How to make your coaching product easier to recommend

Mike Israetel is one of the best-known figures in evidence-based fitness. He co-founded Renaissance Periodization, publishes widely on training science and has thought carefully about how a fitness business scales without losing quality.

In a conversation with Propane, embedded below, Mike described the two principles that drive his company and explained why caring about clients does not require delivering everything personally. Those principles also explain what makes a coaching product easy for clients to recommend.

Caring at scale

In the conversation, Mike credits much of the company's success to his co-founder Nick Shaw and one habit in particular. Nick reads every customer review personally, not a summary or a monthly report. A substantively negative review keeps him awake, and the next morning he is asking the team how to fix the problem.

Mike's view is that this personal level of care about the customer experience is a core ingredient of their success. When you care what customers think, as a reflection of whether you are helping them rather than as a metric, it changes how you build and improve the product.

The goal is the result, not the relationship

Caring about clients does not mean personally delivering every part of the service to every person. It means caring about the outcome they get. The delivery mechanism is secondary.

Mike argues from a comparison between medication and psychotherapy. In his view both can be effective for certain conditions, and people do not attend therapy because they want to talk to someone. They go because they want their problems to improve. The method is the vehicle.

The same holds in fitness coaching.

"People don't come to you for the relationship. They come to you for the body and the health that they want."

A dentist analogy makes the same point. When you arrive with toothache, you do not care whether the fix takes two minutes or an hour. You care that the pain is gone, and you do not ask for a refund because the dentist was quick. The result matters and the visible effort does not.

The guilt trap around templates and scale

The moment a coach considers templates, automated programmes or any delivery model that does not depend on their personal time, a voice asks whether this cheats the clients.

Mike's answer is clear: only if you lie about what it is. If someone buys a template programme, follows it and gets into the best shape of their life, they will not complain about the absence of three hours of personal calls a week. They came for the result and got it.

Clients may value the usefulness and clarity of the service more than the visible effort behind it. Check what your own audience values rather than assuming.

Offer both and let the market choose

Mike's approach is to let clients self-select.

Offer a high-touch personal coaching service for people who want that experience, with the calls and the check-ins, and price it accordingly. Offer a template or programme for people who want the result without the contact, and price that accordingly too.

Describe each service accurately. Do not present a template as bespoke coaching or imply that different tiers include the same access. When people know what they are getting and choose it anyway, they tend to be satisfied, because they got what they wanted. Some want the full human experience and some want to skip the pleasantries and get to work. Both deserve a product built for them.

The McDonald's principle

Mike makes a comparison worth sitting with. McDonald's makes more people happy, at a basic and accessible level, than any steakhouse. It is not a superior culinary experience. It is honest about what it is, it is accessible and it delivers what people expect every time.

There is no shame in that model, and there is an argument that serving many people well at a lower price is more valuable than serving a few at the highest level. The point is not that you should build the McDonald's of coaching. The point is that the delivery model does not determine the value. The result does.

Two principles held in tension

Underneath everything Mike and Nick have built are two principles that pull against each other and must both hold.

Nick's principle: make sure the customer is happy.

Mike's principle: only sell things that work.

These are different. You can make a customer happy in the short term with something that does not work. You can sell something that works to a customer who ends up unhappy with the experience. The goal is both, all the time.

What makes a product easy to recommend

Referrals follow from the same two principles. A client recommends a product when it did what it said and the experience matched the description. That gives you three practical checks.

• The promise is specific. A client can repeat in one sentence what the product does and who it is for. Vague promises produce vague recommendations.
• The description matches the delivery. If the tier includes weekly calls, the calls happen. If it is a template, it is sold as a template. Any gap between the two is what a client mentions when a friend asks.
• The result is visible. Progress photos, a strength log or a simple before-and-after summary give the client something concrete to show. A result they can point to is easier to recommend than a feeling.

Read feedback the way Nick reads reviews. Each complaint shows where the description and the delivery diverged, and closing that gap makes the next recommendation more likely.

What this means for you

If you have been sitting on a scalable product, whether a programme, a template or an app, out of guilt, examine where the guilt comes from.

If you worry about client outcomes, good. Put that energy into building the best possible product. If you worry about what other coaches will think, that is a different problem, and it is not your clients' problem to solve.

Build the best thing you can. Be honest about what it is and what it is not. Let people choose the version that suits them. The guilt is optional. The results you could be helping more people reach are not.

Related guide: How to connect marketing, sales and delivery in a coaching business.