Building a results-focused, transformational course

initial course planning board

How did I design the Consulting Club course?

Members love my course! I want to share how I developed it.

Consulting Club’s core program wasn’t always so amazing. But with the accolades of late I wanted to create some space to share my learnings in building not a skills-based course, but a results-focused, transformational course.

I had some qualifications to make a course:

I had taken numerous skills and transformational programs.
I had presented and conducted sales trainings in the past.
I had been operating as an independent consulting and achieved $30K in monthly sales.

I did not have any formal authority that had deemed me a certified trainer.

In my lifetime I’ve spent close to $200K of my own money on learning and developing. I’ve made poor investments and I’ve made great investments. Generally speaking there is a lot of bad transformation training out in the world. Plenty of skills-based training and arguable if it can actually help another person acquire the skill.

I didn’t enter course design without having invested in some growth myself. I feel it’s important for me to have done something before asking another person to do the same.

The Initial Failure

I designed a workshop for a client. Ten employees showed up for two days of training. I saw a 10% success rate. You might think, well company training generally sucks. And you would be right.

Here were my takeaways:

Do not ever train someone who has no skin in the game. There are very few employees who really take free education seriously. Most of them desire to check a box and say that they did it. You may have received some insight, but you have achieved no transformation.
Put the most powerful part of the material in the beginning. People are tired by the end. I discovered the first 2-3 hours matter that most. Additionally, it sets the tone and people know you’re dead serious!
Put any knowledge-related, or skills-related material at the backend
Engage the participate as much as possible in visual, auditory, and kinesthetic ways

Finding the Winning Formula

I ended up redesigning the workshop as a workshop for independent consultants. It just so happened to coincide with a request from a good friend of mine. I decided to only work with people were great at something so I created a set of 6 questions that would help me select the right people (this was key learning I had from my consulting practice: client selection matters more than anything else).

Then, I focused on the outcome. I wanted this individual to obtain their first client within 6-8 weeks (the average currently 3-6 weeks). For the outcome to be achieved I had to do two things:

I had to create the spark to change behavior (success is a set of practices, not a set of skills). I read this book.
Then I had to layer in the key knowledge, which I had in an order that would build and show the individual they themselves were progressing.

I also knew we wouldn’t achieve the desired success in two days so the impact of the program had to last longer than the two days - I tried to focus on 3 months of impact. I had to build momentum, generate excitement/enthusiasm/belief, and give them the transformational power to overcome inertia.

There is only one tool in our verbal toolbox as humans with the power to transform us, or others: questions. So I drafted over 100 questions that I could possibly use to drive people to their desired destination. I narrowed them down to 53.

I created additional skills and move them outside the core course offering. They were still valuable, but I didn’t need to teach something people could read and refer back to (I now have this in audio format as well).

Conclusion

There is a growing group of course creators and I wanted to share my learnings over the last 3 years having built and operator a live in-person course and one that now lives online and self-paced. If you have a superpower to help others grow and flourish you may want to consider the possibilities of building, or improving your own course to deliver the maximum impact it can.

Best of luck!