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Your calendar’s full, you don’t want to raise your prices again, and you’re tired of trading hours for dollars. So you do what every business strategist tells you to do next: build a course. Or maybe you already built one, it’s sitting there half-used, and you can’t tell if it needs fixing or if you should just let it go.
Dr. Catrina Mitchum runs into both versions of this constantly. Her read: the standard advice, build a course to scale, skips a step. It treats every skill as teachable in a group setting and assumes every client actually wants to learn it themselves. Neither is always true, whether you’re deciding to build something new or deciding what to do with something you’ve already got.
Catrina is a recovering academic and learning designer who helps businesses build courses grounded in learning science instead of marketing hype. She built a two-filter audit for exactly this.
How It Works
Catrina runs every course decision, new or existing, through two filters.
The first is teachability. If you can’t name a real, specific skill or outcome, it’s not ready to be taught, group format or not. This works just as well as an audit question for a course you already have as it does for one you’re considering.
The second is the strategic job the course needs to do in your business. There are four options: it warms up leads, it’s the main thing your business runs on, it supplements your one-on-one work (prepping someone for it, or giving them somewhere to go after), or it’s a smaller “side quest” that supports the bigger done-for-you service. Catrina points to her own SEO consultant as the model: full one-on-one SEO work up front, then a quarterly “back pocket SEO” membership afterward so clients can maintain it themselves.
Why It Works
The standard advice skips a step: it assumes wanting to stop trading time for money automatically means a course is the fix. Catrina’s seen people build entire courses off someone else’s template, ones that technically worked for that template’s creator, only to find it didn’t match how they actually wanted to serve clients. The course sits unused, and building it, even with AI doing some of the lift, still costs real time and energy that’s now gone.
Results
- One former client ran her existing course through this and found out her clients weren’t paying for the course, they were paying for her. She skipped the rebuild and kept doing the work they wanted, and that she actually wanted to do.
“No” isn’t a rejection here, it’s data. Finding out a course is wrong before you build it costs an hour. Finding out after costs the months and resources you spent building it.
How you can do it
What you can knock out on your lunch hour
- Try to complete the sentence. “After this course, they’ll be able to ___.” If you can’t fill in something concrete and specific, it’s not a teachable skill. And that means a course is not the move.
- Name the actual job you need this course to do: lead gen, your main offer, a supplement to your one-on-one work, or a side quest supporting it. The job determines the structure, a lead-gen side quest doesn’t need strategy calls built in while a course meant to replace your main offer does.
- Write (or rewrite) a 3-5 sentence description, specific about what someone gets and why they’d want it. Vague descriptions usually mean the offer itself is still vague, new or existing.
When you have more time, here’s where it goes next
4. Turn that description into what Catrina calls learner questions, basically market research questions, aimed specifically at readiness to learn: do you want to learn this yourself, how much time do you actually have in a week, what’s your experience with this already?
5. Talk to your ideal clients. Ask the learner question to former clients, people who’ve expressed interest in your services, relevant newsletter subscribers… Make sure you’re targeting potential buyers. A conversation is better than a survey, but a survey is better than nothing!
6. Watch for the real tell. If what your clients actually want is done-for-you, not to learn it themselves, a course is the wrong move, whether you’re about to build one or already have.
If you’ve already got a small team, this shows up a little differently. You likely brought people on to replicate what you do, and when that replication doesn’t fully take, a course can start to look like the fix. It’s worth running the same two filters anyway, a course doesn’t solve a training gap, and stacking one on top of a stretched team just adds something new to manage without a clear job attached to it.
Tools
- Not sure yet whether it’s a build, a fix, or a pass? Take Catrina’s quiz, Is a Course Right for You?, to run your own answer through her filters.
- Get more course tips in her newsletter, Cut the Crap.
Once you’ve decided whether to build, fix, or let go of a course, the next question is where it actually sits in your offer stack, what you’d want someone to say yes to next after they’ve said yes to that. Jessica Miller’s Day 10 tip will help you answer that.
See you tomorrow,
Stacy
P.S. Dr. Catrina Mitchum is a recovering academic and learning designer who helps businesses build courses grounded in learning science, not marketing hype. Find her at cmlearningdesign.com, on LinkedIn, Threads, or subscribe to Cut the Crap.
