This program review update has been in my notes for awhile because I had seen that there were some updates made in Dave Ramsey's Financial Coach Master Training since I did my first review of the program several years ago.
Keep in mind, I’m not going to repeat the things I said in that blog post, so please go there first and that will actually help this updated review make more sense and give you more context.
(You can also watch my original review here instead)
Please don’t make a decision about Dave Ramsey's Financial Coach Master Training or my Become a Coach program until the end of the post. Sometimes people comment half way through when I answer their questions later in the post.
What's New
Here’s the new things that have been added since I went through the course in 2019: there are three new lessons: the Coaching Model, Building a Storybrand, and Fanatical Prospecting. They’ve also added group coaching, the my practice tab, and bonus materials.
The Pros
Let’s start with the pros, because there are several new, positive changes that have been added to the program. In the new lessons, I found myself agreeing with a lot of the instructions when it came to coaching like don’t give your clients busy work, always meet with married couples together, find your clients’ “why,” Chris Hogan is very focused on empathetic listening, and they finally recommended virtual coaching!
Some big beef I had in my previous program review is that they were very behind the times when it came to running an online business, and I'm happy to report that they have taken massive strides in this area!
There is now a tab that has a CRM attached and you can use this to keep track of prospects as well as current clients. It’s nice to have all of this info in the same place and organized for reference.
The downside to this set up is that you are manually entering in everything, manually sending every email, and it doesn’t look like this CRM integrates with any other software which means a huge chunk of your time is going to be spent copy pasting the same welcome email and typing in prospects’ contact info.
In my Become a Coach program I love integrations and automations and I guide my coaches on how to set this up so that they aren’t wasting so much of their time. If/when you start to grow you will immediately grow out of this FCMT feature but it is free and included so it can get you started.
Next new feature that fell in the pro category was the group coaching scheduler. I think you can book these whenever? There’s not a lot of instruction but you book them based on how much revenue you are earning per month which I think is a great idea so everyone on the call is at least in similar places in their business.
I can’t vouch for the quality of the call itself. I know in the previous video the calls were very awkward and I did not benefit from them largely because I was in a different place in my business but that could very well be different now.
The last big pro from the new content is the bonus materials! There are some key bonus videos that are an immense improvement. Under the development tab (or the "bonus content" tab, it's different on mobile vs desktop and the Boot Camp material is not on desktop...), and the launch plan there are structured walk throughs of tools like Calendly, Jot Form, Paypal, Zoom, Mailchimp, and Facebook page set up.
This was a HUGEEE hole that they had in the program before and although this list is not comprehensive of the tools that you use in an online business, I was so happy to see that they added a lot of content around the business side of financial coaching!
I was shocked that this content is kinda off the beaten path, I wish they would have put it in the main lessons section (and the desktop version doesn't have the Boot Camp Series). It’s almost like they are afraid to fully commit that financial coaching is a viable online business. They still say in the lessons many times “if you charge,” or “it’s optional if you want to have this as a business," and one of the cringiest was "your clients' payments are applause for your service" (yikes, no, it's not) BUT these pros are still a huge improvement and I’m glad they are taking steps in this direction.
Here's the desktop vs mobile version so you can see the bonus content is missing the Boot Camp series I mentioned.
Don't forget, there are many other pros I go through in the original post! These were just the pros from the new content added.
The Cons
On to the cons of the program, let’s start with the content first. The flow of the content is still a big issue. This was something I harped on in my original video and I think the new content actually made it even more convoluted.
You have to piece together the actual coaching instructions from all over the dashboard, and it still seems to be incomplete. Instructions like "talk to people, send emails, post content, make a website" really leave you hanging. I’m sitting there waiting for the “how to” part to start and it just never does!
A glaring example of this is the consultation. In the new lesson 3, The Coaching Model, Chris Hogan gives you some cues on what to do and what not to do, listen, ask good questions, but never specifics.
Sales calls are very intimidating usually for both people when you’re just starting out and that’s why I have an actual script in my Become a Coach program that walks you through the different parts of the call and when you’re just starting out, rigid structure like that really gives you confidence so that you can be more yourself and not worried about “what do I say next??”
It gets more confusing, consultations are also covered in the new Client Creation series in the bonus content, in the Boot Camp lessons (which are missing on desktop), AND there’s another video about consultations under the Launch Plan.
The consultation is so IMPORTANT. This determines whether or not you get clients, and yet there’s all these different videos in different places giving you a pep talk about it but no real concrete plan.
My theory is that Chris Hogan does a LOT of the teaching under the lessons, which is honestly kinda weird, and makes it feel dated already since he has been gone for awhile. Since they can’t have him update or redo any videos, they are adding these videos under the bonus material to try and fill in gaps that they find coaches are having, but by trying to piece this stuff together, it comes off very disorganized and not like a truly cohesive, step by step, program.
In order to learn about this - you have to jump over here - and that info is over there - but it overlaps with this lesson... and I really think they need to overhaul the whole program so that everything is chronological, and by one or maybe two people.
This is my next big con, there’s so many people teaching this stuff and almost NONE of them have recent experience in an online business. Think about that, this is a real problem with this program, most of the people teaching it have never had a booming online coaching business.
Some of them might have done some in person coaching or coached years ago but they don’t have that anchor who is in the trenches of online coaching right NOW doing the majority of the content.
They bring in big names, Dave Ramsey of course, Donald Miller, Jeb Blount, Chris Hogan, but have any of these people actually built an online coaching business?
It’s a valid question and it seems like they have to stay broad and vague and keep bringing in big names because I truly don’t believe they KNOW the nuanced hurdles and problems that a coach is going to face in their business in 2024 and beyond.
The next big con, and this one breaks my heart, is lesson 13 Building a Storybrand. When I first saw they had added a new lesson with Donald miller, I was STOKED. I have been a Donald Miller fan since I was in high school reading Blue Like Jazz. I read all of his books, and I would fan girl so hard if I ever met him someday.
Anyway, I was so excited and I click into the first lesson and he starts talking about “if you confuse, you lose” in regards to your messaging to prospective clients. And I'm like "Where have I heard that? HOW have I heard that?? I’ve never watched this lesson before."
I instantly remembered I bought this book in 2018 less than a year after it was released. And my face just fell, I thought “He’s just going to talk about all the stuff that he talked about in his book!” and sure enough. Granted, he does a great job condensing a whole book into about an hour of content but the book is better...isn't the book always better?
Long story short, the other new lesson is Jeb Blount basically doing the same thing with his book, which I'd also read several years ago, Fanatical Prospecting.
And if Dave Ramsey's Financial Coach Master Training could be summed up with one big miss, it would be THAT. Taking repurposed material and knitting it together for this program is such a disservice to people who are paying thousands of dollars.
Those books are like fifteen bucks. And they are BETTER than the 60 min excerpts you get in the program! At one point, Donald miller actually says “You can read more about this in my book” and they didn’t even edit that out? It's like a slap in the face to people that pay a lot of money for this program; I couldn’t believe it!
Moving on, I wanted to give a quick update on the forms. A big issue I had and people in the comments had in my last review was that the forms they give you are pdfs with Ramsey branding and you can’t make it your own or really change it for your clients' needs.
They are now fillable pdfs. This is another huge miss for FCMT. If you don’t use their materials with their brand, you are making everything from SCRATCH. That is extremely overwhelming!
There’s really no reason for this. I try to give the coaches that go through Become a Coach as MUCH as I can so that they DON'T have to spend their time reinventing the wheel. The whole reason why someone would invest in a program like this is to SAVE TIME and have a jump start on things.
On the flip side, I was astonished in a bonus video it was instructed to “curate” content. What they mean by curate was repost and reshare content that was produced by Ramsey Solutions. So basically follow all of their personalities and add your thoughts to their posts and then just reshare.
I talk about in my last review how I was reprimanded for not following the baby steps to a tee and so of course it’s much safer to just use their materials and curate your content by reposting their content, but does this really teach people how to start and grow an online coaching business?
Growing an online business is HARD WORK, and it’s a LOT of hard work. I think it was Kevin O'Leary that said if I had known how hard this was going to be, I never would have done it. And I feel that in my soul.
When I was making weekly youtube videos, it was exhausting. Coordinating with my editor, thinking of new ideas, recording, making thumbnails, uploading descriptions, finding keywords, there’s stuff that goes into making those videos that you guys don’t even know about. And that was just the marketing!
Meanwhile: Just repost content, *shrug.* It's insulting to me as a financial coach, but I think it’s also insulting to the people that are going to see the "curated content." It sends the message that unique content is overrated and people aren’t worth it anyway.
And you might be thinking I sound like a flip flopping hypocrite! Didn’t I just say that they should provide the coaches with more resources and templates?
I think Dave Ramsey's Financial Coach Master Training has this backward. The stuff that makes your business YOU... YOU have to create! This is stuff like youtube videos, tik toks, lead magnets, you want this stuff to be YOU. I teach you HOW to do all that instead of WHAT to post.
On the other hand you’ve got welcome emails, checkout pages, sales call scripts, more admin/behind the scenes stuff, THAT stuff should be templates and more 'done for you' if you invest in a program.
This is a ginormous difference between Dave Ramsey's Financial Coach Master Training and my Become a Coach program. In Become a Coach, I go over many free platforms, including Youtube, and how to set everything up, my 4 content pillars, as well as apps where you can batch content and it drips it out over a week or a month.
To learn more about Become a Coach click here to watch my free 60 min pricing workshop and you can get a feel for my program and hear my coaching philosophy.
Last new con and it’s a big one for me: as I was going through the new content, a pop up ad kept coming up and it said “Sign up to lead a Financial Peace University class. It is a great way to make connections and find new clients...”
This struck me as manipulative because Ramsey Solutions is funneling coaches to essentially work for free by hosting FPU to promote the Ramsey brand and get new clients but that’s NOT the understanding of the people that are signing up for FPU. They are already paying for FPU and it just seems like the coaches are getting used and promised things that are not upfront to the FPU attendees.
It sounds under the table to me and seemed like Ramsey Solutions saw an opportunity to promote themselves by using their eager coaches while attendees think they are going to FPU and not aware that coaching is actually the upsell.
I try to distance myself from anything that sounds sketchy or not 100% upfront, and this rubbed me the wrong way.
Those were my major pros and cons that I wanted to highlight for you guys as you make a decision about enrolling in FCMT or my Become a Coach program. Don’t forget, you can watch my free pricing workshop right now and drop any questions you have for me in the comments.
