From Agency to Courses to Software: Pat Henseler on Action-First Course Design

Pat's company started as a LinkedIn and email marketing agency charging clients $5,000 to $10,000 per month. The courses emerged from a clear market signal: potential clients who could not yet afford agency services were asking for a do-it-yourself option. "They were asking for a more do-it-myself option with a smaller price tag," Pat explains. The first courses were simple screen recordings of team members walking through processes, essentially training customers the same way they trained employees. Concerns about cannibalizing the agency business proved unfounded. Course participants fell into two groups: those who would never afford agency services but wanted the knowledge, and those who needed education before committing to a higher-priced service. "We saw both sides of our business improve when we started using courses," Pat says. Clients like Yammer (owned by Microsoft) and Neil Patel used their agency, while smaller entrepreneurs enrolled in courses that often led them back to the premium service.

The turning point in Pat's course design came from a simple observation: students could understand the material and recite it back, but they were slow to take action. "We really tried to redesign our courses to say, rather than what are we teaching this lesson, what's the action associated with this, and kind of work backwards from there," he explains. This shift had cascading effects. Videos got shorter because they were focused on driving a specific action, not covering comprehensive material. Step-by-step implementation details moved from video to written workbooks and resources, because "not many people are watching a training video, pausing, doing something, rewinding, making sure they did it right." The results were dramatic. Completion of the critical first milestone -- building a LinkedIn connection database -- went from roughly 10-15% to 65-75% the following year. The team also added live group coaching calls, starting with the biggest sticking point: defining a prospect profile. Many participants were hesitant to commit to a niche, so live breakout sessions with coaches helped them overcome that initial block.

Pat describes the combination of courses and software as "peanut butter and jelly." Connect 365, their email automation tool, was born from internal efficiency needs at their agency. When they paired it with courses, both products became stronger. Courses taught the strategy; the software made implementation faster. "There's a lot of software and tools out there," Pat observes. "We found that when we first started selling our software without courses, people got the tool but not the strategy to use it effectively." The courses solved this by getting customers started in the right way, which improved long-term retention. For course creators, the lesson runs in both directions: existing course businesses can identify software tools that complement their curriculum, while software companies can dramatically improve user outcomes and retention by wrapping education around their product. As Pat puts it, "When you become a course creator, there's an added dimension: how can I make it easier for my customer to implement what I'm teaching them?"