A few years ago I had what most online business coaches would call the dream. A six figure business, six months of traveling around Europe in a campervan, and one premium coaching program that carried everything, even through the hardest months of my life.
I don’t sell that program anymore.
In this post I want to tell you why, because the answer isn’t really about me. It’s about a question almost nobody in our industry asks, and once you’ve heard it, you won’t be able to unhear it: who carries the risk when someone invests in a program?
How I got into selling high ticket coaching
I didn’t start out selling $10,000 programs. I started out as someone who was actively put off by that whole corner of the online business world.
You know the model I mean. Coaches teaching coaches how to coach coaches, everyone selling business growth to everyone else who sells business growth. From the outside it always looked a little bit like a pyramid scheme to me. All about how much money you make, screenshots as the product.
And then 2020 happened, and I got sucked in anyway.
It happens gradually. You watch people around you growing faster than you. They all seem to be in these masterminds, and they talk about their coaches the way you’d talk about a secret ingredient. At some point the story in your head shifts from “that’s not for me” to “maybe this is the thing I’m missing.”
So I joined a mastermind for $10,000. Then another one for $20,000. And in those rooms I learned how to package, position and sell high ticket programs. I launched my own, sold it for $5,000, and eventually up to $10,000 for a year of working with me.
What selling a high ticket coaching program taught me
Here’s the part that surprises people. It worked.
In 2022 I sold basically nothing else but this program. It carried me through the campervan months and through the months after my mum died, when I wasn’t really working at all. And I’m not going to pretend that having someone pay you $5,000 for your work doesn’t feel amazing. It does. There’s nothing wrong with wanting that.
I also genuinely believe I delivered. Some of my students got incredible results, $20k months, big launches that changed what they believed was possible for themselves.
But there was a crack in it, and over time I couldn’t stop seeing it.
Some people signed up and then disappeared. They stopped showing up, stopped doing the work, and some eventually stopped paying. It was a small percentage, but every single one stayed with me. Because each one meant a real person, usually a yoga teacher without a lot of spare money, who had committed thousands of dollars to something she wasn’t using.
And under the high ticket model, that was, in a strange way, fine for me. I had been paid, or mostly paid. She carried all of the risk. I carried none of it.
I never designed it to work that way. But that’s what the structure was doing underneath all my good intentions.
What a $1,200 a month mastermind actually gets you
The moment everything really flipped came when I was the buyer.
A few years ago I joined a mastermind from a very well known coach, on a monthly payment plan of $1,200. I’m not going to name names, because what I experienced is so standard in this industry that naming one person would miss the point.
Here’s what $1,200 a month bought me. Maybe 5 to 10 minutes of so-called hot seat coaching on a group call. Some feedback in a Facebook group that was more cheering on than anything constructive. And a curriculum that was essentially a pile of old trainings with no guidance on where to start or what actually mattered for my business.
And here’s what I understood in that room. The support wasn’t thin by accident. When you sell a high ticket group program, every minute of real attention costs you margin. The model doesn’t force you to deliver less, but it rewards you for it, and nothing in the structure pushes back.
So whether a high ticket program is wonderful or hollow comes down entirely to the integrity of the person selling it. And you can’t verify integrity before you pay. The sales page looks the same either way. The only thing you can judge is their marketing skills. You hand over $10,000 and then you find out which kind of coach you bought.
Why high ticket offers are harder to sell in a trust recession
I’ll be honest with you about something else. I didn’t walk away purely on principle. Around the same time, the program got harder to sell. Not just for me, for pretty much everyone in this industry.
We’re in what I call a trust recession. Years of pressure calls, thin programs and income screenshots have burned through the trust this entire industry runs on. Every disappointed buyer tells her friends. Every hollow program makes the next sale harder for all of us, including the honest sellers.
High ticket didn’t get harder to sell because the marketing stopped working. It got harder to sell because the model finally spent more trust than it was creating. The market wasn’t rejecting my program. It was rejecting the structure, and honestly, the market was right.
So here’s the test I want to give you, whether you’re buying or building. Ask this about any offer, at any price:
Would this offer still sell if people could leave anytime?
If a business model only works when people can’t leave, when they’re locked into payment plans, when the money is gone before the value arrives, then it’s not a good offer. It’s a good trap. And the difference between those two things is the difference between a business you can be proud of and one you have to keep justifying to yourself.
Why I’m turning my signature program into a membership tier
This is the decision my whole story has been leading to. I’m moving my signature program into the Blissful Biz Hive as a premium tier.
Same depth, teaching you how to create your signature program and scale your online business with evergreen funnels and ads, with high-level support. But instead of $2,970 upfront, it’s a monthly subscription of $297 that you can cancel anytime. You can launch your premium program and set up your sales system in one month, or two, or three, and then cancel, downgrade, or stay for the deeper support as long as it’s serving you. There’s even a free 7 day trial.
And here’s what that does to the incentives. Under the old model, my best month was the month you paid. Under this model, I have to earn your membership every single month. If I stop delivering, you leave, and you should. The risk moved from your side of the table to mine.
That feels fair. That feels aligned, and I mean aligned the way we mean it on the mat, not the way marketers mean it. What I believe, what I say and what I sell finally point in the same direction.
And one more thing, so nobody misunderstands me. I haven’t stopped believing in premium support. I’ve stopped believing that premium support has to come with long contracts or giant upfront investments. If I ever offer a mastermind, and I might, it will run month by month too. If I can’t keep earning your money every single month, I don’t deserve to have it.
How to sell your yoga offers without pressure tactics
If you buy programs, ask exactly what support you’ll receive before you invest. Ask what happens if you need to stop. And run the test: would they still get my money if I could leave anytime? If the answer makes you uncomfortable, trust that.
And if you’re building your own offers, I want to say something about that resistance you feel around selling. The industry calls it a money block, a mindset problem, something to push through.
I don’t think your discomfort was ever a flaw. I think it was your values doing their job. You looked at pressure calls and fake countdown timers and payment plans designed like traps, and something in you said no. That instinct was right. It was never selling itself that clashed with your values. It was that way of selling.
You can charge honestly, deliver visibly and let people leave whenever they want, and you will build something better. Slower, maybe. But better, and yours, and built on trust in an industry that has burned through almost all of it.
Join the free 4-day challenge
From August 10 to 13 I’m running a free 4 day challenge where we build the foundation of your online business together. Real work, real progress, one step at a time. And at the end I’ll tell you about the Blissful Biz Hive, openly and without any pressure, because you know now that’s the only way I do things.
Save your spot here: susannerieker.com/challenge
Join the Blissful Biz Hive
This is exactly the kind of connected thinking I teach inside my membership the Blissful Biz Hive and it’s part of the Honey Flow Method – a simple, aligned system for growing your audience and selling digital offers, so you can stop trading time for money and build a profitable online business alongside your teaching.
And you won’t be building it alone. Every week there’s a live group call with me, you get direct feedback on your actual work, and we have a buzzing community of yoga teachers doing it right alongside you.
