Coach Foundation Accelerator Coaching Program Review 2022
Accelerator by Coach Foundation is a group coaching program that promises to help coaches launch and build their coaching practices, and take all the burden off their shoulders that come with building a coaching business so that they only have to deal with what they love: coaching.
This program comes with a number of big promises, but does it live up to them? In this review article, we’re going to answer that exact question. Today we’ll continue our series of reviewing online courses and programs on starting various kinds of online businesses. We’ve looked at eCommerce, and Amazon FBA in the past but today we’re going to do something different.
A program that helps you build a coaching business. As usual with these reviews, we have no affiliation with Coach Foundation, there are no affiliate links, and we’re not sponsored by them.
We’ve reached out to them and they agreed to give us a test drive of the program for this review, they have no control over what actually goes into this review, so we’ll go cover all the different parts of Coach Foundation Accelerator, then give a rating based on my experience with online marketing as a marketing agency owner.
Is Coach Foundation Accelerator a course or a coaching program? What is Accelerator
Now, I will be very honest with you here right off the bat. When I first heard about Sai Blackyrn’s Accelerator program, it was a bit confusing at first, because it has so many different things bundled into just one product. And the more you learn about the program the more confusing it gets, so I wanted to start by calling that out and shining some clarity on what Accelerator actually is!
Sai Blackbyrn’s Coach Foundation Accelerator program consists of a 1-year membership of access to their online video platform which reflects an online course, but it also includes access to an online community, group workshops, coaching calls, and your own “tech team”.
The tech team is responsible for building and maintaining your website, editing videos for you, automating your webinars and emails, and so on. But let’s not get too ahead of ourselves.
So all in all, it’s a combination of an online course, a coaching program, workshops, accountability, marketing services like building your website, and a bunch more things. Accelerator tries to be a one-stop solution to all the marketing “get clients” needs a coach can have. Perhaps the easiest way to understand what it is and how it works is to look at how you progress through / complete Accelerator.
Progressing through the Accelerator program
When you sign up for Accelerator, first, you start the program with an onboarding call with the program’s head coach: Ari. Ari sets up your access to the online video platform, where you will find your modules, lessons, action steps and exercises (more on this later: The quality of the material).
The onboarding call
Ari helps you set up Slack, which is just a software Coach Foundation uses to stay in touch. On slack, you have access to your team of coaches who you can send your questions along the way and they will get it answered whenever you want it and they are also the ones that help you communicate with the Tech team. You’re also added to the “Aces of Accelerator” Facebook community where you can talk to all the other members taking part in Accelerator.
On this onboarding call, he helps you put together a customized, personalized plan on how to progress through all the modules of the program – which modules you need to take, what are the next steps in launching your coaching business, and so on. Then it’s time to get to work with the first section of Accelerator: “Start-up”.
The mindset module
After learning to use the membership site and all the tech elements of the program, you first start off with a mindset module. Here, you find videos about productivity, work ethic, improving your motivation, consistency, daily rituals, and reasons why coaches fail with their practice and why others succeed.
Some will find this part module of the program basic. For example, if you ever had any type of business, these most likely won’t be of any new insight to you. However, if it’s your first time setting up a business, I think having the right business mindset and knowing the basic do’s and don’ts, is absolutely crucial.
The niche module
Then, you have to choose your coaching niche, which I think in 2022, having a niche is absolutely essential for any type of online service business you’re starting. It’s just incredibly difficult to get started being a generalist, you’ll face a ton of competition, and you won’t be able to find places to advertise your services.
Coach Foundation seems to get this right, and I have to say the video material in the niche section is top-notch. At the end, they also have you get on a call with their “niche coach” – someone with a marketing background who’s working for Coach Foundation and his only task is to make sure people going through the course get their niches right.
This is very nice attention to detail. Many start your business programs just have the same coaches for all the different tasks, and it’s great to see CF employing a specialist for such a critical role, as choosing a bad coaching niche can cost months and tens of thousands of dollars wasted down the line. And from what I saw in the Accelerator Facebook community, members of Accelerator seem to have great niches from a marketing standpoint, where starting their business is viable.
“Your high ticket program” module
Accelerator is built around the concept of the high ticket coaching program. Sai Blackbyrn is an avid believer that the hourly coaching model is outdated and high ticket coaching is the next best thing to sliced bread.
So what is high ticket coaching you might say? The concept means that instead of charging hourly for coaching, you’re selling people a coaching program that costs somewhere between 5 to 10 thousand dollars. And it has to be a start to finish solution to the specific problem that they seek you out for.
Just to use Sai’s example, when he decided to work as a dating coach (before Coach Foundation), he decided to “niche” to young men in their 20s trying to get a girlfriend, and he built his first coaching program around the promise of that. And instead of charging hourly – like most coaches do – he instead sold a $5000 package, which included hours of 1-on-1 coaching, online workshops, and also a weekend in-person workshop in Bali. This is basically what a high ticket program means.
And I have to say that as a marketer, this concept totally makes sense. By selling a package first, you can craft a much more desirable offer and message, because you can link it to the client’s dream outcome far better, and therefore, it becomes easier to sell. You’re also saving yourself a lot of the stress of clients showing up for 2-3 sessions and then just disappearing before they get results – which is the reason why I don’t do consultations on an hourly manner, but sell it in packages.
This module of the program has you come up with the idea of your high ticket program – as in who you’re going to be targeting with it and what problem you solve for them, how you describe your program (marketing messaging), how to structure your modules and sessions, whether you should give a guarantee or not, and what price you should charge.
At the end of the module, you get on a call with the program coach, who is another specialist with expertise in the field, and he helps you finish the last details on your coaching offer, as well as validate if it’s something that’s viable from a business / marketing standpoint.
I think the high ticket program is very well-thought-out, and they managed to make some very difficult tasks easy and straightforward, and they deserve props for that.
Creating your website
One part of Accelerator is that the tech team will create a custom coaching website for you. Because of how the program is structured to get your first clients as soon as possible, you will have two versions of your website. They call it Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 (how creative!)
What this means is first, they will build you a website that is “minimum viable” which is basically a startup business term for quick but good enough. This means, your website won’t be the most spectacular you’ve ever seen. Rather, they prioritize getting it out ASAP (so you can start getting in clients), and also having it conversion optimized.
So what is conversion optimized you might say? In marketing lingo, this means that the layout, the arrangement of the buttons, media, use of imagery and the content is all built in such a way that it maximizes the number of people reaching out to work with you. This can be done with things as simple as making the website easier to use, but also through psychological persuasion principles.
At the agency, we build a lot of websites, and I can say that Accelerator’s websites are using both principles. So while they are not the most attractive-looking, their performance should be (I don’t have the exact data on that) pretty good. I also have to state that the more fancy-looking websites often perform poorer on the cold-hard metrics of how many people reach out through them, although they are great for long-term brand building.
If we only look at performance numbers, however, simple and basic websites win the game. That’s what you get here. And later on, a few months into the program, Coach Foundation will build you a more sophisticated, brand-oriented website.
The Accelerator 6-weeks fast-track
Now, the 6-weeks fast track is the most exciting part of Accelerator. This is where you take the foundations of your coaching business, aka. the niche and the high-ticket program, and you start up your marketing & sales machine to get your client. It’s very action-oriented and throughout the entire 6-week period, you always have something you have to be working on.
It’s also this part, where you start working with Ari (the head coach) again, on the so-called accountability workshops which are once every week. Now, they call this an accountability workshop, but I’ve attended one, and it’s definitely more than just accountability.
This workshop is where you get personalized coaching from the head coach, Ari who meticulously tracks everybody’s progress going through the 6 weeks and helps them along the way. They set goals and objective key results, which makes it very straightforward, you always have the next steps in front of you and it makes it easier not to slack off.
The fast-track modules
The 6-week fast track has one video module for each week:
- Getting JV ready
- Contacting and closing JVs
- Scaling traffic
- The foundation
- The methodology
- The sales process
Accelerator’s source of coaching clients: Joint ventures
Accelerator uses the so-called Joint Venture method to get you, clients. Now, it’s very interesting that they use this method, as this is something I have never seen in any other coaching program or course, and I too, personally only learned about it from my network of other advanced marketers.
So what are Joint Ventures (JVs?). JVs are basically when you find someone who’s working in a similar niche and field of clients as you are, and they already have a following, whether that is a youtube channel, an email list, or a Facebook page or group. You promote them to your own following and in exchange, they promote you to their following.
But how can you do that when you’re just starting out and have no following at all?
Coach Foundation will promote back JVs for you as a part of their service.
Meaning, you find somebody with a similar following to yours, and the Coach Foundation team, from their dozens of email lists, promotes back that person. The end result of this is that you can get promoted by a similar coach who has 100 000 followers and you have to do nothing in exchange because Coach Foundation takes care of all that.
Now, this is crazy right? I think this part of their service is super neat and so useful to beginner coaches.
Your first 1000 email subscribers
During the “6-week fast track”, the coach foundation team does a promotion (to their same email followers from their various lists) to promote your coaching business and get you your first 1000 subscribers on your list.
Now, that’s cool, but what does 1000 people on your email list mean right? Does that translate into actual clients? Well, it depends on the quality of the email list. I.E. if they’re super interested, it’s better than if they don’t care about your services at all.
But a typical range of how many you can turn into clients (with good emails, which they say they write for you) is around 1-5%, which from a 1000 people email list is actually quite a lot. It translates to your 10-50 first coaching clients, which even at the bottom of the range is good enough, to get your business off the ground.
By the way, I’m really don’t want to sound like I’m praising their every move, but I think this is also something that’s super cool to include in this program, as other people would charge you $3-5k to build such a list for you, let alone write the emails too, and this is all included in Accelerator.
Sales training
If you’ve been around the online business/marketing world, you will know that $3-5k high-ticket clients won’t just come sign up from a website. For that reason, people normally send potential clients to a form where they can book a call, and then they sell the product/program/service on that call.
Again, Accelerator takes this into mind, and for that reason, your website and funnels are all built by them to lead people to book a call with you. But you will have to be able to sell your coaching to these people, so they must include a sales training in Accelerator.
This is the second part of the 6-week fast track. Here, the modules guide you through quite detailed sales training which builds up from the absolute basics and fundamentals to quite advanced levels. Their sales methodology by the way is very low-pressure, focuses on being ethical, and it should be easy to execute even for introverts and people who don’t like speaking a lot.
Besides the modules, when you get to the second half of the fast track, you also unlock the weekly sales coaching calls, and sales roleplay calls, and you get to record and send your sales calls to the sales coach for analysis, to which they then give their feedback so you know where to improve.
After the 6 weeks
Accelerator is a 1-year program so what happens after the 6 weeks? Most of it is the same as in the first 6 weeks: rinse and repeat: getting more JV promotions, more sales calls, and more coaching clients.
You still get to attend the following calls:
- Weekly ask anything Q&A calls with Sai
- Weekly sales Q&A calls with the Coach Foundation Head of Sales
- Weekly JV Q&A coaching call with the JV department lead
- Weekly accountability coaching call with the head coach
You get access to the “8-week scaling challenge”
This challenge is where you focus on automating your coaching business via more advanced funnels (automating the client acquisition side.) They coach you through scripting and recording your own automated webinar, which is a webinar that you record once and then runs automatically.
This allows you to have much more efficient funnels, which you can then scale to even more JVs and even more clients coming through. You also create a more advanced automated marketing email sequence, which the Coach Foundation team integrates with all of your funnels, and sets up all the tech for you including the webinar funnel.
After the 6 weeks, the Coach Foundation team
- builds your “2.0” website, the more professional version
- creates your blog for you
- creates your advanced funnels
- automates your webinars
- creates your Facebook page and builds it to 1000 likes
Our overall rating: 9/10
All in all, Coach Foundation Accelerator seems to be a well-put-together program, and probably the best value for your money program for coaches. It is a breath of fresh air in an industry where everybody is overcharging and underdelivering (I won’t name names, not to get sued.) The team in Accelerator focuses on doing the exact opposite.
The value of the services included with the program really sets it apart, and if you were to get everything included in this program (PR, website, funnel building, etc.) you’d end up spending double the price you pay for Accelerator. You also have the Accelerator tech team ready to roll for you every day of the week, and that kind of availability would not be possible working with an agency or freelancers.
So, to recap:
The quality of the material
All the material in the modules is well-written and well-thought-out. It covers all the necessary basics of starting an online business with some changes specific to coaching, in enough detail to explain every concept to a beginner but not get lost in the details.
I especially want to highlight the Joint Venture and the sales methodologies. The Joint Venture methodology is one of the best ways to get clients for any online business, and with the help of the Accelerator team, it’s possible even for complete beginners.
No other course or program I’ve seen to this day is teaching JVs, as it’s relatively unknown, hence why it works so well. And for the sales methodology, their approach is also relatively new, replacing the old ways of doing sales that you know from pushy car salespeople with a much laid-back and passive, ethical way of selling.
The help
From what I’ve seen, the Accelerator team is highly committed and goes the extra mile to help everybody, keep track of progress and if someone gets stuck, help them with their blockages.
It’s also a team made up of specialists: you have a specific coach for sales, and joint ventures, but you can talk to Sai about general business topics, and I think it’s also important to have somebody who has the full picture of all the things in business and sees the correlations.
Accelerator’s extra services
Accelerator is not just a coaching program or course.
It also includes marketing and tech services:
- building your funnels
- building and maintaining, updating your website
- building your automated webinar
- getting you published in news outlets as significant as Forbes for PR and brand recognition
- getting you published as a bestselling author to establish your expertise in coaching
- having your marketing copy reviewed by a pro writer who’s responsible for millions of dollars in sales
No other program or course in the coaching space matches this kind of value.
The only thing I find a bit lackluster is the community and networking opportunities. In a group coaching program of this magnitude, there is normally more activity in the communities, and people are encouraged to network with each other.
Even though I saw people celebrating wins and helping each other out with JV promotions in the Facebook group, I still think there is so much more that they could do in this area with live events, online networking workshops, and so on.
All in all, Accelerator is still a well-rounded program and a great buy, therefore it gets a 9/10 Influence Digest rating.
