Evolving and Launching a High-Ticket Mastermind Program
Ep 4: On Evolving and Launching a High-Ticket Mastermind
Programs are living, breathing things. And sometimes, that means letting one chapter end so something new can take root.
In this episode of The Midnight Edit, I take you behind the scenes of how I closed a successful group program and evolved it into Masterpiece, my high-ticket mastermind and private coaching hybrid.
This is a candid look at the strategic and relational decisions behind designing a high-level offer that’s built for depth, sustainability, and real transformation.
Inside the episode:
The signs it was time to retire my previous program
The two specific lenses that guided the design of Masterpiece
The intentional architecture behind its structure, intimacy, and outcomes
How and why I priced it the way I did
If you’ve ever wondered what it actually takes to evolve into a high-ticket mastermind without burning out your audience or yourself, this episode offers a grounded, behind-the-scenes roadmap.
Episode Transcript
Welcome to episode four of Midnight Edit.
I've just been having a jam session to Maggie Rogers, and I am so ready to tell you all about how I evolved and launched my high ticket mastermind slash private coaching hybrid program Masterpiece.
It is 1:09 AM — so let's do this.
Something that I say again and again to clients is that programs are living, breathing things.
This myth that floats around out there, that you create a program once and it just gets to exist for the rest of your business lifetime, needs to be put to bed.
Because the fact is, is that's just not true.
You are gonna evolve and grow.
Your people are gonna change.
Things are going to need to shift not only in your offer ecosystem, but in your offers as well.
And sometimes that looks like making tweaks, making adjustments, editing the curriculum… and sometimes that looks like closing down the entire program.
That's exactly what happened to me with my program, The Incubator.
So if you're new to my world and you haven't heard me talk about The Incubator before, this was a group program that I ran for a couple of years in a row where it was a bit of private coaching, but mainly group coaching, and I would lead you through designing, building, and launching your own course or program or scalable offer.
In the beginning, it worked really well.
I had this beautiful vision of this scalable program that was going to be the bread and butter — like the core momentum offer of my offer ecosystem.
This was going to be the thing that I was going to scale up.
I was gonna bring tons of people in.
And as someone who is an expert in curriculum design, I spent a lot of time building out these pathways to make the program as structurally sound as possible so that I could hold and handle a high volume of people coming into the program without compromising on the results and without compromising on their experience.
Okay. But the thing that I noticed is no matter how much I tried, I kept treating every single client in this program like a private client.
I wanted to keep my hands in their business.
I wanted to have my eyes on everything they were creating.
And what I came to realize was in combination of the level of intimacy that I desired to have with my clients, as well as the level of business owner that was coming into this program… on those two levels, there was an incongruence with what I needed and where I was in my own business journey.
So I realized that the program was attracting people who were earlier on in their business journey than I really wanted to be supporting.
And I also realized that I just wanted to be supporting people on a deeper, more intimate level.
I wanted to be working with people who were established in their business.
They'd been running offers, they knew their people.
And they were also at the threshold of wanting to expand into something bigger — whether that was expanding their ecosystem, opening up more space to grow their family, or just being like, I want my work to be out there on a bigger level.
So with my clients, whenever we're designing a scalable program and they keep kind of cutting the scalability out of it by treating their clients like one-to-one — which is exactly what I was doing — it comes down to two factors.
Most of the time it's a structural piece where we don't actually trust the architecture of our offer to hold our people in their transformation without our presence.
And that's something that through learning design and curriculum design, we can make sure that the program can actually hold the results for people.
But other times, and this was the case for me, it's just not in alignment with how I wanted to be serving my people.
So that's when I knew it was time to close this down and evolve the program into something else.
And this is where Masterpiece was born.
So I wanna walk you through how I designed my mastermind from two different lenses.
I'm gonna walk you through how I designed it through the lens of what I needed out of this offer, and then I'm gonna talk you through how I designed it through the lens of what my people need as part of their transformation and their journey in the Masterpiece experience.
We start, as always, with what we need out of an offer.
Now, I spent a good part of the early years of my business preaching about learner-centered design, where we need to put the needs of our learners and the needs of our clients at the heart of everything that we do.
But the reality is, is that we come first.
Our needs come first because if we're not lit up and loving what we're doing and feeling supported by our offers, ultimately that is not a recipe for a successful, thriving business.
So we always wanna start with:
What is the life that we wanna live?
What is the impact we wanna make?
What is it that we need out of our own offer?
So for me, when it came to Masterpiece and what I needed out of it on a soul fulfillment level, I knew I needed to have a lot of closeness and a lot of touch points with my people.
I wanted to be deeply involved in their journeys.
I wanted to be with them as their business grew over a period of time.
I wanted to have my hands on their offers, my eyes on their strategy.
I wanted to be their partner, their strategic mentor in their growth and their scalability of their business because that is what lights me up.
That is what I absolutely love to do.
And on a practical level, I also knew I needed a little bit more spaciousness in the calendar.
So really shifting towards having a little bit less calls, so I'm not a hundred percent dependent on one-to-one clients.
Having a little bit more room in my calendar, a little bit more flexibility just in case life circumstances shifted — whether it's travel or family planning, whatever it may be.
I was like, I wanna have a core scalable offer that really is bringing in the revenue that I needed out of my life, but also having the balance of what I want my days today to look like.
And also on a practical level, I wanted monthly recurring revenue so that I can predict out my revenue over a longer period of time.
So those are the core things that I needed out of the experience.
Then keeping that in mind, keeping that as a lens through which I looked at how to design this mastermind experience, I really started to think about:
What do my people need out of this experience?
Now, unfortunately, what I've seen a lot in the industry when it comes to designing masterminds, it's dump a predetermined amount of people into a Zoom room and just hope they all get along and hope that they support each other and hope that some sort of like amazing friendship blooms, and sadly, that is just not the reality of how you facilitate transformation.
Now for peer masterminds, sometimes when people already have a connection, they've already have some closeness, that can be enough and you can get away with kind of a little bit more of a loosey goosey approach to it. But for me, what I really wanted was this strategy meets ritual experience for the established expert who was really looking at stepping into that like next level of being a luminary in their industry and really stepping through the threshold of, I know my stuff and I know what I do is gold, and it's so intuitive and it's so magical to me, but I wanna bring it out to the world in a more scalable way.
Whether that's expanding the offer ecosystem through newer offers or books or retreats or certification programs or licensing models, whether that's going, I have built my business to be a certain way, but now I wanna start a family, so I need to kind of start my offer ecosystem from scratch to build out a mat leave for me and have more flexibility in my days.
I knew that for people that were at this edge of evolution, that were really shifting and growing things in their business, they needed more, significantly more than just being dumped in a room with like four other people on the same journey as them and hoping that they could all get along and support each other.
Core Building Blocks of Masterpiece
So here are the kind of core building blocks of masterpiece and why I specifically chose each one.
1. The Group / The Community
Of course, number one in a mastermind. It is the actual group. It is the actual community. Now I intentionally keep this cohort very, very small. I'm limiting it to five or six people, whether it's five or six. It's going to very much depend on the people who are inside the program, because I'm going to be incredibly specific about making sure the right people are inside this program.
I'm limiting it to six max because our biweekly group calls are gonna be around 90 minutes to two hours so that everyone can actually get a good chunk of time. Instead of it just being like, you wait an hour to ask a five minute question, and then you're like, okay, cool, I guess I'll see you in a month.
I am keeping it a closed cohort so that there can be a lot of intimacy and closeness formed with the members of Masterpiece, so we can all really get to know each other and we don't have that kind of disruption of people coming and going in and out of the experience.
I'm keeping the calls biweekly because I find, in my experience, weekly calls doesn't allow enough integration time in between. Whereas biweekly calls give you time to get the support you need, get the answers you need, get some sense of what needs to happen, and then be able to integrate it and take action on it.
2. Quarterly One-to-One Calls
Now in tandem with the this nice, small, intimate cohort, these biweekly group calls. I know that sometimes group isn't quite enough on its own, especially when you're moving through this huge evolution in your business. And that's why I made the decision to include quarterly one-to-one calls with me.
I waffled. I was like, do I wanna do monthly? Do I wanna do quarterly? But whenever we're trying to make a decision about elements that we add into our program, we always wanna come back to what is gonna be most supportive for people without suffocating them by like fire hosing them with everything we could possibly add in.
So in this case, I chose to do quarterly because they're still getting biweekly moments with me. I'm still doing this hot seat facilitation where every two weeks, not only are they getting the eyes of everyone else in the group on what they're working on, but I'm also there as a facilitator and the coach supporting them with that.
But being able to have these quarterly intensives where it's a longer call, just the two of us where we can like really look at like, what's going on in your business, what's going on in your life, what's going on in your offers? Let's get really, really clear on what your focus needs to be and make sure that instead of, you know, being in responsive mode, we can actually be proactively planning for the life that you wanna be living and how your body of work needs to shift to support that.
3. Two-Day In-Person Immersive
So we have the biweekly calls. We have the quarterly one-to-one coaching with me, and then I was like, there's something missing. What is missing? And that's when I realized, when I think about what some of the most powerful transformational shifts I have seen in my clients have come from in a short period of time, have been from the France retreat.
Now the beauty of an in-person experience is not only is it very bonding and very like integrating, so people can really get to know each other on quite a deep level in quite a short period of time, it allows you to really connect into the energy of your own work, your vision, and where you're heading.
And so that's why I made the decision also to include a two-day in-person immersive to kick off Masterpiece.
So Masterpiece starts in the early fall here in North America. So for those of you in a different hemisphere, I'm referencing end of September, early October.
And really what I wanted to do was, early on in the program — it doesn't have to be before the program starts, if you're thinking about planning something like this in your own business, it doesn't have to be right before, in fact sometimes it's good to have a couple virtual calls and then gather — early on in the program, I'm actually bringing everyone here to my hometown on Vancouver Island, in Canada for a two day in-person immersive, where we're gonna blend the visioning, the strategy with this like gorgeous ocean front spa and going around to a fun other couple places because not only does that allowed us to casually connect as a cohort, but it just shifts up the scenery and allows us to really kick off this nine month experience from a very deep, integrated place right away.
4. Nine-Month Container
Okay. Now that brings me to my final piece about when I just mentioned there it being a nine month experience.
Now, why nine months? Why not three months, six months, 12 months? Really what it came down to was, in my experience, running the incubator, six months was just not enough time. I actually very ambitiously started the incubator as a four month program and started extending everyone to six months to eight months when I realized, I was like, they need more time.
And over my years of working with clients, I've often been referred to as a course doula and people have referred to the process of birthing this body of work as, you know, it is a labor of love. It is a journey, and so I thought there would be this beautiful parallel of having it be a nine month journey where it's not quite a year, 'cause sometimes a year can feel a bit daunting, but it's longer than six months because that's just not enough time to really see the blooms and the fruits of the labor of what we'll be working on behind the scenes.
So with this all in mind, the final thing that I wanna talk to you about, about the behind the scenes design of this high ticket Mastermind is the high ticket part of things — and how did I arrive at the price?
Now, given industry standards and given what my one-to-one price point is for working with me, I probably should have priced Masterpiece closer to the 30K mark. Given that there, I've seen a lot of other masterminds kind of offering comparable transformations with maybe like slightly less qualified facilitators (if I'm being shady) priced closer to the 25, 30, 35 — even I've seen, you know, 50K masterminds — for this level of entrepreneur that I'd be serving.
But for me, when I was pricing it out, I was like, okay, the in-person immersive and the one-to-ones alone are worth over $10,000. And I was like, I wanna make sure that I'm not undervaluing the experience that I'm offering. And I also wanna keep it at a monthly rate that is still manageable for the level of entrepreneur that I'm serving.
For people who are having consistent business coming in, this is, you know, it might feel a bit stretchy, but it's not gonna push anyone into that like nervous system overdrive of, oh my gosh, I don't know if I can make my monthly payments to Emily.
And so that's how I landed at the 18K investment mark for Masterpiece — because for people who sign up before we actually start, it actually brings their payments below $2,000 a month. And for people who want to start the investment and sign up right on the first month that we start, it leaves it at about 2000 a month, which is slightly less than what I've seen for the rest of the industry, but still feels in alignment with the rest of my offer ecosystem and the people that I wanna serve.
Okay. I know I have shared a lot in this episode, and it has gone a little bit longer than I intended, but my intention for sharing this is to really take you behind the scenes of the thought process that I have whenever I'm designing an offer — to show you that not only can we let previous offers become the fertilizer for something new, that we can release them and let something else emerge out — but also to show that there's no one way to do an offer.
Just because it's a mastermind doesn't mean it has to look a certain way. My way of designing and offering and facilitating a mastermind may look different from how you may do that. If you're thinking about adding a mastermind into your offer ecosystem, the important thing is to always come back to the two questions of:
What do you need out of this offer, out of your offer ecosystem so that it is supporting the life you wanna live and the way that you wanna feel, and what lights your soul up for how you like to show up for your people?
And balancing that with — what do your people need out of it? What is the transformation that you're providing?
And how do we make sure that every single element of your offer and your offer ecosystem is intentionally architected to support that experience?
And if you were listening to this and you were like, Hey, Masterpiece sounds exactly like what I was looking for, I would love to learn more, feel free to reach out to me either on email or you can send me a message on Instagram and I'm so happy to chat more about the experience and see if it's a good fit for you.
I’m obsessed with this offer. I think it's one of my favorite things I've ever designed, and it's going to be absolutely a magical nine months. So if it is pinging something for you and you're feeling like, Hey, this may be for me, I encourage you to reach out and let's have a chat.
✨ Let’s keep the conversation going
I’d love to hear what stood out for you in this episode - feel free to send me a DM on Instagram @emily.mwalker (it's my fav place to hang out!)
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