How to Start a Group Coaching Program That Scales Past 1:1

If your 1:1 calendar is getting full, you may be wondering if group coaching could help you work with more clients without adding more hours to your week. Here’s how to turn what you already teach into a group program, price it, fill the seats and run it.

Why Clients Get Results in a Group

If you’ve been coaching 1:1, there’s probably one question holding you back from group coaching. Will your clients still get the same results if they aren’t getting all of your attention? In a 1:1 session, a client gets the whole hour with you, but put eight people on the same call and that hour has to serve all eight.

A group call does something a 1:1 call can’t, though. Say a client comes in with a pricing question. They hear your answer, and they also hear how another client is handling pricing in their own business. Then someone else asks a follow-up they hadn’t thought of yet, so even when you’re not talking directly to them, they’re still learning.

That’s one of the biggest benefits of group coaching, since clients learn from everyone on the call, including you. They also start holding each other accountable. Because when a client tells you they’ll finish something by Thursday, that’s a promise to one person. But when they know they’ll report back to the whole group next week, that promise carries a lot more weight.

And over time, the group becomes part of what keeps people engaged. Russell Brunson makes a similar point in Expert Secrets, where he says people usually join a community for the expert but stay for the community.

So how do the results compare when you put the two formats side by side? A 2025 randomized trial from UCLA tested that with 79 internal medicine physicians, who went through six virtual coaching sessions over four months in either small groups or one-on-one. Burnout dropped in both coached groups, by 42% in the small groups and 34% in the 1:1 group, while it went up for the physicians on the waitlist.

That’s one study of doctors, so it can’t predict what will happen in every coaching niche, but it did find one area where 1:1 came out ahead. People in the one-on-one group reported more energy and enthusiasm for their work, which the researchers connected to having more time to talk through what their work means to them.

So for some goals, especially very personal ones, 1:1 may still be the better fit. But for many kinds of coaching, a group gives clients your expertise plus a room full of people working through the same problems.

And when one hour of coaching can serve several clients, a coach’s whole week starts to look different.

How the Math Changes When One Hour Serves Ten Clients

In 1:1 coaching, every new client adds another hour to the calendar. Picture a coach with 20 clients who each get a weekly session. That’s 20 hours of calls before prep, follow-up emails or admin. Once those hours fill up, there’s only so much room left to grow without adding more hours or charging more for the ones already booked.

Russell makes this point in Expert Secrets, where he explains that one-on-one work means trading your time for money. But a group changes how that time gets used. Put those same 20 clients into two groups of ten, and the weekly calls drop from 20 to two. If each group call runs 90 minutes and takes another hour for prep and follow-up, that’s about five hours of work instead of 20.

Or the coach could run five groups of ten in about 12.5 hours a week, serving 50 clients in less time than those original 20 clients took. These numbers are just examples to show how the math works, and every program will look a little different. But the more clients you can serve in the same call, the more your time can stretch.

That doesn’t mean 1:1 has to go away, though. Some clients need work that doesn’t fit a group setting, like a sensitive personal situation or a business problem that’s too specific to share. And some coaches keep a handful of 1:1 spots at their highest price for clients who want that extra level of attention, while the group serves everyone else. That way, 1:1 stays available for the clients who need it without taking over the whole week.

But a group needs a plan, and the 1:1 sessions a coach has already run are usually the best place to find it.

Start With What You Already Teach Every Client

Think about the last five clients you coached 1:1. Chances are, their first few sessions covered a lot of the same ground. Maybe every new client needed help getting clear on their offer, or maybe they all got stuck around the same point in month two. Those repeats can be the starting point for a group coaching program.

Russell walks through a similar exercise in Expert Secrets. He has experts write down everything they’d want to teach their younger self just starting out, then put it in the order they’d teach it. For a coach, old session notes are the easiest place to start. Mark the topics that come up with nearly every client, put them in teaching order, and they become your curriculum, one week or module at a time.

Once you have that list, you can start making the decisions that shape the program.

Pick One Outcome

A group works best when everyone is working toward the same result. “Help business owners grow” is too broad for one group, but “help new coaches sign their first five clients” gives everyone something specific to work toward. It also makes your curriculum easier to build, because you can look at your session notes and decide which topics help members reach that outcome and which ones can stay out.

Decide How Many People to Include

Group size comes down to how much time each person gets. On a 60-minute call with eight people, everyone gets about seven minutes of direct attention if the time is split evenly, and adding more people makes that number smaller. So smaller groups give each client more room to talk, while larger groups rely more on teaching and peer discussion than individual coaching.

Set the Schedule and Length

Weekly calls keep the group moving, while meeting every other week gives clients more time to work between sessions. Program length should follow the outcome. A goal like launching a first offer might fit into eight weeks, while something bigger, like building a full client pipeline, may need three months or more, and your curriculum can help you figure out how many sessions you’ll need.

Choose Online or In Person

Online group coaching lets clients join from anywhere, and it makes it easy to record calls for anyone who misses one. In-person groups limit who can join, but some clients may get more out of being in the same room. And you don’t have to choose one forever, since an in-person meetup can always come later, once the group is up and running.

With the outcome, size and schedule in place, it gets a lot easier to figure out what to charge.

How to Price Group Coaching Using Your 1:1 Rate

The easiest place to start is the rate you already charge for 1:1. Imagine you charge $200 per session and want to run a 12-week group program. If a client went through those same 12 weeks with you 1:1, they’d pay $2,400, so that number becomes the anchor for pricing the group.

A seat price between one-third and one-half of that 1:1 total is a practical range to work from. In this example, that puts each seat between $800 and $1,200. Clients get less individual time with you in a group, so the price comes down, but they also get the teaching, peer support and other benefits that come with learning together. These numbers are just examples, so use your own rate and program length to run the same math.

Where you land in that range depends on how much of your time each client gets. A smaller group or a program with a few private calls can sit closer to half, while a larger group that relies more on recorded lessons and peer discussion can sit closer to a third. 

You also get to choose how people join. With a cohort program, everyone starts and finishes together on set dates, so you open enrollment a few times a year and fill the group before each start date. With an evergreen program, people can join anytime, which often works better with a monthly price since members come in at different points.

And whichever format you choose, a payment plan can make a higher seat price easier to say yes to. A $1,200 seat, for example, could be split into three monthly payments of $400. Some coaches set the payment plan total a little higher than the pay-in-full price, giving clients a small reason to pay upfront.

Your group coaching packages can give clients a few different ways to work with you. Using the same example, the tiers could look like this.

Group, $800: 12 weeks of group calls, the community and the course lessons
Group Plus, $1,200: Everything in Group, plus two private 1:1 calls
VIP, $2,000: Everything in Group, plus a private 1:1 call every other week

The higher tiers give clients who want more of your time a way to get it without leaving the group. And once you’ve decided what each package includes, you can start thinking about how to fill the seats.

Filling the Seats Before Your First Session

The first seats are often the easiest to fill because they can come from people who already know you. Current and past 1:1 clients already know how you coach, and some may be happy to move into a group, especially if it costs less than working with you privately. After that, your email list and social followers are the next places to look.

Before enrollment opens, a waitlist gives interested people somewhere to raise their hand. It can be a short page where they leave their email so you can let them know when enrollment opens, and it gives you an idea of how much interest there is before you choose a start date. If the list is still small, you can grow it with a few lead generation strategies for coaches, then use a coaching sales funnel to turn those new leads into clients over time.

When you’re ready to enroll, a launch window gives people a clear deadline to make a decision. Enrollment opens for a set number of days with the waitlist getting first access, and then the cart closes before the program starts. A free training can be a good way to open enrollment because people get to experience your teaching before they buy, and a webinar funnel can handle the signups, reminders and replay.

From there, people can either buy directly or apply. Direct checkout works well for a lower-priced seat, where someone can read the page and sign up on their own. For higher tiers or smaller groups, an application gives you a chance to make sure each person is a good fit before they join.

Russell uses applications for his own group coaching. In DotCom Secrets, he shares two questions he asks applicants, which are why they’d be a good fit for the group and how they can contribute to it. Asking those questions helps protect the experience for everyone else in the program.

Some coaches add a short call after the application, which is a common step in a high-ticket coaching funnel. Since those calls take up your time, screening applicants before they book one keeps your calendar open for the people who are ready to move forward.

Once the seats are full, it’s time to plan what members get between calls.

What Members Need Between Calls

The live calls are the center of any group program, and they can happen on the same video tool you already use for 1:1 sessions. But most of a client’s week happens between those calls, so the rest of the program has to support them during that time.

A community space gives members somewhere to keep talking after the call ends. They can post a win, ask a question that came up during the week or share how they handled something from the last session. And other members can jump in, sometimes before you even see the post.

Course content takes care of the teaching that doesn’t need to happen live. If every group needs the same walkthrough on something, record it once as a lesson and use the call for coaching instead of going through the same material every week. Worksheets, templates and call replays can live in the same place, so members who miss a session can catch up on their own.

Accountability between sessions keeps people moving. A weekly check-in post gives everyone a place to share what they committed to and whether they got it done. Some coaches also pair members up as accountability partners, giving each person someone else to check in with during the week.

Running all of this across separate tools can get messy, with the checkout in one place, the lessons in another and the community somewhere else. ClickFunnels brings the sales page, checkout, course lessons and member community together in one platform, so there are fewer tools to connect and manage. 

With all of that in place, there’s just one more part to figure out, which is the calls themselves.

How to Run a Group Session Where Everyone Talks

A group call runs best when members know what to expect each week. A common structure starts with a quick round of wins, moves into a short lesson, then opens the floor for coaching and ends with each member naming one thing they’ll do before the next call. Keeping the same order each week helps members come prepared and keeps the call from turning into a lecture.

Hot seats are one of the most useful parts of that coaching time. One member brings a specific problem and gets focused help from you and the group, while everyone else gets to learn from watching it get worked out. In Expert Secrets, Russell describes running his Inner Circle mastermind groups this way. He says the groups had about 30 people, with each member getting a turn to present their business and get personalized help from everyone in the room.

You also have to keep an eye on who gets to talk. Some members will speak up every week while others wait to be asked, so rotating hot seats and asking specific people for their take can keep one voice from taking over. A low-pressure question like “What stood out from the lesson?” gives members who hold back an easy way to join the conversation.

You don’t need to make your first group complicated, though. A consistent structure and a few hot seats each week can give you a solid place to start.

Frequently Asked Questions

From a Full Calendar to Your First Group

If you’re ready to move beyond a calendar where every new client means another hour on your schedule, group coaching gives you a way to serve more people without making every part of the program a 1:1 session. And once you know what you’re teaching, how you’re pricing it and how you’ll run the group, the last step is bringing it all together in one place.

ClickFunnels lets you sell the program, take payments, deliver your lessons and give members a space to connect between calls. Try ClickFunnels free and start building your first group coaching program.

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