Should You Create a Course at All?
Not everyone needs a course. And I say that as someone whose work centres around helping people create them. Courses can be incredibly valuable when they’re designed well and used in the right way.
But they’re not always the right next step.
Quite often when someone tells me they’re thinking about creating a course, the real question isn’t actually about the course itself, it’s about the direction of their business. They might be feeling stretched with one-to-one work or wondering how to share their knowledge in a way that reaches more people, or thinking about creating something that continues to support their income even when they’re not working directly with clients.
A course can absolutely help with those things but only if it’s designed with a clear purpose.
The question that helps most when someone comes to me with a course idea, the first thing I usually ask is this. What role will this course play in your business?
Because courses can do several different jobs, sometimes they act as an entry point, they introduce people to your work and help them experience your approach. Sometimes they support existing clients by giving them a structured way to go deeper into a topic and sometimes they become a core offer that forms a central part of the business.
All of those are valid, but when the role of the course isn’t clear, the course often ends up trying to do everything at once and that’s when things start to feel complicated.
The foundations that matter at this stage. At this early stage of course creation, two foundations make a big difference.
The first is mindset.
Creating a course often means stepping into a slightly different role, instead of sharing knowledge informally through conversations with clients, you’re packaging that knowledge into a clear structure that other people can follow. For many experts, that shift can feel uncomfortable at first, there can be doubts about whether the knowledge is valuable enough or whether people will buy it.
Recognising that this is simply a new stage of business helps remove a lot of pressure.
The second foundation is how the course fits into the wider business.
A course shouldn’t feel like an extra project added on top of everything else, ideally it should support the work you already do. For example, a course might:
- introduce people to your work
- prepare people for deeper coaching or consulting support clients between sessions
- or create a structured path people can follow.
When the course fits naturally into the business, it becomes much easier to talk about and much easier to sell.
A helpful way to think about courses, Rather than seeing a course as something separate, it often helps to think of it as part of a wider journey for your clients. Someone might first discover your work through content or a workshop. Then they might join a course to learn a specific process, later they might move into deeper support.
When the course sits clearly within that journey, everything starts to make more sense.
For you and for the people you help.
A simple question to consider
If you’ve been thinking about creating a course, this is often the most useful place to begin.
What role would this course play in your business?
Once that becomes clear, the rest of the process becomes much easier.
If you’re thinking about creating a course, or wondering how it would fit into your business, a useful place to start is looking at what would actually make it work.
I’ve put together Make Your Course Sellable that helps you do exactly that.
👉 link
And if you want a space to explore your ideas, ask questions, and see how others are approaching this, you’re very welcome to join the community.
