Are High-Touch Services Making A Comeback?

High-touch services are experiencing a powerful resurgence, and after years of prioritizing scale, many are seeking deeper, more personalized client connections. In this episode, Gwen Bortner and Tonya Kubo discuss this trend. They explore why the ‘one-size-fits-all’ model might be falling short and discuss whether chasing the latest trend aligns with the business you really want. Gwen and Tonya share invaluable insights on navigating the shift from scaled offerings to one-on-one interactions, including essential tips on pricing and the potential for subcontracting. Tune in to discover how you can build authentic, meaningful client relationships and create a fulfilling business rooted in high-touch service.

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Are High-Touch Services Making A Comeback?

I’m wondering if you have been seeing the same thing I have been seeing recently, which is cookie cutter frameworks and one-size-fits-all solutions aren’t delivering the results they promised. I don’t think is new information. I think that’s old news. What is new information as I’m starting to see people out and loud, and places like LinkedIn and on other podcasts, and even on YouTube channels and such that I follow talking about this elephant in the room.

I’m here with Gwen, and we are going to be talking about this phenomenon that I’ve noticed. I don’t know if Gwen’s noticing it. We’ll find out in just a moment. Also, what does that mean? If we’re moving away from these cookie-cutter one-size-fits-all solutions, where are we going? Gwen, you are here, and I am curious. Have you seen what I am seeing?

High-Touch Services: The Comeback & Balancing Act

I have seen a little more discussion. Now I do not stay on top of things like you stay on top of things. The fact that I haven’t seen it as much really is not saying anything because I see way less than you see.

I think you’re saying I’m chronically online, which may be true there.

It’s also part of your job and your role. That makes sense. I would say proportionally, from what I was seeing. As I said, if we’re doing it like a per capita analysis, I am seeing it more. I always find it interesting because this is one of those places that you would say, “You’ve been doing this for a really long time. Why did you start versus choosing the other?” I always pull out the little post-it note that you made me write for myself, which reminds me that I often am doing things ahead of what other people are doing them. I have noticed it, but I have noticed it in the “People are now starting to do more of what I do” way, as opposed to probably the way that you’re seeing it, which is much more as a trend.

The question that I’m going to ask you, and I’m just giving you a heads up here, is I’m wondering, it’s like I know that you do this, but I don’t think the average person sees themselves in that same picture. Where I’m hoping to get by the end of this episode, dear reader, since you’ve been hanging out with us for a good like two and a half minutes now and don’t know where we’re going, is it possible to create meaningful personalized client experiences without burning yourself out in the process?

If it is possible, how? What I am seeing is that I do believe that what is old is new again. I have been in business long enough to see every single trend under the sun at this point go up and come down at least three times. What I’m seeing is this resurgence of high-tech personalized services in the market. I was talking to a friend the other day, a mutual friend of mine and Gwen’s, and she was just like, “Fine. Courses are dead.”

She had been representing a few clients who were all having difficult launches. She’s like, “Fine.” If courses are dead, then one-on-one is up. One-on-one just came back from the zombie apocalypse. In five years, one-on-one will be part of the apocalypse, and courses will be back up. It’s just that’s the cycle of things. Which is great.

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The pendulum swings back and forth, always does. If it’s swinging toward personalized services after years of scale at all costs, that’s great for anybody who has personalized services to offer. I think we still have to address the issue, Gwen, which is the reason people like scaled offers or product-type services, as I’ve heard it call. The reason people like to work one-to-many is that you’d rather get paid twenty times for one hour than only get paid once.

For many people, one-on-one services are a burnout. I’m wondering from your perspective, how do you see that playing out? If somebody has been working and doing group programs, doing courses, and they’re going, “That’s not selling for me,” what do I do next? If next happens to be, “I’ll go back to working one-on-one,” how do you manage that and still have boundaries around your time and your energy and all of that?

Chasing Trends Vs. Business Vision

I think I’m going to not answer your question with a different.

Like that’s anything new.

I know. What I think is part of the problem that causes these up and down cycles is that we’re always chasing what we think somebody else wants.

You have to talk a little bit more about that.

This goes back to what we talk a lot about. It’s really about the title of the show, The Business You Really Want. If you’re always chasing what everybody else wants, are you ever actually chasing what you want for your business? I think the burnout happens when you’re chasing somebody else’s dream of your business as opposed to your own, and saying, “Do I like doing personalized services?”

Maybe you do, but someone told you you’re supposed to scale, and so you stopped doing personalized services. This is going to be a heyday for you because you’re going to be able to go back to personalized services. If you’re someone who the thought of doing 2 or 3 or 4 one-on-one Zoom calls in a week, let alone in a day, just makes you want to choke yourself. There’s nothing I can tell you that’s going to make that not overwhelming, not cause burnout, or cause all of the things.

I think that’s one of the things that I’ll say does make me different is I’m willing to say that to say, “I know everyone says, goes one-on-one. Screw them. Keep your course. Stay with your course. Do your course.” If that’s what’s working for you, now, like I said, I think the problem is we get too caught up in what other people are saying is successful.

As you know, I have not been doing courses, and I have not been doing any large group work. I have a few very small group things, but not large group work by what anyone would call a scalable program. I don’t have anything that anyone would call a scalable program that I’ve been doing for nearly ten years now. I’m able to do it successfully continually because it’s what makes me happy with my business.

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I haven’t chased the other things that say, “The only way you’re going to be successful is to do A, B, C.” It’s like, “No, that is not the only way to be successful.” Now, can I create a hundred-million-dollar business doing one-on-one services? Probably not. Although I do know of 1 or 2, and the trick is that they’ve gotten so popular and valuable on the right clientele that they charge them, the ten people they have, $10 million a year.

There are those people.

Yeah, but there are three of them, and probably none of them are listening to this podcast. There is a thing of like, what does success mean to you? Why do you want that thing? I think that the first piece is to say what pieces of this resonate with you and the business you want? Start there. If you like being on one-on-one calls, this is good. As I said, this is going to be a heyday for you because people are going to appreciate the fact that you’re able to do it.

It’s the thing I’ve always loved doing. Yay for me. If you don’t like lots of one-on-one calls, you don’t like that interaction, you don’t like the energy, whatever it is. It doesn’t have to be anything other than about you. You have to look and say, “How much does the personalization matter to me? What are the ways I can do that in more scale? Is that something that I can allow someone else in my business to do, or I can bring someone else in my business to do?”

If you’re moving from a course, let’s say, just to give us a tangible example, a course into trying to offer a more personalized model, that means that you have a whole bunch of predefined processes, worksheets, steps, and data. Why couldn’t you train 8, 10 people to do that and deliver it one-on-one? You aren’t having to be the one on the call. Maybe all you’re interacting with now are these 8 or 10 people, that may be a manageable number for you.

That’s one possibility. It’s not necessarily the only possibility. For sure, it’s not the only possibility. Maybe you offer group calls that allow some personalization on top of the course that you offer. I think the key to actually getting success, and for me, we’ve got a whole true to the title of the podcast, Building the Business You Really Want, is not chasing the thing because someone told you it’s the thing to chase.

The Rise & Fall Of Online Courses

I think we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves here in the conversation because you’re right. There are so many different options after you make the decision. First, you have to make the decision. Are one-on-one services what I want to move toward? Is that something I want to promote? Do I want to try to shift what I’m doing with my group programs, with my courses? That’s the first choice.

After you make that choice, if you do decide, one-on-one services make sense, then the business model you choose to approach offering more personalization to your clients. You’ve got some additional options there. I think that that’s all true and reasonable, and there’s a lot of information out there, but what I think is more interesting is addressing the root cause of the pendulum shift. I’m going to tell you what I see, and then I would like for you to see how that aligns with what you see.

If you are a course creator, you may. Listen to my words and go, “That’s not what I do, Tonya.” I’m so glad that’s not what you do, but you are not everybody. I’m just going to ask you to have an open mind, and maybe I’m not talking to you, maybe I’m talking to people you’ve taken courses from. I feel like the last resurgence of online courses. I felt like it was starting to hit about 2014. It got hot in 2018 and was naturally already starting to go down, but then the pandemic hit. I think the pandemic forced the peak of online group programs and courses to be a lot longer than it would have naturally.

I would concur with everything that you just said.

   

   

Let’s just say that we’ve had a longer peak than we would have typically if the market hadn’t been disrupted like it was. What happens with anything that becomes on trend and everybody does it is that you always start off with some people who are doing it well for a variety of reasons. Maybe they are offering a solution to a very specific problem, and that specific problem is rampant enough that a lot of people have it. Their solution is decent enough, quality enough that it works for a majority of people who have that problem. As it gets more popular, what ends up happening? People get into the business not of solving the problem, but of training other people to sell solutions to problems.

That was my favorite thing because that’ll be the next thing we see is how to actually “Come work with me one-on-one to learn how to work one-on-one.” I haven’t seen that yet. We should put that out tomorrow as a marketing thing. I could make a zillion dollars.

Probably could. What’s funny is I have a lot of clients in the homeschool market, and I’ll get back on track here. A lot of clients who serve the homeschool market and they will go to these webinars and stuff, and somebody will say, “Buy my thing and I can help you make six figures.” They’ll ask. They’re smart business owners, and they’ll say, “I don’t doubt that you can do that, but I serve the homeschool market, and not sure what you offer is appropriate to me.”

It works in any industry. They get into it. One of my clients enrolled in a 10K program, and it was the second session where they said, “You just need to teach other people how to write curriculum.” She was like, “I’m a curriculum company, why would I create more competitors in the market?” They’re like, “Your consumers won’t spend more than they’re already spending.” She was like, “Didn’t I tell you that before I got into this, because I think I did?”

The thing is, when more people get into the market, the quality drops. It’s the same thing as get a designer handbag and then Target gets a license with the designer. I don’t think anybody thinks the Target version is the same quality as the Rodeo Drive version. It looks the same, but it’s not quite the same.

What happens is that now the market is flooded with group programs and online courses, not all of which are of the same quality, not all of which are of the same effectiveness, but word starts to spread that online courses aren’t working. Those group programs aren’t working, and because they’re not, because the quality went down. People start to go, “What else is there?” They start wanting more attention.

The reason they don’t work in general terms is they’re oftentimes too standardized to create something to serve 100 people. You cannot control for every possible eventuality. What you have to do is say, “This is the general standard that I’m going to teach you. Your mileage may vary, but you’re going to have to handle that customization on your own as the business owner and the expert in your business.” That works for some, and it doesn’t work for others. Do you have any disagreements so far, Gwen?

Marketing Traps & True Effectiveness

I have no disagreements. I think the piece that you mentioned, which was almost a throwaway piece, but I think it’s actually the critical piece because I’ve seen it so many times, is courses work really well when it’s a very specific and or acute problem. Therefore has a very limited number of answers, options, and learnings to solve that problem.

As the course creators who are teaching people how to create courses, and that’s actually all that they know how to do is how to teach other people how to do the thing that they’re doing, which they haven’t really done other than this one course teaching them to teach other courses. The problem there is they make it sound like you can do anything in a course. Technically, the answer is yes, but we’re assuming courses like high school, college, and graduate school, where it’s interaction and personalization, and it’s not just fixed content like we do now, because that’s the nature of it.

I think the problem is that we get people who are dealing with very complex problems trying to go with a very simple solution. I will have to say, this is one of the places. Sorry, Tonya, you know how I feel about this. This is my tiny T trauma about marketing that I get upset about marketing is that they sell this as this will absolutely work for you, because it worked for me. It’s like, you’re into this piece of one. I don’t care if it worked for you. I want to hear how many hundred other people of all sorts of industries and backgrounds and experience and age and knowledge and all the things also had it work for them, because it’s working for you.

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There are so many factors that no one can even take into consideration because it’s all of our background and our history and knowledge and experience and things that we don’t even think may have contributed, that did contribute to that success. When we’re in specific, that’s one thing, but when we’re in these broad strokes, I think that’s where people start feeling the failures.

What I’d like to do is just spend a few more minutes talking a little bit more about what the market is looking for now. I want to shift into how we, as individual business owners, especially those of us who are women, because it’s not that men don’t have competing priorities, but women have just some different societal demands than men typically do. What could shifting from a one-to-many model toward a one-to-one model look like for a woman in business, whether she’s a solopreneur or she has a team? Full disclosure, I am a course creator. I don’t have a ton of courses that are actively for sale, but I have a couple.

I can do in a couple of different areas that I have.

You’ve got DIY courses. Mine are all live deliveries. I always tell myself I’ll get to DIY, but I’m just not there yet. What I see is when I see the market fresher, I’m seeing people post on LinkedIn. I will be honest, like I am not a big course person these days either, unless I’m looking for a very specific thing. The last course I took was like teaching me how to leverage everything within Google Workspace, like the Google suite of tools.

Very specific information I likely could have gotten if I had, pardon the pun, Googled it all, but I didn’t have time or energy to do that. I didn’t know all of what was possible. I took a course from an expert so that they could show me everything that was possible, so that I could then later decide what I wanted to dig deeper into. For the most part, I personally shifted away from courses and into seeking one-on-one service providers because I got tired of three-fourths of the group calls being spent on people who were at very different places in business than I was.

I do find a lot of times in these open Q&A calls, the people who say mid-level of experience and hire are not often the people who are asking the questions on the mic. It’s a lot of times, it’s the people who are much more early stage. I love beginners. I love mentoring people, but it’s really hard when I look at everything I have to do in the course of a week, and to go I’m spending an hour. All of these questions are questions that could have been answered if somebody had just watched the prerecorded video or done something else.

I think part of it is a time thing, especially on those that have like a live Q&A calls, live support. It’s like, “If I’m not going to leave here knowing more than when I got here, then I don’t want to be here.” The other thing is going, “Okay, but I have already done a lot of what’s presented in this framework.” That’s the other thing, a lot of these courses, to your point about marketing is they’re marketed like, “I’m going to help you do this.”

When you start it, they take you into a bunch of foundational stuff. Of course, if the foundation is not laid correctly, you’re not going to get the outcome. Sometimes you get into that course and you have already laid that strong foundation. You’re back to feeling like time has wasted. If the course is dripped out, for instance, so you have to wait until week three to access the week three material, that can be frustrating. I think what I also see is just everybody is trying to do the best that they can to increase their profit margin.

When I’m looking to learn, I am looking to either be able to be more efficient in the work I bill clients for, or to specialize to the extent that I can bill at a higher rate. That’s how I’m increasing my profitability by taking a course. Now I’m sure the course creator or the group program facilitator they’re looking to increase their profit margin by serving as many people as possible hour for hour. I don’t get the same experience when I’m in a group program of ten people as I do when I’m in a group program of 100 people.

Personalization Vs. Profit Margins

How could you? Now you’re getting a hundredth of an hour as opposed to a tenth of an hour.

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I think that there was a time, and then I’m going to hand the baton back to you, Gwen. There was a time where we said, “The group programs, $500 a month. They say if I want to work with them one-on-one, that’s 5,000. All I can swing is $500. They’re so amazing. I will work with them in any capacity I can. I’ll take the $500 a month option.” Now, and maybe I’m the only person on the planet, but I don’t think I am.

I’m sitting back and going, “What would it take to be able to give them 5K for one month of their time?” I feel like I would go farther in one month individually with them than I would in a year of working in this group program at $500 a month. It’s the whole thing. It’s like you can usually go faster and deeper one-on-one than you can in a group setting, because while I get a lot out of my fellow group members’ experiences, I cannot get as fast and as targeted as I would be if I were all alone. What do you think, Gwen?

That last piece is what we see with the three offers that we have at Everyday Impact. The three primary offers that are what I’ll call high-interactive offers. One is completely asynchronous. One includes a small group program. When we say small group, we really mean small group. We’re trying to max it out at 8, 10, 12. A small group is not even meaning like 25. It’s a small group. It also has a small one-on-one component. We have our upper component that is a completely one-on-one component.

As we were doing all of our marketing rewrite and rework, we really realized that what it is not only how much do you have to invest, because that is a factor. Let’s be honest, not everyone can afford the full one-on-one piece. At the same point, the ones who work with me one-on-one get further faster because it is intense and it is directed.

The people who are in the small group, because they get a lot of individual time in the small group because of the way that we’ve designed it, and they do get some individual time also go faster than the folks that are in the asynchronous program, which they also get directed time one-on-one individual coaching, but just asynchronous, less directive, less intense, less time. You can see, and we’ve watched some folks move from one to another and back and forth in various combinations.

We can see they move faster, the higher up they go. We just had someone come back who originally was in the small group program and said, “The group dynamic just doesn’t work for me.” “I know that. How much would it be to work with you one-on-one? What’s the way we can make that work?” We made an offer, and she said, “I’ve only got enough to guarantee that I can work with you for a month and a half.” She was coming in at half a month.

We don’t normally do half months, but she was coming at the half-month mark. I said, “Fine.” I knew that I would get her as far as I could. She said, “If you get me as far as I think you’re going to, then I’ll have the money to continue to work with you.” I really think that’s where the difference is with all of them is how much do you want? I think it’s a valid question that you brought up, of whether I could pay $500 a month for 10 months, or I could wait, or put something else off, or whatever, and pay $5,000 this month. Which one will get me further at the end of 10 months? My guess is $5,000 for one month.

It depends.

It depends on what the issue is. Back to if it’s a broader, more complex issue, most likely you’re going to get further with it. Now, if it’s something that’s more intense or acute or something that really will take you ten months to do regardless, maybe the $500 a month really is the way to go because it’s keeping you on track. Back to my standard, there is no single answer because I really don’t believe that there’s a single answer.

I know that can be hard. For someone who’s reading, it can be hard to not just tell me what to do and I’ll do it.

   

   

I want to say something about that. I don’t usually interrupt you, but I have to this time. Often, that is actually the issue. I just want you to tell me what to do, and I’ll do it. The problem is they don’t know enough to really tell you the right thing. I think that’s part of the reason we often find people failing at courses because they’re looking for the thing that just tells me what to do, and I’ll do it. It’s like, but that’s not actually the problem. You don’t know that because we haven’t had enough interaction and conversation, and whatnot. That mindset, that attitude, can be part of where the frustration is coming from. Sorry. I just had to say that.

That made me think of something else. I am going to just say it. I wasn’t going to, but I will. Which is, if group programs are your thing, like I am not here to convince you not to do a group program. That isn’t it. One inherent challenge of a group program is you will have people who believe with their heart of hearts that they are doing everything you tell them to do, like the letter of the law. If you were to have the opportunity to talk to them a little bit more closely, you would find out that they are doing what I like to call the bizarro version of what you have told them to do.

We have talked about this before. I don’t think we’ve ever talked about it on the podcast. I love your Bizarro version. Yes, you are right. It seems obvious to you.

If you’re familiar with Superman comics, then you understand who Bizarro is. Which means it’s like when you look at what they’ve done, you’re like, “That is not what I told you to do at all.” When you take a step back, you can see how, in their mind, they did everything you said point by point, and not one single thing that you meant for them to do. An example for me is I was supporting an organization that taught course graders, and we were teaching market research.

One of the things that we taught was market research conversations. Whenever you offer, you’ve got offer market fit. You’re making sure that you’re designing something the market wants. This is for many of you, Course Creation 101. This particular student was like, I had a hundred conversations and like, I got nothing. “I don’t have time for this.” It’s like, “A hundred conversations and you didn’t get anything usable.”

Like, I am just shocked. I found out that there are a hundred conversations consisted of what I will call spamming LinkedIn groups with questions and then DMing all these people in LinkedIn groups with their questions. Which is not the type of market research we were teaching. We were teaching market research interviews, like get this person one-on-one on a Zoom call and ask these questions back and forth. They were just like, “You just said to reach out to folks on LinkedIn to ask these questions.”

Which is what we did say. Reach out to them on LinkedIn to book the appointment, so you can have the call so you ask the questions in person. That is not what this other person interpreted. The reality is they did believe they were doing everything right. In the conversation, I was like, “In an effort to do everything right, you did everything wrong.” That’s the stuff that traditional courses like the course creator doesn’t know. You’re just not as connected to your students as you would be otherwise.

Thank you for bringing that up because it is true. What I wanted to shift to now is talking about, because I think it’s important, if I’m the business owner working one-to-many, can working one-on-one work for me? There are some undeniable values of working one-on-one. When you work one-on-one with clients, you definitely build a stronger relationship. You get more trust. A lot of times, your one-on-one clients will stick with you longer than group clients will. You get such a deep understanding of what their problems are and potential solutions.

You can oftentimes help them at a much wider scope than you could in a group environment. You tend to both get to know each other well enough that the referrals tend to be a little bit stronger than there are in courses. Gwen, what I want to talk about, though, is how does that becomes sustainable over time? Again, we’re only talking to the person who says, “Maybe it’s time for me to do some one-on-one or maybe add one-on-one to what I’m already doing.” I think the first place where we really get stopped up is on pricing. What do you have to say about that?

Pricing Strategies For One-On-One

Obviously, one-on-one work has to be priced higher than group work. It just has to back to, we’ve only got so many hours in a day. The next question relates back to the beginning of the conversation in the podcast is, do you have to be the one to deliver all of the one-on-one, or can you subcontract or hire, depending on what makes the right business model sense, someone to deliver some amount of the one-on-one work?

If you don't enjoy it, it's not sustainable success for you. Share on X

Now it’s not your hour, but it’s multiple people’s hours. Now, I’m just going to pick a random number. If you’re charging $200 an hour, you cannot be paying them $200 an hour because there’s nothing left for you, and you’re paying for the marketing and all of the things. Can you do that in a way that works? Maybe you can, maybe you cannot. Depends on your market, depends on your topic, it depends on all sorts of things.

My instinct has been if you’ve been doing coursework, you usually can find people who really get your coursework and would love to be able to share it. Back to you’ve also got a few people who are good at sharing the knowledge, not just implementing the knowledge. Different thing. There is a pricing piece. How much more are we going to price it versus group work? Do you want to shift completely from one to the other?

Maybe, maybe not. Do you want to have what I’m going to call an interim step? If you’ve been doing what I’m going to call large group work like a membership that has, I don’t know, 500 people or a thousand people in it, at a pretty low price point, do you have something that’s a mid thing as opposed to completely one-on-one? Where it is small group work, you limit the size, so you’re still getting some scale, but they’re getting more access to you.

The difference, like we talked about, of a tenth of an hour versus a hundredth of an hour option. That potentially is in there as well. Back to, do you need to the person delivering that information, or could you bring someone else into that, and you pop in once a month if you’re doing that as a weekly call? I’m making all of these. There are so many options here in a business model, I’m just making assumptions along the way. Pricing is going to play into it, and back to how much of the pricing that is in your group model is paying for infrastructure that, if you aren’t doing the group model, you don’t have to pay for.

That’s a piece that people don’t always think about. Sometimes there’s some infrastructure piece that you’re paying for in this large group model that you don’t count. All of a sudden, it’s like, “When I have, I’m back to making up a number. Instead of 500 clients, I have 15. All of a sudden, there are some huge pieces that I can drop. When I raise the price, all of a sudden, technically, I’m making the same amount.” Now, back to, is it the work you want to be doing? Different question. There are options, but I think you have to be creative.

Obviously, there’s no shortage of options. I do like what you were saying about having to be creative. What I’m hearing, though, is if this is a path you want to go down, you’re going to have to first start by thinking about, like, what is it that you’re doing that you would enjoy personalizing? What needs to be standardized?

I think you made a really good point about there are different ways to segment your offers. You don’t have to go from my flagship offer as a membership with a thousand people to now exclusively work one-on-one. You could say, “What are some steps between the membership of a thousand people and working with me one-on-one? Are there any steps in there that seem enjoyable that I would like to do that may make sense for me and make sense for the person taking it?”

Something that you have said several times on the podcast, Gwen, is if you don’t enjoy it, then it’s not part of sustainable success for you. Back to you who loves to be in Zoom calls all day long. Makes you like exquisitely happy. The average woman we needs at least doesn’t love to be in Zoom calls for as many hours per day as you love to be in Zoom calls. What is sustainable for you is not sustainable for them.

I would almost never recommend my business model to almost anybody that I’ve ever come across. They’d have to pull all of their hair out, and they’d be blind because they would have poked their eyes out at some point.

Although I have to say, though, having met your clients, I would be in six hours of Zoom calls a day with your clients. They are amazing. Maybe it’s just a matter of picking if that’s your business model, also thinking about who do you want to be with in that amount of time.

Ensure you're offering services to people you genuinely want to spend that much time with. Share on X

That’s an interesting point that I don’t think we were planning on talking about, but I think it’s an interesting point to bring up. If you’re grading them A to F like we did in school, you can deal with some, definitely a pretty good handful of B clients, and definitely some C clients, and maybe even a D and an F client when you’ve got a membership of a thousand.

When you’re dealing with clients one-on-one, you do not want to ever be getting on a call where it’s like, “I have to talk to fill in the blank.” I never do. Even when I know we have to have a hard conversation, because sometimes we do have hard conversations, it’s never like, “I do not want to get on the Zoom call with filling in any of my client names ever.” If that was happening on any regular basis, more than once a year, which isn’t very often, that would be like, “This is probably not a good client.”

That would change my willingness to do the one-on-one. You may, if you’re moving to one-on-one, also have to get better at vetting your clients on the way. We didn’t even talk about that, but that’s actually a huge point, and I think it’s one of the places that people struggle when they move from group to one-on-one, is often the people who say, “I want in,” are not the people that you want to be in.

Maintaining Boundaries & Client Vetting

Let’s leave this here. I have a feeling that we’ll be talking about this topic more in the coming months. To just wrap a bow around it is even if high-touch relationship-based services are making a strong comeback as both business owners and clients recognize their value, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right approach for you. If you do, however, want to explore the idea of offering more high-touch services.

Let’s just start with rule number one is you’ve got to make sure that you’re offering these services to people who you genuinely want to spend that amount of time with. To Gwen’s point, that the annoying person, the person who is argumentative, the person who always has some random like one in a million example to throw into the group call, they’re easy to manage in the course of an hour when there are other people you’re going to be talking to. To spend an hour with them with no buffer will exhaust you quickly.

Another thing to consider is your boundaries. I think a lot of people would say, “In order to be successful with one-on-one work, you need to be able to set and to maintain very clear boundaries with your time and with what the scope of the container is.” You also owe it to yourself and to the people you work with to only enter into engagements with individuals who will respect the boundaries you set. To keep in mind that you will not be able to manage the volume of work in a one-on-one capacity that you could manage in a group capacity. When did I leave anything out there?

I don’t think so. I think the most important thing out of all is to make sure it’s what you want to do. I know there are some people who are really great course creators and/or really good group facilitators, who the thought of one-on-one work, are like, “Now I have to do this.” It’s like, “No, you don’t.” If you’re good at what you do, you’ll still be good at it when it’s not the cool thing to do.

If anything, you’ll be standing out even bigger, better, brighter.

You’ll be one of the few still doing it.

What I’m going to say is that regardless of whether you’re all in on group experiences, or you’re all in on one-on-one, or you’re somewhere in between. If any of it is making you feel stretched, then you’re struggling with burnout, or maybe you want to make sure that you avoid burnout while you’re offering these meaningful client experiences. I would encourage you to download our assessment called Breaking the Burnout Cycle. It is both an assessment and an action guide. We’re not going to have you take a test and then go, “You got a problem.” No, it assesses where you’re at with burnout so that you can create an action plan to get out of it. It is free. All you have to do is go to TheBusinessYouReallyWant.com/Burnout and you can get your copy. We will see you next time.

  

Mentioned in This Episode

• Everyday Effectiveness
• Gwen Bortner on LinkedIn
• Gwen Bortner on Facebook
• Tonya Kubo on LinkedIn
• Everyday Effectiveness on YouTube
• Breaking the Burnout Cycle

   

About Your Hosts

Gwen Bortner has spent four decades advising executives and entrepreneurs in 45+ industries. She helps women succeed in business without sacrificing happiness by identifying their true desires and aligning their business functions. She spots overlooked bottlenecks and crafts efficient plans toward sustainable success that center your values and priorities. Known for her unique approach to problem-solving and accountability through the G.E.A.R.S. framework, Gwen empowers clients to achieve their definition of success without sacrificing what matters most.

Tonya Kubo is a marketing strategist and community builder who helps entrepreneurs build thriving online communities. As co-host of The Business You Really Want and Chief Marketing and Operations Officer (CMOO) at Everyday Effectiveness, she keeps conversations on track and ensures complex business concepts are accessible to everyone. A master facilitator with 18+ years of experience in online community building, Tonya takes a people-first approach to marketing and centers the human experience in all she does.