This episode discusses the challenges of course sprawl and overwhelm for course creators and students.
I'm sharing what challenges I've had with student numbers and economics this year.
I’m sharing my process of auditing the course content and restructuring it
New versions of tirered, targeted content, resources, and support designed to meet the specific needs of students at different stages of their business growth.
The new structure aims to prevent overwhelm, provide more focused support, and ultimately help more students achieve success.
Don;t worry, there's ONE last opportunity to enroll in the current version of the course with lifetime access and weekly Q&A calls.
Watch our Instagram live this Thursday May 9 for an exclusive offer. & Tune in next Thursday for an interview with the founder of Norsu.
Thanks for listening to this episode of "Designing Success: From Study to Studio"! Connect with me on social media for more business tips, and a real look behind the scenes of my own practicing design business.
For more FREE resources, templates, guides and information, visit the Designer Resource Hub on my website ; https://oleanderandfinch.com/
Ready to take your interior design business to the next level? Check out my online course, "The Framework," designed to provide you with everything they don’t teach you in design school and to give you high touch mentorship essential to having a successful new business in the industry. Check it out now and start designing YOUR own success (waitlist now open) https://oleanderandfinch.com/first-year-framework/
Remember to subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. Your feedback helps me continue providing valuable content to aspiring interior designers. Stay tuned for more episodes filled with actionable insights and inspiring conversations.
This episode discusses the challenges of course sprawl and overwhelm for course creators and students.
I'm sharing what challenges I've had with student numbers and economics this year.
I’m sharing my process of auditing the course content and restructuring it
New versions of tirered, targeted content, resources, and support designed to meet the specific needs of students at different stages of their business growth.
The new structure aims to prevent overwhelm, provide more focused support, and ultimately help more students achieve success.
Don;t worry, there's ONE last opportunity to enroll in the current version of the course with lifetime access and weekly Q&A calls.
Watch our Instagram live this Thursday May 9 for an exclusive offer. & Tune in next Thursday for an interview with the founder of Norsu.
Thanks for listening to this episode of "Designing Success: From Study to Studio"! Connect with me on social media for more business tips, and a real look behind the scenes of my own practicing design business.
For more FREE resources, templates, guides and information, visit the Designer Resource Hub on my website ; https://oleanderandfinch.com/
Ready to take your interior design business to the next level? Check out my online course, "The Framework," designed to provide you with everything they don’t teach you in design school and to give you high touch mentorship essential to having a successful new business in the industry. Check it out now and start designing YOUR own success (waitlist now open) https://oleanderandfinch.com/first-year-framework/
Remember to subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. Your feedback helps me continue providing valuable content to aspiring interior designers. Stay tuned for more episodes filled with actionable insights and inspiring conversations.
Thank you for yo...
Welcome to Designing Success from Study to Studio. I'm your host, Rhiannon Lee, founder of the Oleander Finch Design Studio. I've lived the transformation from study to studio and then stripped it bare and wrote down the framework so you don't have to overthink it. In this podcast, you could expect real talk with industry friends, community, connection, and actionable tips to help you conquer whatever's holding you back. Now let's get designing your own success. I was a little bit nervous about recording today's podcast episode because once I put it out into the world, I can't bring it back in again. And yes, I'm confident that it's the right decision because I have spent ages and ages agonizing over it. But I do know that once I put it out there and I put some timeframes on it and I talk about it publicly, it's like, oh, wow, it really feels real now, which is equal parts exciting and terrifying. And I will go into that in just a moment. I haven't changed these probably since I set up my own business, but my brand values are approachability, transparency, and communication. So in the spirit of transparency, I am happy to share all of this with you. Sometimes that brand value of transparency has been at my own peril. I've chatted to people who say, Oh, they don't need to work with me in private coaching sessions or join the framework because of all the free content that they get on my Instagram or Pinterest or website, whatever. Which is definitely something said by someone not in the framework. That free stuff is just the tip of the information iceberg. There is no way that I am putting out on my Instagram what you get inside of my course. That is madness. And can you imagine how mad these students would be when they got in there? If they were like this is all just sitting on Instagram. Anyway, for a long time, I've been really carefully surveying people when I onboard them into the framework and when I offboard them, and I've been acutely aware that the course has become. Outrageously, like just a beast I can no longer control. There's a solution, a template guidance for almost anything that comes up in your first three to five years of business. Insert screaming face emoji, because that's just massive as someone who was meticulous and careful when I was planning the course to make sure I was meeting learning outcomes and not overwhelming students. I mapped it all out. So it was everything that you needed. Actually, originally it was called the First Year Framework and even before that it was called the First Year Fast Pass because it was all about designers coming out of studying at design school, wherever school they go to, and wanting to start a business. And it was just that first step. But it is somehow muddied over. the waters over the last 18 months to two years. And it has become one stop shop for everything that you could need for the first five years of your business, which doesn't help anybody. I, again, am acutely aware that it can overwhelm some students, some personalities, some people I know have come into the framework and I have to work 10 times as hard in that support sense in order to take them through step by step, because they can get really overwhelmed by it. Looking 15 steps ahead and seeing that there's an entire two hour tutorial for email sequences, for example, but that's not something you need in your first year. I'm all for saying build an email list from the get go, but not if you don't have correct documentation and you are nowhere near. Where you need to be in the basics of marketing. If you don't know the basics of Instagram and Pinterest and SEO, all of that sort of stuff. Even Pinterest, for example, Pinterest, some businesses are not ready for Pinterest. I said what I said, I will actually say to some students, can we not, can you just pull back? I would much rather see you create enough quality content before you start plastering it all over a place like Pinterest, where it can last for five years. I certainly don't want things from five years ago, business, me floating around. If they were not yet good enough. Like I just hadn't refined what it is that I do and how I help people yet. Anyway, off topic I guess I've just been feeling really uncomfortable about the overwhelm that much volume of content can create for people. And I counted it this week and I am equal parts pleased and ashamed to say there are 267 individual pieces of content, each with its own unique template, email, notion page, list, process slash document, and all with actionable tasks at the end of that particular piece of content. And that's just in the resource library, not even the video lessons. So no wonder it feels like a lot. If you looked at that all at once, you're like, I'm going to walk in the other direction and not actually start a business because that is terrifying. Now, I'm always reassuring my students that they have Lifetime access and they don't need to complete it all in our supported 12 month period working together. It's listed out in order Plus there's bonus webinars things that it's like these are a nice to have but they're not an must do in order to run a successful business, but it can feel like the never ending story. I'm also conscious that when you see that much stuff, when you first log in, it can feel really demotivating and make you paralyze it. I can't possibly achieve this. So I'll just achieve nothing, which is absolutely the. opposite of what I'm trying to achieve and the impact I'm trying to have across the industry. So I keep a regular eye, not in a weird stalky way, but across the progress and activity of students. I know the general statistics for people who Buy online courses are like 2 to 10 percent of people actually complete them, which makes me really proud because I run at 90 percent of my students have done the full course. So they've watched all 40 snackable videos and they have gone through the workflows, customer journey, setting up the pricing, their offers, their processes. Full suite of documents, like I know that because I meet with them every single week and I can see obviously what they're touching in the resource library and what they're watching and so on. And yes, those 10%, the people that don't actually do anything, I do reach out to those people to offer support and, Find where they're at, what's going on, but sometimes plans just change. We've had surprise pregnancies, life just happens. Some people I've even had someone sign up for the course and two weeks later, decide to pursue photography instead of interior design. And she went on to do the entire course and fed back that she found it really helpful in setting up all of her processes and timelines and client documents and so on. Even though it was a different industry, because I guess they're both creative and there's really enough content in there for her to make it workable. My point to that though, is that I can see that people are using all of what is in the current resource library. I just have felt for a really long time that there has to be a better way. There's something missing from where we sort started to where we have found ourselves. I am in a 12 month supported course myself. And on one of my weekly calls recently, we started looking at the challenges in our own individual markets and how to meet our clients where they're at. And I got up and said, look, In the spirit of transparency, this year has been so much harder for me to have those big launches. I know people are tired of the online course creator space. They're tired of MRR. Oh my God, when that was going on last year and everyone was like six figures in six weeks and it's not hard and this is how you write a course and use AI and here's a prompt to go and write a course. Cool. I promise you every single one of you has a course inside of you and you can write a course. That's not an issue. You absolutely can, especially with AI. You could go write a course. Do you understand learning outcomes? Do you have a background in training? Do you have a corporate marketing or product innovation background? Can you deliver it? And can you take people from where they are right now to where they want to be? In a way that lights you up on the daily. I don't know. That's not for everyone. To find something that you're so passionate about and be able to create a course that you will never, ever get sick of, that's magical. So yeah, courses are becoming so much, launches, I should say, are becoming so much harder. I have thrown around the idea of just making it evergreen, so always open. But for me personally, I have found that people are reluctant to join as just one person when a group is already all together because they feel like they're, I'm not going to have the relationship that everybody else has that's not necessarily a founded thing, but it is a fear and it's hard for people to go, okay, I will just sign up on my own. So that is why I've not previously had the framework just evergreen any longer. I just. It wasn't working, but those launches were like 50 K launches five times a year last year to definitely nothing like that. And in this course, we sat down and I was like, these are the issues I'm having. Cause he lives, of course, is a massive thing. I am talking to people who are saying like 199 a month for the framework. I know the framework will change my life, but so well, putting 199 worth of shopping on the table for my family. I don't have paying clients yet. And so it's just not feasible. And I get that for some people, obviously the value trumps the finance and they can, but let's check our privilege a little, not everybody is actually in a place where they're like, I'm just doing this for fun. A lot of us are having big career changes, midlife. Metamorphosis, if you will. And we're coming to design as something we've always passionately wanted to do. We know the framework is going to help, but it is a lot to ask to invest in yourself that very first year when you haven't even learned the importance of investment in your business because you don't have a business yet. So month by month subscription was It's actually something I did at the end of last year to help combat that cost of living rate rise. It used to be you could only get into the framework in each of those launches by paying in full. So by splitting it out into monthly payments, that was one way I tried to meet my clients where they were at financially and what was going on. But unfortunately, I guess for me, the ATO. still sees that as though I'm having those big 50, 000 launches five times a year and is going to be wanting me to put that tax up front even though I'm only really collecting 200 a month from people. That's neither here nor there. It doesn't really matter. It was just a shift and something I thought was worth mentioning for anyone who is making these sorts of business decisions in your business either now or in the future. When I talk about transparency or not. Gatekeeping, it's me trying to always give you as much background information about the considerations and the thought process that I go through. Like successful business people make quick decisions through through different perspectives. And what I mean by that is I always put my lenses on from a business owner, a CEO lens from a client perspective, and their perspective is always Outcomes. And then again, as if I were a third party drone observation strategist looking at everything and saying, is this the right thing for the business? The right thing for the client? Am I okay with this? And do I authorize it? And if all three quality checks get a green light, then we go ahead and do the thing. I like showing you the thought process in the background that happens because we don't just suddenly up and go hey We're just gonna do I'm not gonna do full payment anymore. I'm gonna do monthly. There's the Infrastructure of how to process that subscription automatically through Stripe and how to do other things. It's a lot more involved than it actually probably looks from the front end, but I always like to be realistic about the struggles in business as well as the successes. I am not the page to come to if you're looking for I made six figures in six weeks and here's all my stripe notifications. They exist, but that is just not my jam. So during my chat inside of my course, I was thinking about, I have this problem with designers struggling to commit to themselves and their future before they have that sort of influx of paying clients to support that growth. Which can be really difficult to swallow because I know it's the very thing that can stop them undercharging or missing out on money or missing out on opportunities or not understanding where there was a partnership opportunity or how to market themselves or systemize their business. But I do get it. So I want to be really clear. Yes, I get it. I've been puzzling this out for a few months before I talked about it inside of my own. support group. How do I lower the price, especially when the value behind the scenes keeps growing? That isn't fair to me. I, and I am emotionally connected to the idea that I have created this amazing resource and there is no way that I'm willing to go, okay, cool. You know what? You guys can't really necessarily afford to be joining it the way you were in 2023. So I'm going to slash it in half. That's not really something that is possible at this point for the aforementioned reasons. And the second part of my puzzle is what is the solution to preventing overwhelm? Being able to support my students in a really intentional and targeted way at the level that they are at and reducing the cost at the same time. Now, they say all the best ideas come in the shower, but for me, it is 100 percent always frantically tapping into my note section of my phone in the dark at 4am. Now, those of you who follow my Instagram will know I've needed glasses for a little while. I still haven't even got on, gotten onto that properly. I'm wearing those like chemist ones. And I can tell you the amount of editing that I need to do when I look back at those notes, because yes, I'm pretty good at like touch typing in the dark, but I can't voice to memo like I normally do for all of my other stuff. And it can be quite, A shambles, but anyway my kids are quiet. I can think I don't know. I just have a really clear mind early in the morning. I'm certainly not in the 5am gang. I don't get up early and smash it out every day, but that is when I find that finally the answer seems to come to me. And one day early last month, it was just suddenly crystal clear what I should do. Insert, add here. 4AMMe made a list of those 267 inclusions in Notion. Yes, I turned the light on for that. And I created three headings. Start, Scale and sustain. I drag, because Notion, if you set it up in platform database, is a drag and drop. I dragged each piece of content or each file into its appropriate column of who would best benefit from that particular piece of content. If it was across Two courses, then I duplicated that piece and I made sure that the startup and the scale both got education in that piece of content. Someone who's in startup needs pieces such as a new business checklist or creating your services and offers, setting your pricing, understanding the industry pricing, market research, creating good habits from the start an introduction to marketing. But they don't need marketing that is going to confuse them. They need to learn the necessary skills, but in a way it's like the way that I discuss things like consent and other things with my children in age appropriate ways. And in no way am I trying to patronize grown ass adults who joined the framework. But I do feel that when you're in a startup, your growth projection is so much like in that first year, it's like the first year you were a parent or You grow so much, like it's extraordinary. The amount of things that you learn and you learn about hashtag strategy and you learn about this and you learn about that. Therefore I do feel strongly that I have watched this play out for over a hundred designers that I've worked with inside of the framework. And I now know what are the exact key things that you need to set up with a really strong foundation and. Not get in your own head, not get in your own way and not get so overwhelmed and paralyzed by what needs to happen that you can't do anything. Meanwhile, our people who are ready to strategize growth and scale their business, they have already set up the foundations and they need support with things such as automations smart, Productivity hacks. They're ready for intermediate level strategy and growth sessions. We want to get them learning more about time tracking and raising their prices and adding on travel fees and dealing with clients and onsite issues, understanding that red flags a little bit more building their email lists and lead magnets and funnels, perfecting content mapping and exploring alternate revenue streams. We teach repurposing creating workflows and email sequences and a huge list of things. And these are the things I'm always trying to hold frameworkers back from doing until they've completed the basic blocks and foundations. I'm not always successful at that. I know there are ones that are like, I want to go play in the AI webinar. I want to go over there where you're teaching how to build an email list through lead magnet with automation delivery and nurture sequences, all that sort of stuff. All of that skillset is important, but it's not important if you can't deliver an amazing end to end process, deliverables results, and you don't have a strong understanding of what it is you bring to the market. So I'm really excited about the scale. section of the new look framework, because this is something that I see so many designers could really benefit from because I have spoken to upwards of 50 designers on alignment calls for the framework and said, one third of what you get inside of the framework is not relevant to you because you're at five years, 10 years, 20 years, whatever. I have girls inside the framework who have over 20 years experience, but they were very aware. In the beginning, when we spoke, there's a whole section that you don't need that new business tech list. Google my business profile, all that kind of stuff. You really don't need it. But what I did see a need for is more targeted Q and a sessions, like the marketing strategies for startup. It's not even a strategy. It's more let's get a basic understanding so you can start to perform, see what works, see what connects with your audience. It's all about trial and error in that startup and understanding what is this platform? What are the ways to use it? What are the best ways that I can use it to showcase my business? And then we get into scale and that's where those Q and A sessions will be really great for growth and for needing more support with sustaining their businesses. The new scale students also I felt could benefit from one or two days a quarter of private one on one coaching. So where we're taking something they're working on in their business and they're working on Voxer with me, which is my walkie talkie app that I do on my private coaching on and they get one or two days a quarter. Where their day is up and all we do is talk strategy about their business. Where can they get better and stronger in local area marketing? What are the ideas? What what particular lead magnet can I help them create that I know speaks specifically to their content pillars, or perhaps we do a day of working on content pillars. It's completely dynamic and that's the beauty of private coaching. It's completely targeted as well. So they will get a chance and an opportunity each quarter to work with me directly to improve something in their business. In this scale cause, I will be talking about things like sales mapping and teaching more advanced notion training. Cause so many people want to do so much more in notion in the framework, but they're quite terrified of it. And they only get like a. An introduction tutorial to using notion. So teaching a more advanced notion training and looking at how they can tighten up any operational leaks. Like at that point of their business, they're like, Oh, you could do that way easier if you just automated this part or we did this thing. We'll be looking at how to outsource if they need to. Thank you. We'll be all on another completely different kind of group call we'll be meeting fortnightly, because that's really realistically That's all you need when you're already busy as hell with a running business You just want to come and talk about your particular challenges in conjunction with your quarterly private coaching element So to recap I dragged everything into its appropriate column. I looked at frequency of support calls Weekly for startup you want to see me every single week We need momentum and you need support and you need A lot more around that imposter syndrome and confidence. So absolutely weekly for the startup guys, fortnightly for scaling and monthly for sustaining their businesses. I added private coaching elements to the scaling and sustaining Course I made amendments to what versions of each course will need. For example, there's an introduction to Instagram and Pinterest and marketing in the startup, but in the scale, I teach the stuff I teach in my marketing workshops like content, scheduling, calendars, automations, repurposing, Pinterest strategy notion, brainstorming hubs. I, yeah, obviously I'm going to have a different introduction to each of the courses. Then I got busy with the pricing structure because that is a key element to this puzzle that I'm trying to solve. So I was trying to make sure I could get the startups to a spot where it's a no brainer or a must have. Why wouldn't you pay that for ongoing high touch support and weekly mentorship? I've landed at 99 per month for the 12 months for that program, which brings it to 11. 99 painful. For the scale at this point, it's looking at around 147 per month, which is great. You've already got clients to help combat that cost and you understand the deep need for coaching, mentorship, investment leveling up your documents. In fact, I'm very nervous about putting that number out. on this before I've actually gone and done this because I'm like, Oh, but you know what? Everything in business is an evolution. And if you log onto scale and it actually looks higher than that or lower than that, Hey, we make that decision just before it goes live. And then for sustain, we're looking more around the one 99 per month for obvious reasons, all that private coaching and all that different focus. And this allows you to get. Some pain clients in your pocket before the rise in inclusions and costs. But this does mean that you will have to take three courses to get what currently is right now, sitting in the resource library for the existing framework is you'll join me for the 12 months, 99 per month. You'll join me for 12 months at 147 per month. And then you'll join me for 12 months for 199 per month, or the paying full versions of that. So the next thing I considered was the amazing community chats we have in Slack, which is our private app. I've always loved the way some of the students who have 10, 20 years experience, just dive in and support those with four months on the board. And I didn't want to lose that or make myself three times as busy with that. Three different kinds of supporting chats that I am in and that I always give feedback on everything. There's never been any issues with the volume of people inside of our Slack community. When it's been up over a hundred, it's still been such an awesome place. It's a private community. We upload each other's pricing and service guides and we give group feedback. It's really helpful. So everyone across three levels start up. Scale or sustain will be invited into that one the framework community slack app. As for our expert guests, we're going to run these sessions as an everybody's invited session. And this way, the weekly, fortnightly, or monthly Q& A's that you have never get railroaded by a guest expert. Because what happens right now is if I invite someone into a Q& A, We don't have time for mentorship. We have to, obviously learn, which is just as valuable. But when I have five guests in a row, that's five weeks. I haven't been able to work on your individual needs. So I knew there was a better way to do that. We have all three levels will just be invited to our guest of the month or guest of the week, depending on who's coming in and what we're doing. And anyone who signs up to any of these three levels will get access to our existing masterclass library of over 120 hours of conversations with experts. We have PR and media, Pinterest, interior photography, SEO, window furnishings, mindset, gosh I can't even think of all of them, they are listed out and you can come and ask me and I can send you some details. Alright, so what are the next steps? I have a ton of video content that I need to film and re film. So that I can build the scale and sustain courses to include some of the trickiest skills stuff that I usually train just in Q and A's or that I do in my private coaching sessions or skill sessions. I'm really excited and nervous. I'm hopeful that this will finally allow me to have more impact, which was my word of 2024 and bring more people into the Oleander and Finch world. I want to take them through step by step from beginning to end through all of that growth and be there to support them the entire way. The second word that I chose for 2024 was fearless. And I can 100 percent And I can clearly endorse that I am feeling the fear and doing it anyway, because whenever you change such an incredible thing like the framework, it took three months of my life to write it and more. It's taken 18 months of building it, of adding resources, of filming bonus content, of creating masterclasses that talk about sales psychology and scripts for discovery calls. The things that are now in there is, it's so insane. I am so proud of it, but I am also very nervous and and feeling very fearless for looking at the market and knowing that I need to make a change and doing exactly what I everything within my power to meet my clients where they're at. And that's you, by the way, if you've ever wondered about joining the framework, but you're worried that you're three or eight years in or more and you think, Oh gosh, it's just first year people. It's just for new graduates. It's not, it never has been, but now I've created a space where we can create targeted documents and deliverables and learn automations, funnels, systems, advertising, things that are directly relevant to your current needs. And for people who've been through the startup stuff and you need to grow and scale, you can access all the support and focus that I give the framework in on a day to day level. This is such an amazing way to have proper support and friendship for The years that you're in business whether that's the startup years, the setup years, the scaling years, all of it. I'm actually really excited about how many more business owners I can support and how intentional that support can finally be. It makes the course less stressful. Pick whatever you want or need because you might not even know that you need or want a particular thing. It prevents you jumping around or focusing on things that you're not ready for. Yes, I'm looking at you fancy pretty emails instead of clear processes and systems. So what does that mean for you? You have one last opportunity to get all of it, all the content for lifetime access. The resource library as it is, the current framework is going to be sold one last time in May. I'm opening the doors on the last time for anyone who prefers the current version of the course, take it all and do what you want with it. For anyone looking to get this on their expenses list for this financial year, May 29 is the last chance. This intake will include weekly Q& A calls for 12 months and lifetime access to that full resource library, which is effectively the three courses. You won't have to complete startup and then scale and then sustain. You just get it all at once like you currently do. Can get your hands on a lot for 199 per month. The new course structure will kick off next financial year. And you may have noticed if you're going with the new structure, it means you'll need to buy three courses one by one in order to get what is already existing in the one resource library right now. Last chance, only way to get weekly support, even if you're here for the scale of sustained content. Join the waitlist in the show notes if that sounds like you or you want the whole resource library as I'm sending out a once off last time offer for this very last cohort. I feel sad, but it's so weird because I'm not closing the framework. I'm setting it on fire. I'm not saying like it doesn't exist, but I'm changing it in a way where it will never be what it is. And that change is always terrifying. If you have any questions, feedback, or ideas of how I can make these improvements more targeted to you or what you want, or something better than the current plan I've just shared with you, and I've probably said way too much too early. All I've done is drag and drop things into columns and decide on, yeah, I think it'll be this, but please drop into my DMs anytime. I make what I make for you. So please tell me if there's something you need if there's some idea that you have and I will be so thrilled to make sure that it's included. If you haven't seen already I'm doing an insta live this Thursday the 9th of May at 7 30 p. m. Very rare evening event. I don't normally do that. I'm going to come out to the studio relax, avoid bed and bath time, chat to Lauren the founder of Triple R Creative, who was my last week guest on the podcast. Pour a drink, come join us. We're going to have some studio chats. There's an exclusive offer going out just for the people watching live. And we're going to be talking all about business in general, personal branding, the be in the room where it happens event that's coming up soon that is flying. Tickets are also flying. There are a few left, but yeah, get in touch if personal branding is on your to do list. And next Thursday I have an incredible chat to bring to you. I was so privileged recently to sit down with the lovely Nat from Norsu interiors, and we talked all things e commerce, business, COVID pivots, and so much more. Do not miss it. Okay. That's it from me for now. I've said too much. Bye for now. Chat to you next week. That wraps up another episode of Designing Success from Study to Studio. Thanks for lending me your ears. Remember, progress over perfection is the key. If you found value in today's episode, go ahead and hit subscribe or share it with a friend. Your feedback means so much to me and it helps me improve, but it also helps this podcast reach more emerging and evolving designers. For your daily dose of design business tips and to get a closer look at what goes on behind the scenes, follow at oleander underscore and underscore finch on Instagram. You'll find tons of resources available at www. oleanderandfinch. com to support you on your journey. Remember, this is your path, your vision, your future, and your business. Now let's get out there and start designing your success.