The Course Mentors Podcast
Hey there, future course creator!
Ever feel like turning your know-how into an online course is like trying to solve a Rubik's cube blindfolded? Well, grab your headphones because "The Course Mentors Podcast" is here to be your secret weapon!
Meet Aimee and Odette (that's us!), your new best friends in the course creation world. We've been in the trenches for over a decade, and for the last five years, we've been rocking the online course space. Now we're here to spill all our secrets in bite-sized, 15-20 minute episodes that'll fit perfectly in your coffee breaks.
No fluff, no filler - just real, actionable advice that'll take you from "um, what's a landing page?" to "holy moly, I just hit six figures!". We're talking everything from crafting your course to marketing it like a pro and building a business that'll have you pinching yourself.
Whether you're dreaming of ditching the 9-to-5 grind, adding a sweet extra income stream, or just want to trade demanding clients for students who think you're the bee's knees - we've got your back.
Think of us as your personal cheerleading squad, but instead of pom-poms, we're armed with proven strategies and a healthy dose of "you've got this!" energy. We're here to give you the straight-up truth (with a side of fun) to help you crush your goals and create that freedom-filled life you've been daydreaming about.
So, ready to turn your expertise into course gold? Tune in to The Course Mentors Podcast. And hey, once you're done implementing our awesome advice, swing by Instagram @thecoursementors and show us what you've created. We can't wait to celebrate your wins!
Let's make some course magic together, shall we? 🎉
The Course Mentors Podcast
Behind the Scenes: What Running a Course Business REALLY Looks Like
We're back from Dette's baby break and spilling ALL the tea! In this completely transparent episode, we're lifting the curtain on exactly what it's like to run a successful course business - the real hours, the actual numbers, and the honest truth about balancing business with new babies!
From working just 5-10 hours per week to building a business that started with $100, we're sharing the behind-the-scenes reality that most course creators never talk about. No fluff, no fake it till you make it - just the raw, honest truth!
In This Episode:
- Our real working hours (spoiler: it's less than you think!)
- Exact monthly expenses and where every dollar goes
- How we get 30% of clients through referrals
- The pilot method that launched our business for $100
- How we scale up and down based on life circumstances
Whether you're wondering if a course business can really give you freedom or curious about the actual numbers behind the scenes, this episode answers all those questions you've been dying to ask.
Ready for the unfiltered truth about course business life? Hit play! 📊
#CourseCreator #BehindTheScenes #OnlineBusiness #Transparency
Hello and welcome to the Course Mentors podcast. I'm Odette and I'm Amy, and today we are talking about Amy. Let us know what are we talking about? We're talking about, well, do you know what? Actually? Let's just address the elephant in the room We've taken a break. We did, we took a break. We didn't tell you we were taking a break because we didn't really think we were, but then we did, because of having a baby. We thought we were pretty sweet for a while and we could just get straight back into it. But no, having a baby makes you busy. If anyone needs to know that before they decide to do that.
Speaker 1:Losing my mind, I quietly thought this might happen, but you know, I don't know. We're happy to be back. It's my first baby, so I didn't. I was optimistic. I guess the important thing is that we are back, and we are back to what do you say? Regular programming.
Speaker 1:I'm very, very excited and I thought to make a bit of a splash and a grand entrance back into the world of podcasting. I thought we would do what I would want to hear from someone who was doing a podcast, which is tell me all of the gory details of your business. I want to know what you do during the day, what your day looks like, how much money you make, how much money you spend. I would want to know everything. So I thought to make our grand entrance back into the world of podcasting. Maybe we should do a bit of a peek behind the curtain of everything. Ocs, yeah, okay, we can do that. To do this, det, I have a bit of a surprise for you. I have a list of questions and we're going to cover them all in this podcast. Amazing, all right, let's do it Like I'm being. Am I being asked or are we back and forth? Let's do that. No, I'll show you the list of questions and we can go back and forth. How about that? Yeah, do that one, one for one, before we get into it, though.
Speaker 1:Dad, how is being a mom? Oh, it's the best thing ever. I love it. I love it. He is a dream baby. He's just so beautiful. I love him so much, more and more every day.
Speaker 1:All the cliches are true, like it's a different kind of love. And name a cliche. It's correct. I love being a mom, obviously like hard, like you know, especially until week 10. But and you had said too there's a cliche, you had said, too, it gets so much easier after 12 weeks and it really did. He just sort of settled himself into a bit of a routine. Things just got easier. So I think he's about he's about four months now, maybe four and a bit months, and, yeah, we're just breezing through now. I'm sure it'll change and get hard, but so so, so good, I love it.
Speaker 1:I think the last time we filmed, you were heavily, heavily pregnant and we were just pausing every six seconds so that you could breathe a bit. So it's nice that you've got your lung capacity back. I had no idea how well I could breathe, because you forget, you know, because you can't when you're pregnant the joys of motherhood and eat. I can eat more, true, oh, yeah, yeah, there's more room Totally. There's more room Totally. Oh, it's so much better when they're out of your body and then you get to hold them. It's the best. I love him, he's great and I just love it. I love it for you.
Speaker 1:Okay, let's get into the questions. Let's do this, and I'm really interested as well, and I think a lot of people will be. I've been doing online courses before I had a baby and then I had a baby, so I got to see like how my life was different. But you're fresh and I think a lot of people will be really interested to hear about how your life has changed since the baby has arrived as well. So tell us everything.
Speaker 1:I suppose let's start off with the first question how often do you actually work and when do you actually work? Oh God, if we're looking at pre-baby versus post-baby, very different. So how? What was the first part? How often do I work? Yeah, baby brain, how often do you work? And like, what does that look like for you right now? Right now I can go with. I'm can't even remember life before baby, so let's not even go there Right now.
Speaker 1:I sort of jump in like I'll have. I have my emails turned on, you know, on my phone, so I'll see an email. If I want to deal with it, I'll deal with it. Or I'll leave it until Friday when we get together for Feedback Friday. But mainly at the moment I'm just sort of jumping in for maybe let's say like 10 minutes a day to just look at emails and maybe deal with one. So I'd say maybe 10 minutes a day for anything sort of urgent, or I'll do like maybe once a week I'll jump in and do accounts for like an hour, so I'll just, you know, look at invoices and get into Xero, so maybe like an hour of accounts when it was tax time, you know, maybe a little bit more. Otherwise, I'll do batch creating, so I'll make a couple of reels or I'll make a carousel or something like that for social media. Besides that, it's really just our scheduled stuff. So maybe I'll do an hour or two one day a week, if that, and then just jumping in and then I'll do Feedback Fridays and the Call, because that's obviously scheduled.
Speaker 1:Would you say less than 10 hours a week at the moment? Oh, my God, yes, I would say maximum five hours a week. And do you know what's completely crazy about that I will just quickly say, is that I did the same thing Before having a baby. I was like, oh, I might just film a reel today and then publish it. But the gift that children give you is that you learn to get control of doing your work and doing it fast, like you know. Okay, I have got to get up today, I've got to film seven reels, I've got to have those scheduled by the end of the day and I've got to get back to six emails and I am done. And you know that you've got three hours to do it and that's your week.
Speaker 1:Yeah, honestly, I have learned to do so many things nap trapped because he won't. He'll sleep on me. I'll get a solid two hours of anything done because he'll be. He'll sleep for a couple of hours if he's on me, so I'll just have him sleep on me and like be typing with one hand and just get like so much done. But that's what it looks like. If you're asking what it looks like, it looks like being nap trapped and getting some work done. I think the phenomenal thing is that our sales are the same, our support time is the same, our calls are the same, everything's the same, but you are just 10 times more efficient. Yeah, yeah, yeah, because you have to be and I'm sure everyone knows that you have to quickly get you know between doing a dish or a yeah, or the laundry as well. Um, that's that makes me sound like a tried wife or something doing a dish and laundry all day long. Doing a dish, doing a laundry.
Speaker 1:I'm going to ask you the same question how does it look like for you with it? Because you've got a two-year-old, two and a bit year old. What does it look like for you? Because you've got a two-year-old, two-and-a-bit-year-old. What does life look like for you? Working, well, it gets easier. That's the best thing about like a toddler is, to me, easier than a baby was, because I don't get naptrapped anymore, but I would say that I'm still fairly the same. I feel like again before I had a baby, I would just be like, okay, feel like before, again before I had a baby, I would just be like, okay, maybe I'll film a reel today, maybe I won't, maybe I'll do this, maybe I won't. Um, and to be honest, I probably just wasted a bunch of time and but now I'm so much more efficient and so I'm the same as you. I feel like I still put 10 hours a week into this, and that includes all of the support and all of the content planning and all of the marketing.
Speaker 1:I think that the greatest blessing in the world is having an online course and then having children, because if you've got a course and you've got the systems to support you, it doesn't have to be a million hours a day, thank gosh. But yeah, work for me. I pretty much work. I'm going to say a day and a half a week on TCM at the moment. Yeah, yeah, awesome, more than me, whoops, okay.
Speaker 1:Next question, and this one's a little bit deeper Okay, is having an online course business what you expected it was going to be from the beginning? Yeah, no, probably not, I would say. Actually, now that it's set up, I would have thought that you would probably have to have worked more in it, and I guess what I thought was, yeah, you'd have to work more, but I didn't realize you could just choose when to work as much, because I was just so used to, you know, working more, like nine to five-ish, so I didn't realize you could just pick and choose when to work, like as long as the work gets done. Like I just know, okay, I need to make this amount of like reels or whatever for social media, I need to do some accounts and I need to do student support. When that gets done probably surprised me how free, and I have a whole new appreciation for being in the online course world now that I have a baby as well Because I thought like, oh my God, am I going to have to like quit and tell Amy you're the course mentor now you know, but the fact that it's so flexible, it has probably surprised me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think what's really shocked me is I have to teach Japanese right, and I can go weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and months and never speak Japanese anymore. And I came from, you know, a very, very, very, very, very hands-on service-based business where I was constantly with people speaking Japanese for 11 hours a day. Sometimes I would do 11 hours of client work, sometimes I would be interpreting for 11 hour shifts, and I just got so used to speaking Japanese all the time and being in that world with my brain turned on that sometimes now I'm worried I'm going to lose it, because my life is quite literally just wins now, which is so great, but all I ever see from people is I'm past my exams and I can say this and I can do this with my language now, and I just went on this incredible trip and I spoke Japanese the entire time and it's just win, win, win, win, win and I never have to speak Japanese anymore. That's what I never expected. So you'd think I, all I do is speak Japanese because I have a Japanese course, but I never speak Japanese ever. Yeah, interesting, that's not, yeah, never what I would have expected.
Speaker 1:Okay, next one. Next one how often do we see each other? Like never, oh, on zoom, maybe once a week. We call each other maybe two to three more times a week and just get to chatting God, we get so much time. We just cook dinner together and chat and like I'll just call Debt while I'm cooking dinner and we will literally just talk about absolutely nothing. But work-wise never. Work-wise never, never. We see each other on the weekly call that we do with our students, yeah, and that's it, and never in person, really. I mean, we have dinners here and there, but like every few months. That's because we live a couple of hours away from each other, not because we can't be bothered. If we were in town, we'd see each other all the time, but otherwise we don't see each other.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, how much time do we spend with students per week? Because program right? Oh wait, I want to say with that last question, my, my partner. He calls Amy our Friday housemate because we're on zoom for the day together. So he has to remember that whatever he says, amy can hear him. So Amy's out Friday housemate.
Speaker 1:Okay, go, I wasn't listening to the question. What's the question. Okay, so this is a bit of a juicy one as well, because I think, again, this is not something that people would expect. But how much time do we spend with our students inside of our mentorship program? Any one person? Okay, any one person, oh, it depends on the person. Like, they need to be engaged, you know they need to. You know, ask for help. The help's there. So it depends, you know how active they are, for sure, and the more active they are, the better. 100%. I love when we hear from people all the time. It's awesome, it helps with giving advice, obviously. But with any one person like I don't know hours and hours and hours, I Like I don't know hours and hours and hours, I think what people would wonder and what people would want to see from the outside especially me if I was being really, really nosy about this. I would want to know okay, so you don't work very much, but you spend a lot of time with students. How does that marry up? That's such a good question. It depends on their engagement. Like they have to rock up.
Speaker 1:Like we're here, lights are on, doors are open, coming to the call um and getting feedback Friday. If you actually engage in that like a lot of time because we will sit down for sometimes like an hour. We'll talk about somebody's work every Friday. So if you submit your work, we're dedicating hours a week. You know all you need to do is submit some Feedback Friday work and come to a call and you've got like a couple of hours a week. Yeah, easily.
Speaker 1:It's really strange because there's so much support that goes into working with our clients and working with people inside of OCS. What that feels like for us is jumping onto a call on Friday mornings and then spending the rest of Friday in the community and working on the Feedback Friday audits, but we still knock off by lunchtime. Yeah, it's great. It's such a good balance of. They're getting a ton of awesome support Like no joke If you engage in the program like it's golden.
Speaker 1:But for us, yeah, it doesn't feel overwhelming. No, never, and we can do it when we want to, except feedback Friday. That's it for Friday. Maybe we'll scratch that then. Yeah, okay, let's hook money. Okay, nitty gritty. And I think you know the answer to this.
Speaker 1:But off the top of your head, how much do you think that we invested into the business at the very beginning? Oh, I know the answer to that um, like nothing. Maybe like a hundred dollars for business registration or a domain or something, but like, yeah, pretty much nothing. Yeah, and how did we do that, do you remember? Yeah, like, how do we start the business? We ran a pilot round, which is the method we teach. We won't go to not follow our own method. Yeah, yeah, we did the same thing for Japanese, and then we did the same thing for sewing, and then we did the same thing, for course, mentors as well. We just knew that we were going to run a pilot round at the beginning, and that pilot round that we ran, we had five people in it, so not massive. I think.
Speaker 1:A lot of people think pilot rounds you need to like, sell out, they need to be these big campaigns, these big launches. We had five people in. That was incredible, such a good process. And then that gave us our cash kitty that we then had for the next six months of software which we just paid up front. We also paid a bunch of our advertising up front and then from there, we were able to reinvest and then start the business properly and start running rounds pretty much straight away yeah, pretty much straight away, ran rounds and continue onboarding students, which just, yeah, grew the business. That's why it's like it's just risk-free If you're willing to put a little bit of time in on the side to a project like, yeah, it's just so risk-free. That's why I'm like, just like, do your course all the time, okay.
Speaker 1:Next question when do our clients come from? Amy, I love this question so much. Okay, I don't know what people would expect. Also, you wrote the question, so of course we love it. We love it quite a fair bit, I feel, you know, and I think it's such a good question. Okay, it's a little bit different across our different courses, right, like, the ratios are a little bit different.
Speaker 1:So, for Japanese, definitely more of my sales come from ads 100%. But with OCS I would actually say that the ratios would be quite surprising for people. First of all, a good percentage of our sales, like the majority, come from ads, definitely, but there's also a huge percentage of people that come from referrals. Yeah, definitely, yeah, which surprised me. It surprised me too because I never thought that it would be a very referral-based business. I definitely thought, you know, japanese would have referrals, sewing would have referrals. People have interests they share with other people. And then they have those groups of people that also like crafts and hobbies and things and they can share that around. I didn't think probably going into this. I was quite shocked that a lot of people knew other people that wanted to create courses. But I would say about 30 to 40% of our sales come in from referrals, from people who loved OCS so much and then told people about it. Yeah, that's mental to me, but yeah, I love when people come in from a referral because then we just end up with more people like our people and then we are having the most our people of all time. Yeah, 100%, okay.
Speaker 1:So more marketing. What do we spend on ads? Ooh, this is again really juicy and I think that this is one of those numbers that people don't often share. But fuck it, let's just say it. We spend about 2K a month on ads, which is not a lot of money to spend on ads. But when it comes to ads, I've got to say that what you spend is relative to what you want to make. So if we were in an active scaling phase of the business, so if right now I was saying, let's just send it to the moon, let's make $1 million a month, then I probably wouldn't be spending 2K on ads, right? But since we're not in that crazy scaling phase right now, I know that every single month we take on 10 people, so 2K to sustain that right now is completely fine and doable.
Speaker 1:Again, if I wanted to go crazy and I wanted to scale this business up, then we'd spend more money, but right now we don't need to and so we're not going to just emerge money for the point of it. That's it like. And we can't because you know we put the hours in per student. So we know we've struck that right balance. I have a full month old. I don't want to work more. You know, if anything, I want to work. No, I don't want to work less because I barely work, um, but I don't want to work more. So even if we wanted to scale and spend more money like nah, I'd prefer to hang out with my four-month-old. Yeah, our other courses is where we're scaling and where we're putting time into growing those other businesses, because those businesses are even more hands-off.
Speaker 1:But because the Course Mentors is such a mentorship program and we spend so much time with people, you're right, like 10 people right now every single month is perfect for us. It's doable. It means that we get to pour so much love and energy and time and effort into people, but it's not so much that you're then having to work four days a week on support right now. So I think, yeah, like the juicy number is 2K a month on ads every single month, but the reality of that number is that nets us enough people between what we're doing in our marketing that we get to be really comfortable with 10 people right now. Yeah, love that. Okay. And then the next money question. I feel like I've just snuck in here to find out, because I actually don't fully know the answer, like definitively know the answers to these ones. I feel like you do it, you manage this side of the business and I'm so thankful and I love you so much for doing it.
Speaker 1:Accounting, it sort of what's our outgoings? Oh, our outgoings Lol, that's hilarious. You wouldn't know that. Okay. So outgoings Thinkific that's where we host our course and that's probably our major software expense and that's probably like a hundred bucks a month. Xero is monthly as well. That's like 90 Australian a month. Active Campaign that's like somewhere between 600 and a thousand a year. Ads. Obviously we just went through.
Speaker 1:Besides that, that's our major software, maybe like Google Suite as well. I think it's like 20 bucks a month. Besides that, though, literally that's it. Besides salaries, yeah, okay, a hundred percent. So you would say like, let's say, 500 bucks a month max on everything and then ads are about 2K a month, so about 2,500 a month in expenses. Yeah, I'd say that's fair, that's pretty bloody lean, that's as lean as a business can get.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's why, you know, people say I say, oh, I'm a business owner, you know. And they say, oh, do you have staff? I'm like hell, no, that is one big expense that I would just never. I would just never. There's someone probably listening to this right now that has a commercial lease. They have a place that they rent, they've got furniture in that place, they've got a million pieces of software that goes into running that business, they've got scheduling software, desks and computers and things you can't get away from, you've got to pay for. Yeah, and they're probably just shaking their fists at us over the over the internets, but that's, it is the truth. And I used to have a business that required a lot of outgoings and I used to have to rent a physical space to take clients on. So I get it. I get, and so did you with the floristry. Yeah, events and floristry that was huge, so I get it, I get that.
Speaker 1:It's probably awful to hear that, uh, but it's also so great like the, like, the amount of outgoings we have. The reason I don't know about it is because, again, it's less than 500 bucks a month. To me, that's not worth tracking month on month on month. It's not something I think about, but it's pretty lean. It's about as lean as a business can possibly get. Yeah, literally, it's awesome.
Speaker 1:Okay, the next question is a bit deep but fun. You haven't planned your answer to this, but I think that you'll have a great answer anyway. Okay, what are our plans for ocs in the future? Oh, that is deep. Uh, our plans, we god it's going so like smoothly at the moment with having a four-month bold and not having to work too much. So I going so like smoothly at the moment with having a four month bold and not having to work too much. So I'm like really happy at the moment. But, plans wise, I'll always want to like reiterate, I'll always want to make better at this. Nothing worse than having a business and not getting to like work on it, because it can always be better, no matter how good it is. You know um plans.
Speaker 1:I would like to maybe bump up like from 10 people a month to 15 people a month when I get more time. You know just more people through. I love helping them and I love and I hate saying no every month to people who want to get started and say I'm sorry, you're at the top of the list next month but we can't fit you. Basically, I said I would like to fix that little, not problem, but that little thing I don't like to do in my life every month. But otherwise, just like, yeah, keep, keep reinventing, keep making it better, keep adding videos and reiterating things. Yeah, I feel like I'm much the same. I love that the business can go up and it can go down. That's one thing that I again.
Speaker 1:Going back to that other question about what I never expected with online courses, I never expected that it would be so controllable, especially, I think, because I worked with clients again before. You had to just take what you could get. You just had to feed when the food was available. You had to take the clients on and you're constantly in a cycle of like Am I going to have enough clients next month if I don't sign enough clients this month? Because what if eight clients leave? That used to be a really hard thing that you had to balance and juggle constantly. And then the idea that you could just turn your sales down a little bit if you want to this month is mind blowing to me, still five years into this business. But I 100,000% agree with you.
Speaker 1:I feel like right now I too I'm currently going through a big and I feel like the ability to turn that down a little bit and say I've got capacity right now to pull my heart, love, soul, energy and passion into 10 people a month. And that's what I'm going to do and I'm going to dedicate myself to, and maybe next month it'll be 15 or 20. Then that's what I'm going to do and I'm going to dedicate myself to, and maybe next month it'll be 15 or 20. Then that's great. But yeah, having the control over the sales right now is so good that I'm just absolutely loving it, so so much.
Speaker 1:But in the future, I see us, I think. I think true, I think I see us definitely taking more people and growing and scaling for sure, because I can't help myself. I've got help myself. I've got to. You know, I've got to admit that the course mentors really is such a creative outlet for me and I get to do so much in there with people and I get to pour so much of my creative energy into other people's courses, which is truly what lights me up. So I feel like I am almost ready, or will be ready soon, to start scaling this and to see us take on more people every single year. Give me a couple more months with my baby.
Speaker 1:I think that's all of my questions. That was kind of a lot. Some of them were deep, some of them were financial and then some of them were kind of just light and lovely. But I want to know, for anyone listening to this podcast if you have other questions for us. What are the nitty, gritty, dirty, detailed questions that you want to know about the behind the scenes of running an online course business?
Speaker 1:Because I want to do more of these episodes. I want to kind of show people a little bit more about what actually goes into it. I think it's so fun and lovely to put on a sales page. You know, time freedom and like have a better way of doing the life and have a better way of making money, and it's so like sexy on a sales page, but the reality is is that it's a little bit less sexy than that. My days genuinely involve a lot of Bluey and Peppa Pig, but also it involves a lot less work than people might truly think, and so I really do want to show people what that really looks like in an honest, behind the scenes lifting the curtain way. That's not the glamorized sales page view of that as well. Yeah, you sort of like you write those things on a sales page and I want to paint what that actually looks like for people because it sounds so, I don't know, cheesy sometimes, but like there's no other way to say it. You get a lot of freedom, but maybe we could do a segment or something, an episode or I don't know, but send them in, actually email us. It's really. It's really bizarre.
Speaker 1:And again, probably one more transparency thing is that when you own a podcast, you don't really truly know what people think about it or how people are listening to it. We get notifications of like you know, 900 people listen to your podcast this week and we're like, okay, cool. Sometimes it's like been as high as like 5,000 people this week. They're like, oh all, right then cool, but let us know, email us, tell us some things that you want the juicy, detailed, gory goss about. Let us know what you've always wondered about what goes into running an online course business and what it really looks like behind the curtain, because one thing that Dan and I believe in truly is transparency. We will just tell you straight up how it is. Yeah, that's how you learn, that's how you move forward, but that is it from us this week, guys. I hope that you enjoyed this little bit of a look behind the curtain and we're really, really excited that we are now back to weekly episodes, so we will see you in the next one. Can't wait. Bye.