Turning a Successful (But Improvised) Cohort in a 7-Figure Academy

By the time Tessa reached out to me, her “experiment” year away from medicine had already turned into a full-blown, six‑figure interview academy for doctors.

She was a pediatric emergency medicine consultant in the UK who ran a senior-interview prep academy for doctors.

In less than a year she’d moved from 1:1 coaching to a four-week cohort program, run it four times, and generated around six figures in revenue.

In her own words, she’d “kind of achieved” the goal of matching her consultant income during a year off medicine.

On paper, it was working.

Underneath, it was held together by instinct, adrenaline, and a lot of Tessa.

She had one main offer. Three calls a week, and heavy daily video feedback on Circle.

Guest experts. A video course, and a thriving community.

And almost every decision about pricing, tiers, and scope had been made by gut feel.

The problems she brought to me weren’t “Is this good?”

There was much more lying under the surface.

The questions had more like:

• Am I giving too much away in the core program?
• Should I raise prices, increase frequency, or both?
• How do I help people who get two weeks’ notice for an interview?
• How do I become the default choice over a legacy competitor who can drop them into a one-day course tomorrow?
• And how do I do any of that without breaking what’s already working?

She didn’t want a reinvention. She wanted a model.

Strong Foundations Before Scale

In the beginning, Tessa’s academy had put roughly 200 doctors through a four-week, milestone-driven prep experience.

They loved the mix of focused teaching, community, and daily practice.

Many had taken the old-guard one-day course and then come to her, quietly confirming what she suspected: the market default was coasting on habit and legacy reputation, not on quality.

But there were cracks in her foundations:

• All tiers felt like small variations of the same promise, with minimal differentiation.
• Pricing had been tested, but not really optimized; if she raised or lowered numbers, people still bought. She didn’t know what “right” looked like.
• The most time-intensive elements – daily video reviews, multiple calls a week, 1:1s – were all bundled into the core, with no clear upsell structure.
• There was no clean way to handle “I just got my interview date and I need help now.” The entrenched competitor could always offer that one-day fix.
• Team members were in the mix, but a lot of value-creating work still defaulted to Tessa because the processes weren’t fully defined.

She’d proven that her way of preparing doctors worked.

She had not yet proven that her business model could scale beyond her personal effort.

Rebuilding the Academy Around Missed Opportunities, Not More Content

My job wasn’t to turn her into something else. It was to keep the parts that made her special and rearchitect the economics and structure around them.

We started with her best customers.

I had Tessa run deep, structured interviews with Academy graduates.

Not to ask “Did you like it?” but to understand how they found her, what else they considered, why they chose her, what surprised them, and what they’d actually miss if the Academy were gone.

A few things became obvious quickly:

• Community and daily practice weren’t “nice extras.” They were the heart of the promise.
• Students cared less about guest experts and more about feeling seen and supported by Tessa’s team.
• Many had first discovered her through Instagram ads and content, not through traditional medical channels.
• Several had used the incumbent one-day course and then come to her, reinforcing her belief that she could  become the default player in this space.

With that in hand, we went after the leverage points.

Clarifying tiers and who they’re for

We pulled her single multi-part offer apart and rebuilt it into a clearer tiered structure.

Instead of “silver / gold / platinum” as arbitrary labels, we framed tiers around real situations doctors were in:

• A core tier for doctors who wanted to build strong fundamentals, work through the milestones, and plug into the community.
• A mid-tier for those with an interview date who needed private support, more personalized feedback, and a clear, time-bound container.
• A top tier for high-stakes, “dream job” candidates who wanted additional 1:1 time and full mock interviews to rehearse under pressure.

Pricing followed that reality.

We kept the core accessible, then stepped up mid and top tiers where the added human time and complexity actually lived.

The goal wasn’t to squeeze her customers for profit, but instead to match price to the real weight on her calendar and her team.

Turning “pocket coaching” into a deliberate upsell

Tessa had been experimenting with what she called “pocket coaching” – WhatsApp-style support for doctors close to their interview date.

The problem was that it was messy and informal:

• Offers went out inconsistently, based on her team’s judgment powered by a simple Slack notification.
• Some candidates were skipped entirely.
• There was no simple view of who had interviews when, or who’d been offered what.

Together, we defined pocket coaching as a real product:

• Who it was for: Students with confirmed interview dates, within a certain window.
• What it included: specific types and boundaries of support.
• When and how it was offered: A simple decision-tree procedure her staff could follow and improve.
• How it was tracked: A basic KPI around “percentage of active students with known interview dates,” and a better use of Monday.com to see that at a glance.

That one change didn’t just add revenue.

It respected the emotional reality of Tessa’s clients: this is the biggest interview of their career.

Having structured access to someone they trust, right when the fear spikes, is worth paying for.

Making launches repeatable instead of heroic

On the front end, the machine worked. She’d driven 1,800 webinar signups off ads she’d run herself. Show-up and conversion rates were strong.

But every launch involved:

• New ad decisions.
• New tweaks to pricing or tiers.
• A webinar pitch she felt awkward delivering to doctors who are used to education being “free.”

We separated “things we test” from “things we keep stable,” so each cohort would actually teach her something about what mattered.

We also reframed the webinar:

• Seeding the Academy early in the teaching so the pitch wasn’t a hard left turn.
• Using stories and testimonials that emphasized both preparation and values – the sense that she cares about whether they get the job, not just their payment.
• Normalizing the act of selling to doctors, without pretending it was the same as selling to internet marketers.

Behind the scenes, we introduced simple checklists so her staff could own more of the launch and live-event logistics.

That freed Tessa to show up as the educator she is, without carrying the entire operation on her shoulders.

Buying back her thinking time

Finally, we mapped out where her time should not be going.

She brought in someone responsible for consistency across coaches and groups.

This individual did a full review of the existing curriculum, then built a plan to re-record it so it aligned tightly with the milestone path students follow live.

We added simple, boring tools (like link redirects) so future tweaks wouldn’t require constant updates to her recorded content.

And we set up an AI-assisted email workflow so her newsletter stopped being a weekly exercise in starting from scratch.

None of this is glamorous.

All of it creates space for her to think about the next questions: earlier-career offers, partnerships with training bodies, and what it would mean to step back from clinical work entirely.

After: The Same Core, With a New Flywheel

Tessa did not want to chase a massive retooling of her business for risky gains.

Her goals were grounded:

• Make at least as much as her consultant role, on her terms.
• Protect and improve the experience for doctors who trust her with a high-stakes moment.
• Turn a good cohort-based experience into a stable flagship that can be run four or five times a year without burning her or her team out.

Today, that’s the path she’s on as she runs a 7-figure business.

Cohorts are selling out at historically high price points.

The Academy has clear tiers, defined add-ons, and more revenue per doctor without resorting to wild claims or degrading the base experience.

She has a cleaner view of who needs what, when, instead of reacting to every message as if it’s the first time.

When I asked her what she’d change about our work together, she surprised me and said “nothing”.

“I didn’t really have a particular expectation,” she told me.

“But if I had, it would have exceeded them. It’s been very good for my business. It’s been fun. I’ve enjoyed it. And I feel like I’ve thought through how to give people the best experience as well as optimizing my business. I’ve been able to do both.”

And when she imagines encouraging a peer to hire me, she’s direct:

“Craig is the best person to help you develop your online course. He’ll adapt to what you need and identify the parts you don’t know you need. It’s made a massive difference to my business – and it was fun.”

That’s the point of this kind of work: not to turn you into someone else, but to build the structure around what’s already working so you can keep doing it, at scale.