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Have you created a retention program for your courses, programs, or services? There’s nothing worse than ending any experience for your students or clients on a bad note, so today I’m comparing my own experience with the retention process of two high-ticket educational investments.

While both programs had value, one investment encouraged me to renew, while the other left me disappointed at the end of the program. Now, let’s dive into why and how you can learn from my own experience!

Strong Retention Program in Your Business (:47)

Why a Strong Retention Program is Important (1:05)

My 2020 Personal + Business Investment Backstory (2:29)

• High Ticket Investments
• Group Coaching Programs
• I Worked Hard, But Didn’t Achieve My Goals
• Both Communicated via Their Retention Programs

Retention Program Comparisons (5:53)

The Professional Program (7:26)

• They Won’t Take a Phone Call
• Cold, Corporate Language

The Personal Program (11:02)

• Asking for Feedback
• Encouraging Language

What I Took Away from This (14:11)

REVIEW THE TRANSCRIPT FOR THIS EPISODE BELOW!

0:05
Welcome to so here’s the thing where we share candid conversations that lift the veil on what it takes to find success, even if that means sharing a few unpopular opinions. I’m your host Laylee Emadi, grab some coffee or cocktail, and let’s get real. Hey, friend, I am so excited about this solo episode one, because it is a topic that I’ve been feeling a little fiery about, a little spicy about and to because I’m actually live right now inside of my Facebook community, the creative entrepreneur community, it is a free Facebook group. And if you’re not already part of it, make sure to jump in and join us over on Facebook. Alright, so let’s get into this, we are going to be talking about the importance of a strong retention program in your business. Specifically, I’m going to be sharing two experiences that I have just gone through inside other programs that I’ve personally invested in. And I’m going to break down the takeaways that I’ve had from each of those experiences. And before I do that, I want to give a little bit of background on this on why it’s important. One, it’s important because so many people don’t realize that it is I think it’s something like five times easier and more financially beneficial to retain a client than it is to get a new client. And that in itself is mind blowing to me. And in addition to that, I really want to make sure that I’m being clear that I’m not saying that everything from either program that I’m going to use as a comparison point was 100%, wonderful or 100%. Awful. I’m just here to like present some facts and the way that it influenced my whole experience that I had inside of these two programs that I invested in. And all of this all of it is in hopes that it will help you think through how you handle client retention, and or how you handle graceful exits for your clients in your business. Because at the end of the day, we hear a lot about client experience. But offboarding is just as important as onboarding. And I think so many people have not thought of onboarding as that important part of your business. And so I want to encourage you to actually use this as a good time to start thinking that through for your own business. Alright, so let’s go ahead and dive into these two experiences. And all kick it off with a little backstory of why I was so fascinated and why I was so hyped to talk about this topic with you guys. Because the way that they both played out was just really interesting to me from a marketing and education standpoint. So backstory in 2020, I made two massive investments. One was personal and for my personal life, and one was professional. So to break it down a little bit more, the personal investment that I made was with a fitness and health coach in 2019. And in the years leading up to it, I was full time in my business. And that meant a lot of sitting at my computer. And because I am a speaker, I was traveling once or twice a month to conferences, to events to speak. And basically anytime I travel, I eat terribly, I drink a lot, I go out, I’m very social, my sleep is off. And so my health was starting to decline, I had gained a lot of weight, I was feeling sluggish and just like not feeling great. And when you work from home, as almost all of us do, you know, it’s really hard to stay motivated. And so I realized I finally hit that point where I was like, I need a coach, like I need somebody who’s going to keep me as accountable to my personal life as I am to my professional life as I am to my business and as I am to my own coaching students. So I invested in a group coaching program. That was for my personal life, it was a high ticket item, aka it costs a lot of money to join it. But I was like, Okay, I’ve got to make this change. At the same time. I every single year invest in my education as a professional entrepreneur. So I always invest in something every single year in my business. But this past year in 2020, I made this huge jump and invested a large sum of money in a high ticket program. Now, I find it really interesting because these two programs happened to be coming to a close at the exact same time. And so there were a lot of similarities in them in that both were high ticket items. Both were advertised as group coaching. And in both programs I made quite

4:54
frankly and completely transparently. I made good progress like I did a good job As a student of both programs, however, I did not achieve my end goal that I set for myself at the beginning of investing in each program. So to recap, two high ticket prices, both made progress, both left goals achieved, and both within days of one another, communicated with me through their own retention program. So all of this at the same time is very similar, right, definitely in alignment. Now, their retention strategies and their retention processes were extremely different and resulted in very different outcomes for me. So what I want to do now is I want to kind of talk you guys through and compare the two, and kind of give you some insight into what I think is worth looking at for your own business. Now, I will say before I dive into this, I believe, as an educator who teaches other educators, as the founder of the creative educator Academy, where I teach other educators how to do this, I believe that student responsibility and client responsibility is a very real thing as a student. But I also believe that a huge amount of that responsibility lays inside of the educators hands. And so I think it is definitely a case by case basis. I think that it’s definitely something that educators need to be aware that having kind of this outward persona of a leader who cares about their students progress and achievements and accomplishments needs to be backed up by action. And action to me means if you are the leader, if you are the educator, you are taking into consideration everything on a case by case basis. So that’s my two cents on, on that on the relationship between the student or client responsibility, and the leader, owner educator responsibility. And I will also say, the concept of under promising and over delivering is the most important thing here. And what I found in these two processes is that one of my programs under promised and over delivered, or at least, you know, delivered what they promised, and one over promised and under delivered. And it was very apparent in that. So let me break this down the professional program, my time was coming to an end, and I got an automated email that basically said, Hey, your time is coming to an end, if you want to join for another year, respond to this email. Otherwise, just keep an eye out as your time comes to an end, we’ll send you a link blah, blah, blah, very standard, super cool, whatever. So I email back. And I say, because again, I’m an educator for educators. So I do not, I do not fit like, I don’t take my role lightly as a student. And I always want to make sure that I’m doing the best that I can as that student. And to be a good contributing member of a programs community, that’s very important to me as the person who invest my time, money and resources into something. So I send an email back and I’m like, Hey, you know, I am definitely interested in coming back for another year, because I did not reach my goals that we discussed. At the time of my onboarding, I would love to jump on a call and share some insights into why I think I didn’t reach that goal, and have a conversation about it. I want to remind you here that this is a high ticket item, I received an email back that they do not do phone calls anymore. Now I will also make this clear, at the time of my onboarding, there was an interest call, because I always do, I don’t care if I’m spending $1,000 or $12,000, if you will not take a phone call with me, I will not give you any 1000s of dollars. That’s very important to me, as a client as a consumer. So I can see my back that they no longer do phone calls. And any communication would have to happen via email, ooh, red flag right there. Don’t super love that not feeling very heard, not feeling very seen. Not feeling very valued as a student as a client. So I respond back very kindly, this back and forth happens for a while. And in the back and forth. It’s very cold language, very corporate language. As somebody who comes from corporate America, that’s the language that I’m getting. However, I am now in small business world entrepreneurial world, let’s hug and be a community kind of world. And that’s what I gave my money for. So definitely did not match the rest of the experience. And so that that has now put this really weird cloud over my entire exit.

9:46
Now, this is a whole year that I put into a program that I dedicated myself, right. So I as a consumer as a client as a student, I’m now second guessing and thinking through every negative thing I could possibly Pull out of the year. That’s a human being psychological reaction. Now, here’s the caveat to that as, as an educator for educators, I’m very thankful that I’m able to differentiate between the content of a program and the outcomes that I’ve experienced from that program to the experience that I’m now getting. And so because of that, at least, I’m not like, Oh, I wasted all my money for a year. I don’t feel that way. I don’t regret my investment. However, I regret the way that the retention process has gone in that I will definitely not be reaping as although my instinct was to stay, they have now turned me away. And how powerful is that? My friends? Like? How powerful is it that I was ready to open up my wallet for a second year, have an extremely high ticket offer. And because no one was willing to get on the phone with me. I said no, and it would have taken like a 10 minute phone call. So I just think that, you know, there’s something to be said for that. Now, let me tell you about the retention process I went through with the personal coaching. Actually, ironically, it was more expensive than the professional high ticket item. But the entire year, I have felt seen taken care of I have been held accountable, they have over delivered on their promises. They take things on a case by case basis, as in, when I lost about a month of my life to COVID. They extended without my having to ask, they extended my program on them. And I did not bat an eye when I got the email that my time was up. Because the email included an exit interview, just in the form of an automated survey, it took no extra time on their part. Within the exit interview, there was marketing psychology woven throughout every single question. questions that I have been trained to identify as marketing. We’re working on me. So I’m going to give you some of these questions because they were bombed. One was something along the lines, and I’m paraphrasing here. One was something along the lines of did you accomplish your goals in our time together? And my answer was obviously, no. But the second question was, what are you proud of achieving? So the focus is now on? How are you proud of your achievements? And not? You didn’t do enough, so you didn’t achieve your goals? So now I am recentering. All of the positive reinforcement that I’m getting from this program, and I want more of it. The next questions, were something along the lines of what are your future goals? And how would it feel to achieve those goals? And how could we better working with you in the future? If you did decide to come back to make you get there? Like these questions, you guys showed me not only the fact that like I already was kind of sold on coming back, but I was sold on coming back to both of these programs. It told me that they cared enough to hear how things went for me, and how they could improve. They had that partnership of client and owner having to both be responsible. You can’t put all of the responsibility on your students shoulders. Absolutely not. Both programs already had my business. One program lost it by showing disinterest and dismissiveness, and the other program sold me and I will sell that other program for ever. That is the biggest deal. So not only are they retaining me for X amount of dollars, but I am now going out there and spreading the word because I am a cheerleader for other businesses. So I can I can actually say that I had blog posts written out for both of these programs, one of those blog posts will not be published. So I just want to make this clear that this is not me bad mouthing another program, because like I said, the content, all of it, I made progress. Everything was great. There are just gaps in this process. And as I tried to do the thing that the educator in me tries to do, which is show these gaps and bring them to attention, I was dismissed. And so I just want to bring this up for a couple of things as I wrap it up for you guys. In the end. I’m hopeful that a this shines a light on your processes as a small business owner, what are your processes? Where are the gaps for you? And be I hope this empowers you as a consumer to stand up and gently push back when needed. But if you don’t get where you want to get with that, feel pride in your progress. And hopefully this allows you some freedom to differentiate experience from outcome, although it’s very difficult to do so. And again,

14:40
that’s why I’m hopeful that this shines a light on your process because experience in the end is what people will walk away with. And now when somebody asks me, hey, how did that program go that you invested in 2020 I can honestly tell them this all was great. But this was not an admin personal one. I can just say this was great. And that makes my job As an advocate for that program for that entrepreneur, it’s so much easier because I want to cheer people on. That’s my goal. So I really do hope that it allows that freedom to differentiate between experience and outcome. And I also wanted to leave on this one note of, I always like to walk away from any investment, thinking about what I loved and what I didn’t. And if there was something I didn’t love, I would encourage you to follow suit on this. Take what you didn’t love and make sure that you never do that thing to your clients so that there is no such thing as a wasted investment because you have learned how not to treat people. So I’m going to go ahead and end on that. And as always, I want to thank you guys so much for being here. I’d love to hear from you. You can message me on Instagram. I would love a rating and review on the podcast and I’ll see you guys next week for show notes and resources mentioned on today’s episode head to so here’s the thing podcast.com and if you’re enjoying the podcast, I’d love to read your review on iTunes. Thanks so much for listening, and I’ll catch you in the next episode.