[Episode 87] How to Choose the Right Courses for Business

If you prefer a Google search approach, you might have typed “business courses” into Google at 11 pm with seventeen tabs open, comparing prices and curricula.

Or

If you prefer to ask Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, or Gemini with the same question but have ended up with a tidy list of options that all sound roughly the same.

Either way, you're not alone.

And here's a question worth sitting with before you go any further:

What is the problem you’re actually trying to solve?

I've sat on both sides of this.

I've bought courses that sat half-finished after the initial motivation has passed. I've also built and run courses for hundreds of business owners, so I've had a good long look at what separates the ones who get real value from the ones who don't.

As a past teacher, my reflection is: it's rarely the content that makes the difference. It's the fit, and how honestly you've looked at your own situation before you buy.

What's the problem underneath the topic?

Most business owners search by subject: marketing, sales, leadership, finance. But what if the topic you're searching for isn't actually the problem? A course on “marketing” won't help much if what you're really dealing with is a positioning problem, a confidence problem, or simply not enough hours in the week to think straight.

So before you look at a single course, what's the honest answer to this: what's actually costing you money or sleep right now? Not the skill you think you're supposed to have. The thing that's genuinely getting in your way.

And if you can't name it precisely yet, that's worth noticing too, not fixing in a hurry.

A lot of business owners land in a course because they perceive they can't afford any other options, when what they're actually craving is space to think clearly with someone else in the room. That's a different kind of support. Which one are you really after?

Who's teaching it, and how do they know?

Anyone can put together forty slides and call it a course. The question worth asking is whether the person teaching has actually lived the thing you're trying to learn, recently, in a business that looks something like yours. Do they know anything about education?

●      Have they run this in their own business?

●      Do they have runs on the board with people at your stage, or is it enterprise case studies that assume someone else does the implementing for you?

●      If you get stuck, is there a real person you can ask, or a library of videos you'll work through alone?

This was one of the motivating reasons I built the Ask Fleur Success Community: I kept watching business owners buy content and end up having to work on it alone. A course you can quietly pause is easy to abandon. A course with a person and a community attached to it is much harder to drift away from.

How do you really learn and finish things?

This one takes some honesty.

Self-paced video works beautifully for some people and becomes an expensive to-do list item for others.

Which one are you, if you're truly honest?

If you already know you need accountability, is the cheaper self-paced option actually the better value, or are you likely to pay for it twice, once in dollars and once in the quiet guilt of an unfinished folder?

It's worth asking what happens when you get stuck partway through.

• Is there a call you can join, a person you can message, a community that will actually respond?

• Or are you on your own between modules?

Picture a business owner taking a course on pricing their services properly, and it's just them making the call, alone at their desk. The content alone rarely changes what they charge the next client. What tends to shift it is someone asking, a week later, whether they actually repriced that contract.

What is staying stuck actually costing you?

A course that costs $500 and sits unfinished is more expensive than one that costs $2,000 and solves the problem or builds your capability.

So instead of asking “can I afford this,” what happens if you ask “what is it costing me to keep doing this the way I'm doing it now”?

What's it actually like, before you commit?

Any course worth its price should let you feel what it's actually like before you commit fully. Could you:

• read a module

• sit in on a session

• talk to someone who's done it?

This is part of why the Success Community trial gives you full access to one online course from day one, rather than a sales page and a promise. For $97, you get to work through a real course properly, feel the format, feel the support, and notice for yourself whether it fits before you decide anything bigger.

The question underneath all of this

Before you buy any business course, sit with this one: in twelve weeks, what would actually be different in my business because of it?

If you can answer that clearly, you've probably found the right one. If you can't yet, that's worth pausing on, because a course you can't picture the outcome of is one you'd be buying on hope rather than fit.

This is not about finding the perfect course. It's about how honestly you can look at the problem you have, considering how you actually learn, and what kind of support moves you to action.

The Ask Fleur Success Community gives you access to all of our mini online courses:

• LinkedIn 101

• The Fast Track Success Challenge

• Success Pitch: Nail Your Elevator Pitch

Curious whether the Success Community is the right fit for you? Start your $97 trial and get full access to one online course, LinkedIn 101, during the trial period.