Wendy McCallum (00:01.848)
Hello, coach. Welcome back to The Coaching Edge. I'm your host, Wendy McCallum, and we're talking about something that is very time sensitive today. I have very strategically placed this episode in mid-October because what we're talking about today is how to get your coaching holiday offers and content ready now so that you can actually enjoy the holiday season this year. And this is something that I...
learned how to do the hard way. For the first five years or so of building this coaching business, I found myself in a similar place in December. And it was something like, you know, realizing I had no real plan for the season and no content done, no real seasonal offer to speak of, just a creeping sense of panic, honestly, and a feeling that I was not going to make any revenue in December because
I didn't have anything ready, but also because I felt highly uncomfortable selling in December, a month when people are typically strapped for cash and feeling stressed financially. And so that just was not in alignment with me as a business owner. I just didn't feel good about that. And if that's you, that is totally okay, by the way, just a little sidetrack here. It is okay to feel that way and it is okay to plan around that. I also think for other reasons, which we're gonna talk about in a second, it's actually a pretty good strategy.
to not plan for December to be a huge month for you financially. But for me, it was also not in alignment with my values. It just didn't feel good to me. On top of that, because of the stress that I would feel about being disorganized, I would end up working a lot trying to fill in the gap and figure it out and hopefully hustle to make a little bit of money. And that stress and all of the work involved in that would lead to, actually would add to the already...
the overwhelm that was already there just because it was the holiday season and I had two little kids and I was entertaining family and all the rest of it. So it was contributing to burnout for me too. Overall, it just was not a good scenario. And what I have learned over the last 15 years of coaching is that it doesn't need to be that way. And actually there is a really much more strategic way to approach the holiday season that will both serve your business and serve you as a business owner. So we're going to talk about
Wendy McCallum (02:26.766)
how to do that. What I realized at a certain point was that for most niches, and again, if you are just new to this podcast, you may not know that I have had several different niches as a coach over the years. I started around food and wellness, nutrition, moved into more personal life coaching around big transitions with a specialty around stress and burnout for professional women, and eventually also became certified around alcohol coaching. And now,
Primarily, I work with coaches helping them build their businesses. So I have experimented with different niches over the last 15 years. And what I have found is that for pretty much all of those niches, this one thing is consistent. And that is that from late October to early November, it's actually prime buying season. So for my clients across all of those niches, it's a really great time to be selling because they're actually interested in buying.
Why? Because they have more bandwidth. So they've gotten through the rush and chaos that is usually sort of back to school September season. They're out of that. There's a little room to breathe between September and the holidays that start in many places sort of towards the end of November. And they're not maxed out by that chaos yet. So they still feel like they have some resources and also, and maybe most importantly in the business of coaching.
they're still thinking about themselves. So they're still thinking about investing in themselves. They have not yet switched to like gift mode, which starts in the beginning of sort of, well, for me, it's the beginning of December, but it's probably a little earlier than that for some people. But that gift mode that we get into, all we're doing is thinking about other people and buying for other people. So for all of those reasons, people have more resources and bandwidth, they're not maxed out by holiday chaos.
They also have more spending ability, more spending power at this point because they're also not maxed out financially at this point. And they're actually still thinking about themselves and investing in themselves. It's a really great time to sell. By mid December, unless your offer is a super giftable offer, i.e. easy to buy for someone else, or it's super low commitment, so it doesn't involve a lot of money or time on the part of your client, it's probably a tougher sell.
Wendy McCallum (04:53.961)
So what I do now is I actually plan my holiday content and offers in October so that I can sell early, i.e. October and early November, so that I can pre-sell some January programming spots. And so I personally can stay out of sales mode in the month of December. It's just not a big...
sales push month for me. Now you for your niche or for your business model, it may work really well for you to sell in December. So I'm not suggesting that is the only way to do it. I'm just saying for me as somebody for whom it doesn't feel great to be really doing hard sales in a month when people are already pretty strapped. And for somebody who, you know, always has a pretty great January offer. I've got a system that allows me to feel
confident through the month of December, not feel overwhelmed, not feel a lot of pressure and allows me to actually enjoy my holidays and have some consistent revenue. So I'm gonna today talk about how I do that. So my planning framework around that, I'm gonna try to share a list of things for you to think about when you are preparing your own seasonal content and offers. And I'm really gonna challenge you to start thinking about this right now, like at the time of this podcast and right after I want you to sit down and start thinking like, what is my plan and strategy in
late October, November, and December. Like, what am I doing? And I'm also gonna try to give you some really specific creative ideas that are flexible so that can be used in any coaching niche. And I'll give you some examples from different types of coaching for how you could use these that are gonna give you some holiday-specific offer ideas, so some ways to do this. So it's gonna be lots packed into this episode. So this might be one that you wanna go back to again with a piece of...
paper or if you're sitting listening to it somewhere right now, take out your phone and start a note. Cause I'm going to encourage you to take these things away and implement them right after this episode. Okay. So why is October the magic month? Why am I having this conversation with you in mid October? Again, it's because of that buying behavior that I was talking about, which is that at this time of year, people are still thinking about investing in themselves. They're thinking about their own goals.
Wendy McCallum (07:13.269)
They're thinking about self-improvement. So for us as coaches who are in the business of helping people with their personal and or business goals This is a great time to be making offers I think you know, we're we're pre that Wallet fatigue that financial stress that starts with the holidays for most people It's before the mental load of the holidays sets in
before people are traveling and really focused on family and other priorities. So that's great. Again, unless your offer is really easy to gift or it's a low effort offer for December, it's probably gonna be a trickier sell for you. And it's also a really great time to start thinking about how you can pre-sell a great January offer. So before people get into that fatigue of the holidays and that financial fatigue of spending,
while they're still ready to invest in themselves and they're still interested in personal growth and development, can you pre-sell a January offer? So that's something we're gonna talk about. So for all those reasons, it's a magic month. But here's the other thing that I wanna talk about today. This is a good month for you as a coach, usually. For me and for most of the coaches that I support in the BBB, my business building bootcamp, that flagship one-year program, we find that September is typically a pretty busy month. It's a back-to-school month.
for most of my coaches, depends on where they live in the world, but for most of us, it is a back to school month and that involves back to work for people and just a shift of seasons. And so there's a lot of extra stress involved in that. it's typically a busy month for coaches personally, but also a busy month professionally. October is a bit of a lull. It's just a little quieter. There's a little bit of relief. You can breathe again. It's a good month.
to get creative, it's a good month to plan, it's a good month to just start working on getting some other work done. So I think it's good for us as coaches, but it's also a good time for our clients to be doing this. It's for me always like a fresh start kind of month, October. like always am just trying to get through September, because September is always kind of nutty for me. Usually the busiest month for people, new coaches joining the BBB. I usually have a bunch of different.
Wendy McCallum (09:31.79)
things that I'm doing, know, last month I did a workshop, I have open house for the BBB, I've got, you know, a bunch of new people coming in that I need to onboard. It's a busy month for me. October is that time where I really have time to reflect and actually do some forward planning. So, for all of those reasons, October is a really great month to be doing this work and that's why we're talking about this today.
Here are the two goals that I have for you. These are my goals and these are the goals that I hope that you will assume as well for yourself around holiday planning. The first thing you wanna do is maintain connection with your audience. You wanna continue doing the nurturing that we've been talking about in recent episodes. It's just really important to build that like no trust, especially in today's trust recession climate. So you wanna stay connected. You don't wanna burn yourself out and just drop off the face of the planet for a couple months.
That's not a great idea. However, if you do need to take a break because you have burnt yourself out, please take the break. This is not me saying don't take a break and just push through it. I'm saying do the planning in advance so that you don't find yourself in that situation. So one goal is to maintain connections, stay visible without exhausting yourself. And the other goal is to generate some revenue in a seasonal and aligned way. So really tapping into the...
emotions and the patterns of the season and how people are feeling and creating a plan that's actually in alignment with that. And again, part of that for me is not being out there doing a you know, hard sale campaign in the month of December when everyone's feeling harried and exhausted and frankly, usually quite poor. That's how I feel in December. those are the two goals.
Let's talk about some of the things to think about when you're planning holiday content and offers. So I'm gonna go through a lot of different things that I think are important considerations. the first thing we have just talked about, and that is to really know your sales windows. So when are you actually going to be actively selling? And if you're planning this in October, you get to decide in advance.
Wendy McCallum (11:48.951)
And that allows you to do it when you know it's gonna feel good to you. So it feels great to me to be selling in September and October, and even into the first couple of weeks of November, it doesn't feel great to me to be doing a lot of hard selling after American Thanksgiving. It really doesn't. So I am going to look at the sales windows as being I can sell in September for October, I can sell in October for November, but I can also pre-sell at the end of October and in November for a January offer.
as opposed to something that's gonna start in December. Now, again, for some of you, the windows might be different and it might be just the perfect time for you to be offering something that actually starts in December. There are creative ways to do this and I'm not saying you can't sell or you can't make offers that are happening in December. I'm saying for me personally, this feels good to me and it's worked for me over the years. So know your sales window. When are you actually, or windows, when are you actually gonna be selling and when are you gonna take a break from like,
Hard sell, not even hard sell. If you know me, you know that I'm not into the hard sell anyway, but I mean just sort of like conscious, really intentional selling. The second thing to think about is batching. I'm a big fan of batching. I batch these podcasts now. This is the third podcast I've recorded in the last 24 hours. I like to get all my podcasts planned, mapped out, recorded.
edited and uploaded two months before they actually air. So I'm actually recording this episode in August. And that's because I get into the groove of it. And once I'm in the groove of it, it's easy to just keep going with it. And I think that that is generally true no matter what type of work you're doing in your business. So what can you batch? Can you batch record? Can you batch write content? And can you batch schedule like your content? Can you do all of that in?
late October, early November and get it all done right through until January. That can feel amazing. Also think about if there's a way for you to tie in some holiday themes to your existing niche and coaching area of coaching expertise. So how can you connect in a really natural and organic way the holidays and the work that you do in all the other months of the year?
Wendy McCallum (14:13.998)
So, you if we're talking about, for example, let's talk about food. When I was coaching around Food and Wellness, had a program called Holiday Balance that I ran every year. I pre-sold it. It ran from November 15th to December 15th, but it was sold well before that. So again, I was looking at that sales window that was the end of October, beginning of November. It was a pretty low cost offer and pretty low investment in terms of time as well, commitment. So it was one of those
like unicorn offers that I was talking about earlier, that's actually a really great offer to run in December because it didn't involve a lot of work for me. So I wasn't doing any live coaching in it. It was a program where people got a batch of content every week for four weeks that was designed to help them get ahead of the holiday game so that they would have a lot of food pre-made and frozen in the freezer and they would be organized.
in terms of all of the holiday stuff that they had to do. And they would also, you know, maybe get better at setting some boundaries and saying no to things and all of that so that they can actually maintain their sense of balance over the holidays. And when the holidays came around, they had all their food in the freezer ready to go and they could actually put their feet up and enjoy a week off with their family. So that little program was naturally connected to the work that I did because the normal coaching niche that I was in was all about helping people.
practically speaking, make more of their own food. So doing that in a simple way with simple but tasty recipes and also figuring out how to balance that with real life and all the other pressures and stressors of real life. So holiday balance program worked great for me. So how can you tie in your existing area of expertise and your niche in with some holiday themes? I would also like have a think about what the
typical emotions, the emotional sort of landscape of your avatar client is during the holiday season. So think about the people that you support. How are they typically feeling in the season? What types of emotions are present for them that maybe aren't present for everybody else? So for example, if you work with newly divorced mothers, let's say that's your coaching niche, there are going to be a whole bunch of emotions that are coming up around the seasons that are unique.
Wendy McCallum (16:35.608)
to that client? Is there a way for you to support your clients in those emotions, whatever those seasonal emotions might be? But you can also, you know, tap into some of those typical emotions that happen in the holiday season. And honestly, it runs the gamut for us. For a lot of us, it's a season that feels a lot more joyful and positive, but there's also a lot of overwhelm and stress and exhaustion. And for many of us,
It can be a time of grief when we're things or people that were once part of our life. that's one that you can spend a lot of time in, but just think about that. What are some unique emotions that you can actually address and support in your programming? Okay, the other thing that I think is really important to be thinking about is the whole, much selling do I actually want to be doing here? And is this maybe a time for me to create more value and do less selling?
And that's what I typically do in the month of December is I'm really trying hard to be putting out some really valuable, helpful, timely content for people without asking them to purchase something. So again, it's not a big sales month for me. It's a seed planting month. do the big sales come before it, the pre-January sales. then once the holidays are over, we're past Boxing Day.
That's when I start selling again for January stuff. Is there a way for you to repurpose? This is something else you can think about. Did you do something last year that worked really well around the holidays? Or do you have some content that you can just go back and recycle, update, change the images, and reuse it? Because you don't have to reinvent the wheel and start from scratch with everything. And especially when we're talking about content, people forget.
And frankly, most people don't see the stuff the first time you put it out. So it's totally okay to repurpose content. Be strategic about that. It's a lifesaver, frankly, as a solopreneur.
Wendy McCallum (18:40.322)
This one's really important. It's really important in October to plan for time off. When do you actually want to be able to completely unplug from your business and take time to recharge, to spend time with loved ones and to celebrate the holidays? When do you want to be able to do that? Sharpie it into your calendar. Do you want a week off around American Thanksgiving? Sharpie that in. Do you want a week off at Christmas time or two weeks off at Christmas time? I usually do two weeks, frankly, and I Sharpie it in.
Why is that important? It's important because in order for me to do that, I need to be ahead of the game with content. I need to have content, newsletters, things like that pre-scheduled so that I know that I can just step away and things are going to kind of run on their own. It also helps me figure out the timing of the selling as well to know when I'm taking time off. So it's really important to do that. But most importantly, if I don't sharp it into my calendar, I don't do it.
Because one of the things I need to do in order to take two weeks off, for example, is I need to reschedule clients. I need to cancel clients. I need to literally clear my calendar. If we're talking about the BBB, I usually take one week off from the BBB at Christmas time. Most of my coaches are happy to take a week off as well then. So there are no office hours for a week. And then the other week, either I am doing like office hours light.
where there's maybe one office hours call that week, or sometimes I bring a guest coach in to host those if I wanted to take longer off. So, but I have to plan for all of that. That doesn't just, can't happen last minute. It's also a really good time to make your content a little lighter again. So just a little lighter, more positive content. What's actually gonna make your clients or your audience feel better this season? It's a good time for...
little tips and stories and reflections and not like super heavy stuff in my opinion. What can you automate with your holiday content? So how would it feel to have everything set up, automated, scheduled, ready to go? I can tell you it feels great. As somebody who's gotten into the groove of having the majority of their content pre-scheduled a full month to two months in advance.
Wendy McCallum (20:58.592)
It feels really, really good. And it was not always this way in my business, but you can absolutely do this yourself. It just takes, it takes some pre-planning and it's so helpful for so many reasons. mean, obviously it's helpful because it takes the load off and there's less pressure in the moment. You're feeling less of that panicky feeling, but it's also really helpful in terms of planning because you can coordinate your content when you have a plan for it. You can sort of coordinate.
what you're saying, for example, I know that in this podcast episode, it's coming out in the middle of October. I know that the timing is right for you, the listener, but also I know that there's nothing in particular right now that I'm doing any kind of big sales push on. There's no launch happening right now. So I'm not gonna be trying to talk about anything in this podcast episode, particularly, I'm just gonna be giving you my thoughts on holidays and strategies and planning.
But sometimes I do episodes and I know that at the time the episode's going to drop, I'm also going to be about to open the doors on, you know, the CCC or there's an open house in a couple days after the podcast drops, in which case I'm going to mention that in the podcast episode. But if I don't have a plan for content in advance, that's really tricky to do. So this is something, again, it took me a while to get to a place where I have a real system around this, but I really want to encourage you to think about this and
The holidays are a great time to start the ball rolling on this and you can keep it going in January and February and on. You can try to be a couple of months ahead of your content, have a sense of what's happening in the next quarter of your year, in the quarter that you're in right now and plan for that. And then you can automate things. You can have it all set up. It's also pretty important to have some financial targets in this last quarter of the year. And this is the place where people fall down.
because they often have a financial target and the financial target is everything that they didn't make in the first three quarters of the year, right? And so they're trying to make that up, but they make the mistake of splitting up the revenue over September, October, November and December, or November, if we're talking about quarters, November, sorry, October, November, December. And as I've said, December is usually not, for a lot of us, it's not a really big revenue month.
Wendy McCallum (23:17.92)
And so this whole planning process that I'm talking about right now is going to prevent you from getting to December and feeling like, shoot, I still have to make up another $10,000 and I don't know how I'm going to do that in my business because it's a bad time to sell and I don't have an offer, right? Instead, what you can do with this, and this is how I do it, is I plan for a very big month in September and I plan for a pretty big month in October. I plan for less in November and for very little in December and a huge month in January.
And all of that evens out to meet my overall monthly revenue requirements or goals, right? So without planning though, you can find yourself in December really panicking about revenue. Okay, so those are the things to think about when you're planning your holiday content and offers. And I'm now gonna talk a little bit about how to organize it and get it done in advance. So some of this is gonna feel like slightly repetitious, but these are all really, really important to think about. So the first thing you wanna do is map out your season.
literally get a big calendar and map this out. Print out some blank calendar templates from Canva. You can find them in there for every month of the year. Just search for it in the templates. Print those out and mark in key dates like things like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Hanukkah, Christmas, whatever the holidays are that are the holidays that you want to address, you want to be aware of or celebrate yourself.
And make sure everything that's important is in there, including your January offer start date. So put your offers in there. So for example, for me, there's always a CCC that runs in October and in November, my coaching course creator program, that's gonna be in my calendar. Sometimes I have other small offers that are running as well, but usually that's the big thing that happens in October. And I pre-sell that in September. But any other...
marketing that I'm doing generally in like November, December is usually either seasonal, very specific small offers, again, maybe giftable things like there may be some gift certificate type things that I'm offering or I'm pre-selling January, right? So I've got that all mapped out though, so that I accept and I'm totally not surprised.
Wendy McCallum (25:36.9)
by the fact that there's less revenue in December than there was in September and that there is going to be in January, for example. Pick your main holiday offer. Like I just said, mine is the October. It's not really a holiday offer. It's not even seasonal, but it's just the thing that I run in October and November because it's a good time of year to be running a course for me. If you're going to do a seasonal holiday offer, decide if it's going to be for October, November, or if it's something like giftable, or if it's more like a January focused thing that you're going to pre-sell.
So holiday offer does not mean necessarily like the 12 days of Christmas offer, right? It doesn't have to be tied seasonally at all. Your content should be. So your social media content, your newsletters, you're wanna make note of the fact that you're in the seasons and you can talk about some of the things that I've already mentioned in terms of like typical emotions or challenges that your avatar client might be having right now, but your offer can be whatever your offer is.
It's just a matter of knowing it and knowing when it's happening. So you're to pick your main holiday offer. Don't do too much stuff. Again, for me, CCC, October, November, and then a big push on the BBB that happens in January. There's always an open house in January. There is also an open house usually in November. So those are the things that are happening. I know that a lot of the coaches who come to the November open house are thinking about joining in January, and I'm cool with that.
Like I am aware of the mentality of buying at the end of November. People are feeling strapped, people are feeling overwhelmed. So I'm totally okay with that. And usually I talk about that in that open house. You may be here because you're thinking about joining in January. Great, I'd be happy to welcome you then. If you have any questions between now and January joining, just reach out to me. I'm happy to answer those. So I'm anticipating that. You also wanna do that content calendar.
you know, which includes a lot of nurturing free valuable content, like we talked about some seasonal stuff and also some offer promos. So anything that you need to do to actually be marketing and selling your offers. Batching and scheduling is important. So once you've got the content calendar done, you'd want to block a couple of days in October. do this, I frankly do this every month, but I block a couple of days to brainstorm.
Wendy McCallum (27:51.64)
outline and then actually record and create content, whether that's podcast episodes, social media stuff, newsletters, all of that. So set aside some days in October to do that and get ahead of the game. Once you have got your calendar all set up with your holiday offers and you've got your time you want to take off all blocked off and all of that. Set up your automations. So that might mean landing pages, payment links, email sequences to go with any offers that you have.
Get those all done in advance and then protect your time off. Put some non-negotiable boundaries around your holiday time. This is so important. And this is where thinking ahead about what might throw a stick in the bicycle spoke in the wheels, I guess, of your bicycle, your holiday bicycle might be like, what's the thing? That's a terrible metaphor. But what is the thing that might cause you to go kind of...
off the rails and not actually take your holiday. And how can you pre plan for that? How can you anticipate that now and make sure that doesn't happen? For me, it's not having somebody to cover off office hours. It's not giving my clients enough time when it comes to canceling or rescheduling appointments during that time. And so I am always thinking about that in advance. So protect your time off. All right, now let's get into 10 creative holiday specific offer ideas. And as I said earlier, I'm gonna try to give you some niche specific.
iterations of each of these so you can see how you could take these ideas and make them work for your particular niche. So how about a power session package for the holidays? So something that is, you a little bit holiday connected or themed, but that's a smaller session. So again, this is probably feels like it's more within the reach of your clients. Something like for life coaching, might be a 90 minute declutter your mind before the new year session.
Right? So it's focused on getting really clear before the new year. I think it'd be a great idea to do one that's like how to make holiday resolutions or sorry, new year's resolutions that actually work this year. So how to make sure that the goals that you set for yourself are actually achievable and that you have a plan for achieving those that sets you up for the greatest chance of success. That would be a great little program to run in December as a life coach or a wellness coach.
Wendy McCallum (30:16.879)
In business coaching, it might be something around like finishing the last quarter strong. a or it might be a business audit that allows you to sit down with somebody like me and go through how your last year went so that you can do some planning for the new year. Something that is, you know, timely, but a smaller sort of power session. So that's one idea. Holiday power session package. Black Friday bonus bundle. So
bundle up a few little things and sell them on a Black Friday sale. I'm not a big Black Friday person myself. Maybe it's because I'm from Canada, but I know that a lot of people love a Black Friday offer. And so if that's you, do it, go for it. So for example, in life coaching, it might be like buy three sessions, get a personalized vision board workshop or something in January. For business coaching, it might be
you know, buy this like self-guided course and get a bonus business audit with me. For wellness coaching, might be, I've got this four week holiday balance program. And with it, if you buy it now, you also get a free virtual pantry makeover or something like that. So it's some kind of little bundle and it's what you offer already, but with some added special.
Session or service or program or resource that you wouldn't otherwise offer with it and it's a black Friday sale another thing you can do is Pre-sell like a jumpstart program for January, but you can pre-sell it in November December so again like a new year new habits program you could sell that as a life coach you could sell that in November for January or for business for if I was you know as a business coach it might be
something around like, you know, filling your client funnel in the first 90 days of the new year, or some kind of a 30 day fitness challenge or an alcohol free experiment for 30 days, like anything that's kind of a jumpstart or a reset program that you can sell that people would be motivated to start in January, but that you can pre-sell in late October, November.
Wendy McCallum (32:39.663)
Coaching gift certificates also can be great. So what is a little package that you could sell that somebody would want to gift somebody else? So I love the idea of if you're, for example, a life coach, you work around transitions for women, you help women through big transitions, you might sell gift certificates that people might buy for their friends, but you're have to tell them why they wanna buy that for their friend and why it's a great gift. So for example, you know somebody who's recently gone through a divorce? I sell this really great like three session,
you know, new chapter coaching package that helps people, know, whatever your transformative promises. Or if you were a business coach, you know, if you've got a friend who's an entrepreneur, this is a really great gift. Or if you're looking for gifts, maybe they're your service provider and you're looking for gifts for your small business clients, here's a really great gift. Gift them a session with me.
a business breakthrough session with me where we do like an audit on their business and come up with a strategy for the next three months for them or some kind of a wellness reset package for somebody who wants a fresh start. So you have a family member who's looking to make some changes, them coaching sessions with me. So coaching gift certificates can be really great, but I think you have to do a little bit of extra work when it comes to the marketing to really explain to people who they're for.
what type of friend or relative would you wanna buy this for? Because a lot of people don't understand what coaches do. But if you can make that connection for them and say, this is like a no brainer. If you've got a friend who's going through divorce or empty nesting, or who's just recently retired or planning to retire in the new year, what a great thoughtful gift to get them this coaching package. Mini group programs are great.
for the month of December for a lot of us. And I talked about my holiday balance package earlier that I used to offer when I did more food and wellness and kind stress management stuff. That was a really popular program. It was a very low ticket program. It was probably a hundred dollars or something. And it always sold really well. But again, I was careful to be selling it before the holiday season, before people were feeling spent literally and figuratively. So if you want to create a...
Wendy McCallum (34:57.065)
mini group program that runs in December, that is absolutely is a thing and you can do it. But I would just really be thoughtful about how people are feeling and what people are actually trying to achieve and what people are actually capable of achieving in the months of December that is typically a very overwhelming and exhausting month and make sure you're setting them up for success and also be wary of the price tag on it in terms of the investment.
A year in review or a goal setting workshop can also be a great thing to sell. No matter what niche you're in, there are ways to brand that and tailor that to your niche. So, you know, for life coaching, it might be like your best year yet, how to make 2026 like amazing. If you're a business coach, it might be something along the lines of what I do in December, which is I often offer my two times your profit in.
but this year it'd be two times your profit in 2026 workshop. It's all about looking forward and planning for the next year. So there are different ways that you can do that. A themed accountability group can be good. This could be paid or this could be free. This would be a great like free offer for people. So for example, to offer a free support group around like avoiding the overwhelm in December or holiday balance support group or community to help keep
keep people balanced and out of burnout or a little holiday hustle accountability group for coaches, for example. I could do that for my coaches, how to stay on top of things in the month of December. So there are different things that you can do there.
Bring a friend promo is also an idea. So that would be like a two for one type thing. You can do that sometimes in December, depending on the niche that you're in. It might be like a partner type promo, or it might be like bring a friend to a call where we're gonna talk about ex nutrition or whatever. Definitely an easy time to put yourself guided.
Wendy McCallum (37:12.332)
evergreen stuff on sale. So if you have like I do some digital courses and assets that you can sell, it's a great time to do a really big sale on those. things like, because those are low investment usually in terms of the amount of time that's involved in them. And they're also low investment in terms of the cost. Generally they're less expensive than one-on-one coaching or even live group coaching. So.
Things like my 30 day Burnout to Balance online program or my self-guided alcohol reset program, those are the types of things that I could sell at 50 % off. It'd also be a good Black Friday thing, frankly. So a self-study course sale, just giving a big discount on that. A VIP day with a seasonal bonus is also something you can try and that can, you could be pre-selling for January. So it might be,
like a January kickstart VIP day, like where you get together with somebody who spent the whole day with them mapping out the plan for the change that they want to make in the new year. And you could do that around wellness, you could do that around business, you could do that around alcohol. I think that's a really great idea. just, again, you wanna be pre-selling that. You wanna be ready for that, have that as your plan so that you're pre-selling that in November, probably, for January.
So those are just a lot of different ideas and hopefully that's been inspiring and motivating for you and giving you some things to think about. Just to recap, the time is now for this. October is a great time to be mapping out your plan for the next couple of months. If you leave it, it will get away from you and you will find yourself really stressed in December. So my goal for you is for you not to be there this year and for you to have a calmer,
more profitable overall holiday season that you feel good about. So I encourage you to pick one main offer. Think about that. What's my big offer going to be? Maybe one that you're going to try to sell for November and you might want to also think ahead to January. What's what am I going to pre-sell for January? And then you could think about whether there are some smaller things that you could use as like more giftable offers that you that you market in November for
Wendy McCallum (39:27.344)
December. And then I'm going to encourage you, I'm really going to encourage you to try to set aside like a half a day to a day to work on this holiday plan, to pick your holiday offer, to start mapping out your content, and to block off your time. Because you're really going to thank yourself for that when the chaos of December is upon you, and you're able to look forward to spending
some time relaxing with your family instead of constantly scrambling to come up with content and Canva templates to post the next day. So I hope you found that helpful. That's just little learned wisdom slash experience from somebody who has been there for 15 holiday seasons now. I've been doing this and I've learned a lot over the years. Hope you found that helpful. Love to hear your feedback on all of that.
Always you can reach out with ideas for topics for this podcast. I'm always, always happy to hear from new coaches. Or if you just want to connect, find me on Instagram at Wendy McCallum Coach or connect with me through my website, which is wendymcallum.com. Have a great day.
