November 2022's featured CoachNow Member, is Andrew Banner, Founder of Forged Swing.
Andrew is a rockstar golf swing & body coach who has revolutionized the way golfers upgrade their golf swing through his proprietary Tour Proven Pathway Program. His flagship program was born out of 16+ years obsessing over the physiology of golf swings. He’s spent 11+ years in the golf fitness industry, helping touring pros, amateur golfers, and junior golfers alike train away from injuries, while increasing their golfing performance.
His all-digital coaching offering is built around education - he is passionate about helping his students understand not just WHAT they need to work on, but WHY it’s important, and HOW to implement an improvement plan.
Spencer was able to catch up with him via zoom a few weeks back. Here are a few highlights from that conversion, covering topics from his transition to an all-remote business to his philosophy around long-term athlete development.
Click Here to listen to the full conversation:
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Enjoy!
You've been in the traditional coaching world for a long time, but over the last couple years have gone full steam ahead on remote coaching. Can you walk me through that transition?
Well as you know, I’ve been a CoachNow user for almost 8 years. I’ve always seen it as a really good resource to supplement my coaching.
But historically, I never really used it as a “profit center” per se. But when the pandemic hit, I had to re-evaluate everything. I had no way to see clients in person initially. And so that's when I really decided to create a revenue stream in a purely online business. I went full steam ahead since I, like everyone else, had no idea when I'd be back to working with athletes in person again.
Fast forward to now, and I am successfully fully online and absolutely love it. At this point, almost 100% of the business is on the remote side. Sure, I still have a few clients that I see in person, but I’m working to fully phase that out ASAP. The reality is that the potential growth of the business is SO much bigger online.
So I’d say the transition itself was born out of necessity, but now that I’m here I’m SO glad it happened.
Awesome. And if you were to describe your “number one” learning that you’ve had over the last couple of years during that transition, what would it be?
Authenticity.
The beautiful thing about social media is you can be yourself and people can quickly grasp who you are. You have an “identity” to your feed posts and story posts, and there's a lot of personality that comes through by consistently posting to social media.
And people have the option to decide on whether or not they like you or don't like you, right? People can like you, people can hate you, but the people that do like you are more likely to choose to do business with you.
And I just really like showing up on social media and being myself. It's worked out very well for me, and I never wanted to lose sight of authenticity.
I think a lot of people get on social media and wonder if they are ACTUALLY talking to me. And they always are! So by the time they're on a call with me, they're already sold because they'll be like “Man, I can't believe how much you've communicated with me in the process. I can tell you are dedicated to me as a client”
I live for those moments, and as a result authenticity has been a core component of my business model.
At the ConnectedCoach Academy, we’ve recently been focusing on the concept of Long-Term Development. What is your philosophy around remote coaching as it relates to a long-term relationship with your students?
Well from the beginning of my remote coaching, I wanted to move away from the “Exchange-Interaction” based pricing. In my marketing, I’m big on highlighting the difference between “instruction” and “coaching”, and focus all my efforts on the latter.
Because, look if you're gonna work with me online, I'm gonna make myself available to you. That’s what you're paying for. Vs. much of my competition who might treat online remote coaching as a way to do more “lessons” i.e. you're paying me for an hour and I'm gonna look at what you did in your practice, give feedback, and be on my way.
But when you frame things as a coaching “transformation”, you open up your business to a completely different price structure. In my 90-Day Transformation Program, I really focus on the fact that I am fully available to the student whenever they may need me.
They are so used to the idea of showing up, getting feedback, and being on their way. My whole thing is prodding them a bit. What if you were able to ask questions? What if you were able to get fast feedback? How much better would you get?
Because most golf credential programs are super outdated at this point. They just teach you to show up, deliver a lesson, and be on your way. But if you are trying to build a career around this, you end up working full eight hour days and limiting the impact you can have in the process. When you’re working in the old fashioned way, you can only give attention to the student that's standing in front of you.
To be honest, had the pandemic never happened, I don't know if I'd be sitting here telling you this. But during that time I asked myself: “if I started it all over, how could I give the most value to get the fastest results for my clients?”
That's how I built this business. And it’s been wildly successful not just monetarily, but also in the impact I’m having.
The journeys I've seen clients make in the 90 day program are insane. In fact, in the last few months, I’ve had two different shave 20 shots off their scorecard - going from the 90s to 70s. That's unheard of! Definitely not something I’d be able to do if I hadn’t changed things up in the post-Covid world.
In our posts about Long-Term Development, we speak about the importance of setting proper expectations from the beginning of the coaching relationship. What expectations do you set with your students before taking them on?
I set those expectations on the initial call. I want it to be as upfront as possible, so they can decide if they want to move forward or not.
Truth be told, Many students are amazed at how little time is actually required to see great results. It’s just all about intentionality with practicing, which is where I can shine in my role as coach. I always tell students “look, if you focus on one thing at a time and you give me 15 minutes a day focused on that one thing, you're gonna make massive transformations”.
Just 15 minutes a day on ONE thing. Whether you're working on my body drills, my exercise drills, or my swing drills, you’re gonna improve SO much faster than the guy next to you who just shows up to hit a bucket of balls a few days a week. I can’t overemphasize how important it is to go into your practice sessions with purpose.
So that’s a big expectation I like to set. I make it clear that I expect my students to put in the work on their game plan, check in with me frequently so I can catch bad habits as they form, and simply get a little better everyday.
And that’s where CoachNow really comes in handy. Because in the traditional lessons model of coaching, your athlete might have a great lesson and leave feeling great. But then a couple days later, they start to have questions and doubts. Their confidence drops, their performance drops.
I also set the expectation that athletes should never have 2 bad practice sessions in a row. They need to know they can and should get fast feedback from me anytime. Because when students actually take advantage of that, they start to learn how to self-analyze and self identify. It gives them confidence to be independent and that's a HUGE deal.
I really believe it’s my job to empower the student to become an educated golfer on their own. We're not gonna work together forever. If they are in a place where they can get better without me, then I feel like I did my job correctly.
Your main product seems to be this 90-Day transformation program. Is there any other shorter- or longer-term program that you also sell your students on?
Funny you say that, I’m working on it as we speak. Currently it’s pretty dependent on the client. Obviously if I know you well and want to continue working with you, I’ll keep you around for more than 90 days. But at that point it’s not as structured as the Transformation Program.
Another interesting thing I’ve noticed. There are many students that see great success with the program, then just want to go out and enjoy golf. So I let them be on their way. But then it’s pretty common for those students to come back like 6 months later and be ready for more coaching. I consider that a great testament to the value they are deriving - I’m getting really good retention on students who take breaks and then end up coming back.
As a result, I’ve started building out automation to continue conversations and keep them engaged. Historically, I’ve done this with email but I know the functionality is also there in CoachNow. In fact, I just created like my active and inactive Lists and am planning to use those soon.
So yeah, lots of stuff in development. Really trying to take your advice right now and stick to one CTA and really drive it home for all audiences. And I’m eagerly awaiting more CoachNow PRO features that are coming, since I know your team is starting to focus more and more on automation, and I really want to take advantage of that.
Awesome. Yeah there is some great stuff coming down the line. You mentioned you are going to start using Lists more to re-engage students who have left. In a broader sense, I’d love to hear more about what other features you are using in CoachNow to effectively deliver your programs.
Currently, I’ve really been trying to lean in to the new scheduled post feature that was released. There’s probably some potential there for bringing back old students, but currently I’m using it with my active students.
My new flow has been saving me a ton of time. Now, when I onboard a new client, I use my pre-made Templates and innately populate their space with my onboarding materials and guidelines. Then, right then and there I preschedule out all my “accountability” posts for the future weeks.
It’s super nice to set it and forget it. And it works beautifully - they truly think it’s me messaging them and it really adds a personal touch without relying on my time constantly to keep my athlete’s accountable.
I’ve heard you speak about tons of ideas around digital products in the coaching space. Any you want to talk about here?
This is actually the part of my business that I'm working on the most aggressively right now. First off, I’d love to make a shorter program (say 30 days) for those who don’t want to make that upfront commitment and do the full 90 out the gate.
I’d love to create an 8 week non-interactive program where each week something gets automatically dripped to them that I can just schedule in advance without thinking about it. I see that having no ceiling - I could literally have hundreds of people learning from me without me having to lift a finger.
Yeah that’s something we are working on. In theory you could tag your content in your library so it’s teed up for something like this. So then it’s at least all in a row and you could access it quickly. But yes, it would be somewhat manual at first and soon we will release functionality for exactly what you’re saying.
Cool. Cause I was like if I scale this and then all of a sudden I’d have to do a lot of manual work and I’m trying to automate my time as much as possible. Really trying to lean into the evergreen side of things, which I know is something you speak to quite a lot.
Right now, I’m relying on high ticket offers. What I want to do is create a modular program, step by step to X, with, with me or without me.
So the “done with me” version will probably include e.g. a weekly group zoom call and a weekly swing check in with feedback. And the “without me” would just be dripped content that they can consume on their own time.
I'm so excited to roll this out. I'm building it right now, but that's gonna be really fun for me. Quite honestly, when I first got into the online space, I thought everyone was super unique and needed their own unique plans. But I no longer really think that’s the case.
What people want is to put in the work and know that they're doing it the right way. And if I can provide them with that step-by-step game plan, they can actually get to a level of enjoyment faster. Whether they are a pro or someone getting started, the game plan I assign usually looks pretty similar.
There is so much opportunity for everyone to learn from the core training I teach. I believe that as long as you create those feedback loops, help people set up practice stations effectively, monitor their practice with them, and help them understand what the success metric for this practice is, then anyone can benefit from my remote training.
So yeah. Lots of stuff to think about! Now that I’m comfortably in the digital space, creating these new revenue streams is the next step.
One of the most common things coaches ask my advice on is the role of Social Media in their coaching business. You’ve been deep in Social Media for years, with a super impressive following. Can you talk a bit about your social strategy? How do you stand out from the other golfers?
Again, being authentic is my main point of differentiation. Currently, Instagram seems to be the best place for golf content (TikTok and/or YouTube may pass it soon).
On Instagram, a lot of the shorter videos are just purely tipp-based. I.e. just a Golf tip, quick fix. That’s part of my content, but not the majority of it. I prefer speaking directly to the golfer about the problems that they face and how I can help them overcome those.
Doing videos like that creates more relatability even if they don’t get as many raw views as those tip-based videos. But at the end of the day, social media only functions as a way to get someone to be a paid customer. People get too stuck on vanity metrics like likes and views, rather than actually knowing what this content is doing for the bottom line of your business.
It’s not about the followers. It’s about the quality of the followers.
Any successful business knows the value of a contact database. A lot of people on social media lost track of that. If I’m trying to build something bigger than myself, I need to have an audience that I can contact directly, outside of a feed.
And it’s also important to listen to what your audience likes. At this point, I’m super confident in my content because I know what they want to see.
Overall, I’ve found that a good social media presence is all about authenticity, consistency, quality of followers, and having a way to get feedback on what your audience likes.
Thank you so much for your time, Andrew. I’m so excited to see where you are gonna go in the next year or so, and so happy to support you however we can. Really appreciate you being here.
My pleasure! I really hope my story resonates with people. I absolutely love CoachNow, so thanks for creating the best app in the space. Catch you soon.