In November 2022, I signed up to become a Certified Pumpkin Plan Strategist. And in December 2023, I cancelled my subscription after just over a year.

Do I regret getting certified? Not for a minute. I’m still 100% behind the Pumpkin Plan methodology, and I gained both skills and knowledge that will stay with me for the rest of my life.

What follows is an overview of specific Pumpkin Plan Certification features – and what worked for me… and what didn’t.

The Pumpkin Plan Framework

While author Mike Michalowicz is probably best known for Profit First (the book & the bookkeeping method), The Pumpkin Plan is the one I tend to recommend to all fellow entrepreneurs.

It’s essentially a book about niching down, and shows beyond any reasonable doubt that knowing your target audience really well pays off – it makes it easier to create an offer that fits their needs + makes it (a lot) easier to market that offer.

Why call it “the pumpkin plan”, you ask? In the book, Mike tells the story of giant pumpkin farmers. To grow a prize-winning pumpkin, they don’t just sow a lot of seeds and see what works – instead, they’ll select the exact right seed, shower the growing plant with personal care and attention, and get much better results than if they had tried to grow and nurture a lot of plants.

When I first read TPP, I just couldn’t wait to share it with others – and I’ve recommended (and even gifted) it to clients and peers often, getting raving feedback every single time. Entrepreneurs are often scared to make their offer and their marketing too specific, until a book like The Pumpkin Plan helps them realise that they’re only sabotaging themselves by trying to serve anyone and everyone.

The Pre-Certification Process

Why I decided to become a Pumpkin Plan Strategist

I took my sweet time between reading the book for the first time, and deciding I wanted to become a certified PP strategist.

The main motivation I had for getting certified, was my experience getting certified as a Storybrand Guide a couple of years earlier: that experience took me from knowing and liking the Storybrand framework, to really understanding the process I should take my clients through in order to clarify their message, and applying that process correctly.

However, the Storybrand process only starts after a company already has the basics down – you can’t start working on branding, messaging, a website or a marketing strategy if you don’t have a great offer that’s irresistible to the people who are supposed to buy it.

The ongoing training and the community of certified Guides make me a better marketer – and I was hoping that getting certified as a Pumpkin Plan Strategist would be the “missing link” in my offer.

The application process

Applying starts with a form on pumpkinplanyourbiz.com.

From the emails that followed, I learned that the PP certification is led by one of Mike Michalowicz’ business partners, a coach called Donna Leyens. And while the application process was a bit clunkier and less professional than I expected from a “guy who has it all figured out” like Michalowicz, it was also more personal than I would have thought. Donna got on a long Zoom call with me to share her story and motivation, and sent me personal emails (as in, I didn’t feel like I was going through some funnel) afterwards.

The certification program runs “live” twice a year, but I was offered to hop on and get certified even after the current cohort already started – they were happy to help me figure something out.

In the end, I decided to wait, attended their pre-launch series of live group calls, and signed up in November 2022.

Getting Certified as a Pumpkin Plan Strategist: 3 Elements

Just like the pre-certification process, the onboarding process was a bit messier than I expected. Full disclosure, I help online course creators optimise their sales and onboarding process for a living, so I pay attention to details – I know several of my classmates did not think it felt amateur at all.

There are three elements to getting certified as a Pumpkin Plan Strategist:

1. Going through the “Pumpkin Plan Action Guide”, which is in essence the PP process you can take your clients through once you’re certified. Going through it yourself first (and applying it to your own business) not only ensures that you get it and that you “walk the talk” (= that your biz has been thoroughly Pumpkin Planned), but it also allowed me to experience the process from the point of view of potential clients.

2. Going through an online certification course – 10 “clinics” + a quiz at the end of each clinic. If you fail on the quiz, you can’t progress to the next clinic.

3. Attending biweekly coaching calls with Donna or her right hand – at the time I was going through it, this was a lovely and very insightful lady called Julie Whelan. The coaching calls are not compulsory (you’ll get the certification if you don’t attend any of them), but this is where you can acquire the necessary skills to coach your clients through the PP process.

Who are those Certified PP Strategists?

To my initial surprise, a lot of the (future) Pumpkin Plan strategists in my cohort were not marketers. Some were or wanted to be business coaches, but the majority were accountants (or worked with an accountant firm) who were already Certified Profit First accountants.

This started making sense as we went through the Action Guide. A lot of the tools offered in Pumpkin Plan your biz are spreadsheets (numbers are important in the process of discovering what clients/customers to focus on), and most accountants in the group joined so they would be able to better coach their clients in making more profit… by focusing their business.

The Facebook Community

There is a Facebook group for Pumpkin Plan Strategists – however I’m not very active on Facebook so I only looked into it whenever we were prompted to do so on one of the biweekly calls… I wasn’t missing much though, the community is not very active.

The Certification Process

I absolutely loved the actual certification process. It took me a while to understand where to find everything, what I was supposed to do, and in what order – but once I got it, I thoroughly enjoyed going through the Pumpkin Planning process for my own business – and then going through each clinic where Donna laid out what to pay attention to, common mistakes or assumptions business owners make when they go through the process, etc.

The quizzes at the end of each clinic made me feel like I wasn’t just buying my certification – Donna actually wants us to know what we’re doing, and take our time acquiring the skills and understanding the matter. Big plus.

The Biweekly Group Calls

I really appreciated the biweekly group calls as well.

For the first 5 months, we had biweekly group calls with PP coaches Donna and Julie, in which our cohort (= the group of people who signed up to get certified at the same time as me) would get small-group coaching.

• For each call, Julie and/or Donna would ask one of us to complete an assignment from the Pumpkin Plan Action Guide (more about that in the next section)
• During the call, the rest of the group would review the assignment, ask questions, get feedback on our coaching from the PP coaches.
• Most calls also allowed us to practice our coaching skills in small groups – we would get divided in “breakouts” in Zoom and ask each other the questions to help each other get to better results (for our own businesses).

These calls helped me (and I believe, everyone who showed up week after week) acquire valuable coaching skills! And after the initial half-year of training, we were able to join the “regular” biweekly calls: this would be alternating calls to help us “grow your biz” (how to market our coaching services etc) and “grow your skills” (helping us improve those coaching skills).

What worked for me a little less, was the Pumpkin Plan Action Guide itself… not because it doesn’t work (it does!), but because it was different than I expected, and it turned out the system didn’t fit the type of work I do or the type of client I often work with.

The Pumpkin Plan Action Guide

The main reason I decided to become a Pumpkin Plan Strategist, was that a lot of my clients are at a crossroads in their business. Often, they realise they’ve been working with clients they no longer want to work with, offering something they no longer want to offer, or there’s a disconnect between their offer and the people they’re trying to sell it to. Many come to me hoping for clarity on how to tweak their offer or how to reach a more suitable group of potential leads instead.

The Pumpkin Plan book and several of the resources in the PP Action Guide help with that – it helps people realise why they’re leaving money on the table by not niching down – and it helps them discover their sweet spot so they can focus on what they love doing AND what makes them money.

However, a big part of the “Pumpkin Plan Your Biz” process is about analysing current clients (collecting numbers, interviewing best clients, etc) – but if someone is in the process of pivoting, they want to offer something completely different or work with a different industry than before, those numbers and interviews won’t really serve them.

In other words: while I loved the process, it didn’t suit most of my clients.

Feedback on the Pumpkin Plan from Clients and Peers

Truth be told, I loved the process so much I considered changing the people I work with so I’d be able to take them through the process. I have seen it make a big difference in some people’s businesses!

However (and here’s where the main hurdle lies for me)… the feedback I was getting from beta-testing clients and peers wasn’t great.

To start, their external marketing is a mess: if you google Pumpkin Plan, you will find different pages on different websites. After the link to the book on Amazon there’s a page on Mike Michalowicz’ website, a separate one-page website to promote the book, and then there’s Pumpkin Plan your Biz where  you can hire a PP strategist or become one.

Each of those websites has different branding, different messaging, and each page has different CTAs and links. For instance, you wouldn’t know there’s such a thing as Pumpkin Plan Strategists unless you go to the PPYB website. On top of this, several of the links on the pages are broken – and e.g. at the time of writing this, the main website had no SSL certificate.

The whole thing does not inspire authority and confidence.

Giving Clients Access to the PPAG

Even if you ask clients to look past how it looks from the outside, the general setup of the Pumpkin Plan Action Guide is clunky – it felt like someone had just built their own website and set things up as they went.

The way the PPAG is set up is outdated as well: the clinics offer around 60 different resources (a dozen spreadsheets, the rest are PDF documents) and once you (the Certified Strategist) give your clients access to the PPAG, they are supposed to

1. Watch the videos in each clinic (one week at the time if they’re going through the whole process step by step)
2. Fill out the PDFs and spreadsheets in that specific clinic…
3. Then save the document and email it to you, the strategist they’re working with.

I’ve used many systems and tools over the years, and have no interest in receiving 50-60 documents by email from each client. Or even having clients uploading that amount of separate materials to the cloud. On top of that, several of the spreadsheets look messy and are more complicated or ambiguous than needed.

While going through the certification process, I did import all spreadsheets and questionnaires (most of the PDFs contain a limited number of questions) into a single Airtable base. Yes, I’m that big of an Airtable nerd. I used parts of that Airtable base once or twice with clients who needed only a couple of the exercises or tools.

Watch a video of how that Airtable base is set up here!

All in all, to me the Pumpkin Plan Action Guide feels clunky and outdated, even though the tools are great. I wouldn’t feel comfortable asking clients to go through the process as it’s set up though. But maybe I’m spoiled – as a Storybrand Certified Guide, I can grant clients access to marketing tools and the Business Made Simple platform. These look good, work smoothly, and e.g. BMS “Flight School” has an absolutely awesome system that allows clients to save their notes and progress on the platform, and then share it with their BMS coach.

Note: yes, optimising and improving online courses and membership sites is exactly what we do at SmartAlpaca Marketing. And yes, I reached out to the PPYB team offering a free conversation on the topic, but the reply said there were no plans to make changes to the website at this time. 

Selling Pumpkin Plan Coaching

With all that I wrote above, I was on the fence: the tools are great, the biweekly calls are incredibly valuable and insightful (even if I missed a lot due to time differences, I always had access to replays), and I could have overlooked the clunkiness of the platform and used my own…

But I found myself incapable of “selling” the Pumpkin Plan to PP-unaware leads and clients. And even though I would have loved to take some of my clients through the full Pumpkin Planning process (which takes about 6 months), and I met several people who would have gotten a lot of value from it, it was just a hard sell.

Getting leads from PumpkinPlanYourBiz.com

I got my first lead from PPYB only days after I got certified, in December 2022. This person wasn’t really interested in going through the full Pumpkin Plan process, but the company was struggling with retention in their courses and membership sites. They just happened to be reading The Pumpkin Plan book, followed the link to the website – and when they saw in my PPYB profile that this was something I specialise in, they got in touch.

We worked together for 6 months and achieved some very successful launches and relaunches in the process, and I ended up making the investment in the Pumpkin Plan Certification back from that one client.

However, this was the only lead I got from being a Pumpkin Plan Strategist in the whole year. None of the fellow PP strategists I spoke to had leads through the website.

Selling Pumpkin Plan Coaching

Several times throughout the year, I talked to clients or leads who would really have benefited from the Pumpkin Planning process – they had a successful business that could benefit from looking at their numbers, and potentially tweaking their offer to accommodate their best customers.

However, most of them were problem-unaware: they would come to me for help with messaging and marketing, and did not realise that their marketing could be so much more impactful if they worked to tweak their offer first. And truth be told, when someone comes to you with a very specific ask (“I need a website”), it’s one thing to tell them we’d need more time before starting to work to work on the strategy first… no one wants to hear we should take a lot more time to really look at  their offer.

And even when problem-aware (they realise their offer needs some work), mentioning “The Pumpkin Plan” as a method we’re going to use in our work together (again) doesn’t instil a lot of confidence. The name alone needs an explainer, and it isn’t until people read the book that they really see the value in the method.

So that’s what I ended up doing: I would send clients a copy of the Pumpkin Plan book, which 99% of them would LOVE and want to take action on immediately, before we would start using some of the exercises from the Pumpkin Plan Action Guide.

Being a marketer myself, I fully realise that I could have made changes in my own positioning and marketing to attract Pumpkin Plan “aware” leads: people who had read the Pumpkin Plan already and were specifically looking for a PP strategist to work with. However from a couple of tries at this, it seemed to attract business types I wasn’t very interested in working with. I love working with online solo-entrepreneurs and freelancers, and most of the PP tools are not what they need.

The cost of becoming Pumpkin Plan Certified

All in all, I found my Pumpkin Plan certification 100% worth my investment.

I had a choice between paying $425 (US dollars) monthly for a year, or getting a discount and paying for the full year ahead.

The value I got for that price was great, but most of the value was in

• Going through the Pumpkin Plan Action Guide and applying it to my own business (which I wasn’t planning on doing every year)
• The insights I got from the certification course (again, not planning on doing it every year)
• The first months coaching calls in which I acquired the skills to coach people through the PPAG
• And some of the biweekly group calls that followed later…

I decided that the biweekly group calls alone were not worth continuing to pay this amount, especially as I wasn’t planning to change my own marketing to focus on Pumpkin Plan Aware leads and clients.

Conclusion

The Pumpkin Plan certification has been one of the least professionally set up programs I’ve been through (at least in the price range of 2k and more).

• The tools and processes in the “Pumpkin Plan Your Biz” method really work
• I acquired valuable skills from the certification process and coaching calls
• I believe every business should at least try to “get pumpkin planned” at least once every 5-10 years

It was worth my investment in the first year, but I wasn’t using the tools with my clients and did not see the point of continuing to invest so I could retain the title of Pumpkin Plan Strategist.

Please feel free to reach out if you have any additional questions!