September 17, 2025

What is the best structure to use for group coaching?

Do you do 1:1 coaching and are considering creating more leverage by offering a group option?

In today’s Ditcherville LIVE Q&A session, we had a question that might be of interest:

Q: “What’s the best structure to use for group coaching?”

It depends.

The best structure to use for group coaching is one that serves both you (i.e., the coach and business owner) and the coachees (i.e., the group members).

I’ve seen three models that coaches use to deliver group experiences:

Coaching Community

A coaching community is an online community of like-minded peers who come together to better achieve their goals.

The coach is the central figure, sets the ground rules, and has a heavy influence on the culture, but most of the value comes from peer-to-peer interaction.

Members often have access to some or all of the coach’s proprietary material, but there is typically not a specific curriculum or learning path.

There may be scheduled events featuring the coach or outside experts. Members are encouraged to create subgroups around special interests and potentially even schedule regular calls to discuss the subject (without the coach).

Coaching communities seem to function best when there are roughly 100-500 members. Fewer than 100 results in low engagement, and higher than 500 can lead to chaos (unless you add community managers).

The pricing model for a coaching community could be an open-ended recurring subscription (monthly, quarterly, or annual) or a one-time “lifetime” membership purchase. Tiered subscription levels that grant access to additional benefits are fairly common.

Mastermind

A mastermind is a carefully curated circle of 4-12 peers who meet regularly to share insights, provide accountability, and accelerate each other’s progress.

Members should have roughly aligned goals, values, or stages of business/life, but not be in direct competition. High-quality peer fit matters more than the number of members. There needs to be a high level of confidentiality and trust between members, and each is expected to make commitments and keep each other accountable.

Meetings are scheduled on a regular cadence - biweekly, monthly, and quarterly are common - and attendance is mandatory. The medium could be in-person, Zoom, or a hybrid. Meeting duration could be anywhere from 30 to 120 minutes, depending on the frequency. It’s common to have a private channel for members to communicate between calls (e.g., Slack, Discord, WhatsApp).

The coach may do an initial presentation to onboard and align the group, but there is no curriculum. The coach’s role is to act as a facilitator, keeping the meetings on track and moving forward. The goal is for the group members to help each other through hot seats, round robins, sharing insights, etc.

The pricing for a mastermind model is all over the map. I’ve seen everything from free to mid-five figures per year.

Live Group Course

A live group course is an online group experience where a cohort of students goes through a curriculum together and discusses their progress, challenges, findings, etc, with the coach and each other.

This is more of an online university model than a coaching experience, but it can be a good fit for a coach who has so much IP that students need some structure and support to work their way through it.

My favorite example of this approach is the Akimbo workshops originally run by Seth Godin, in which a series of video lessons was published over time into a private online forum.

Since students can’t jump ahead and “speed run” the entire course (because the videos are released one by one), the cohort pretty much stays together and can discuss each lesson as a group.

The coach can decide how much to interact with the students, but shouldn’t plan on answering every question that comes up about the material. Instead, the coach can deflect questions to other students who have a strong grasp of the material, collect common questions and answer them all in a recorded video shared in the forum, and/or hold periodic office hours where students can ask questions for a set time frame.

This model works best with at least 20 participants and can scale up to thousands (although you’d probably need a “teacher’s assistant” for every 500 or so students to keep yourself from going crazy LOL!)

I’ve seen pricing for this model range anywhere from under $100 to the low four-figures. NOTE: The higher the price, the fewer people will buy, so you want to find a sweet spot that balances high revenue with optimal group size.

Okay, that’s it for now. I don’t think I’ve discussed this topic much before, so please reply and ask if you have any follow-up questions. TIA!

Yours,

—J

P.S. Have you wasted months (or years!) stuck in analysis paralysis? Don’t waste another year moving one inch in every direction. Join us in Ditcherville now »

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