4 Questions to Help you Decide whether to Take a Course - or Hire an Expert

Is an online course the best way to move your business forward?

Short answer: sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't.

Longer answer: sometimes, another online course isn’t the best investment for your business.

I'm a big fan of courses - taking the right course at the right time can boost your business big time! However, sometimes they'll just take weeks out of your life you can't get back... and you end up not being about to implement anyway.

So when should you NOT buy a course to learn a new skill - and what can you do instead?

When you’ve got unfinished courses lining up

Having multiple courses that you secretly still need to take or finish, it may be a sign you’re a procrasti-learner. Learning new skills is a great way to keep you from doing the things that would get you clients, make sales or get you traffic - or in any other way get yourself out there and make (more) money.

So before you sign up for the next course, ask yourself:

“Do I really need this course?
What do I expect this course to do for me?
How will I measure return on my investment?”

If you decide to take the course, rreview your answers at least once a week while you’re taking the course.

When you’d like to get things done sooner rather than later

Buying a course so you can learn how to do things yourself is great - buying a course about something you’d need done sooner rather than later might not be the best investment.

Let’s imagine you want to supersize your Facebook marketing strategy.

You could pay for a course, spend 6 weeks learning all there is to learn, then spend a couple more weeks trying to implement what was in the course. By the end, you’ve just spent hundreds (or thousands?) of dollars and spent several hours each day during 2-3 months to figure things out.

Ask yourself:

“Will this course allow me to do this [in a way that’s good enough for me] within an acceptable timeframe?”

Alternatively, you could have hired someone who knows Facebook and can tell you exactly what to do and how to do it for a fraction of the price - and have everything up and running in just a couple of weeks.

When you want things done well from the start

This is something a lot of my clients struggle with: you’ve taken this course, but implementing it is a whole different ballgame. You still need to find out which tools to use, how to do the tech on the backend, how to plan it all so you get it all done within a reasonable amount of time - and so it yields the results you’re looking for.

Whenever you’re hesitating to take a course, ask yourself:

“Would I be better off investing (my money) in someone who’s experienced and knows how to achieve success from the get-go - so I can invest (my time) in the things I really love doing?”

When this is not something you’d want to do yourself, longer term

Whenever I’m hesitating between learning a new skill, or outsourcing so someone else can do it for you, this is the question that works best to help me make the choice:

“Is this something I want to be doing in my business, long-term? Is this a skill I’d love to build upon later on?”

As a marketing & monetising strategist, things that help my business move forward are skills that I can apply to the work I do for clients (social media management), as well as frameworks and methods I can share with them during our strategy sessions.

Would it make my business better if I learned professional film editing? No, it wouldn’t. I can tell my clients how to record videos and which basic tools to use to do some (basic) editing - but I’m not planning to offer film editing as a service (ever). So why would I need to take a film editing course, just so I can edit my own videos? It’d be much cheaper for me to outsource it.

In the video below, I give you a couple more examples or arguments. Sometimes paying for another course is a great investment for your business… but sometimes, you’re better off investing more time and effort in all the other things you’re supposed to be doing as an online business owner.

Want to talk about this? Got an opinion you'd like to share 1:1, or just want to meet & get to know me?

Schedule a call here - no strings attached!