Anyone can buy or sell a course— an info-product that’s a self-serve experience, not much different than producing a record for sale that potentially millions of people can consume.
The success rate on books, courses, and other formats is single digits– as few even complete the training– and then a fraction of these folks do the exercises necessary to achieve whatever result.
A program, however, has the hidden promise of results– like a college degree has the hidden promise of a job.
Thus, programs are courses that also have coaching, support, and other components beyond a series of videos you can play– even if it’s LightSpeed interactive videos.
We’ve sold millions of courses for Rosetta Stone to help people learn Spanish.
Most of these DVDs sit on the bookshelf, like all the other beautiful aspirational decorations, collecting dust for the one eventual day when we just might want to use it.
We’re happy to sell COURSES via LightSpeed– free and paid. The system has all the functionality necessary for the basics, much like Kajabi, LearnDash, Thinkific, and even GoHighLevel.
But a PROGRAM means we can’t accept a 2% success rate, as is normal for courses.
We would want to flip this into a 98% success rate with only a 2% fail rate.
People joining a program must be committed, qualified, and able to do what it takes to win– like what each of us has discussed about winning being the absence of not quitting.
And only upon this commitment, which is to be earned, not granted by default, are we willing to let people into any of our programs to invest in their success with our network, our time, and our money.
The “turd in the punchbowl” is that course creators peddle their wares as if it were a PROGRAM.
But there’s no valid certification, implementation, accountability, support, or backing.
The way I closed one of our clients — when he was the one who attended my workshop and called me, not me calling him– was asking him if he was here just to make millions selling courses or if he wanted to actually help people succeed. The latter requires measurement, which none of his famous course-creating buddies are doing.
