Imagine that you're a super fan of Bruce Springsteen.
You've got every one of his albums, know all his songs, and you've eagerly waited for the day when you could go and see him live in concert. Then you hear that Bruce Springsteen is coming to town.'
At this point, it's not even a decision, is it? You buy the ticket, and then it's a countdown. On the day of the concert, you see lots of people heading out in the same direction. They're wearing similar clothing. There's buzz, excitement in the air. You've got in really early. You sit down, you look around — and then something is missing.
There's just Bruce, and there's you.
No crowd, no shared energy. Surely this must be one of the best moments of your life. But it doesn't feel like it. I call this empty concert syndrome.
It's how clients feel when they've been exposed to the correct structure and delivery of group consulting. You would think that people want to deal with just the trainer, just the consultant, one-on-one. Yet once a person has tasted the amazing nature of group consulting, they realise that the concert, that event, isn't just about the performer. It's the crowd, it's the group, it's the people around you that create the experience.
As consultants and trainers, we strongly believe that people come to us for guidance, and they do.
So we end up like Bruce Springsteens — going around singing for one person at a time. If that sounds insane to you, well, it is bizarre. It's exhausting for the performer, and the client in the audience doesn't get the same feeling either. So why do we do it? Well, there are many reasons, and we're going to cover them in this article.
Let's start with the first point — the fear of losing hyper-personalised attention.
In 1999, psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons conducted a now-famous experiment at Harvard. They asked participants to watch a short video of two groups of people — some in white shirts, some in black — passing basketballs back and forth. The task was simple: count how many times the players in white passed the ball.
What happened next is what made the experiment famous.
Halfway through the video, someone in a gorilla suit walked into the frame, faced the camera, thumped their chest, and walked off. The whole thing lasted about nine seconds. And yet roughly half of all viewers never saw it. They were so focused on counting passes that a gorilla — in plain sight — was completely invisible to them. Chabris and Simons called this phenomenon inattentional blindness. We don't see what we're not looking for, even when it's right in front of us.
This is exactly the kind of problem we have when we're talking about hyper-personalised attention.
The gorilla in the room that we don't see is the medium. When you think of group consulting, you often think of it as happening through Zoom calls, video meetings, and audio discussions — and in these formats, only one person can receive attention at any given point in time.
When 10 people are on a Zoom call, one person speaks while the others wait. The result is frustration and a fragmented experience. Yet this limitation isn't about group consulting itself—it's a flaw of the medium. We're so fixated on giving clients attention that we miss the real problem: video and audio calls are the disruptive gorillas. We often overlook this entirely.
Audio and video conversations create several hidden problems.
To begin with, they force synchronous interaction. Clients must show up at a specific time on a specific day. They have to work their whole day around just that one meeting. The second problem is that it encourages rambling. When people speak, it's like they're sitting around in a café — they wander through thoughts, they're figuring out what they want to say, they repeat themselves, and they tend to get more pompous than when they're writing.
Writing forces you to focus on your words and the structure of your sentences.
So when people are on these calls, they just take up so much bandwidth. We've all been on that call where one person just goes on forever, and you want to throttle them—regardless of who it is.
When one person is going on like this, it creates passive learning. Everyone else spends large amounts of time listening to a conversation that mostly doesn't apply to them.
When you have written interaction, the dynamic changes completely.
In a well-structured forum or written discussion, a client asks a specific question and receives a detailed response. The client can follow up, and this exchange may happen dozens of times in a week. Rather than a single, lengthy call, clients benefit from brief, focused advice throughout the week—resulting in more personalisation, not less.
In written consulting environments, the level of interaction can become extremely high.
When we run courses, some clients create 30-40 posts a week; others create 70-80. Even if only a third of these are direct advice from me, that's still 15 focused instructions per week. Delivering this much information in audio or video calls would overwhelm clients and make it unmanageable for everyone involved.
What seems like hyper-personalised attention is actually a headache for both parties. People default to one-on-one consulting because that's how they've always seen it done — but that doesn't mean the past has to equal the future.
At this point, the second question comes up — the logistics of filling a group.
One-on-one consulting seems to have a clear advantage: a client can start tomorrow. In contrast, group consulting appears more rigid. You need to gather several people, set a fixed date, coordinate schedules, and ensure you have enough participants. As a result, the process can feel dependent on marketing and sales, which often triggers uncertainty and fear.
Almost every consultant begins with one-on-one work.
When I started out, an hour would fly by on a call. Sometimes it would stretch to an hour and a half because I like to talk. Maybe the client does too—it doesn't matter. When I moved into working with companies, nothing really changed. I'd drive to one end of the earth to meet one company, then another. It was all about time and more time.
To be fair, one-on-one consulting isn't the problem.
You can only work with a limited number of clients, but your hourly rate can increase significantly—some people charge as much as $5,000 or even $20,000 an hour. However, not everyone reaches those levels. With limited hours in the day, there’s a ceiling on growth unless you change your model.
Transitioning to group formats while still maintaining individual clients can feel daunting. Typically, you continue your existing consulting, announce a group programme, and start with a small number of participants—often just 3 or 4, not 10 or 15.
The starting point is always a decision — a decision to move slowly into group consulting.
You say, “I will run this programme.” Without setting a destination, that journey will never begin. Usually, the start date is months away.
You'll need to figure out how a forum works. Avoid platforms like WhatsApp or other chat apps, which can be unreliable or hard to track.
The forum has existed pretty much since the start of the internet, and it's still everywhere.
The biggest sites in the world—like Reddit—are forum-based. If they can do it, so can you. Once you set a goal, your marketing and preparation will start to align with it.
This brings us to the third part — accountability in an asynchronous system.
Many consultants rely on scheduled meetings to keep clients on track. People complete tasks because they have to report progress on the next call. Without those scheduled calls, motivation weakens, and people drift. But accountability doesn't require everyone to be synchronised. Structure can exist without constant meetings.
There are examples everywhere — schools, airlines, manufacturing, restaurants, bakeries.
Each is doing their own thing, but they're all working towards a shared goal. People operate through clearly defined roles, schedules, and expectations. Consulting programmes can work in exactly the same way. The real key is structure, not timing. Accountability comes from goals and milestones — none of which require weekly calls. In many cases, written reporting and progress updates are far more effective.
Yes, this is a lot of work.
But we're not planning for right now — not today, not next week. We're planning for later in the year, maybe even early next year. There's nothing wrong with group consulting. You have to set the right parameters for group consulting to work. But it's entirely doable.
So let's bring it back to where we started — back to Bruce Springsteen and that empty concert.
We covered three fears.
The first was hyper-personalised attention.
Just like the gorilla experiment showed us, we've been so focused on the idea of one-on-one attention that we've completely missed the gorilla: that written, asynchronous consulting actually delivers more personalisation, not less. The medium was the problem all along, not the group format.
The second fear was scheduling.
Group consulting is harder to start, harder to fill, and harder to coordinate. It also takes planning, but that's exactly what makes it work. The concert doesn't happen by accident. The date gets set, the preparation begins, and when the night arrives, the energy in that room is something a private performance could never replicate. That's not empty concert syndrome. It's the real thing.
The third fear was accountability.
We fear that without weekly calls, clients will drift. But structure doesn't require synchronisation. It requires clear goals, clear milestones, and a well-run forum. Organisations far larger and more complex than any consulting programme run on exactly that principle.
One-on-one consulting still has its place.
We charge over $1,000 an hour for it, and it sits comfortably alongside the group programme. But it's the group consulting that has provided steady income for the last 20 years. Both can coexist. That's the goal.
These are just three of the problems that will come up.
There are probably another 300. But you get through them, and one day you'll be standing on the other side thinking, “Yep, I'm doing group consulting — sometimes one-on-one too — and this is exactly where I want to be.”
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