How visionary CEO Tracy Saunders profitably pivoted from a 1:1 to 1:many business model – without dropping the ball on client experience

by | Jul 3, 2022 | Case Study, Online Coach Business

The Client

Tracy Saunders left her corporate career as an executive recruiter for top companies like Amazon, Google, and Cisco, to found her company BossmakeHer™.

Now BossmakeHer™ helps women — Director-level to the C-Suite — break through barriers and make the career moves they want and deserve through bespoke guidance and confidential networking.

Visit the BossmakeHer™ website

The Challenge

“The business model we had wasn’t scalable or sustainable, and of course – doing everything alone was time consuming and exhausting.”

Tracy loves working with her brilliant clients, and she’s inspired by them everyday. Solving complex problems they face when it comes to both systemic and self-limiting barriers lights her up. 

However, holding space for their growth started to take an emotional and energetic toll on Tracy. 

Besides, keeping up with a rapidly evolving business, while doing #allthethings wasn’t getting any easier.

“We serve both B2B and B2C audiences – progressive organizations and women who want to make power moves in their career. And before meeting Paty, I was handling all aspects of the business: admin, marketing, delivery, sales – you name it. 
Everything became a little intense, you know?”

 

Tracy realized that her company BossmakeHer™ was at that stretchy (and exciting) point where they needed to shift their business model from 1:1 to 1:many. 

A couple of things supported this decision:

  • She already had a repeatable framework that got results for her 1:1 clients
  • By creating a group program, she could make her pricing accessible, while still ensuring a high level of revenue for BossmakeHer™.

 

Tracy tried to package up her 1:1 framework into an MVP to launch quickly, however, all the moving pieces – outlining the program, choosing and setting up the right tech, designing the customer experience – held her back. 

“The good news was the methodology was adaptable. The bad news? It was all too much for me to handle. Even with a VA – whom you’d have to train and teach anyway.”

 

That’s when Tracy realized she needed a high-level strategic partner who could organize her thoughts, give her clarity on the next steps, and help her launch the program – sooner rather than later. 

“In the next few weeks, I interviewed a lot of strategists, but none of them felt right for my business. Some of them were process heavy or needed a lot of info – nothing wrong with that, but that’s not how I work. 
I chose to partner with Paty because she seems to have a really cool blend of ease and flow and advanced knowledge of tech. There’s a sense of calm about her that really compliments my personality.”

The journey

Organizing and aligning Tracy’s ideas with her company’s goals, while creating systems that supported her vision

Tracy had a great sense of what worked for her clients and in which order. 

So the first step was to structure the program and lay out the specifics including: the content and sequence of the videos, relevant homework and resources to support each milestone, how to keep them engaged with the content, etc. 

“Paty pulled every little detail out of me and created a roadmap. The way she approached it, I knew she had done this many times before. 
Paty knew exactly what she needed and she helped me organize my thoughts around it.”

 

The next step was to design a high-touch customer experience, while giving Tracy back her time and brainspace. 

This involved mapping out the onboarding process, the cadence for the check in and update emails, designing a comprehensive welcome packet, as well as selecting and setting up the right tech for evergreen enrollment. 

“These were all Paty’s ideas. The way she set it up.. it was automated – yet so high-touch. Everyone got a welcome packet to review and at regular intervals they received emails asking for updates and homework.
 It was amazing to see how my clients interacted with this kind of communication. I never thought this level of personalization was possible!”

 

Since this was a beta launch, the marketing was mostly organic. Tracy is active on LinkedIn, and we shared the offer with her warmed up audience on the platform as well as her email list – and it worked!

Currently, we’re in the process of refining the program and setting up comprehensive funnels to meet her goal of enrolling 10-20 people per month in the program – a major shift from working with only 5 private clients 1:1. 

“Paty has a cool sense of every aspect of a launch from high-level strategy, to marketing, to advanced tech builds. 
It’s amazing how she can be front-facing (She was my Program Manager and engaged with the clients when they needed help) as well as so knowledgeable about the backend of a business.
We had a number of tech issues to sort out to make the experience seamless for our clients, and Paty was up for the challenge every time because her knowledge is platform agnostic.”

The Impact

“By organizing the chaos and laying it out like a true game plan, we just left $10k months along the side of the road.”

The launch catalyzed a key shift in Tracy’s belief: that it was possible to scale her business – earn more money and serve more people – without doing more

And, having someone handle the strategy + execution was as much about staying in her zone of genius as defining and defending her boundaries. 

“I got really uncomfortable with the perceived kind of silence – you know, from talking to my clients every day to meeting them only once a week. Initially, it felt weird to shift to this model – and I kept thinking ‘Are they getting value?’
But then I attended the calls and everything was working. They were thriving!”

 

In her own words, Tracy has a “bias for action,” and she needed a partner who could match the momentum of her visionary ideas and execute on them: I was honored to support her. 

Phase 1 of her launch involved conceptualizing and launching a minimum viable product (MVP). 

The MVP version had fewer students – and 4 integration calls per month was enough to guide them through the process. 

However, over the past 6 months we’ve been enrolling clients consistently, with most of them opting for the VIP tier ($7000 value). In the meantime, we also gathered feedback about their experience in the container. 

That’s why we in Phase 2 (rolled out in June 2022), we focused on maximizing the value her  thriving evergreen community can get from the program by including 6 calls per month:

  • 2 weekly coaching calls (led by Tracy)
  • 1 weekly networking call
  • 1 monthly community (led by Tracy)
  • 1 monthly guest expert session
  • 1 monthly mindset session

This helped Tracy strike the perfect balance between scalability, profitability, and quality.

“A launch is complex right? And yes, there were curveballs – followed by tears. Paty stayed calm and held space for me without any judgment when I was freaking out. 
She’s the kind of person who can walk into any situation, be agile, and get a handle on it.
A creative, visionary mind has so much to share, but it can be difficult to figure out how to deliver it. And it was such a relief that I could finally share my program with the world – exactly the way I had envisioned it.”

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