One-on-One Workflow Coaching for Subscription Business Owners: Smooth Out Churn and Enjoy Work Again
Discover the many benefits of one-on-one workflow coaching for professional support as an entrepreneur, or leader, and how they benefit subscription service businesses, especially.
Some business owners seek out a coach they connect with just to have an outlet for the most stressful of situations and needs, and others prefer ongoing coaching, group settings, or even informal peer mentorship. But there are many other executives out there who are not accessing any type of support at all, because it is unfamiliar.
For leaders in all stages of their careers, we run into this question frequently: “what do you teach in one-on-one workflow coaching…”, because the concept itself can feel intimidating for some, elusive to others, or like an environment they would not want to step into, much less pay for.
But first – who are business coaches in general?
What does an executive businesses coach do?
As a baseline definition from the AstroCat dictionary…
An executive business coach is a person who assists a leader from the perspective of that leader. The coach contributes strategy and analysis, thereby increasing the leader’s problem-solving capacity.
Essentially, we consider it a donation of our minds to a leader’s cause within the scope of our coaching work with a client.
In most cases, a business coach is a former business owner, or entrepreneur themselves and pull from their experience to advise others – much like a tutor.
As you can see, this definition can also be elusive in determining what you would learn from a business coach and how they would help your operation as an owner. There is a lot of room for different coaching styles, focus, and areas of expertise. We are lending our minds, after all.
In general – no matter the instructional style – business coaches are typically stand-out experts in their field. Their knowledge being available to access as needed gives their clients a peace of mind and sense of background support.
Within our firm, AstroCat Consulting, our areas of business expertise are subscription services and recurring revenue operations. Our coaching encompasses client and customer rapport, staffing, community building, branding, executive presence, sales, and marketing…the list goes on. We learned about so many different aspects of business, because our own work as entrepreneurs called us to develop these skills.
But in the area of operations, there are many business coaches, courses, and programs for development available due to the challenges involved in running a service business, a recurring revenue operation, or a company offers a service with a recurring revenue model.
Experts offering support through coaching and training programs for subscriptions have defined topics they work on frequently with their clients and that come up over and over: revenue growth, client retention, workflow, and reducing admin time.
Why is fast execution so challenging for subscription service businesses?
A subscription service business, or recurring revenue model, is a challenging type of business to operate because of the human factors that come into play both with your staff and clients, as well as the way these operations scale.
You typically have a staff of providers giving a service as a product for ongoing business, or you are a solo-provider. In either case, it’s not just one successful sale we achieve with a recurring service – each visit, service completion, etc is a sale as well. You are consistently earning your clients’ business as you go.
When you consider revenue growth and expanding your operation to serve more people, there is an immediate objective to prepare the level of staff and resources needed to offer your service – i.e scaling. It is very common to scale as you go and over time, rather than create a larger-than-needed infrastructure to hold future-business first. But when you have big growth waves, or opportunities are unpredictable, considerations for expanding your operational capacity can be more challenging than other industries and products.
Instead, you have to learn how to ‘ride the wave’ of an ongoing service business and control the revenue stream your operation is earning, as well as internal staff retention with external client retention.
If you are unfamiliar with subscription models, check out this excellent explanation of Recurring Revenue Model Businesses from the Indeed.com blog that gives both the definition and examples.
A subscription-service challenge and impact:
For many years, I ran and developed an ongoing and on-location music lessons program. One year, we had a lucrative school-program opportunity offered to us that we wanted to take.
In total, it generated nearly $30K in revenue for 2 quarters of work ($15K per quarter), which is large for one single program that was accounting for less than 5% of our current business.
And yet, the challenge was staffing, as well as the operational support needed on top of our normal workflow. We could not secure new music teachers for the program and had to pull from our existing staff of in-home teachers to make it work.
In this particular Fall season, we only had 5-7 new teachers with open schedules during the times they wanted across the entire DMV area, but they needed every-day coverage in a very specific area (within NoVA).
After checking schedules, we found it would take 2 teachers to cover the specific needs of the program, and unfortunately, this would take out all our new NoVA teachers we were relying on.
Ultimately, we forced a solution and were able to secure the school program, but at a big cost to our admin team. They had to find solutions to fill in these gaps with our veteran staff that was already bursting at the seams with roster-size.
The negative ripple effect impacted many unrelated parts of our operation that year too – like creating delays to our recitals, creating a dip in our in-home sign ups that Fall because of short-staffing, and other set-backs we experienced from being overwhelmed.
The worst was for me personally, though, because our business took on a big responsibility with this program, but did not have effective systems developed for this much work. I ended up making up much of the difference by subbing, supporting performances, and having to bridge the gap within my team.
There is no greater lesson learned than when you are personally affected by the wrong choice, or lack of systems!
This specific experience taught me so much as a leader, and it perfectly illustrates the day to day decisions and predicaments you face while running an ongoing service business. It put a spotlight on where gaps were in my process, as well as the processes I had set out for my staff.
The long-term solution for our school program challenge
Ultimately, to solve this scenario for the long-term, we went back to the base needs we were missing as a program: staffing consistency that gets us ready for expected surges, quick administrative practices that keep us moving swiftly through 50% upticks in enrollment paperwork volume, and pricing that acts as a gatekeeping.
Then, we engineered seasonal solutions and more efficient ways of managing this uptick with our established school-programs. This did mean saying “no” to big programs we were not ready to take on in following seasons and knowing our limitations, but our solutions for streamlining programs that were within reach and we should be able to serve became more systemized.
For example, the staffing consistency was a matter of pre-planning for our organization around 3 months out from the school year start and new year start for students. We went from 5-7 hires to bringing on 10-12 teachers as the goal – basically doubling our previous expectation.
The admin practices that helped were around teacher-education and standardizing that process. Specifically, we added targeted trainings according to specific teaching areas (instrument + program-type). Also, we considered the amount of experience the teacher has in determining the training level needed.
As a final measure, we made sure our pricing was set high enough in future seasons to control enrollment popularity with incoming students and actually cut back on the enrollment surge to stay within capacity. We increased school program tuition by 15%, which redefined our value.
When you have a booming, recurring service that your audience wants, it’s a good problem to have! Setting pricing on the higher side of average (or increased by approximately 10-15% for services like music lessons) can help with controlling subscriber growth you can’t manage, as well as the level of customer commitment you are getting.
How does one-on-one workflow coaching contribute to subscription business operations optimization?
In our scenario with the music school, we had to follow a process of trial and error to develop the best solution for our predicament. Though this is a tried-and-true way of learning, executive business coaching for subscription business owners is an even better way of managing challenges ongoing service providers encounter proactively and generating positive growth.
Business owners do not need to wait for a disaster to strike their operation in order to benefit from an executive coach. Instead, engaging help before your operations spiral out of control is a more sound path that saves you both time and money in the long-run.
The best executive business coaches have owned and operated businesses themselves that experience the same challenge you are encountering. Making sure you are working with the right person who can provide insights for your industry is an important first step.
After establishing the relationship, though, a business coach for subscription services can help with a number of critical processes and solutions:
- Improving client retention through business coaching: many times the ways owners are losing customers and clients are the big blind spot to address. We need to know exactly why subscribers are exiting their service with an organization. Once established, the solution is typically the easy part, or at least clearer.
- Subscription business operations optimization: When you, or your administrators, are not working accounts efficiently and fully serving client concerns, your organization loses trust…and revenue. By tightening the flow of information and steps with your service’s processes and reducing churn, you not only gain efficiency, your entire team starts gaining admin time back for other work.
- Execute faster with workflow coaching: Swift and confident execution of tasks is related to one thing – decision making skills. You CAN improve on this as a leader and professional by learning strategies to assess risk quickly and refer back to established systems for guidance.
Of course, business coaching can include many other focuses that are all-encompassing for leaders in any step of their journey. For subscription businesses, the unique issues we encounter and the rhythm of our growth lends itself to a special type of coaching and area of work with our clients.
To help with creating positive change, we set up specific and intuitive systems for managing complex processes with leaders that help them move quickly with decisions and delegation, as well as maintaining good pace (i.e. avoiding workflow bottlenecks).
What is a workflow coaching session like?
At AstroCat, we adapt our coaching process to the level of service you have selected, as we have single session options, as well as ongoing frequencies.
For one-time and ad hoc coaching sessions, we have an intake process ahead of the first meeting so we can jump right in and not waste any time. We have a similar intake process for our ongoing coaching sessions, but we use the first session as a baseline to discuss multiple goals and areas of improvement, rather than just a single area of focus for a one-time meeting.
With ongoing workflow coaching, we talk about the challenge you are facing as an owner, as well as your goals and which are most important to dive in to our work together. In the first session, our objective is to get started on a plan of action for at least one of your goals that you will work on ahead of our next session.
From there, we start a cycle of review > introduce a new area > refine systems as a week to week, or bi-weekly rhythm. Of course, if a challenge arises during our work together, we can always switch focus to a new area of advisement as well.
By the end, you should have systems in place to address the front-line area of disruption where challenges can form for your subscription service business. This allows you to enjoy peace of mind as an owner and maintain the time you need for business development and further growth – not just putting out fires.
Our coaching process is collaborative, so hearing what works, what didn’t, and where you would like more help as an owner gives us a lot of information to work with and create improvement.
In conclusion – one-on-one workflow coaching helps your service business grow!
We all need expert advice and a mentor. When you are a leader, or business owner, your role can be stressful and isolating, which is a reason many seek out an executive coach. However, there are many more reasons to work with an expert for support outside of having an outlet to vent.
Business coaches have specific areas of expertise, and finding the right relationship and advice can be a game-changer for your company. In the case of subscription service businesses, you can learn techniques to improve retention and overall profits through key strategies and systems a coach will deliver to you.
If you are seeking mentorship and development support for your subscription service business, we would love to learn more about your organization and needs! Fill out a contact form to share more about yourself and your industry – we will follow up to help you schedule your first appointment and get started!
