’ motivation dips, they anchor into WHY they are logging on even if they are not feeling like it right at the moment.
Engagement Pro-Tip: Have your students share their own transformation statements for why they joined your course and you’ll get even more students logging on. Why? Because adult learners are motivated by being able to see themselves — and their desire for transformation — within the one you’ve written for your program.
#2 HOW DO I TAKE THEM ON A JOURNEY THAT MAKES THEM WANT TO KEEP COMING BACK? Designing offers built on neuroscience, motivation and engagement science, and nervous system behaviour change.
LESS is MORE online. Because many of us wrongly believe that online teaching and learning is less valuable than in-person learning we tend to overcompensate by adding too much content. This hinders the learner because their brains become overwhelmed and their motivation wanes, they stop engaging and oftentimes feel embarrassed that they’re not keeping up.
Engagement Pro Tip #1: (And non-negotiable) Edit down your course deliverables by at least 30 per cent the first time you offer your course. Your students will have a higher likelihood of feeling — and being — successful, which increases motivation and engagement — rather than tapping out because there’s just too much to do, read, and sort through.
Engagement Pro-Tip #2: You can always add a dig deeper section, which is bonus material that they can CHOOSE to engage with. Learner choice is important so your students’ fulfilment (fuel for motivation and engagement), and this way they won’t be overwhelmed just getting through the basics of the course. *Overdelivering will also stop them from signing up for more. Why would they want more when they haven’t been able to get through what they already have? It’s bad for conversion.
Most of us teach adult learners with busy lives. We live in a world with a fire hose of content streaming at us every day. Every day over 700,000 hours of video are uploaded to Youtube and as of May 2023 Pilates Anytime has 89.6K thousand subscribers and Pilatesology has 55.6K thousand subscribers.
So the answer is NOT more and the answer is NOT free.
When you lean into your transformation statement you only offer educational resources that support your students to achieve the goal. And once they’ve achieved it, or at least seen measurable results, they will want to keep working with you to have more of that same inspiring experience.
#3 HOW DO I CREATE A CONTAINER OF SAFETY AND TRUST? Identifying exactly what and how to create enough safety and trust that your students are able to truly experience behaviour change and optimise their learning.
Within the online environment, people can feel unsafe just like in the studio for reasons we expect and some we’ve never even thought of.
Although many of the same components can play out in online learning, we also need to design for: fear of technology; the need for personal connection to optimise learning and regulate the nervous system; variance in the learner; accessibility for all abilities; establishing clear expectations, goals, deadlines and procedures.
We want to design online teaching and learning that makes people safe so that they can be transformed.
Lack of safety commonly manifests as lack of motivation. Designing for what students can do if (and when) they lose motivation shouldn't be addressed by adding more or newer content or flashy choreography, which actually diminishes safety. The reason people don’t continue is deeper than that.
The brain and nervous system are at the heart of feeling safe and we can design for that, too! Through nervous system-based strategies, creating intentional and supportive community learning, varying learning strategies and materials, and giving learners choice our containers, whatever they are, promote safety, trust and…you got it: transformation!
To keep your students logging back into your online studio you want to design it so that they feel warm, squishy and safe in that online container that they desire to log back on. To do this, become a student of your students and think about what circumstances allow your students to feel safe.
Engagement Pro Tip: Most people feel safe when they can establish a connection, or even bond, with others. Providing opportunities for your students to connect with each other in your online studio will increase their sense of safety and lift up their intrinsic motivation.
Taken together, these three strategies allow us to step into hybridisation with clarity, ease and energy. This is how we pave the way for diversifying our work so that it is packed with meaning and generates the money we desire, while avoiding the struggle of the high-volume model that will more easily drain us than sustain us.
It’s time to step into greater leadership within the online space and move beyond creating copious amounts of new exercise videos. We’ll leave that to what happens on Youtube.
About Chantill Lopez + Anne Bishop:
Chantill and Anne first crossed paths in 2002, each in the midst of building their Pilates businesses in neighbouring cities. Nearly ten years later they reconnected and began collaborating on their first continuing education and business development projects. In 2016 they launched the first iteration of their shared business, now known as the Embodied Business Institute. Their mission is to support teachers in the Pilates and movement industries to make money and meaning from expertise.
If you’d like to get more of a taste for how to design for transformation both in-person and online, click here to get a free 6-Step Design Guide to Skyrocket Your Engagement, Conversion + Course Profitability HERE
If you’re ready to jump in and want to discuss next steps with Chantill and Anne, book a free Clarity Call NOW.