Building Your Coaching or Consulting Business As A Digital Nomad
Expatsi's membership lead, also a real estate coach, on structuring and pricing an online course you can run from anywhere.
- Members only
- Recorded webinar
- 1h 18m
- August 9, 2025
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About this session
Stephanie, who runs the Expatsi membership, leads a hands-on workshop on building an online course or consulting business you can take anywhere. She draws on her own real estate coaching company, the Enterprising Agent, and on clients she has coached. It includes three timed exercises.
The exercises move from your ideal client's biggest pain point to a three-to-five-chapter outline built like a cookbook. She then covers pocket products, pricing and launch timing, plus the tools she trusts. Audience members shared ideas from HVAC to awkward billing conversations. One asked whether a hybrid model works. It does.
Key takeaways
- Keep course videos to roughly 7 to 15 minutes each. Short pieces are easier to digest, and when information changes you re-record one step instead of the whole course.
- Start with a pocket product: a small, affordable item such as a short ebook, checklist or mini-course that gives people a taste of your work. Come up with three ideas and pick one for your launch.
- Don't price yourself the cheapest, because people read a far lower price as lower quality. List what others in your space charge, compare without copying, and aim for the middle or slightly below it.
- A one-time purchase suits a static course, while a subscription suits regular Q&As, webinars or content that changes often. A hybrid of the two works, but start with whichever model fits most naturally.
- Run a soft launch for early adopters with a discount or free trial, usually for less than 7 days, before the full launch. Working 5 to 10 hours a week, plan on about four to six weeks to get there.
- Teachable, Thinkific and Kajabi all host courses with payment processing built in, so you don't need to build a website or code. For email, Mailchimp or Constant Contact; for video, Zoom, Loom and Descript.
- Limit promotions to about four times a year, timed to when your audience finds value, such as August for a course aimed at teachers.
Chapters
- 0:20Welcome and Stephanie's path from real estate trainer to course creator
- 3:07Why online courses and consulting fit a life abroad
- 7:35Defining your audience: improv, teaching and art therapy examples
- 11:22Exercises: your client's biggest challenge and four guiding questions
- 19:39Choosing a niche: specific, not granular, and where to research it
- 23:42Outlining your course like a cookbook, with a chapter exercise
- 36:35Mixing videos, worksheets and quizzes, and why videos stay short
- 42:45Pocket products as a way to build trust and generate leads
- 45:34Pricing: one-time, subscription or hybrid, and not undervaluing
- 53:18Personal branding, video on social media and lead magnets
- 59:30Soft launch, full launch and the tools for hosting, email and video
- 1:07:26Keeping students engaged, scaling with upsells, and next steps
Questions from the session
Can I sell a fixed course and also offer an ongoing subscription?
Yes, a hybrid model works. A fixed course can sit alongside a subscription for the personal touch, such as regular Q&As or live play-alongs, and one-on-one coaching can be sold as a one-time purchase. Start with the model that fits your offer most naturally, then add the second piece once you're organized.
How long does it take to launch an online course part-time?
If you put in about 5 to 10 hours a week building and recording, plan on four to six weeks: a soft launch after about four weeks and a full launch by six. With more time to dedicate, two to three weeks is doable, but four to six keeps it from feeling overwhelming.
How do I get the attention of business leaders for my online coaching?
Build trust before you sell. Offer a pocket product or free lead magnet that captures emails, show up on social media and in video so people get to know you, and at full launch use email campaigns, social ads and collaborations with others working in your space.
Is it a problem if I change my course idea while brainstorming?
No. Outlining chapters often shows you don't care enough about an idea, or that it's too narrow and needs to expand. Expect to repeat the exercises several times. You'll learn where your passion lies and what sets you apart.
Transcript
Auto-generated from the session’s captions and lightly corrected; it may contain errors.
0:20Perfect. Um, if you have questions during tonight's session, uh, you there is a little Q&A box. Please pop those in your Q&A box and I'll make sure that we get all of our questions answered. Um, if you just jumped in, um, please have something to write with, something to write on, or if you're a digital notetaker, open up a Google doc, whatever works for you. We're going to have a few exercises that we're going to be doing um, here in our session tonight. So, I want to make sure that everybody is prepared. Um, so, welcome everybody to tonight's session to learn
0:54how to create your online course or consulting business. My name is Stephanie Stone Rob. Um, I wear many hats. I uh run the expatsy membership side. So um architecting that and organizing that is kind of my domain within the business. Um I will tell you a little bit about my experience with building online courses and consulting um approaches. Um especially when it comes to planning on getting out of the US. Um I worked in the real estate industry for about six years now. you know, started traditional real estate agent, opening doors, going on appointments, putting signs in the front yard, that approach. Um, quickly moved
1:31into agent development, business development, training, and coaching. Um, and I found that as I was working with agents, um, I was having to say the same thing over and over and over again. So, when I built my first online course, it was really to solve the problem of not having to repeat myself consistently um, to folks. Well, that pretty quickly moved into something where I was like, well, if I'm sharing this within the folks within my brokerage that are under my purview, can I expand it from there?
2:02Um, so started to market this to other real estate trainers within my company and then went outside the company and that's sort of where I'm at right now. So, I've learned a lot in terms of how to build it, how to organize it. And then I took all that information and started to parlay it into helping other people build coaching businesses, consulting businesses that fit their niche, that fit their joy, that fit um where their expertise is. So, just wanted to tell you a little bit about myself before we got started. Um let's go over what we're going to be learning
2:35today. So, um again, like I mentioned, I am a actionable person. Um, I'm that perfect operations project manager. So, um, I want everybody to leave with a plan. So, we're going to focus on how to plan and structure your course or consulting business. Um, we're going to talk about the marketing side of it because it's great to have something to share with people, but if nobody knows about it, um, it's hard to uh to make money off of it. Um, we're going to talk about the idea of pocket products and how that can help with your marketing and your launch. Um, we'll talk about
3:07tools and software. Like I said, I want everyone to feel like they are leaving this with, you know, at least your first few steps to get you going. Um, and like I mentioned, we'll have a few exercises to get the creative juices flowing a little bit. Um, so I want to start a little bit about talking about why why even look into doing something like this. Um there has been a huge growth of e-learning, online training, online consulting, whatever you want to call it, especially during the pandemic. Um that's really where my business grew. We went from doing training in person in an
