Transcription

Oh, yeah, baby! I am pumped for today’s interview. Today I’m excited because, for the first time, I’m going to connect with one of the pioneers in our space.

His name is Dr. Frank Lipman. You may have heard of him. If you haven’t, shame on you, because he’s been around for a while. He’s done some pretty big things. I’ll just give you a little rundown of who he is just in case you’re wondering.

He is a pioneer in both integrative and functional medicine. He’s the founder and director of Eleven Eleven Wellness Center in New York City, a New York Times best-selling author, and the creator of Be Well, which is a lifestyle brand that offers premium supplements, cleanse programs, and personalized health coaching to help people achieve genuine and sustainable life changes.

He’s also a leading international speaker in health and wellness, he’s been featured in all the top magazines and profiled in many of them, too, including the New York Times, New York Magazine, and the Oprah Winfrey Magazine, and has appeared on TV shows like The Today Show, Extra, Dr. Oz, and many more.

If you’d like to learn more about what he’s up to you can check out his website bewell.com.

Without any further ado, let’s bring Frank onto the show, tap into his years of wisdom, and look at how he has broken out of the mold of sitting in a clinic all day long to spanning his reach and reaching more people through his ideas, thought leadership, books, and so forth. You’ll get a lot of value out of this one.

Hey, Frank. Welcome to the Healthpreneur Podcast. How are you?

Frank:             Great. How are you doing?

Yuri:                I’m doing very well, thanks. I’m excited to have you on the show because since back in 2006, I’ve seen you all over the internet as well as in bookstores. You’ve got some great stuff out there. You’re a New York Times best-selling author, and you’ve just been such a prominent figure in the health space for so long. I’m happy to have you on the show, so welcome.

Frank:             Thank you. Thanks for having me.

 

Frank’s business model and why he’s “a terrible businessman”

Yuri:                Well, you’re very welcome. It’s good to connect. We gave your bio before we brought you on the show, but can you give our listeners a sense of what your business model looks like? What does the Frank Lipman machine encompass, in terms of how you support your clients and your customers? How do you generate income and what is your focus?

Frank:             I’m probably the wrong person to ask about business models, because I’m terrible business man. I’ve just always done what I wanted to do. I’ve been a medical doctor since 1979 where I qualified in South Africa, but in the early days of my training I realized that Western medicine was wonderful for crisis care – breaking bones, acute surgeries and infections – but I noticed early on that it wasn’t particularly good at solving people’s chronic or day-to-day problems.

I started exploring alternatives in the early ’80s, and I knew there was a better way. Maybe I was lucky to grow up in South Africa where there was an apartheid and I knew the system was rotten. Early on I knew the medical system was, maybe not rotten, but not a great system.

From the early days, I explored these alternatives and I knew there was a better way to practice medicine. I kept searching for techniques and modalities that would help my patients. That was always my model. I never thought of it as a business, I just went to discover healers, practitioners, and therapies that I thought would help my patients. That was my journey.

Maybe eight or nine years ago I decided to expand the business and sell supplements online, and that’s how my online business started. It’s always doing what I feel passionate about, what I think can change people’s lives, and getting a message out there that, at that stage, I didn’t think was out there.

Now, wellness is the wild west. It’s all over the show. In the early days when I got into this it was about getting this message and these therapies out there that I know work, because I saw it every day in my practice. It was about getting it to a larger audience. That’s how the business developed.

Yuri:                That’s great. You say you’re not a business man, but I want to challenge you on that. You’ve obviously built something special, but there are also a lot of people listening who are in your shoes. They just want to share their content and expertise. They don’t want to figure out how to build the business.

Let’s talk about that. What was the moment in your journey where you got to a fork in the road? How do I find the right people to support me in this? How did all of that start? Who were the first one or two hires to support you to build out your online presence?

 

How he got started in the online world and how he remained true to himself

Frank:             I was just practicing and there was a lovely young guy who came into our office, Dhrumil Purohit, who started the clean program and has moved on since.

Yuri:                Oh yeah, Dhru’s awesome.

Frank:             Dhru was in the office and he said to start tweeting and writing blogs. He pushed me in that direction because I had just written a book or two by then. You know, I’m an old man. I’m sixty-three and I thought I wasn’t interested. He said to me, “Frank, you’ve got to do this. This is the future. You’ve got all this information. Why don’t you start sharing with a bigger audience?”

I started because Dhru said I should start. It grew organically and my brother-in-law started helping with the products behind the scenes. My wife started helping me. It’s a real family business. Then we brought on a health coach and it developed organically.

Dhrumil was the person who pushed me into getting started on writing for the web.

Yuri:                That’s cool. Is he still working with Mark Hyman?

Frank:             Yes.

Yuri:                That’s awesome.

 Frank:             Lovely, brilliant, young guy. I love him.

Yuri:                Absolutely, great dude.

In your experience, could you boil it down to one trait, factor, or skill that has helped you go from that initial starting point to where you are now? Is there one thing that helped build a great presence and successful business while leveraging the internet?

 Frank:             It helps that I have a big practice and am well-known in New York. A number a famous people see me. That helps. That what’s most important to me and what I see the younger people appreciate; that I’ve stayed true to who I am. I’m not a bullshit artist, I just say things the way I think they are. I just say it like it is.

I am authentic. I practice what I preach. I’m very honest about everything. Maybe in the old days that didn’t go down so well because people got upset when I said certain things. I think this new generation seems to appreciate that more. So being authentic and being true to yourself, and not compromising too much anyway is a helpful tip. I think that is important – and it makes it easier to live with yourself, anyway.

Yuri:                It’s always a nice skill to sleep well at night.

What advice would you give to up and coming Healthpreneurs, medical doctors, and naturopaths who are inundated with comparison syndrome and looking at everyone’s social media feeds, followers, or whatever. What advice do you give to those who want to be more impactful in their respective fields?

 

The advice he gives his own daughter

Frank:             Interesting question, because I’m going through that with my daughter now. I have a thirty-year-old daughter who is a therapist, trained in nutrition, and does social work. She does interesting stuff and she’s building her own practice. I get that question from her.

I just encourage her to keep refining her craft. Keep learning new things. Keep being open, and remain authentic. Don’t do things because it’s the latest fad. Do things that are meaningful to you and your patients; things that you feel good about.

The most important thing I would say as a practitioner, is to learn about yourself. The more you can be present in any relationship, especially with your patients, the better you’re going to be. I would say to learn who you are and be true to yourself. Don’t get caught up in your competitors or how many followers they have. That’s all irrelevant.

Be true to yourself. Know who you are and do things that turn you on.

People get your passion. When people see how passionate you are, that turns them on. To me it’s all about developing yourself. I think meditation is a wonderful skill for people to learn. It’s a wonderful way to learn about yourself apart from learning to relax.

 

Meditation and how it changed his relationship with clients, family, and self

Yuri:                That’s great advice. What have you learned about yourself, good or bad, over the last several years in business or through mediation?

Frank:             Meditation’s probably been the most significant thing for me and it’s taken me a long, long time to get it. I mean a long time. Many, many years. I used to dabble with mindfulness. I didn’t start feeling the effects until I started developing a regular practice where it became a habit. I became less reactive and more present with not only my patients, but with my family.

I was just more comfortable with myself. Meditation, if you can make it a habit, has so many beneficial effects that I didn’t even realize it had. I did it to relax and make myself less reactive. The benefits go way beyond that.

I would encourage everyone to take meditation seriously. If you can, make it into a habit. If you can make it into a daily practice, after a month or two you’ll start seeing these subtle changes in yourself, your reaction to people, and the way people react to you. The people you work with and your family will notice it as well.

It’s hard to notice these things for yourself, so it’s great and I’ve been lucky to have a wife who is a great sounding board and is always giving me feedback. You asked the question, “What’s been really helpful,” and I think it’s having a partner who is on the same path, is honest with you, and tells you exactly what’s going on. Also, a daughter who’s blatantly honest as well and tells you when you’re full of shit. That helps.

Sometimes when you’re in my position or people look up to you, you can get a little cocky. But when you have people who bring you down to Earth, it’s very helpful. I think all these things help.

I’ve been surrounded by wonderful people. I’ve got an amazing daughter and wife, unbelievable friends, unbelievable mentors, and an amazing staff. I have surrounded myself with people who I adore, who adore me, and it’s like a little tribe. When you have a tribe where everyone can be who they are, I think that makes a big difference, too.

It’s hard to do these things by yourself. You need a team. You need a tribe. You realize you’re just one part of a machine.

Yuri:                Great advice. It’s something that we see repeatedly on the podcast.

People talk about how they go from technician – a doctor or an expert in a specific field – then build a business and quickly realize they can’t do all this by themselves. We need to surround ourselves with great people that are great at what they do so we can spend more time doing what we love to do.

I want to touch on meditation for a second. Meditation is something I’ve made a regular practice every single day for myself for a while. I’ve got an acronym I use called RPM, which is Rise, Pee, Meditate.

Frank:             Yeah, that’s exactly what I do. I love that, thank you.

Yuri:                You’re welcome. You can totally use that. Do you practice a specific type of meditation? Is it guided, is it transcendental, what does it look like for you? How often do you meditate? How long do you meditate for?

Frank:             I do RPM as well. Rise, Pee, Meditate. I sit for at least 20 minutes every morning. My meditation is a mix. The thing that helped me the most with my meditation – because I used to dabble with mindfulness for a long time, then I studied with a teacher who taught me – is to start focusing on the buzz you get between your ears when you’re quieting down.

A year or two ago we had a Vedic teacher come into the office to teach us. It’s not TM but it’s the same tradition where they teach you a mantra. And I found that helped me the most in terms of getting me back to my meditation.

So, I do a combination. I always will use a mantra to a certain extent. But then there’s just being present with the surroundings. I often get caught up in this buzz that I get in my head. It’s a combination. But, I will say, the TM type of meditation, the Vedic mantra type, has been the easiest one in terms of getting me to do it and do it effectively.

I always found mindfulness very difficult. Maybe because my mind was so active. I just couldn’t stay with it. After doing that training with this teacher, Michael Miller here in New York, and getting a mantra – not that everyone has to do that – that helped me.

I just find it very easy. I can do my other meditation and when my mind goes, I go back to my mantra. That seems to have made a big difference.

Yuri:                That’s awesome. Almost everyone we’ve had on the show has talked about meditation being a big part of their morning ritual. But even if you look outside of our guests, I think a lot more very successful people are coming and being open about the fact that they meditate once or twice a day. It’s a huge, huge factor in not necessarily their success, but their level of happiness and fulfillment in life.

I think it’s so critical.

If you’re listening to this and you’re not meditating, just give it a shot. I’m very like you in that my mind is always racing with ideas. It’s about being able to quiet that. It’s a nice practice to get into. You start feeling better about yourself and everything else seems to flow more easily.

You seem to be very growth-oriented. With that in mind, what are one to three books that have most impacted your life?

 

Frank’s book recommendations and thoughts on investing in growth

Frank:             “Between Heaven and Earth” and “A Guide to Chinese Medicine”, written by my Chinese medicine mentors Efrem Korngold and Harriet Beinfield.

There was a book about body rhythms and light. Maybe it was called “Lights Out”. When I started getting into how important body rhythms were, reading that was such an “ah-ha” moment for me.

I’m trying to think of some meditation books that have been helpful. I found Jon Kabat-Zinn books just made it so simple. Being an intellectual and a left-sided brain person just trying to understand everything, I read a lot of Buddhism. When I read Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book where he sort of Westernized all those concepts, it made a lot of sense to me.

His ability to take a lot of that Buddhist philosophy and put it into a Western concept was very helpful for me in understanding a lot of this stuff.

I’m an avid reader. I’m looking at my bookshelf to see what else has influenced me over the years.

Yuri:                Are you more fiction, nonfiction, or both?

Frank:             Nonfiction. Having said that, when I read fiction, I love it. My wife always pushes fiction books on me because she says I’m always reading nonfiction. Non-medical books, Leonard Cohen’s biography was unbelievable. And then there’s been some books on South Africa that have been fascinating for me because I’m a South African that left South Africa.

Not because I don’t want to live there. We left because of apartheid. We love South Africa, the actual country, but we didn’t want to live under apartheid. I love Mandela’s story.

In terms of medicine, “Between Heaven and Earth” was influential in how I thought about health and life in general.

Yuri:                Awesome. From an investment perspective, what’s one of the best investments you’ve made from a money, time, or education perspective, in terms of helping you develop as a professional in business?

Frank:             I haven’t been a good investor money-wise. I’ve invested in so many health-related things before, from retreats to spas, to you name it. I lost all my money. So, I’m not a good investor in terms of money.

But I’ve invested time in growing. I spent so many weekends and weeks at meditation retreats. Whether it’s functional medicine or nutrition, I just think growing. Anything that helps you grow personally, spiritually, or intellectually. I think – as I encourage my daughter – you can’t go wrong with that knowledge.

Invest in the type of thing where you’re going to learn something; not only about yourself, but something you can bring to your patients as well.

Yuri:                I have a term I call “grow giver”. The more you grow, the more you can give.

Frank:             I love that, too. These are great terms. RPM and grow giver. Absolutely, yes.

Yuri:                Well thank you. What I love about entrepreneurs, especially in our space, is that we’re very growth-oriented. We want to learn for ourselves. We want to help ourselves, and obviously with what we learn we’re able to support our clients and the people that we know closely.

It’s tough to share stuff you don’t know. It’s all about growing and contributing. The more you give the more you grow, and it’s just a nice cycle.

 Frank:             Yeah, and you never stop growing. I’ve been doing this a long time, but there’s always something to learn. I’m getting so intrigued by CBD oil. And now I’m going to learn more and more about CBD oil. There’s always ways you can grow. You’re never going to know enough.

Yuri:                Absolutely.

If you’re speaking on stage to a group of entrepreneurs or health practitioners, and you were to say the number one trait or skill that you guys must have for lasting success, what would it be?

Frank:             Knowing yourself and being true to yourself.

Yuri:                That’s good advice because I think a lot of people, especially today, try to be like someone else. I think one of the big differentiators we have is being ourselves.

 

The Rapid Five

Frank, this has been a lot of fun. Before we finish off though, we’ve got the Rapid Five. Are you ready?

Frank:             I’m ready.

Yuri:                Alright. Five questions, rapid fire. Whatever comes top of mind is the right answer. Here we go. Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

Frank:             I don’t exercise. I’m lazy.

Yuri:                Number two, what is your biggest strength?

Frank:             I’m open, honest, and know my shortcomings.

Yuri:                Excellent. Number three, what’s once skill you’ve become dangerously good at to grow your business?

Frank:             Learning how to choose the right people. The right person needs to be in the right place. If you don’t have the right people doing the appropriate things, it’s not going to work.

Yuri:                That’s good. Number four, what do you do first thing in the morning?

Frank:             Meditate. RPM.

Yuri:                That’s right. There we go. Number five, complete this sentence: I know I’m being successful when…

Frank:             When I’m just comfortable with myself, things are going well at home and in the business, I’m doing what I want to do, and loving what I want to do. When I’m just happy with life.

Yuri:                That’s great. Awesome. Dr. Frank Lipman, guys. Frank, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today and for all the amazing work that you’ve done to support people in improving their health.

What is the best place for our audience to stay in touch with what you guys are up to, whether it’s your website, books, or anything else?

Frank:             Bewell.com. My new book, “How To Be Well” is brilliant. There are a hundred tips all in one book. I think it’s the best of my five books. I recommend everyone get it. Just go to my website.

Yuri:                Great. Very easy to remember. Thank you once again, Frank, for taking the time. Thanks to everyone for joining us and we’ll speak to you soon.

Frank:             Thanks so much.

***********************************************************

Yuri’s Take

Don’t you just love the wisdom that comes from people who have been around for a while? He’s one of the original gangsters. It’s so refreshing to speak with individuals who’ve been around for such a long time. I’m not trying to age him by any means, but let’s be honest. He’s not twenty years old. He’s doing some great things and has done some amazing things.

It’s important for us to sit down and have a conversation with someone who’s been around for such a great length of time, transformed so many lives, and done so many great things.

One of the things that we spoke about was that he’s not necessarily a business guy. He’s just a content guy. I am the chief content creator for our businesses. You don’t have to be the best business slash marketer, but you do have to have some pretty big ideas that can help people. Then it’s just about surrounding yourself with other great people who can take care of all the stuff that you don’t want to do.

That is the key to building a successful, sustainable, and scalable business. If you’re doing everything yourself and you hate most of what you do, and you feel like you must do it, you’re never going to get where you want to be. And if you’re scared of hiring other people, well, you’re going to be stuck where you are now for a long time.

Here’s the thing: you can always replenish money. You can invest in a team member, an employee, or a contractor, and that money will come back to you in spades because of the work they’re doing. That gives you the freedom to do other things that are going to bring more revenue, but you can never replenish time.

Yes, you can try to figure things out all by yourself, or you could just ask, “Who can help me do this?” It’s a smarter way of doing things because you’re going to save a ton of time and that’s the one thing we can’t replace. At least not yet.

Now, speaking of the “who”, if you want help and you’re serious about moving the needle forward in your business, we can certainly help you. This is not right for everyone, so if you want to see if this applies to you, check out healthpreneurgroup.com/book. If you like what you see on the page and you want our help to help you take your business to the next level and get a lot more clarity, simplicity, and a predictable blueprint that you can follow to attract and enroll more clients; to deliver amazing results for them, without one-on-one coaching, without trading time for money, without overwhelming yourself with a thousand things to do; then we can certainly help with that.

We do so through a 45-minute result accelerator call. It’s a free call and it’s all about helping you go from where you are to where you want to be. Or to get you closer to that with more clarity and a proven path. If that’s of interest to you, then go to healthpreneurgroup.com/book. Grab your spot today if you qualify.

Again, it’s totally free. There’s no hidden agenda here. There’s no sales pitch. If you are interested in working with us and having us help you deploy some of the stuff we talk about, we can certainly talk about how that can happen. But that’s not the goal of the call. The goal of the call is to be of service to you and lead with a helping hand. That’s just the way we do business.

That’s all for today. I hope you’ve enjoyed the episode and the podcast in general. If you do, awesome. Leave a rating review on iTunes when you have a moment. No big deal, but it all helps. In the meantime, just continue to be awesome. Go out there, be great, do great, share your light, help more people, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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Transcription

Today we’re going to talk about an important concept in business and in life: It comes down to putting in the reps.

This is extremely important if you are a health expert who is building out a coaching business where you’re one on one coaching or running a group-based program, which is what we teach our clients to do. If you are doing that and commanding premium prices, you need to get people on the phone to enroll them, right?

Someone’s probably not going to drop $3,000 – $5,000 by going to a website and clicking the buy now button. What I’m about to share with you is extremely important because it pertains to that and is key to any aspect of business or life in which you want to get better. The whole idea here is that you become what you practice.

 

The importance of putting in the reps in life and business

As you know, I played soccer my entire life until I was 25, and I played professionally for several years. There are two reasons why I believe I got there. Number one is I that had massive self-belief. I had so much belief in my myself and my ability that it propelled me to work through the tough, challenging times and continue to train, travel, and go to different training camps to get better.

That was the first thing. The second thing is that I put in the reps. I put in the reps, practiced, trained, and kept getting better and better.

When I played in France, I had quite a bit of time on my hands. Outside of training and sometimes after, I’d go to one of the training fields on my own. I was a goalkeeper. I’d think, “All right. What’s one aspect of my game that I can improve on my own?” I worked on strength and conditioning and looked at improving my power and speed.

One of the things I would do after training sessions was take several balls and stagger my distance from the fence. I’d start 10 yards away, then go 20 yards, 30 yards, and so forth. I’d set myself a little goal. I would say, “From this distance, I’m going to work on my drop kicks.” A drop lick is kicking the ball in a very specific manner out of my hands.

A lot of goalies will just drop the ball and punt it, but I was practicing a few different ways to kick the ball out of my hands. I practiced a sidekick. I practiced a drop kick where the ball slightly bounces first. I challenged myself. I said, “Okay. I’m going to work on this type of kick and get 10 in a row to this specific spot of the fence.” I wouldn’t move until I got those 10. If I got to eight and missed one, I’d start again. If I got to seven and missed one, I’d start again.

If I got to 10, great. I could then move to the next marker, which was 10 yards further behind. Again, I’d set myself a new goal, “Okay. I’m going to get 10 balls right in this spot or very close to it.” A lot of times, after training, I’d spend an additional 30 minutes on my own putting in the reps.

Here’s the key though: Doing them properly.

 

My personal example of becoming what you practice

If I just went out and started kicking the ball against the fence without any rhyme or reason, that’s different. If you train in a very specific manner, you become what you practice. Practice makes permanence. Whatever you practice is what’s going to happen in a real life or game situation.

I would be very diligent in doing things properly. I would tune into my body and ask, “Am I connecting properly? Is the technique good here?” At the time, I wished I had video footage because it would have been awesome to get that feedback. Nowadays, it’s so easy with an iPhone.

So, that’s pretty much what I did, and I believe it was that type of diligent work and commitment to excellence that allowed me to be the best possible player I could be. The funny thing is that the same thing happens, well, 13 years later now in my business. I’m still doing things all the time to improve.

Whether it’s our enrollment calls and how we speak to people on the phone, our webinars, messaging, emails, you name it, I’ve continually refined and practiced so that overtime I get better at it. That’s the whole path to mastery: You practice, but you don’t just put in the reps. You put in quality reps because you become what you practice over time.

 

Putting in the reps, but doing it properly

If you’re doing phone calls with prospective clients and they’re not enrolling with you, it doesn’t mean that phone calls don’t work. They do. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re speaking to the wrong people in the first place, which could be part of it.

Look in the mirror and take responsibility for your lack of results or your great results. If you’re not seeing the results you want to see, you must be plugged into the right type of system, the right type of support, and the right type of coaching so you can see your blind spots and know what to do better.

Once you know what to do, it’s about putting in the reps.

 

The path to mastery

Here are the three steps to mastering anything. Number one is to set a clear intention of what you want. Number two is to know how to do it properly. That’s a very important piece that a lot of people forget. Third, put in the reps.

So, know what you want and know how to do it properly. That’s where proper coaching and guidance comes in. If you’re trying to figure out on your own how create an amazing webinar or speak to people on the phone to enroll them without feeling like a salesy car salesman, it’s going to be very tough. You need that coaching and guidance. Lastly, put in the reps. For some people, it happens faster than others, but put in the reps. Nothing, nothing can replace that.

 

Some to-do’s

I hope this message finds you well. You become what you practice. Put that into practice, pun intended. If you’ve enjoyed this, then subscribe to the podcast if you haven’t already. We’ve got tons of amazing episodes, interviews, and solo rounds like this one. If you’ve enjoyed the show, you can leave a rating or review on iTunes, which would be great.

If you want our help to practice what matters in your business like attracting more clients, enrolling them with more ease so that you can earn the income you desire, and creating greater impact for the clients you serve, then here’s what I want you to do right now.

Attend our free training called the Seven Figure Health Business Blueprint. It’ll walk you through our whole system. You’ll basically get the business in a box right there on the training. If you want to go deeper with us afterwards, you can book a call to chat with us.

To register for the training go to healthpreneurgroup.com/training. Do it now! It’ll make a huge difference for your future and business. In the meantime, I want to let you know that I’m back on Instagram. Find me @healthpreneur1.

Join me there. I do lives, stories every single day, and posting some stuff that will help you out. In next week’s solo round, I’ll share why I’m back on Instagram. I look forward to seeing you on Wednesday. We’ve got an amazing interview with Josh Trent. Friday we’re talking with Dr. Michael Bruce, who’s been on Dr. Oz 39 times. He’s going to be sharing some of his magic. Talk to you then!

Transcription

Welcome! We’ve got Joe Arko on the show today. He’s been in the fitness industry for over 20 years. He is the host of two TV shows called Body Fuel and Training with the Pros. He has written for major fitness magazines, presented all over the world, and has owned his own high-end performance center.

Today, he’s the founder of the personal training certification called ATS, Advanced Training Systems, along with running PT Profits, his personal training consulting business which helps trainers run successful businesses. In 2017 he was a nominee for the Fitness Hall of Fame and was also the International Trainer of the Year.

That’s a pretty nice accolade to add to your sash. I’m thinking back to boy scouts, when you had the sash with little badges and stuff. Anyways, we’ve got a great conversation. We’re going to be talking about how to clone yourself, how to build a team, how to grow leaders, and we’ll also have some heated discussions about the future of the online training industry.

Without any further ado, let’s welcome Joe to the show. Joe, welcome to the Healthpreneur Podcast. How’s it going?

Joe:                 Things are absolutely fantastic. And yourself?

Yuri:                I’m doing very well and as usual, it’s always great to connect with fellow Canadians. We’re cool. We’re a good breed up here in the great white north. I’m excited to chat because there’s a lot of people in the health and fitness space in and around Toronto, and it’s great to connect with new people and expose our audience to awesome people like yourself.

Our audience has a bit of understanding of your background, but give us a quick run-down of what your business model looks like.

 

The two tiers of Joe’s business, how he built them, and how he’s scaling

Joe:                 I’ve got two similar yet very different businesses that I run right now. One of my businesses is my certification course, the Advanced Training Systems, which is a two level, two-day certification course for personal trainers. I used to teach every single course and this year was the first year where I licensed that out. Now I have over six or seven different trainers licensing that program and teaching on my behalf. So that’s residual income for me.

I only do private courses, some invitation only, but basically that whole model now is a residual income stream for me. My primary business, PT Profits that my partner Sara Fennell and I own and operate, is a multi-tiered system where we do mostly private coaching workshops and six month mentorships. We also do some entry level online coaching for that as well.

 Yuri:                Awesome. We’ve spoken with other people in the space who’ve done a similar type of thing. They’ve taken what they do well and started to license it out and have other coaches coach their methodologies, like Jason Phillips and Casey Arnold.

It’s cool to see how you can take your methodology and have other clones, if you will, go out and share the message with other people. What was a moment in time where you woke up and said to yourself, “I can’t keep doing this all by myself. How do I go about branching out and cloning myself?”

How did you go about building that out?

 

Teaching the delivery of information and having reasonable expectations

Joe:                 So last May, I had an amazing trainer in this field. He runs our trigger point courses, barefoot courses, and things like that. He’s a super intelligent guy. He took my course and said, “Joe, I’m going to teach your course one day.” I laughed and said, “Kennedy, no one’s teaching my course. It’s my course. Not your course. Nice try.” He came back to another one and another one, and took the same course four times.

Yuri:                Nice.

Joe:                 I realized that the guy was driven. I gave him that. Super smart and driven, so I became willing to listen to him.

I had a meeting last November with a major gym organization. Their headquarters are in the states, but they have gyms all around the world. They said, “We like your model and we’d like to incorporate some of this throughout our gyms. But you’re only one guy, so maybe this might not work.” I thought wow, I’m going to miss out on a massive opportunity if I don’t learn to replicate myself fast.

I was also tired of traveling all over the place. I’ve taught in Australia, across the states, and across Canada. Traveling gets a little tiring. I’ve got two kids at home, I’ve got an amazing partner, and I want to spend more time at home.

In November, I decided to replicate myself and teach other people to do what I do. I spent two months putting together a master instructor certification course. So, no longer teaching trainers, but teaching professionals how to teach what I do. This past February, we found a good group of people and it was my job to start teaching the trainers to teach the students.

Yuri:                That’s awesome.

Joe:                 It’s cumbersome growing pains. In terms of replicating yourself, I can’t remember what old movie it was – I think it was in the 80s or 90s with Bill Murray – where he’s multiplicity, creates multiple versions of himself, but every version is not as good as the original.

There are some growing pains when you’re used to teaching in a certain way and style. You market things a certain way and the expectation is the same for everyone else. You realize, “Wow. They don’t care as much as I do,” or they don’t treat it the same way you do. At the same time, it’s a good lesson on how to scale this business and what the expectations are.

It has taught me a lot about the amount of time and effort that needs to go into training people to make sure that they are at the right level.

Yuri:                Yeah, that’s a great insight. A lot of experts have this methodology. They’ve nailed the steps to produce a result for their clients, and now they’re apprehensive to give that off to someone else because it’s not going to be perfect.

What advice do you give to a person who says, “I don’t have time to do this anymore. I’m maxed out, but I don’t want other people to do it because they’re not going to be as good as me”? What are some of the lessons you’ve had to learn along the way that you could share?

Joe:                 Well, there’s a few things. One is that there’s a difference between content and delivery. You can go watch a stand-up comedian with amazing jokes that make you laugh and you understand that content.

You can try to deliver that content yourself and screw it up. It’s just not the same. I’ve learned not to just teach the content of what I want them to know, but teach the delivery of the information to create the experience and deliver it with the same passion I would. A lot people say, “Here’s the content. Go teach it.” It’s just not delivered the way you want it to be.

The second thing I’ve learned is that it’s never going to be a 100%. That’s just it.

I’d rather have seven people teaching at 80% than me at a 100% because I’m only one person. When I first started doing this, I was probably less than what they are right now, too, and I think sometimes we don’t even realize the evolution and how far we’ve come.

We expect people to deliver things the way we deliver it right now and not the way we delivered it on day one ourselves. Sometimes the expectation’s a little high and we expect them to catch on quickly rather than allowing them to catch up to where we are now.

Yuri:                That’s great. Don’t compare your beginning to someone else’s middle or vice versa in this case.

In terms of training other coaches to train your methodology, what type of process – in terms of time and dedication – do you put in or have you put in?

Joe:                 We had a 32-hour master trainer certification that we put them all through. Let’s say a client comes in to see a trainer and all they want is weight loss. Some clients just get it. They’re dialed in. You tell them what to do and they go do it.

Some people need a little more attention. Step one is identifying where that person is and where they need the most amount of help for the business to grow. For some people, it might be in delivery, social media, or marketing. Who knows?

So, we identify where some of those weaknesses are. Then it’s on an individual basis. We have very little contact with some people. They go, they run their courses, and they’re awesome. There’s no hand-holding whatsoever.

With some people – and I say this very diplomatically – I just bang my head against the wall a couple times a week. Those are the types of people you need to spend more time with and that need a bit more hand-holding.

As a business, it’s your responsibility to make sure that you’re giving them the attention that they need to succeed. Because, at the end of the day if they don’t succeed, not only does it look bad on them, but – guess who it looks worse on? Your business.

Yuri:                For sure. Totally.

Joe:                 So it’s very individual. It’s very independent and, like I said, it depends on how much time you want to put in. There are times where I think, “Wait a second. I’m doing this so I can free up time. I’m spending so much time developing these people that I feel like I should just be doing it myself.”

But once they’re developed and you go into year two, three, and four, that’s when you start to reap the rewards of the effort that you’re putting in right now.

Yuri:                I think that’s a big thing.

There’s a difference between a business owner and a technician. And it’s having that mindset of being an investor. That’s what you’re doing. You’re investing your time and resources into people, which I believe the best use of any leader’s time is to cultivate other leaders. It’s almost like having kids.

Human kids are useless for quite a long time, right?

Joe:                 Very true.

Yuri:                If you don’t raise them the right way, we’re not going to have the legacy or the outcomes that we ideally want from them down the road. I think it’s very much the same with employees, except they’re not as useless as kids are when they’re first born.

During this process and seeing which ones take it, run, and do great, versus others that you’re banging your head against the wall with, have you gone back to the drawing board to ask yourself who is the perfect coach to train?

Has that criteria changed at all and if so, what does that look like for you?

 

Attitude over skill

Joe:                 I am so happy you brought this up. If you didn’t, I was going to.

At first we looked at if they had a good reach, a big following, an understanding of the content, and were knowledgeable. We’re going to be taking on some more people next year and our entire intake process has completely changed.

I was talking to one of my early mentors about hiring people and he did something very simple. He walked up to a board. He drew a big A, a line under the A, and then a S under the A. He said, “At the top is attitude, on the bottom is skill. Always hire for attitude and train skill.”

That’s something I’ve known for so long, and I did it when I operated my gym. But with this, I looked for skilled people and did not emphasize the attitude part, or the ability to teach and deliver the skill that they have. Next time, I’m going to be less hung up on, “How smart are you? Do you understand biomechanics and anatomy?” and stuff like that.

I’ll have almost a stand-up comedy act where I’ll say, “Stand up and present to me. I don’t care what topic it is. I don’t care if you’re talking about Super Mario Brothers Three. I just want you to engage me. I want you to talk to me, I want to see how well you deliver information, and I want to see what kind of attitude you have.”

That’s something that we’re going to change in the next round.

Yuri:                That’s awesome. It’s so true. A lot of trainers can appreciate that because I think most people in the health space have some type of athletic background.

Playing soccer, some of my best teams were the weakest on paper, but we had the best attitude and collective spirit. I can’t stand coaching or being part of teams where you have the egos and people who think, “I’m too good for school. I’m not going to show up for practice and I’m not going to give my full effort.” Others are maybe 80% as good, but they show up, they give their all, and have a great attitude.

That’s so important, guys.

Attitude over skill. That’s a huge one. I totally agree with you, Joe. Even when we look at hiring people for our company, it’s the same thing. We’re in the process of building our delivery side, but also the enrollment side.

Since we’re virtual for the most part, one of the things we have everyone do is send us a video to sell us on why we should hire them. It’s not so much about what they say, I just want to get a sense of their communication style, because that emotional intelligence and communication is so important.

We’ll say, “Sell me anything. Sell me a pen, pencil, or whatever your favorite thing is,” to see how they operate in that communication style. The days of looking at resumes are not even applicable for most of our businesses anymore.

Joe:                 I can’t remember the last time I had to write a resume. Well, I’ve worked for myself since I was 19, so it’s been rare.

Yuri:                We’re basically unemployable. We’re pretty much useless to other companies because we’d be breaking all the rules anyways.

Joe:                 Very true.

 

The state of the industry, gaining experience, and creating long-term success

Yuri:                Let’s talk about training trainers and online training. You have some opinions about this. Talk to me about what you feel is the state of the industry this day and age, as it pertains to online training.

Joe:                 Oh, boy.

Yuri:                Take it away.

Joe:                 The normal Joe would go into a rant, but I’m going to take both sides on this.

I think it’s fantastic that today, we can help inspire and change people’s lives literally anywhere in the world. I think that’s amazing. I think that the technology that we have to connect with people is amazing when used properly. That’s the nice of Joe.

The honest, other side of Joe says that there’s a part of the online training industry that is completely ruining our industry. When we talk about personal training, there’s a personal connection to that. When it comes to taking a client, understanding how they move, how they behave, and what it is that they need from you, a lot of these things cannot be solved merely just through online training.

The other thing that I have an issue with is people who are literally very green. They just started in this field, got their certification, and say, “Wow. I can make so much money sitting in my underwear at home training people. Why would I bother working at a gym and giving them a percentage? Why would I bother having my own studio and having overhead? I’m going to make six figures and just do online training.”

They do the exact same thing everyone else does; same platform, same training, and copy paste, copy paste, copy paste. They think it’s easy, and the reality is that it’s not. I don’t have a lot of respect for those who are doing it for the wrong reasons.

For those doing it for the right reasons, I think it’s an amazing way to scale your business and help people that normally wouldn’t be able to see you. It’s a more formal way of having a trainer, as well.

People who don’t pay their dues and have never trained a person in their life are basically a glorified Men’s Health. They say, “Here’s your shoulder day, leg day, arm day, chest day, and back day. Go have fun and I’ll modify things in four weeks.”

That’s the part I don’t like and that’s the part I feel so many people are gravitating towards because they see it as a scalable business.

At the same time, you know what? People say they want to make six figures doing online training. If you’re charging a hundred bucks a client just for program design, you’ll need 83 clients to make six figures.

Yuri:                That’s a lot of clients, for sure.

Joe:                 That’s a lot of emails, complaining, and questions. That’s a full-time job.

If you charge 200 bucks and you’re new, you’re not going to find the people that’ll justify paying you that much. And you’re still managing 40 clients. A lot of people don’t realize the investment that’s needed to give people what they deserve and are looking for.

Yuri:                I totally agree with you; you must put in the reps.

You must pay your dues because if you don’t, you have no business helping people at that level. If you want to do that, that’s fine, but I think there’s a huge distinction that happens when you’ve had years of experience in person and you can see what this person might going through in the gym. You can start to overcome potential obstacles that they might be encountering because you’ve been in those scenarios hundreds and hundreds of times.

If you’re just coming out of certification after a weekend and you’re looking at how to get clients online, you don’t have that. You don’t have that repertoire of experience and I think it’s a big disservice to the people you serve. I still think that, for certain, people will have that accountability in a coach, just to get them to work out. But I do agree with you.

You must put in the time because nothing, nothing replaces experience. A lot of trainers come online because they think they want to scale their business, but as you said, to earn six figures, that’s 83 clients. Right? The way most trainers are coaching online is still one on one.

So why not just do that in person and give them a higher level of service?

Joe:                 Correct.

Yuri:                I don’t understand the one-on-one online training. Why would you do that? You’re still trading time for money. It just never made a lot of sense to me.

Joe:                 For a lot of people they feel more free. They feel like, “Well I don’t want to be at the gym Monday, Wednesday, Friday from four o’clock to seven o’clock, and I don’t want to be there at six AM. I don’t want to work the crazy hours.”

I don’t know if you’re a music fan or not, but I’m a massive, massive music fan. I like everything from country to rock, you name it. I love going to concerts and I feel like music is kind of going the same way as training, where people – if you have a YouTube channel and a million views – can sell some records and get famous suddenly.

I enjoy the old-school way of how music was made. Guys got together, they practiced in their garage, they got in a van, and drove all over the place doing these little gigs. They put up posters, they put in the time, and they put in the dues to get recognized. They put out an album, they gave it to their friends, and did everything they could to say, “Hey. Here we are, here’s what we do.”

They got better and better and better, and they slowly started to make it. Because of social media, the internet, and stuff like that, anyone now can be Insta-famous overnight. I think people are skipping those steps to do what’s necessary to create long term success.

Yuri:                I think you’re on to something there because the more digitized we get, the more there’s going to be a demand for in-person, experiential, hand-holding, in-person type of experiences. Talking about music, I was in Belgium last summer for a huge electronic music festival called Tomorrowland.

I’ve grown up loving tech and house music, and I can listen to it every single day on my computer. But to be in that environment for three days was epic. I did it with my brother and we had an amazing time.

Everyone listening, whether you’re training clients online or in-person, there’s a level of experience that you can offer people coming together in-person that will bring your people together like glue around you and what you stand for. I feel there’s a huge opportunity there.

Ride the trend wave a little bit, but look at where the opportunity is on the flip side. As you mentioned, there’s a big opportunity when going back to our roots and connecting at that level.

Let’s talk about your business specifically. As you’ve grown over the years, was a big lesson you had to learn the hard way?

 

Delegating, having a “get it done” attitude, and valuable teachings for the kids

Joe:                 Oh, my God. I don’t think I’m going to have time for this.

One of the biggest lessons I learned was to stop thinking I could do it all myself. I grew up with this whole self-made mentality; I could do it all alone, even when I opened my facility in 2013. It was an 8,000-square foot performance center and I did everything.

I demo’ed and did the changing rooms. I did the floors. I did everything for two or three months and even when I opened it, I did the front desk stuff. I was doing the admin, I was doing the accounting, and I didn’t learn how to delegate tasks. I felt like by delegating, I was being less than a good business person because I should be doing it, it should be mine.

Now, I try to do as little as possible. I try to do the 5%, the most important things to help my business. I delegate the rest, hire someone to do the rest, or it just doesn’t need to be done.

When you’re starting out you think, “Oh, I don’t have the resources,” or “I don’t have the time,” or “I don’t have the money to do that. So, I’m going to do it all on my own.” Once you realize how much more time you save to do things to make you more money, then it’s the more you delegate, the more money you make. It’s just getting the mentality that you don’t have to do it all and you can ask for help.

I was horrible at asking for help when I was younger, now I just love asking. I remember reading “The Aladdin Factor”, by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen. I fell in love with asking. I needed something, I asked for it. It’s amazing what you can get when you ask good questions, and it’s amazing how many people are willing to help you and help you succeed. Just put it out there.

Yuri:                And the cool thing now is that with so many services online or even in-person, execution is now a commodity. If you want anything done, you can have someone do it. As you said, striving to do less is a higher value activity for entrepreneurs at our level. We’re the visionary, the leader of the company, and we shouldn’t be grinding away 40 hours a week.

We must focus on the big thinking and build out the systems, then put people in places to run those. That’s a big distinction when people think of success. It’s not just the money. If you’re grinding away, you’re not building a business; you have a job that you’re enslaved to and, unless you’re taking the time to put those people in the right seats and have them do the work for you, you’re just going to be running a rat race forever.

Joe:                 I 100% agree.

Yuri:                What do you think is the number one skill that entrepreneurs must possess for lasting success?

Joe:                 Oh, boy. Being able to work when you’re not motivated. A lot of people ask me how I stay motivated, how I get things done, and how I do it. I think that entrepreneurs are the people that, despite how tired they are, how much they make excuses, or how much they want to do something else, just get the work done when other people don’t.

I work from home and we moved into our new home a year ago. Can you believe that we’ve watched our television, in terms of cable, twice in one year?

 Yuri:                Good for you.

 Joe:                 And I work from home, so it’s just not part of our life.

There are days where we think, “I don’t feel like doing it.” I make the comparison to a professional body builder. How many times do they feel like eating their food or doing their cardio or going to the gym? What separates the professional from the non-professional or the winner from third, fourth, or fifth place is doing the things they need to do even when they don’t want to.

That’d be my biggest advice.

Yuri:                I agree with that one. We ask people a question when we speak to them on the phone. We ask, “What kind of person are you? Are you a ‘do your best’ type of person or ‘do whatever it takes’ type of person?” Very rarely do we want to work with people who are the “do your best” type of people, because they’ll find excuses if they didn’t meet a specific goal.

The “do whatever it takes” type of people will do whatever it takes; they’ll get it done no matter what. I don’t know if that’s taught, if it’s something you’re born with, or grow up developing, but it is such a necessary trait. I agree.

Joe:                 I toyed with the idea of whether entrepreneurs are born or made. Looking back on my childhood, I came from a very old school, European family. My grandparents were very hardworking people. From a young age, it was work hard, work hard, work hard, and don’t make excuses.

I don’t know if it’s by birth or if it’s the people that you see. I’m sure there’s a certain subconscious paradigm that you start to develop at a young age, and the people that you’re surrounded by help enforce whether you make excuses or whether you get it done. It’s very hard to say, but you can quickly tell the people who can get things done compared to the ones that make excuses.

Yuri:                Totally. I want to talk about kids in just a second.

Joe:                 Sure.

Yuri:                But you just brought up a thought. We’ll talk to people every now and then, and they’re very faith-based. That’s fine. I’m spiritual. They leave it in the hands of the gods. They’ll say, “If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be.”

I think that’s a good cop out and a great way to never meet your goals. It’s like saying, “I’m not willing to step up and do whatever it takes because maybe it’s not meant to be.” I say, “Well it’s not meant to be for you, ever, based on that type of mentality.”

I want to talk about kids. I’ve got three young boys and they’re very strong-willed. They do things in a different way from each other, and elements of that are frustrating for me as a parent, but also I see the benefit for them in the long term. For example, not being able to sit still, having all sorts of different ideas, being creative, and stuff like that.

These are all things that I think fuel entrepreneurship down the road. Is this something that you’ve noticed with your kids as well?

Joe:                 Here’s what’s interesting. I separated from my ex-wife about seven years ago. My kids are now 12 and 9. They were young when we separated and that’s all they know.

So, they have two realities, dad’s house and mom’s house, and dad and mom are very different people. Mom is nine to five, works for the government, loves structure, loves having that guaranteed income, and she not an entrepreneur. Our nutrition habits are different, our activity levels are different, and everything’s just so different that you notice a change.

The kids will literally morph from house to house. They’re one way with me and another with her, neither good or bad, but that’s just the way it is. This year I’ve noticed the most how much nurture can affect a child.

Both my kids know everything me and my business. They know the ups and the downs. I’ve been frauded and almost lost my company, and they knew that. I want to teach them resiliency, reality, and they know that dad’s an entrepreneur. They know the struggles, they know the highs and lows, the benefits, and this is the first year the kids are getting involved.

Every Wednesday, we do presentations. The kids present for 10 to 15 minutes on any topic they want, get in front of us and, as a house, get used to speaking and presenting. All my work’s in my office. They can use whatever they want, they have vision boards, and they have goal boards now.

It’s cool to see them developing that mindset. My son wants to be an entrepreneur. School’s done now, but when he was in school he had an entrepreneurial class and we sat there for weeks putting together a website, marketing material, and he put together an amazing PowerPoint presentation for his class that he nailed.

It’s so cool to see them coming to me and saying, “Hey dad. If I want to do this stuff, what can I do?”

I don’t know a lot of 12 year olds who know who Les Brown, Brian Tracy, or Tony Robbins is. That’s the stuff that we spew around the house all the time. By the time he’s 18, 19 or 20, he can decide if it’s for him or if it’s not, but I’d rather give him the tools now that I never had.

I never had those tools. I’m curious to see how they grow up. We’re planting seeds now. As parents, all we can do is plant seeds, hope for the best, and see which one’s root and which ones grow. By the time they’re old enough to make their own decisions, you hope you planted the right seeds and all you can do is hope for the best.

Yuri:                That’s awesome. I was introduced to Tony Robbins at 23 years old. What a difference it would have made if I’d been introduced when I was five or six.

That’s very much like our kids. I don’t mind taking them out of school for trips as long as they’re learning along the way. But immersing them in Unleash the Power Within with Tony Robbins for three days, doing different events, and exposing them to that level of thinking and energy is awesome. It’s great.

That’s why I love hanging with entrepreneurs. We get it.

Joe:                 It’s just a different mindset.

We do meditation and affirmation cards every single night. I’ve taken the kids to an Arkangel event in Toronto and I’ve taken them to my workshops and seminars. They’ve seen me speak in front of a ton of people and it’s cool for them to say, “Hey, dad’s up there speaking.” They’ll even give me tips and advice, what they noticed, and what they took away from it.

I love being able to expose them to – for lack of a better term – the real world and what the real world’s going to offer them as they get older.

 

The Rapid Five

Yuri:                Yeah, totally. That’s awesome. Joe, this has been a lot of fun, man. Are you ready for The Rapid Five?

Joe:                 I woke up and I said, “You know what? I cannot wait for the Rapid Five today.” Oh. I’m ready.

Yuri:                All right man, here we go. Five rapid-fire questions. Whatever comes top of mind is probably the right answer. Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

Joe:                 Stubbornness.

Yuri:                Nice. What is your biggest strength?

Joe:                 Resiliency.

Yuri:                Number three, what’s one skill you’ve become dangerously good at to grow your business?

 Joe:                 Selling.

 Yuri:                Nice, that’s a big one. I think a lot of people recognize that, too. Number four, what do you do first thing in the morning?

Joe:                 Meditate.

Yuri:                Finally, complete this sentence: I know I’m being successful when…

Joe:                 I wake up every day completely happy.

Yuri:                Awesome. There we go, guys. Mr. Joe Arko in the house. Dude, thanks so much for taking the time to join us today, and for all the amazing work you’re doing to elevate our industry.

Where is the best place for people to follow you online?

Joe:                 My website is joearko.com, and my Instagram is @joe_arko.

Yuri:                Awesome, it’s a simple name for you guys to remember, not like Yuri Elkaim, which no one knows how to spell.

Joe, thanks so much for joining us today. I hope you guys enjoyed this one.

Joe:                 Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

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Yuri’s Take

So there you have it, Mr. Joe Arko. What a great conversation, great guy and again, another great Canadian. I’m starting to see a trend here; there are some pretty savvy kids up here in Toronto, Canada, and Canada in general.

I’m always happy to bring them to you and expose what they’re doing to serve their clients. That way, you get ideas of how you can better your business. I hope you’re enjoying the podcast. If you’re enjoying the show, we’d love to see a rating and review from you on iTunes. It always helps the show, helps us get more visibility, and helps us help more people. If you want to express yourself, do so over on iTunes.

In the meantime, if you want a little nudge to help you get your business to the next level, then we can possibly help you, specifically if you’re looking to attract more clients predictably, want to enroll more clients without feeling salesy, want to deliver an amazing result without one on one coaching, and want more simplicity and clarity in your business instead of spinning your wheels doing a thousand things.

We can probably help you with that through a free 45-minute result accelerator call. If you would like to grab one today, do so over at healthpreneurgroup.com/book.

Now, the call is not for everyone. On the page, you’ll see exactly who it is and is not for. If you do qualify, then please grab a spot because we can certainly help you as we have done for many, many people before. Just so you know, it’s not a sales pitch. The whole call is about serving you and showing up in the best way possible for you to determine where you are and where you want to go.

And if you want us to help you deploy some of the stuff we talk about, we can certainly tell you how we can do that at the end of the call, but there’s no pressure either way. So, that is the deal. Again, if you want faster results, if you want a little bit more done with or done for you, and if you want to spend a lot less time trying to figure things out on your own, then your first step is to jump on the phone with us.

That’s all for today. I want to thank you once again for your attention, time, and loyalty. I’m Yuri Elkaim, signing off. In the meantime, continue to be great, do great, and I will see you on the next episode.

 

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Transcription

Boy oh boy, do I have a treat for you today. Welcome to another episode of the Healthpreneur Podcast. I hope you’re doing great and having an awesome start to your day. It’s only getting better because I’ve got my good buddy Dr. Matthew Loop on the show. If you’ve been around social media, online for any number of years, or are in the chiropractic, practitioner, alternative health space, you’ve probably heard this name. This guy is the real deal.

Not only is he a trained chiropractor and has had his own practice, but he realized that to get out of that rut, serve more people, and live the life he wanted, he needed to figure out this Internet thing.

This episode is a gem. There’s a lot of golden nuggets you’re going to discover because Matthew and I started online around the same time. I love speaking to people who’ve been around for a long time. The original gangsters. The people who’ve seen the rise and fall of things like MySpace and who’ve seen how the tides turned as it pertains to building a business online.

One of the things you pick up on with people who’ve been around for a long time is that there are some fundamental principles that they get. We’re going to talk about a few of those in this episode. I’m not going to ruin the surprise, but be sure to buckle down and listen to this one.

Let me give you a bit more of a background on Matthew, in case you don’t know.

Matthew Loop is an international best-selling author, Harvard speaker, philanthropist, and the highest paid social media revenue strategist in North America. Not too shabby. He helps entrepreneurs multiply their influence, impact, and monthly revenue by harnessing the power of Facebook and other powerful online platforms.

Since social media’s infancy in 2005, he’s consulted thousands of entrepreneurs in over 25 countries. Millions have viewed his free business growth tutorials online and Matthew has developed a reliable blueprint through his knowledge and experience connecting anyone or company with a big vision to their desired outcome.

As I mention in the interview, you’re going to want to get his book, “Social Media Made Me Rich.” It’s a terrific read.

It’s an all-encompassing course, if you will, for building a business online. If you want to learn about that, go over to SocialMediaMadeMeRich.com.

Without any further ado, let’s welcome Matthew Loop onto the show. Matthew Loop, welcome to the Healthpreneur Podcast. How’s it going?

Matthew:                    Excellent, Yuri, how are you today?

Yuri:                I’m doing awesome, man. I’m excited to chat with you. We connected a couple of months ago and I’ve known of you for some time. We have a lot of mutual friends and it’s great to connect with someone who is doing some awesome stuff in our space and serving not just health professionals, but also entrepreneurs in general to leverage social media and build businesses that are super-successful.

Can you give our audience a sense of what your business model looks like?

 

Matthew’s business model and how it evolved

Matthew:                    Yes, absolutely. Most of the time, I’m a consultant. I travel and speak all around the world to help doctors and professionals grow their practices. Or I show them how to create additional sources of income online.

Through that consulting and speaking, I’ve got a separate company that does Facebook ads for doctors and professionals. I’ve got separate products and programs online that are digitally delivered, free reports, and the whole gamut in between. I consider myself an information marketer, classically, but I love traveling and speaking, so my model mostly revolves around the consulting element.

Yuri:                Awesome. What’s your favorite place to travel to?

Matthew:                    The Caribbean. At least once a year we go to Turks and Caicos and then once a year we go to Cancun. We probably hit the Caribbean at least twice per year, but I do love the Old-World style of Europe. I’m getting ready to speak in Amsterdam this year.

That’s one of the beautiful things about what we do. We can go all over the world, speak, and experience different cultures. I’m very grateful.

Yuri:                Yeah, it’s funny because people ask if I’m traveling for business or pleasure. It’s very tough to answer that question because even if I’m traveling for pleasure, I’m still doing work. Even if it’s a conversation. It’s tough to separate the two when you love what you do.

 Matthew:                    I was speaking last year in London and I put out a bulletin on Facebook. I said, “I’ve got a half-day available. I’m going to be in this area because I’m hosting a seminar for a couple hundred doctors. I’ve got a four-hour window if anybody wants a total emersion private training for a company or group. Message my assistant.”

I put that out there and within a few hours somebody had booked that. It’s a beautiful thing to be mobile and able to do trainings on demand for people that are hungry for the stuff.

Yuri:                Yeah, that’s awesome. You had sent me your book, “Social Media Made Me Rich” which, by the way, guys, get it on Amazon or in bookstores because it’s a great book. I was surprised. I thought it was just going to be, “Hey, here’s what to do on Facebook,” but I got a full all-encompassing business plan almost.

It covered everything you could need. I guess you’re most well-known for this kind of approach to social media. How did you crack the code for yourself within the online space or social media in general?

 

Facebook marketing and how he cracked the code

Matthew:                    That’s a great question. I started way back in 2005 in social media’s embryonic stage. Were you on MySpace, by chance?

Yuri:                I’m a very late adopter I refuse things until I must do them. So I didn’t actually do MySpace.

Matthew:                    It was by accident for me, but I was on MySpace hanging out with friends and I thought, “Man, this is an interesting channel. You can connect with people that have certain interests that are five miles from my chiropractic office. I wonder how I could make this work?” I started experimenting and growing my audience way back then.

Lo and behold people saw me, they saw what I did, and they said, “Hey, can you help me with this problem?” That snowball turned into an avalanche and then I had other colleagues starting to ask me, “Hey, what are you doing? How are you attracting patients from this ‘kids’ network?”

I began showing them what I did, then I realized it was cutting into my practice time. I didn’t know how to package my knowledge and expertise into a downloadable product, program, or DVD, so that was a whole new learning experience. It’s much easier to do it nowadays, but that was my initial journey and taste into information marketing and how I evolved from a private practitioner.

I thought if I could help thousands of doctors reach millions of patients, that’d be a really cool thing to do. 2005 or 2006 is when I set my sights on consulting. My life has never been the same since.

The book “Social Media Made Me Rich” basically details my journey and it also shows you what the world’s highest paid internet entrepreneurs are doing to multiply their impact, influence, and monthly revenue. Those are strategies that I learned throughout the years. I mastermind in certain groups and what-not, but it is a very comprehensive, very strategic and tactical book to use.

 

Using social media, direct response, and marketing to influence people

Yuri:                What I enjoyed about it was your acuity for direct response and the understanding of how to influence people. Guys, when I say influence I’m talking about that in the best way possible. We’re not talking about doing stuff that’s ridiculous, but just understanding how to weave words together in a way that compels people to act.

When you help people with their social media do you find there’s a missing piece in their toolkit? Do a lot of people just post some stuff on Instagram or Facebook and think it’s all going to work out without understanding direct response? Do you find there’s a disconnect, or are people starting to put it all together?

Matthew:                    There’s a huge disconnect, especially in the health space. You and I work with a lot of health practitioners. The reason is because these people want to help as many patients as possible, so they typically look at the direct response or selling component with a certain stereotype. For those that don’t understand it, like you said, it’s about influence not manipulation. When you understand how to craft certain words to get people to act, it’s the difference between making a few hundred thousand versus a few million.

I wish I would have connected with mentors like Dan Kennedy, Gary Halbert, or some of the legendary copywriters of our time much sooner because that got me to look. Do you know who’s great in the health space way early on? I knew this, but I didn’t know how great he was in marketing. Dr. Joe Mercola. He’s a classic example of someone you listen to or you view his emails and you can’t throw them away because the subject headlines are so compelling.

Yuri:                Totally.

Matthew:                    You and I both know that if you can’t get your email opened, no one is going to see your message, so I’m a big fan of direct response marketing. When you combine that with social media the right way, it opens a whole new world of opportunity for you and you’re able to reach and impact so many more people based on that alone.

Yuri:                It’s so true. We’ve had about three episodes on this podcast already that have gone deep into copywriting. Not becoming a Gary Halbert copywriter, but just understanding how to weave words together. I think it’s one of the most important skills you can have if you’re going to be communicating online, whether in video or written form, because it follows a framework that allows you to be so much more effective at what you do.

Gary Halbert, one of the greatest copywriters of all time, passed away a few years ago, but he’s got stuff all over the place. A lot of the greats refer to him. Dan Kennedy has a great book called, “The Ultimate Sales Letter,” which is a great reference as well.

Matthew:                    What did Gary always say? He always said, “You’re one sales letter away from being rich,” which is crazy, but true. If you have an online course or product and you can compel people to take a certain action, the world is possible. I learned this very early on, even in practice. I had somebody that had a herniated disc and for some odd reason there was a mental block between them coming to see me or taking out their credit card to pay for the treatment they knew they needed.

It’s the same thing online. People know they need this information to better their quality of life, but how do you bridge the gap? How do you get them to take the next step and work with you? It’s an art and science and I’m a constant student.

 Yuri:                I think he also said, “Every problem can be solved with a good sales letter,” as well, which is true. That’s a good thinking exercise to go through. Anyways, you had your own practice before coming online. Why did you decide to come online? Was there a pivotal moment in your clinical work where you decided you couldn’t keep doing it and needed something different?

 

The journey from a struggling private practice to a flourishing online business

Matthew:                    My journey is interesting because when I got out of school all I wanted to do was help people, like most doctors. I learned early on that you don’t just hang a sign and people come in. We accepted health insurance and, at least health insurance here in the United States, you submit a claim and won’t be reimbursed for two or three months. It’s insane sometimes.

No one ever told me that, but I was very naïve when it came to business. I got out of school and I thought I was helping a lot of people, but it got to a point where my credit cards were maxed, I had $1,000 in the bank, $120,000-$130,000 of student loan debt, and my ex-girlfriend’s father took me out to Bahama Breeze to float me a $2,000 check at lunch and I was humiliated. But I couldn’t refuse. I had to take it.

I still remember, I said, “I got to figure this stuff out. I’m a great chiropractor, but something is not working.” That’s when I started to get my hands on books like “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” by Robert Cialdini, or “E-Myth” by Michael Gerber. It completely revolutionized my thinking. I discovered that there was a technical component of the business.

There’s the entrepreneur and there’s the manager, and most doctors don’t focus on that entrepreneurial aspect. That got me thinking about marketing- advertising to grow my business. Around that same time in 2005 is when My Space stepped in and I started to learn about the value of using the Internet to bring people in. Then my other friends started to consult me and ask me what I was doing, and I began to show them.

That’s when the whole thing with online courses started. I had to figure that stuff out. It was right around that time and that hardship propelled me into an area that I could have never anticipated, certainly, but I’m very grateful for what transpired.

Yuri:                Yeah, no kidding. What a great story. It’s always cool to see how people evolve in their business and life. That’s great. As you started the online side of things, what were some of the initial internal blocks – from a mindset or external perspective – that you had to overcome?

Matthew:                    I thought I had to do everything myself. I was getting good at programming and article writing and all these different things. It was fun initially because I was learning a new skillset. It was just another beautiful day once I discovered Elance and ODesk, which now merged to create Upwork.

It was a huge epiphany to learn that I could delegate to people that were more experienced at writing great content than I was at that time. I could also find somebody that was very proficient in Google AdWords. That was a huge burden completely lifted, and that’s when I learned one of the most important lessons: Strengthen your strengths and delegate your weaknesses. That allowed me to scale to the next level. I wish that was something I had learned very, very early on in business.

Yuri:                Yeah. I was just about to ask you: knowing what you know now, what would you do differently if you started again? Other than that, is there anything else you would do differently?

Matthew:                    I would have connected with mentors early on, as well. You and I both know because we’re in masterminds and groups that it’s a lot easier to pay to get in certain circles, have the information immediately, or have access to somebody that has already been where you are and encountered every hardship or obstacle.

That’s one of the other gems that I wish I would have taken early on. I didn’t start getting involved in mastermind groups probably until four or five years later. I connected with other influencers because I was so early in the space and people would approach me to promote my stuff, but in general, your inner circle is what makes you grow quickly, so I can’t say enough about connecting with mentors that way.

Yuri:                Yeah, totally. The really successful people that we’ve interviewed on the show – from a financial perspective or business growth perspective – have all said the same thing, that they wish they would have had a mentor sooner and specifically paid for one. I think there’s a big distinction there because a lot of people say, “Hey, can I pick your brain?” When I say that I’m being sarcastic.

Matthew:                    I’m like, no.

Yuri:                No way. As someone who values the advice you give, have people pay to play. That’s something I learned the hard way as well, but hindsight is 20/20 and we both believe coaching and masterminds are super important. What do you say to people who are just starting out or don’t think they have the financial resources or stability to hire a coach or join a mastermind?

Matthew:                    It’s interesting because we all have different priorities. In my life, if I reflect on everything that has ever been a real top priority, I’ve always come up with the money.

I realize that certain masterminds can be $20,000 plus per year and I get that, but there’s nothing that is preventing you from going to a successful business owner locally, talking with them, and seeing if you can help them out in some way, shape or form to provide value to them first. That is another way that I connected with a lot of influencers.

I had experience with products and programs and I would do video testimonials for these people because I saw great results. That put me on the map in certain circles. I would go and approach other businesses that were successful and offer to do stuff for them. Then I could at least get a few minutes of talk time. You don’t have to have a huge budget, but at the same time you certainly should make that a priority.

I wanted to touch on one more thing, too. When you invest a lot of money in something, like if I invest 7,10,20 thousand dollars in coaching or whatever it is, it’s very difficult for me to sit on the sidelines. I get sluggish at times. I know my weakness. Sometimes, I don’t want to do anything. But, if I have a lot of skin in the game, I don’t want to let that go to waste. So, that’s another motivating factor. Just like with anything else, it’s simple psychology but can be powerful.

Yuri:                Totally. I’m sure you’ve been part of some groups that have been better than others and some events that have been better than others. I spoke about this on stage at our event last year. I said, “I traced every single event in my business, and it all started with that first decision to join a mastermind.” Even in the masterminds or coaching groups that were less than ideal, there was always one relationship or something that came out of that that which was infinitely greater than the monetary investment.

Would you agree with that?

 Matthew:                    Absolutely, and this even goes into seminars that are high-level. We both know that if you want to attend a high-level seminar in this space you’ll pay at least $1,000. That is a barrier to entry for a lot of people. I remember spending $3,000 or so way back on Yanik Silver’s “Underground.” Half the room was making over six-figures in passive income through their online businesses so that is a huge thing.

I love social media, but nothing compares to being in a room with high-level influencers and getting face-to-face with these individuals. Amazing opportunities can open whether it’s through a seminar like that or a mastermind.

Yuri:                Totally. That’s why I keep saying that the best way to build your online business is to spend more time offline and connecting with humans. It makes a huge difference.

Matthew:                    I like that. I’m going to steal that. I’m going to give you credit though.

Yuri:                Go for it. What would you consider a defining moment in your life business, personal, or otherwise?

 

Working at home with kids and teaching them entrepreneurial skills

Matthew:                    When I had my first son, Ethan, and looked in his eyes for the first time. That was just amazing and unbelievable, and put a lot of things into perspective. He gave me this deep-down reason why I have to be successful and continue even though I don’t want to continue sometimes. That was pretty defining.

Yuri:                You’ve got two boys, right?

Matthew:                    Yes.

Yuri:                What has having kids taught you about yourself or business?

Matthew:                    It’s taught me to be a heck of a lot more resourceful. Maybe you’ve had similar situations. Even though I have a home office, I just never know with two tornadoes going everywhere. I could be in an interview and get knocks on the door. Stuff like that happens.

I’m just trying to be a lot more resourceful. I wake up much earlier than I did before. If I can get up at five o’clockish I know I’m going to hammer out at least two, 2-1/2 productive hours of silent time. I can get a lot done during that period. That’s something I would have never thought I would do before.

 Yuri:                Yeah, I tell everyone that if you want to be more productive, just have kids. It’s the ultimate productivity tool.

Matthew:                    That’s right. 

Yuri:                You learn so much about yourself, too. It’s awesome.

Matthew:                    Of course. Do your kids star in some of your videos with you?

Yuri:                They do. I don’t know if I should mention this publicly, but when we travel I make sure I shoot videos because I use those videos as advertising on social media and in all our marketing. They’re models for our company. They’ve been in some of my videos.

It’s cool for me from a parent perspective. It’s fun to look back on some of the older videos when they were young. I’m so happy I had them in those videos because we sometimes forget how far they’ve come and how much they’ve grown. It’s nice to have those memories on video even if it’s on YouTube.

Matthew:                    I totally agree. Another thing I like is the spontaneity. I’ve got a six-year-old and a two-year-old, and you never know what’s going to happen. That gives an extra authentic feel to the video sometimes, but now, with my six-year-old, we’ll rehearse a little bit before. But I do like that extra level of authenticity.

Yuri:                I think it’s good for the kids, too, because they’re growing up with a father or parents that are living this type of life. I’m sure they ask you what you do, or if they don’t understand it, at least they’re seeing how it all works. It’s a very different experience than mommy and daddy going to a job in the office and not seeing them until an hour before bedtime. They’re seeing you add value to the world and helping other people by sharing your knowledge. I think it’s cool to grow up like that.

Matthew:                    I’m hoping to impart some of that on my son. I want him to be an entrepreneur and he’s got that entrepreneurial spirit right now. I like that he thinks big. He says, “Dad, I want a Ferrari like yours.”

Yuri:                Nice.

Matthew:                    I said, “Well, Ethan, what do you have to do?” He’s like, “I need to start a company.” I said, “Ethan, that’s absolutely right, and what else do you need to do?” He said, “I need to deliver value to the marketplace.” I said, “Absolutely, that’s right.” I’m trying to get him in the habit that with constant repetition, you can have anything you want, if you just help enough people.

 

The Ferrari and what Matt has learned about priorities, happiness, and life

Yuri:                That’s great. Let’s talk about the Ferrari for a second because I love fast cars. What kind of Ferrari do you have?

Matthew:                    430.

Yuri:                Nice. Was that a bucket list thing for you? Was there a moment in your business where you said, “We hit it big, I’m going to buy a Ferrari.” What was that like for you?

Matthew:                    It was after I sold one of my companies, but I wanted to get it early on. My wife wanted a four-door sports car. I said, “Sweetheart, well, with Ferrari or Lamborghini they typically make two doors.” It was a dream of mine since I was five years old. I don’t know where I got this, but I always have to prove certain people wrong. I have this deep fire, my “why” which is my family, but if I set my mind on something, I do it.

It was more like the validation that if I set my mind to something, I do it. It’s a memory that if I work hard enough, have a clear vision of what I want, am willing to put the time and energy in, find the best tools, resources, and adjust or tweak certain things, anything is possible. It gets attention, too, which helps you in business anyway, so from many different angles I enjoy it. Mostly, when I get in the car I still feel like a little kid and it excites me because it’s something I’ve always wanted. It’s been a very cool experience.

Yuri:                Yeah, that’s awesome. It’s always nice when you buy something like that. I have an M5 and that was one of my dream cars for the longest time.

Matthew:                    Nice.

Yuri:                I’ve had it four years and the novelty still hasn’t worn off. I’m sure it’s very much the same with the Ferrari. You just appreciate it, love driving it, and it’s just so much fun every time you get in.

 Matthew:                    100%.

Yuri:                Yeah, that’s awesome. A lot of people seek out these “toys” because they think they’re going to be happy or because they’re going to feel a certain way. Did you notice anything shift in you once you made that purchase? Did it help you reprioritize what was important, or did you already have that understanding of what makes you happy or fulfilled before you bought the car?

Matthew:                    That’s a great question. I was confident before and grounded in all things. My family is first to me and travel is second, so we spend most of our time, energy, and money on travel and doing cool things and experiences. Toys and trinkets are very nice, but there were no trumpets sounding when I bought the Ferrari like I thought there would be when I was five years old like, “Now he’s good enough.”

It wasn’t like that. It was a cool experience and I got the whole thing on video. I’m not sure if I ever showed you that video because I did make an inspirational video out of it.

Yuri:                Oh, nice, send it over. I’d like to have a look.

Matthew:                    I think it almost has a million views now, which is cool.

Yuri:                Awesome.

Matthew:                    I was always grounded from that level. Certainly, I like nice things, fine experiences, and you can easily use them for your business ventures as well, but I think it’s important to stay grounded. It’s not the toys, like you said, that stuff doesn’t make you happy. It’s nice if you’re ever feeling down to go take a drive in the Ferrari, certainly it cheers you up a little bit.

The important things in life are family. I will hustle, I work my ass off, but I’m not one of those guys that’s doing and creating content 24/7 every waking moment. I know that I’m not going to get these years back with my kids, so it’s a super priority to me. I respect the guys that do the 24/7, but it’s not something that I totally resonate with because I like freedom and flexibility.

Even if you make $10 million per year, what good is that if you can’t enjoy it with the ones that you love?

Yuri:                Totally. What do you say to those who have an issue with money? They don’t feel they’re worth it. They don’t feel they’re good enough. They don’t feel people will pay them for the true value they provide. What type of conversation do you have with those types of entrepreneurs?

Matthew:                    That’s a very interesting question, too, because I deal with people from all different walks of life. I can relate because I was in that situation. I grew up in a lower middle class family where I heard all the typical things. Money is the root of all evil. It doesn’t grow on trees. My parents had the best of intentions and they did the best with the knowledge that they had at the time and I’ve very grateful. But you learn very early on that if you want to play a little bigger in the world and reach more people, something’s got to change.

When I relate my personal story to them or when somebody reads my book I think that’s the best end to being able to change their mindset because they see, “He came from a small 600-square foot duplex, now he’s like this, and he still seems pretty grounded. He donates a lot. He’s philanthropic.”

I don’t remember where I first heard this, but money essentially amplifies the person you already are. So, if you’re an obnoxious jerk, when you have money you’re going to be even more of an obnoxious jerk, but if you’re really kind and generous, you’re going to be even more kind and generous. I believe that.

I think that’s held true in my own life. And, at least from friends and colleagues that I’ve seen who’ve done exceptionally well, it’s held true in theirs.

 

The Rapid Five

Yuri:                That’s awesome. Good advice. Matt, this has been awesome, dude. I know we could talk about this forever, but are you ready for the Rapid Five?

Matthew:                    Let’s do it.

Yuri:                We are moving onto the rapid-fire questions. I don’t believe Matthew knows what these questions are, so here we go. Whatever comes top-of-mind is probably the right answer. Number one, is what is your biggest weakness?

Matthew:                    I’m a control freak.

Yuri:                Nice. I don’t think anyone can relate to that.

Matthew:                    Not at all. I know when to delegate, but it just takes me a little bit longer than usual sometimes.

Yuri:                Yeah, totally. Number two, what is your biggest strength?

Matthew:                    My biggest strength is my consistency and ability to give value because I feel that no one will outwork me. I’ll hear people say they feel guilty and like they should buy something from me because they’ve made so much money off my free stuff, but I’m consistently giving. I think that’s one of my biggest strengths.

Yuri:                You should just set up a Matthew Loop Foundation for people who want to send in charitable donations.

Matthew:                    Exactly.

Yuri:                Number three, what’s one skill you’ve become dangerously good at to grow your business?

Matthew:                    Facebook advertising.

Yuri:                Nice. Let’s talk about that for a second. What’s been your secret to success with Facebook without going into the grander details? Is there a guiding principle that has allowed you to be successful with Facebook advertising?

Matthew:                    I can stand out when there’s all this noise. One of the ways I do is by consistently giving content, so while there’s so many direct response offers on Facebook that try to get people to buy now I’ve always tried to build my email list first. I think a lot of entrepreneurs think they should have built their email list earlier, before Facebook started to jack up the cost-per-click and change the algorithms.

I was very fortunate to do that early on because, like you, I studied some of the direct response greats like the classic internet marketer Frank Kern. He’s been a huge mentor of mine.

Early on, build the list. That’s where most of the money comes from anyway. With Facebook, I consistently deliver value. Sometimes, I’ll just do goodwill campaigns because I have the money to spend. I’ll put it out there; whether it’s a great video that shows somebody how to get results in advance. With Facebook, we can re-target people that watch our videos for over 50% of the time so there’s ways that we can still go for the direct response in the backend.

The ability to deliver value has helped me a lot. I just give people something that they need to give them results in advance before I ask for money.

Yuri:                That is such a great principle to live by, in life and in business, so it’s no wonder it’s worked well for you. Number four, what do you do first thing in the morning?

Matthew:                    I wake up and have about 15 minutes of quiet time. I try to clear my head, breathe deeply, reflect on everything, and count my blessings. Essentially, I’m grateful for my children, that we can live a wonderful lifestyle, and that I’m going to help so many people.

I set the stage whether it’s Bob Proctor, Tony Robbins, or any self-help 101 stuff that works and shapes my entire day. That’s the first thing I do.

Yuri:                Awesome. Finally, complete this sentence: I know I’m being successful when…

Matthew:                    That’s a good one. When my children follow in my footsteps, meaning that when they start to deliver value. Whether it’s my son in his class or if it’s online or whatever, I want them to always be givers. I like what Joe Polish says. He says, “Life gives to the givers, and takes from the takers.” 100% true.

That’s what makes me feel successful; when I see my children picking up those great habits of consistently giving. It makes me very happy.

Yuri:                Awesome, that’s great. This has been a lot of fun, man, thank you so much for taking the time and sharing your story, your journey, and your wisdom.

I know our listeners are going to get a ton of insights out of this, so thank you so much. What is the best place for our listeners to see what you’re up to online, follow your work, and all that good jazz?

Matthew:                    Absolutely. If you go to SocialMediaMadeMeRich.com/gifts you can download the first six chapters of “Social Media Made Me Rich.” That book will help transform your life. It’s worked for thousands of others and I’ve been very blessed throughout my years. I used to sell the information in that book for $15,000 because it can dramatically alter the course of your life, so I’d recommend starting there.

You can look me up on Facebook, Instagram @matthewloop, and my fan page is just @MatthewJLoop. If you have any questions, I try to answer to the best of my ability, but you’ll find all the information about me and how we could potentially work together at SocialMediaMadeMeRich.com.

Yuri:                Awesome. There you go, guys. Matthew, once again, thanks so much for being here and doing what you do in this world to support our community in bettering themselves. Thus, you help their patients, clients, and customers at a deeper level, so I want to express my gratitude to you as a friend and colleague.

Matthew:                    Thanks, brother, I appreciate you having me on.

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Yuri’s Take

Amazing stuff. Hopefully you enjoyed that one. There’s two things I want to take away from this episode. Number one is the importance of mastering your craft. It’s not about dabbling, trying a little somethin’ somethin’ and it doesn’t work out. No, the thing that makes Matthew different, the things that have allowed both of us to thrive and survive in this very competitive space is that we just never gave up.

We’ve learned how to master direct response marketing, how to become better copywriters, and how to use words to influence people in a positive manner. These are things that don’t happen after a month. These are things that happen after years of relentless practice and persistence.

Surround yourself with great coaches and amazing people who are doing great things in their businesses and following proven strategies to elevate the game. Are you surrounding yourself with the right people? Do you have professional accountability? Do you have a proven strategy to follow? Do you have what it takes? Are you an “I’ll do my best” type of person, or are you the “I will do whatever it takes” type of person? I’ll tell you, if you wanted to come work with me you must be the latter.

I won’t hire people who say, “I’ll do my best” because that ends up fostering excuses. “I did my best, but the weather was cold.” No. If you’re a “do whatever it takes” type of person you will go for a run when it’s minus 20 outside and snowing. That may not be the greatest analogy because not even I would want to do that, but whatever your desire, outcome, or goal is, if you have that “I will do whatever it takes no matter how long it takes me” type of attitude, I guarantee that you will reach your goals.

I don’t know when, but I guarantee you it will happen because that is a virus that you have in your brain. It’s a very good one. Please just follow it.

I hope you enjoyed this episode today.

If you want a proven blueprint to help you build a successful six or seven-figure online coaching business, you know the drill. Head on over to HealthpreneurGroup.com/training and jump on to our free online training called “The Seven-figure Health Business Blueprint”. It’s a terrific 75-minute training.

I get paid some pretty high keynote fees to share this content from stage. If you want to enjoy it for free and have your eyes opened to what is possible with your business with a smarter way of generating the income you want and attracting more clients predictably – instead of relying on referrals or manual prospecting or spray and pray marketing – I think you’ll enjoy that.

Take advantage of that training today. In the meantime, remember to subscribe to the Healthpreneur podcast on iTunes. If it’s your first time, welcome, I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you stick around, and if you’re a continued subscriber I appreciate your continued loyalty. I know it takes time to tune in every week, whether you’re walking your dogs, sitting on your couch, or doing anything else. I appreciate your attention to this because you could be listening to something else.

Thank you so much. Have an amazing day. Continue to go out there, be great, do great, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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Transcription

Hey guys, how’s it going? Welcome back to the Healthpreneur Podcast. I want to share an interesting insight with you. As you may or may not know, I love playing tennis.

This year, I’ve been very fortunate to have traveled a lot, especially in the first quarter. I’ve traveled to Morocco, Orlando, Mexico twice, Scottsdale, and some other places. In most of those travels, I played quite a bit of tennis, which is amazing but also a bit of a dichotomy.

 

My revelation while travelling and playing tennis

I’m going to share exactly what this means for business in just a second, so bear with me. In Morocco, I got some lessons from a tennis pro. Cool stuff. Then I went to Orlando, to the UST National Tennis, and I trained down there. I got some direction from their UST coaches.

Then I came back to Toronto and it was freezing cold, so we went to Mexico. I played tennis down there and got some instruction from another coach. When I got back to Toronto, the season started getting a little bit warmer, now I got some instruction from the pro at our tennis club.

 

Why having too many coaches is worse than having none

I quickly realized that having too many coaches is worse than having none.

I believe this is true because every single one of them told me different things. “Here’s how to position yourself on the forehand. Here’s how to position yourself on the serve. Here’s how to move your feet for this backhand,” they said, and each case was different.

As a player, it became confusing, overwhelming and, quite frankly, very frustrating. All I wanted was one approach.

I wanted to be told what to do, and I wanted everyone to say the same thing. Now, let’s take this to the world of business, health, and wellness. Your clients, the people you’re serving, probably feel the same way because they’re on a lot of different people’s list. They’re following a lot of different gurus and experts, and those experts are probably all saying different things.

 

Focus on one path, have one coach, stick to it, and have your clients do the same

“Oh, I heard this from so and so. I heard the complete opposite from this person. What do I do?” This is the dilemma that we have to solve, and I believe as a coach, as a leader of your tribe, you have to tell people, “Listen, if you’re with me, you’re with me. I’m going to show you one way and I want you to follow that one way until we get the results you want to get. Then, from there, you can move onto other things, but for now, we need to put the blinders on and focus on this one path.”

In tennis, for instance, there’s no one way to hit a forehand. So, when a coach said, “No, no, no, no. You must hit like this,” I thought, “This doesn’t feel good to me at all. This doesn’t feel natural to me. Why am I doing this? It’s pissing me off more than anything.”

What you need to do is find a coach whose approach resonates with you. At the same time, when you’re bringing clients on to work with you, they should be seeing you as the one person to help solve their issue.

There’s more than enough people to go around. We’re always thinking from a perspective of abundance, not scarcity, because if there’s a million people that you could potentially work with, not all one million people will resonate with you. Some will resonate with someone else, and that’s fine.

At the end of the day, as a coach, we’re not just selling our system or our framework. We’re selling ourselves, our personality, the way we are, and our methodology.

That’s why it’s such a great space to be in, and that’s why I believe that having too many coaches is worse than none.

Now, obviously, it won’t help you to have no coaches because then you won’t have any direction, guidance, and accountability moving forward. But I can tell you from my experience with tennis, it’s very frustrating. That’s why I think a lot of tennis players have one coach. Ideally, they spend a lot of time with that one coach instead of changing coaches from tournament to tournament.

 

An example of the long-term game plan paying off when you stay focused

Another example is Toronto FC, the soccer team in Toronto. They won the MLS Cup last year. They’re arguably the best team in MLS history, as was mentioned by several people at the end of last season. Ten years ago, they were the worst team in MLS. Teams enjoyed coming to Toronto because they knew they’d get points to throw into their reserves.

For six or seven years, that persisted. Every single year, there were one to two new coaches every season. There were all sorts of new players coming in. There was no consistency.

About five years ago, Maple Leafs Sports and Entertainments, which is the managing company that runs the Toronto FC, Toronto Raptors, and Toronto Maple Leafs, made a decision. They knew that what they were doing wasn’t working. They bought in one coach and, come hell or high water, they decided to stick with that one coach.

They brought in Greg Vanney about five or six years ago. For the first two or three years, they didn’t get the results that they were looking for, but they knew that this was a long-term game plan. Fast forward four or five years later, and they become a championship winning team.

I want to get this point across to you: Find that one person, that one coach, and be that one coach for other people.

I understand that people will evolve. They’ll come in and leave and move on to other things, and that’s fine, but during your engagements, whether that’s six months, twelve months, ten years, or whatever it is, encourage them to put on their blinders and just focus with you.

You’ll give them a certain approach to improving their health and life, and that approach might be a little bit different than what somebody else might say.

 

What to do TODAY to get rid of contradictory and confusing sources

You don’t want your client to come back to you and say, “I heard this over here and I saw this on a commercial,” because you’re always going to be having to explain to them why that stuff doesn’t make sense. Obviously, it’s a challenge in today’s day and age where there’s bombardments of information and new ideas and new things, so as a coach, our goal is to get people to stay focused on the path.

If you’ve got kids, it’s very much like that. “Hey guys, walk on the sidewalk. Yeah, come off that person’s lawn. Get off the road. Yes, come back to the sidewalk.” It’s like herding cats. People are the same as kids. Well, kids are people, but I would say adults are very similar because we’re distracted.

Our attention is a big deal. We’re on Instagram, we’re on YouTube, we’re on Google, we see something, and it’s like, boom. Off to the next thing.

We want to dial that in, and get people focused.

It’s better to have one coach than many, and if you’ve got many coaches, it’s probably better to have none. That’s just my perspective. Here’s what I’m going to suggest to you: If you’re on a lot of different email lists, unsubscribe from all of them except for one or two. That’s it. That’s what I’ve done.

I get my inspiration from one or two sources. From a business and marketing perspective, it’s two sources. From a personal growth perspective, it’s coming from one or two sources, but those sources are so in line that they’re not contradicting each other. It just depends on my mood and the flavor of the day. I’m either listening to something like Earl Nightingale or Abraham Hicks, and the message is the same, for the most part.

 

What to do if Healthpreneur resonates with you

I’m not listening to stuff that is completely out there or contradictory to what I’m on this path to do, and I would recommend the same for you. In your case, maybe you’re thinking, “Hey, Yuri seems like the dude, and Healthpreneur seems like the group that I want to be a part of because this makes a lot of sense.” If that’s you, awesome. I’ll tell you what to do in just a second, but if you’re thinking, “Listen man, this guy is full of shit. I don’t like what he’s talking about,” that’s totally fine as well.

Unsubscribe from the podcast, go your own way, and find somebody else. That’s totally fine. No hard feelings. That’s just the way the world works, right? But if you do feel like this makes sense, if you’ve listened to 122 episodes of our podcast, something tells me that you see some benefits to what we’re talking about here.

Obviously, we can serve you. We can help you if you’re willing to step up. So, here’s what I’d like you to do right now if you haven’t done so already. Book a call with us.

Let’s get on the phone and talk about your business, what you want to do, where you want to go, where you are now, and what’s holding you back. Let’s have an honest, truthful conversation and let’s create some big wins for you in 45 minutes. Again, it’s a completely free conversation.

The reason we offer this is because it’s the best way to build a relationship with our tribe. Secondly, we know a percentage of people want us to help them at a deeper level to move their business forward.

Let’s be honest and transparent. It’s not a sales call or pitch. There’s none of that nonsense. We’re going to serve you and we care about your success. So, if that’s of interest to you, if you want to jump on the phone with us and get a clearer path for your business, then head on over to healthpreneurgroup.com/book right now.

Book a time to chat with us over the next day or two, and let’s get you moving in the right direction.

Thank you so much for joining me on the show today. We’ve got lots of great stuff coming your way. Book your call today. In the meantime, continue to go out there, be great, do great, and I’ll see you on Wednesday.

Transcription

Hey guys, welcome to another episode of the Healthpreneur Podcast. Today we’ve got a great guest. Her name is Casey Arnold. One of our mutual friends is a mutual friend, and I was just introduced to Casey a little while ago.

It just so happened that one of my former colleagues and good friend from 15 years ago is one of her closest friends. He moved all the way from Toronto down to Texas. It’s a cool synchronicity. It’s such a small world.

Today’s episode is going to inspire you to realize the true way to build your online presence. Now, whether you’re coaching clients or selling products, the fundamentals are the same. And what you’re going to discover in this episode is how to build your business online by spending more time off-line.

Sounds like a bit of an oxymoron, right? Let me introduce Casey more officially for you.

So, she is the founder and owner of Casey Arnold Nutrition. She’s been in the fitness and nutrition industry for over 10 years, and holds several nutrition certifications and mentorships under her education umbrella. Her true passion is education and empowering people with great insights and knowledge to make a bigger difference for their lives.

She’s been a primary educator to other trainers and coaches from high school to collegiate levels. She inspires clients, athletes, coaches, and groups to live their best and most empowered life, which is something her and I share very much in common.

She believes that success lies within education, dedication, discipline, and consistency. If you want to learn more about what she is up to, you can check out CaseyArnoldNutrition.com.

Without any further ado, let’s welcome Casey to the show. Casey, what’s up? Welcome to the Healthpreneur Podcast. How’s it going?

Casey:                        Oh, my Lord. It is going so well. It’s just another beautiful day in Colorado. I’m sure it’s going great up in Canada, right?

Yuri:                Yes, it is. I’m excited because we were just chatting before we started recording about something that we both believe in, which is spending more time off-line building human connections to build your business and brand online. I want to go deep into that in a second.

First, give our listeners a bit of context. Talk to us about your journey. Then we’ll jump into that goodness.

Casey’s journey and the importance of in-person connection

Casey:                        Absolutely. I’ve been in the health and fitness space for over 12 years, and started out on the fitness side as a fitness educator. I saw broken pieces in our industry, the biggest being nutrition. I had a nutritional downfall, personally, about a year ago and that’s what stemmed my growth and my desire to help as many people as I can traditionally speaking.

Through that journey in building my business, coaching team, and everything online, I realized that the biggest missing piece to that success is maintaining human connection outside of the Internet.

Yuri:                Yeah. It’s funny because before we recorded, Casey was talking about some great people from Toronto that we both know are now down in Dallas. It’s such a small world, it’s all H to H, and as the world and business becomes more digitized, the need and desire to get more in person is going to be even greater for everyone, not just entrepreneurs.

Was there a moment when you recognized that it just made sense to spend more time building these relationships?

 

How a lack of connection impacts your business

Casey:                        I’ve always been a lover of people. I feel like I’m like a walking heart with arms and legs. When I was at a conference four years ago, I noticed everybody walking through the expo was on their phones. People didn’t have their heads up trying to connect with people. And that’s why you’re there. You’re there to make connections, talk to people, and create authentic relationships.

I was in an expo of thousands of people and I looked around and everyone had their head down because their social media post, text message, or Snapchat was more important than making the connections to elevate their business.

That’s when I thought, “Oh my gosh, I have to be doing something right because I’m the only one that doesn’t have my phone out.” I didn’t have a huge connection to my phone, but I knew that it was important. That was a huge wake up call. You have to maintain human connection in order to create authentic, valuable business connections and create a much larger impact on this world.

I still see a ton of fitness and nutrition entrepreneurs struggling because they feel they need to hide behind the computer or their phone. When they’re in person they don’t know how to have that conversation. They don’t know how to speak about what they desire to have because they’re so used to just typing and surface level conversations. They don’t know how to get deep and be true to their selves and what they want.

Yuri:                I couldn’t agree more. I was having dinner with two buddies the other night and one of them is a pretty prominent figure in our space. He loves Instagram and Instagram stories.

I see it from a business perspective for him, and it makes sense. I told him, “I don’t have Instagram or Facebook on my phone because I know myself. I go down those rabbit holes very easily and it just becomes a whirlpool of nonsense. I don’t want that to compromise the quality of the relationship I have with my kids.”

I don’t want to be on my phone when I’m with my kids or, if I’m at a conference or mastermind, everyone’s typing on their phones and missing out on the experience. They’re missing out on being present, connecting, and learning.

I believe that human connection is a dying art. I don’t know if the millennials have the ability. I’m not going to say all of them, but you know, some of them are just so fixated on their devices that they feel more comfortable texting than having eye to eye contact with another human. So, it’s an interesting time that we’re navigating.

Casey:                        A hundred percent. I was giving a nutrition seminar recently in Dallas, Texas. Over 90 percent of the people in the seminar were so busy taking pictures and trying to Instagram story, like my seminar and the questions were not there.

For the younger generation, everything was about, “Okay, let me just get this on my IG story, let me get this. Then, afterwards I asked, “Do you have any questions?” and I got a slew of Instagram DMs from these kids asking questions because they don’t know how to communicate in person.

They literally lost that skill. You wonder: are they being taught that at home, or is that a lost art in school? Especially with my husband and I having our first child on the way, we are aware and extremely hypersensitive to the technology that’s around us all the time. How are we going to create and make sure that our child grades those relationships so they’re not stuck with their heads in their phones?

Yuri:                Yeah, totally. So, how do you advise entrepreneurs to navigate that when they think they must be spending all this time online to build out their platform or whatever it is they’re doing? How do you feel this lack of connection is impacting their business?

 Casey:                        I think it’s impacting people’s businesses hugely. When you see people online and they go out to a conference to try and make more connection, when you look deep into their content, all their content is just themselves. There’s no human connection in the content and they’re with no one else. It’s all just them, them, them. It’s almost like they’ve turned into a “me monster”.

Other entrepreneurs wonder how I’m so well connected. I get emails or DMs all the time asking, “You know so many people. What are you doing?”

It’s all about time blocking. I allow myself to have time blocks throughout the day where I’m allowed to be on my phone. I’m getting better at it, too. I get to be on Instagram for 30 minutes, get my post done, and that’s it.

I get to check Facebook morning and night, and maybe once in middle of the day, but I hold myself accountable. I also have somebody that holds me accountable, which is one of my business coaches. They hold me accountable and make sure I’m doing what I say I’m going to do on my social media time so the rest of my time is focused on building out content and connecting with others outside of social media.

Everyone thinks they should do all these connections on social media, but you need to have those in-person connections. Find people in your area, and go get coffee with somebody. Take that time, because when you make those invaluable moments of conversation in-person, it leads to the most valuable content and connections moving forward.

The biggest advice I can give is to find one of the few people that you do not want to disappoint, and have them be your accountability buddy for your social media time. If that’s what it’s going to take, then do that, and once you’ve created a rhythm and routine, then maybe you won’t need that much accountability anymore.

Then you’ll go out and set goals like, “I’m going to connect in-person with three different people this week.” Or, “I’m going to be in this city. I’m going to make sure I get lunch with this person.” Or, “I’m going to get dinner with this person.” Make sure you’re setting up weekly or monthly goals of in-person and social media time. Then, move forward from there.

Yuri:                Love it. I’m guilty of this. I value connection probably more than anything. Yet, I find myself prioritizing other things sometimes. So, instead of spending Friday afternoons connecting with other people in-person, I’ll just do other things. I’m guilty of that.

But when I travel, I find that I’m more open to booking group dinners and that kind of stuff. Time blocking for social media is good advice. Putting that time aside to connect with people in-person is important. There’s never been an event, paid or not, that has not paid off in ROI and better relationships.

If you just put yourself in these situations to connect with new people, it’s awesome. Selfishly, that’s one of the reasons I love this podcast. I get to meet awesome people like yourself and start these awesome relationships that I may not have had otherwise. Listeners, that’s another cool reason you may want to consider a podcast if you enjoy doing that.

Casey:                        I couldn’t agree more with you, Yuri. I’m guilty of it, too. My husband also keeps me in check. Even when we’re out to dinner alone, our phones are put away and we have deep, authentic conversations. We see so many couples, especially when we go and have lunch or dinner dates, just sitting there and not even talking. They have their food in front of them, they haven’t touched it, and they’re too busy on their phones. It’s the same thing as what you said about the conferences.

When I speak to other people, and they ask, “How do you do it?” I say, “Just put your phone away and just be you.” People are almost too scared to just open themselves up and peel back those onion layers to be their real authentic self in front of people. That holds them back in their business.

If they just take the time to put that stinking phone or social media away and be themselves in person, that’ll resonate tenfold because then other people are going to talk about them and say, “Wow, it was so great to meet Yuri. He was so great to have a conversation with, it was amazing.” Rather than, “Oh, I never got to talk to Yuri because he had his face in his phone the whole time.”

But you see that so much. That’s the biggest connection piece to success: Taking the time to look somebody in the eyes and have that conversation, even its five or 10 minutes, without your phone. I don’t know if this happens to you a lot, but when I meet people with their phone in their hand, they’re half listening and half on their phone sending out that next text message or Checking Facebook or Instagram. They’re not fully present in the conversation.

Yuri:                If I’m in a situation where that happens, it tells me everything about the person right there. I don’t like to make snap judgements, but there’s a lot to be said for that; either they don’t value you, they don’t value the time, or who knows? I completely agree with that.

One of the most important lessons I can impart upon anyone is: if you’re present with someone, be present with them. Having been in this space for a long time, I remember meeting a couple of people that are very prominent figures in our space, and there’s nothing worse than getting into a conversation and they’re looking by you, looking for someone else more important to talk to.

It doesn’t matter if you’re talking to a complete newbie who you don’t think is worth your time or whatever it is. Be present with them because I guarantee you they’ll remember your presence for a long time.

I think Joe Polish said, “Be nice to the people on the way up, because we’re the same people you’ll see on the way down.” It’s a very true statement, because if you think you’re too cool for school, people will remember that. There are people that I have blacklisted just based on a 30 second conversation I’ve had with them, based on how they treated the conversation.

Casey:                        I couldn’t agree more with you, Yuri. You hit that on the head. It says so much about that person. I’ll get messages here and there from people who never had someone pay attention to them. I’ll get a message saying, “Hey, thank you so much for listening to me.” I think, “Wow, that’s something you shouldn’t be thanked about all the time.” That’s something you should naturally be doing, something that we used to do until media and social media came around and people’s voices stopped being heard. They feel lost and sad because they don’t feel like people care.

That’s a big part of my mission in what I do. I allow people that come into my life, whether they’re clients or new coaches that I’m hiring, to understand that I care about them, I am here, I’m listening, and they are more important than anything else when we’re having conversations. That’s the way everybody should feel when they’re having conversations.

Incorporating connection with your team and clients into your mission

Yuri:                Totally. How do you operate with team members or coaches in terms of communication? Sometimes, especially in the digital space, entrepreneurs want to delegate and let someone else do things and never speak to them. Or they micromanage the hell out of them. What communication styles you have and how do you encourage your team members? What does that like for you?

Casey:                        For me, when it comes to having a solid team, I’m not in charge of anybody. They’re on the exact same level as me. We are one team. They’re no better than I am, and we’re all learning together. That’s how I have it set up, and it’s completely open door communication.

We have weekly phone calls set up so that we can communicate. We can see each other via Zoom because I don’t live in the same city as any of my coaches. They’re in three different cities across the U.S. And it’s important for them to understand that I’m not better than them. They have just as much opportunity and value in my company as I do. We collaborate and when we communicate, it’s an open door.

I’m no better than them. I don’t delegate. I don’t tell that they must do X, Y, and Z. I allow them to bring up their ideas, and then we create – as a team – the best solution moving forward so they feel valued, confident, and independent. They have some statute in what we’re doing as a company moving the vision forward of Casey Arnold Nutrition.

We’re a team and we’re walking up this hill together.

 Yuri:                That’s awesome. Does that management and communication style just come naturally to you or is this something that you’ve developed over the years?

Casey:                        I have to give thanks to all the coaches and mentors that I’ve had in my life. This was literally taught to me at my first big job as a boot camp educator. Still, this woman is one of my best friends and she was in my wedding. I used to be, well, I still am very type A, but I wanted to tell people what to do. Like, “This is how you do it, and it was my way or the highway.” I was quickly put into my own pants by this phenomenal leader in Boston. She said, “You’re not going to get anywhere in life if you’re trying to lead that way. You need to make people feel like a part of a team.”

She taught me that 12 years ago. Every other mentor I’ve had my life, whether it be Ballantyne or Jason Phillips, you name it, they all have that same way of educating and implementing how to be a great leader and business owner. And it’s not about you, it’s about your team.

I’m so grateful that I was put in my place 12 years ago because if I wasn’t, I don’t know if I would be in the space that I’m in right now as a leader and business owner. I was taught very quickly that that was not going to get me anywhere.

Yuri:                That’s awesome. I mean, it’s sad that it takes a real kick in the ass for us to realize things, but that’s just the way humans operate. It’s always cool to see the journey that we go through because usually one pivotal moment, or a series of things, make you realize you should do something differently to change. Now, everything happens for a reason, right?

I just had a friend and colleague of mine whose entire staff just left him. I didn’t know this until a couple of days ago, but apparently, he treated them terribly. This is surprising to me because he’s a nice guy otherwise. I don’t know him in that setting, but his entire team just left. Got up, left, boom. And it’s sad to hear that happen. It doesn’t happen often, but for that to happen something bad has got to be going on.

 

Vulnerability, struggle, and growth over ego, and people-pleasing to destruction

Casey:                        Oh, yeah. Don’t get me wrong, of course, we’re all striving for perfection. I’m not perfect by any means. We strive for that. To be completely selfless, I still catch myself in some moments trying to micromanage or doing something. My better half will just give me a good check and let me know, and sometimes we argue because it’s hard for me to be wrong.

But just humble yourself, put that in your back pocket, and move forward. I think that’s also one of the biggest things for business owners in our space. They don’t want to humble themselves. They feel that if they are humbling themselves, then they’re being too vulnerable and not being strong enough. But to me, true strength comes by being vulnerable, putting your dark guard down, and allowing yourself to grow, because with struggle comes growth and when you see that happening, it’s a beautiful process.

We’ve seen lots of different business owners transform how they manage their teams or themselves when they become vulnerable, humbled, and choose growth and struggle, rather than ego.

Yuri:                Nice. Good advice. What’s one lesson you had to learn the hard way and how can you help our listeners avoid that mistake?

Casey:                        One lesson that I learned the hard way was being a people-pleaser. You cannot please everybody, and there was a point in my life eight years ago when I was making my shift, where I was people-pleasing so much that it literally debilitated me. It almost cost me my entire business. It landed me in jail, which we can talk about later, full transparency.

People-pleasing is not going to get you anywhere, but we don’t want to disappoint, right? We want to make sure everybody’s happy. But, at the end of the day, when you learn that you are not going to make everybody happy, you are not for everybody, you are for your niche tribe, there are 6 billion plus people on this planet, and there are plenty of people that you can serve within your tribe, that’s when you’re going to completely game-change your business.

If you feel you must make everybody happy and please every single person, you’re going to burn out. You’re going to burn bridges. You’re going to hurt relationships, and that’s not a fun place to be in. Trust me, I’ve been there.

Yuri:                That’s a huge insight. Guys, rewind and listen to that again. I know you may have heard this before, but one of the things I’ve recognized over the years while helping people with their coaching businesses is that, as a good coach, you’re able to have meaningful conversations that cut to the truth.

I think a lot of people shy away from asking tough questions because they don’t want to be disliked. The fear of being dislikedis one of the biggest things that holds us back from building our business, because we’re afraid of asking for the sale, being rejected, or whatever it is. But it also paralyzes you from having deeper, more meaningful conversations with other people. What you mentioned there, Casey, is huge. Trying to please everyone is just a race to the bottom.

Casey:                        Oh, a hundred percent. And just like you said, people are afraid to be themselves and ask for what they want. You’re never going to know unless you ask. The right people will be there, and if you’re speaking your authentic truth, people are not going to like you, they’ll love you.

If you’re living in your truth and you’re being honest and authentic, the right people are going to be by your side. That was another thing that held me back: Comparison syndrome. I was told by so many mentors and coaches, “You’re the best, Casey. Why aren’t you out there more?” I literally just compared myself. “Well, they’re better than me so they can just go coach with them.”

But, everybody has their own special and unique gift. As soon as you can let that go and know that you are special and there are people you can serve, that’s when the magic really happens.

Yuri:                How did you get through that? How do you get out of that comparison stuff? What did you do to get yourself focused and recognizing your differentiator, how you add value to the world?

 

The reason why there’s no excuse not to have a coach or mentor

Casey:                        That process for me was having a coach and a mentor. You need a village around you to create that success. I knew I couldn’t do it on my own and I needed the right mentor and the right coach. And so, this is like words I live by, A coach ingrained these words I live by in my head: “Put your blinders up, hold your vision, and serve your people.”

So, when I put my blinders up I realized that it doesn’t matter what anybody else is doing. My mentor told me, “People are literally dying because you’re not in their lives. You are being selfish because you’re not serving your people; because you are too afraid of what everyone else is going to think about you, and you’re comparing yourself to the next nutrition or health coach.”

When I grasped the concept of, putting my blinders up and serving my people, that’s when the game changed for me.

It was like a light switch just went on, Yuri. It was also the accountability from my coach asking, “What are you doing? What are the action steps that you’re taking?” That was something I relentlessly implemented every single day. Something that I’m still even working on today.

As soon as that happened, my tribe started to navigate towards me. The people I wanted to work with, those were the people coming to me because they saw me serving them through my content, writing, Instagram, or Facebook posts. I knew who I was serving. I didn’t care about anybody else. I knew my target and who I wanted to help.

And as soon as you do that, everyone will start to gravitate towards you. Don’t try to serve everybody else and worry about what everyone else thinks. Get an accountability buddy or have a coach if you need it. That’ll really help push you through that.

Yuri:                Great advice. What do you say to people who feel they can’t invest in a coach?

Casey:                        I tell them there’s no excuse, because there literally isn’t. In my mind, Yuri, there’s no excuse. If they say, “I don’t have the money,” it’s all mindset because money is energy, and if you don’t have the money, it’s because you’re choosing to believe you don’t have that money to invest in a coach.

I mean there’s people out there that are brokers and brokers have no money and they find the money. They find the way to get that coach because their vision and their mission and what they want to do is so much more important than any excuse out there.

So, if you say you don’t have the money, then you’re telling yourself you don’t. But, in all reality, I promise you that you do. You’re not digging deep enough to work hard enough to get that money, to hire that coach.

Yuri:                That’s awesome. That’s great advice and I think that’s part of what separates those who succeed. Whatever you want to call success in business from those who don’t. About 80 percent of the people we’ve had on this podcast have said that very same thing. The number one thing they attribute to their success other than persistence, is having a coach or mentor.

And they wish they would’ve had one sooner. I would put you in that category. My first coaches were Bedros and Craig and you know, this was like three years into my business online. I didn’t have the money to spend – $18,000 at the time – but I knew that’s what I needed to do to get to the next level. It was the single best decision I made in my life because that started a whole sequence of events that got me to where I am now.

I know I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t made that decision. As you said, it is a mindset. It is a hundred percent mindset. Whether it’s $5,000 or $20,000 what’s the worst-case scenario? What’s the worst thing that can happen if you lost that money? Would your life be over? No. You would be able to get clients, pick something up, or make lattes at Starbucks.

Obviously, that’s not what we want to do, but the upside is limitless, right? Some people are so limited in terms of their beliefs. They think, “Oh, I can’t scrap this money together,” or whatever, and other people say, “Yeah, I’ll just turn on my credit card and make this happen.”

Casey:                        Totally. And that’s exactly what I did. It’s also that support, right? I knew I needed Craig and I knew I need Jason. I still kick myself in the butt thinking about if I would have had Craig four years ago. I’d be in a totally different space. But I’m so grateful that I have him and Jason Phillips now.

It was non-negotiable. My husband was like, “Okay, we’re just going to do it.” When you believe so much in your vision and your mission, you’re going to make it happen.

What’s the worst thing that’s going to happen? You’re not going to go backwards. You might have like, $5,000 or $10,000 of credit card debt, but you’re not going to go backwards. You’re going to create, you’re going to get an experience, and you’re going to get so much further than where you are, just meddling in your own crap.

Yuri:                It’s not like you’re buying a new pair of shoes. You’re learning and growing. At the very minimum, you’ll learn one new insight that changes the way you think. Even if your money was gone forever, you’re a different and better person. So, guys, if you’re listening to this, get a coach. I call this the litmus test: If you are coaching clients and you expect them to invest in you, but you don’t have your own coach, there’s a massive disconnect.

Casey:                        Amen.

Yuri:                And are you the client you want to attract? If you’re having a tough time enrolling clients because they don’t see the value in investing in you, ask yourself, “Do I invest in myself?” If the answer’s no, that’s probably the solution. Tough love, man. You’ve got to do this, it’s a big, big thing.

Casey:                        I could not have said that better.

 

The Rapid Five

Yuri:                Awesome. Well that’s what I’m here to do. Casey this has been awesome. We’re going to segway into the Rapid Five. Are you ready?

Casey:                        Ready!

 Yuri:                Alright, here we go. Whatever comes top of mind is probably the right answer. What is your biggest weakness?

Casey:                        My biggest weakness is being controlling.

Yuri:                I don’t think anyone can relate to that.

Casey:                        That’d be the first thing my husband would say. Control freak.

Yuri:                Yeah. Nice. Number two, what is your biggest strength?

Casey:                        Love.

Yuri:                Nice. Number three, what’s one skill you’ve become dangerously good at to grow your business? 

Casey:                        Human connection.

Yuri:                Nice. Number four, what do you do first thing in the morning?

 Casey:                        First thing in the morning I get up and I have a glass of water with lemon and apple cider vinegar.

Yuri:                And then what do you do?

Casey:                        And then I go into the bathroom and I put my makeup on in my pjs. I feel like if my face is done, then I’m ready to go for the day.

Yuri:                Awesome. Finally, number five, complete this sentence: I know I’m being successful when…

Casey:                        When I know I’ve impacted someone’s life in a positive way outside of a monetary value.

Yuri:                Love it. That’s awesome. That’s good. Casey Arnold, thank you so much for being with us. This has been awesome. I hope you guys have enjoyed this one. What is the best place for our listeners to stay in touch, follow you, and see what you’re up to?

Casey:                        Right, the best place that they can find me is at Caseyarnoldnutrition.com, or follow me on Instagram @CArnoldNutrition. My Facebook page is Casey Arnold Nutrition. I’m on all those platforms to help, serve, and be there for everybody.

Yuri:                Awesome. Thank you. Casey, once again, thanks so much for taking the time to join us today. This has been a great conversation. I’m sure we could talk about this forever, so I look forward to continuing the conversation in the future with you.

Casey:                        Oh, thank you so much, Yuri. It’s been a pure, absolute, amazing joy.

 Yuri:                You’re welcome.

 

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Yuri’s Take

Such a great interview. Wasn’t that so inspiring? Casey’s energy and enthusiasm in truly connecting with other humans is what it’s all about, guys. I hope you’re starting to get this.

We’re like more than 100 episodes into this podcast and the same themes keep coming up repeatedly. Spend more time connecting with others, hire a coach, get mentorship earlier, surround yourself with amazing people, and follow a proven path. Don’t reinvent the wheel if you’re not doing this stuff, okay? You are significantly handicapping your ability to move forward in this world and, see, it’s not about you.

So, don’t get all caught up in the fact that, for instance, you can’t afford to hire a coach or whatever. It has nothing to do with you because you not doing this is being selfish. Selfish to the people that need your help.

Think of it that way. Every month or year you delay or put off that thing or program and you think you’ll get there eventually, but you’re not there quite yet, more and more people are suffering because of your selfishness. I’m sorry to be brash and sassy about this, but you know what? That’s the way I see it.

You must move forward and you must do whatever it takes because not only are you going to serve other people out of their suffering to their bigger dreams, but you are going to help yourself because of that. Okay? That’s my little kick in the butt for today. Get out of your comfort zone and make the move that is going to make you a bit uncomfortable. Do the thing that you know you need to do, but scares you a little bit.

Remember, fear is wetting your pants. Courage is what you do with wet pants. Have the courage to step into the fear, get out of your comfort zone, and do that thing you know you need to do, but you’ve been holding back. That’s my message for you today.

If you want help with this and you want a proven strategy to help you grow your business and help you earn six, seven figures from coaching – not necessarily one-on-one, but more of a leveraged program that you can deliver online – then checkout our Seven Figure Health Business Blueprint.

It’s a free online training. It’s 75 minutes that will knock your socks off and open your eyes to a smarter way of building your business, especially if you’re tired of doing a thousand things in your business and not seeing the results you want. Even if you’re already successful and you’re just bogged down and busy, this training will help you and open your eyes to a better solution to building a business that impacts people on a deeper level and is one that you love as well.

Grab that over at healthpreneurgroup.com/training, and if you haven’t subscribed to the podcast, remember to do so today. Otherwise, I’ll come and hunt you down. Just kidding. Anyways, thanks so much for joining me. Hope you have an amazing day. Continue to get out there, be great, do great, and I’ll see you in our next episode.

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Transcription

Hey, hey. Welcome back to another solo round. I hope you enjoyed last week’s interviews with Andrea Nakayama and Marnie Greenberg. I thought they were awesome. This week, we’ve got some good ones coming up, too.

 

Why the need for certainty hurts us

Today, I want to share an interesting perspective on mindset with you. It’s this whole notion of certainty. I believe that the need for certainty hurts us, and could be hurting you in your business. Now, what does this mean, exactly?

Well, if you’ve ever done any Tony Robbins or deep work into your human behavior, you probably know that there are several fundamental needs that humans crave. One of them is certainty. Another one is uncertainty, which is an oxymoron. We need the variety, but we also need the certainty of things being the same every day or all the time; like the sun rising every day from the same side of the Earth.

Having consistent cash flow or profit coming into your business is a degree of certainty that I think most business owners want, and that’s important. That’s called “predictability,” not just certainty.

But there’s a type of certainty that hurts most entrepreneurs. I say “most” because – let’s be honest – most entrepreneurs fail in business, and this is part of the reason why.

I’m bringing this up because we get on the phone with a lot of health coaches and health entrepreneurs every single week, and our goal is to help them go from where they are to where they want to be and support them as best as possible during our time on the phone together. If there’s an opportunity to work further together, we certainly do that. If not, it’s all good, but we find that one of the biggest reasons that people are stuck is because they need to see something before they believe it.

We need to believe in results before we can see them

But that is not how entrepreneurs create magic in this world.

You see, what’s amazing about being a business owner and entrepreneur is that we have creative superpowers. We must believe something before we can see it. If you’re listening to this on an iPod or an iPhone, do you think that Steve Jobs needed to see this thing before he believed it would work?

No. He knew, whether that was from universal energy or he just knew intuitively based on what people want or what they don’t want, that this was going to work. He believed it before he could see it.

If we need to see something before we believe it’s possible for us, essentially we need certainty that it’ll work before being willing to take the leap. I’m sorry, but that’s not the way the world works. In fact, it’s the exact opposite.

Think of the clients you might be serving. They may come to you to lose weight, for example. As an expert, are you going to tell them, “Listen. You want to lose weight and to do that, you just have to believe it before you see it”? No, we’re not going to say that, right? But what we need people to buy into is the fact that if you want to see the weight loss results, believe and understand that you must put in the work. Commit to the process and have the courage to walk across the chasm.

The reason we want certainty is because we’re fearful, and all it comes down to is if you’re going to let your fear stand in the way of your bigger dream and hold you back from getting what it is that you want. We turn to certainty because we think, “Okay, I’m scared. I don’t know what the outcome of this thing is going to be, therefore I need a 100% certainty that this is going to work.” But that’s not how the world works.

If your clients come to you and they want to lose weight, can you 100% guarantee them a specific result? Can you say, without a shadow of a doubt, you will get this result? No. You can do what you can to help them get there, but they must meet you halfway. They must understand that they need to put in the work, even before they see the results.

That’s the key.

If you’re allowing your need for certainty to get in the way of stepping forward with your business, you will never get the results you want. Never.

 

My personal examples of stepping into uncertainty

Let me give you a couple examples from my life. I’m not sharing this with you because I think I’m some god or whatever. I’m sharing this with you because I am somebody who is a great example of someone who doesn’t need certainty before I do things. That’s one of the reasons why I’ve had the failures, but also the successes, that I’ve had in my life.

Let me give you an example from soccer. This is not business-related at all.

When I was young, I believed I was the best goalie in Canada. Probably the world. I was delusional. I’d call it delusional optimism, but that level of confidence allowed me to take a lot of risks. I played in Brazil with one of the top clubs in the country. I played professionally in Toronto. Then I lived in a new country, a foreign country, France, where I’d never lived before and was away from my family to pursue my dream of playing pro soccer.

I didn’t have certainty that things were going to work out. There was no way I could know for sure whether things were going to work out, but the only thing that I did know was that I believed in myself.

When we speak with people who think they need to see social proof and certainty, what that’s screaming is, “I don’t believe in myself.” That’s what it comes down to, guys. If you need certainty for something to work for you, you don’t believe in yourself. That’s the bigger problem, and that’s when you should look in the mirror.

Another example: When I first published a book, I invested $300,000. Yeah. $300,000. It’s ridiculous. That’s the price of a house in a lot of places. I would never recommend anyone do that, but I was hell-bent on making it happen. Did I know that that was going to work out? Did I know I was going to see an ROI from that? Did I know that my book was going to hit the New York Times list?

100% no.

What I did know was that I was going to do whatever I humanly could to make that happen. This is the difference between the entrepreneurs who succeed and those who fall flat on their face time and time again, struggle, and never see the results they want.

 

The difference between successful and unsuccessful entrepreneurs

You must believe in yourself and be comfortable being uncertain. If you don’t, you will not get the results you want. It’s as simple as that.

Whether it’s investing in something that you’re not too sure is going to pan out for you, or doing something that you’re not too sure of, if you feel that it’s the right thing for you to do, and you know deep down inside that you will make it happen no matter what, that’s all that matters. As an entrepreneur, you can create magic out of thin air and turn an intangible idea into a physical result for somebody, and that is what matters most.

That’s why I believe the need for certainty will sabotage your business.

It will hurt you. It will hold you back in so many areas of your life, and if you’re listening to this and you’re thinking to yourself, “You know what, Yuri? I am somebody who needs a ton of proof before I jump into something.” Or, “I do procrastinate for months on end before I decide,” I’m going to challenge you.

Ask yourself why you do that, and if it boils down to not believing in yourself, then go back to the drawing board and build your confidence. Build a better program that’s going to create amazing results for your clients, because when you have that, you have the confidence you need to move forward. If you don’t have that, then you have no business enrolling people in the first place. I’m serious about that.

This is a little bit of tough love today, but I hope this message sinks in deep for you. It is core to what allows you to succeed or not succeed in this world in any area of life. Like parenting. If you’ve ever had kids, did you have 100% certainty that the kids were going to come out healthy? No. Did you have certainty that you were going to be an amazing father or mother? 100% no. So why is it that people, time and time again and until the end of time, are going to continue having kids?

Because they know they’ll figure it out, right? It’s the same thing with business. It’s the same thing, and if you can’t see that, you’re going to struggle. I would hate for that to happen.

 

What to do if you’re ready to step up

So, if you’re ready to step up and if you want us to help you work through some of those limiting blocks, then let’s get on the phone and chat.

Here’s what I’d like you to do right now: If you’re ready to step up and are serious about moving your business forward, making the income, enjoying the freedom, having that dream life you’ve always wanted – maybe it won’t happen next week – but if you’re ready to get on the path to get you there, then let’s jump on the phone and let’s talk.

Book a call with us today.

Go to healthpreneurgroup.com/book, and I’m going to call you out. I seriously will. If you are not willing to step up and if you’re not willing to move past your own fear, this is not right for you. We’ll talk about where you are and where you want to go, but the goal of this conversation is to get to the truth of what matters most. It’s to have an honest, vulnerable conversation and say, ” You’re saying you want this stuff, but there’s an incongruence here. So, what’s really going to happen?”

Part of being a coach is having these difficult conversations. They’re not always difficult, but there will be times where you must go a little bit deeper, and you must get the weeds out of the garden. That’s what we can help you do on this call.

So, if that’s of interest to you and you’re ready to move forward and get your business where it wants to be, even if things haven’t worked out the way you wanted them in the past, then let’s book a call and do it now.

That is all for today. I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. If you’ve enjoyed the podcast, if you haven’t yet done so already, subscribe today on iTunes. Leave us a rating and review as well. That would be greatly appreciated. For now, continue to get out there, be great, do great, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

Transcription

Hey guys, Yuri here and welcome back to the show. Today, we’ve got a special guest named Andrea Nakayama. If you are in the world of endocrine or thyroid health, you’ve probably heard that name. She’s been around the block and she’s doing some big things in this world.

She’s become a notable name in the world of functional medicine as a nutritionist who can help chronically ill people get better when no one else can. Her clinical skills have won her the attention of many world-renowned doctors who consult with her on their own difficult cases and she trains hundreds of practitioners every year to have the clinical success like she’s had in her practice.

Through her work at the Functional Nutrition Alliance and Holistic Nutritional Lab, she’s training an army of change-makers in the field of healthcare. She’s doing some pretty big stuff. If you want to learn how to create better outcomes for your clients, especially if you’re working in a coaching modality, where you’ve got people with different health issues, what Andrea will share is going to be extremely valuable for you.

Without any further ado, let’s welcome Andrea Nakayama to the show. Hey Andrea, welcome to the Healthpreneur Podcast, how are you?

Andrea:                                I’m good, thanks for having me, I’m excited to be here.

Yuri:                      You are very welcome, it’s great to have you here. It’s always a pleasure to connect. I love doing this podcast because it gives me a very selfish reason to connect with amazing entrepreneurs like yourself who are doing such great things serving our industry. It’s a lot of fun.

I’ve given a bit of context to our listeners as to what you do in the bio leading up to the interview, but can you give our listeners a better sense of what your business looks like? What is the business model and how did you come about building the business you built?

 

How Andrea found her true calling and is filling gaps in the market

Andrea:                                It’s complicated and multi-tiered. I’m a functional medicine nutritionist and I started very humbly. This is, as it is for many of us, a second career. I worked in book publishing for 15 years and after I lost my husband – he died of a brain tumor – I took stock of my life and realized that I had a different calling.

I put myself back through many years of school and started, like I said, very humbly. I first saw clients at my dining room table. I taught classes in my living room for the parents in my son’s class on sugar and on fat – good fats, bad fats – and it grew quickly, much more quickly than I expected.

I would go to health conferences and other health coaches would approach me, ask me how I was building things so quickly, and how I did what I was doing. They loved my newsletter and would savor it and read it. They begged me to start training them what I was doing in practice.

I thought I would start a little support group for health coaches wanting to learn more about nutrition and that grew into a seven-figure business and a school. I now train thousands of practitioners around the globe.

I think we have practitioners in 58 countries now; everybody from health coaches to MDs, nutritionists, RDs, and nurses. All sorts of practitioners in the science and the art of the functional nutrition practice.

The school is the biggest arm of the business. I have a virtual clinic with several nutritionists. I consider that our R&D; it keeps my toe in the water.

I see a few clients and then I have a team that sees clients. We also have online programs for the B to C audience; for the consumer audience. There are different areas of the business and lots to manage. We have a team of about 17 at this point and they are always busy, moving, and excited by what I’m doing.

 

Opportunities for new practitioners in the field today

Yuri:                      That’s awesome. It’s great to build something out of necessity and demand based on what people are asking for. What are you seeing as these health coaches and practitioners come to you for additional education and support? What are you finding are some of the big gaps in their own education or practice?

Andrea:                                Oh, huge. I teach a lot on this. I call it the gaps and the traps in functional medicine and functional nutrition. If we’re looking at the medical side of the equation, the gap in functional medicine is that we are putting the functional medicine physician on a pedestal and asking them to pay attention to everything.

They know that diet and lifestyle modification matters, but they haven’t been trained in diet and lifestyle modification. As those of us who work in that arena know, it takes a lot of time to get into the nuances, not just the behavioral change from a coaching perspective, of what diet works for an individual and when and how we must move the needle.

In the functional medicine model, there’s a gap in a missing practitioner. I call that practitioner the allied functional medicine practitioner. If you think of a pyramid, the physician may be at the top of the pyramid, not because they’re better or know more; but because they can see that diet and lifestyle modification matters. They don’t necessarily know that it’s going to take more than a handout to get somebody to make diet and lifestyle modifications.

The patient is in the weeds. They can’t break apart their signs, symptoms, diagnosis, or what they’re supposed to do. They’re overwhelmed with the information online these days. So, that person works almost like a manager of the whole case to say, “Hey doc, this is what I’m seeing here. This person can’t eat this diet because…” So, that’s one piece of the equation.

On the coaching side of the equation, there isn’t enough that goes beyond theory. So, a lot of coaches learn how to be advocates and work with behavioral change, but they don’t necessarily understand the science behind the diets or what’s going on physiologically in the body. So, “Oh yes, this doctor said that you need to take methylated folate, but why is that causing you to be dizzy and not get out of bed?”

Coaches need more of the physiology training to understand what these clues mean and where diet and lifestyle modification matter. An infection treatment might be too aggressive for a person who can’t tolerate it, and we need to understand that and know why.

What I’m teaching is the science and the art of the functional nutrition practice. It’s asking “How do we become clinicians versus coaches and learn how to think on our feet so every sign, symptom, and everything a client says gives us more information about what’s going on in the body?” Does that make sense?

Yuri:                      Totally. What do you see as one of the big opportunities now for these practitioners and coaches moving forward into 2018 and beyond, within the medical space in terms of getting their message out there? From a legal perspective, functional medicine doctors can practice virtually, correct? Alternatively, medical doctors need a license in the different states that they’re practicing in, right?

Andrea:                                It depends on the model they’re using and whether they’re using insurance. If they’re a medical doctor, they still might need to see that patient for the first time in-person and then go to a telemedicine model.

Functional Medicine is a big catch-all, in a lot of ways. But, in terms of the practice management way, some docs are still trying to work in the insurance model; but bring that understanding to what they do. Others have gone to a cash pay model. It depends.

As far as the allied functional medicine practitioner goes, and this, again, can be a health coach who has gone through additional training from our school or a nurse, a physician’s assistant. I think they can be the future of medicine.

Nurse practitioners and all the other practitioners that are touching a patient or a client have a huge opportunity and there is a necessity for the work we do, because the population of patients that are sick and not getting better is on the rise.

There’s so much information out there through summits and books, and people are trying all those things and they aren’t working for them or they’re skipping and hopping from doctor to doctor looking for the quick fix from any one of those resources.

They’re not finding them. We talk about the clients that we see in our clinic as the “big bigs” or the “huge bigs”. That means they have a big health issue and they’ve already made a big effort and they’re still suffering. That population is on the rise. People are sicker and sicker and they’re not getting better.

Yuri:                      It’s a sad reality but it opens a massive opportunity for everyone in our space that’s doing this.

As you’ve said, and I’m a firm proponent of this, the summits and the books and the blog posts, they’re all good and everything; but it’s not putting a dent in anyone’s life in a positive way.

 It’s not impactful enough. It overwhelms and confuses people more than anything.

Andrea:                                Well, and it’s not individualized care. It’s not functional because it’s not considering the whole of the person’s reality, which includes their history, their physiology and what they’ve done to date.

So, when people are watching a tele-summit and they hear that if you have Pyroluria, you should take magnesium, B-6, and zinc, they self-diagnose as having that condition and start taking nutrients, that may not be appropriate for their system.

I call this the epi-genetics of the online tele-summit, because I think patients may be making themselves worse by adopting everything they hear instead of having a trained clinician bring in the appropriate nutrients and modifications for their signs, symptoms, and diagnosis given who they are.

Yuri:                      Absolutely. We’ve completely shifted with Healthpreneur. The old model we taught to help other practitioners and coaches grow their businesses of just putting together some summits, challenges, and e-books wasn’t helping people. I don’t believe so, and I believe the future, as you’ve said, is more personalized attention.

There’s a big opportunity and people are hurting for solutions. So guys, if you’re listening to this, this is big news.

Andrea, before we go any further, I’m sure there’s a lot of people wondering how to find out about your awesome program. Can you give us the best place for people to learn more about how to pursue their own studies and education with you guys?

Andrea:                                Yeah, absolutely. I also have gift for everyone here. It is, speaking of epi-genetics, my Three Tiers to Epi-genetic Mastery. It’s the system that I teach in, too. It isn’t don’t eat gluten, then remove sugar. Those things are important, yes, but this is a system that allows us to think.

People can get their hands on that e-book at fxnutrition.com/yuri. FX is for functional.

You can always learn more about us and the work we do at the Functional Nutrition Lab – that’s the school – and then the whole business is the Functional Nutrition Alliance where we have those different audiences that we speak to as I noted.

 

Struggles and vulnerabilities when building a business

Yuri:                      What I love about this is, for everyone listening; between what Andrea’s doing with the physiology of the coaching side and what we’re doing to help you guys grow your business, it’s a beautiful marriage. So, take advantage of both.

So, talk to me about the journey of your business. What’s one big lesson? What was a pivotal moment over the past decade or so of building this bad boy up where you were against the wall and you thought to yourself, “How am I going to make this happen?” What was the lesson you learned from that and how did you move forward from that experience?

Andrea:                                I’m smirking, because it happens all the time. It’s so funny, when I’m speaking to my students – who are great people to tune into what you’re teaching, Yuri because they’re also trying to start their businesses – they’ll say things to me like, “You don’t understand. This feels vulnerable.”

I respond, “No, you don’t understand, it always feels vulnerable. You’re always at a new level of pushing yourself out there and having to go into a new terrain with things.”

So, I would say one of the biggest challenges I faced was when I tried to grow my practice beyond me is seeing the clients directly, because people still come to our clinic to see me. They’re not coming to see Jen or Caroline or Sandra who work on my team, but that’s who they get.

The bridge is that they still get me on the back end. I look at everybody’s labs and my team has client review meetings with me. But the transition from being the personality of the brand and getting to touch me directly, to now knowing and feeling comfortable as a customer working with someone who’s been trained by me and gives that comfort, was a huge hurdle for me to cross.

So, it took time. There were some mistakes made and I learned a lot. But, I must say, in all the hurdles I’ve experienced, what it takes is being flexible, adaptable, and listening to your audience. Listening to their concerns and wins.

We use Slack on our team and we have an Outside In channel. Outside in means we post anything that is a win or a concern that we hear from a customer or client. It’s a very active channel and it allows everybody to know our wins and all the love we get, but also problems or frustrations so we can all problem-solve it.

Yuri:                      That’s great. I know a lot of experts are the face of their brand, and a lot of cases are at their clinic. If they want to scale or want more freedom in their life, they must step away from doing all the patient visits themselves.

What advice do you give to a practitioner or coach who has been helping people and can’t scale beyond their current capacity unless they step back and start creating some systems that enable other people to do what they do? How does someone approach that? What’s a mistake to avoid, and what’s a better direction?

 

The downfalls of having quick-start energy and the need for systems

Andrea:                                One of the benefits I have in that arena is that I teach, so I get to pick from the cream of the crop. I get to see who is showing up and if I want to take them further.

Some of the mistakes that I see occur are that practitioners tend to fall in love too quickly. Those of us who are oriented towards building a business have a lot of quick start energy in us. We might see that a person’s great to bring on as a partner or apprentice, and it takes more time like any relationship to build a relationship that is going to be sustainable.

That’s one bit of advice: To take it slow, get to know each other, know who is in charge, and what you want the relationship to be. I like to talk about agreements versus expectations.

Make sure you know what you want as a practitioner and write those agreements out with whoever you’re bringing on to help you do the work. Then, educate them in your ways, your systems, and in the way you think. That is a huge opportunity for growth because it makes you strip off what you do naturally – that you might not even think about – and teach somebody.

I can guarantee you that nobody will do it like you’re going to do it.

For me, that’s been the huge benefit of teaching so many people. I’ve had to strip off my skin and ask, “How do I do this? How am I thinking? What’s my brain doing here?” so I could create those systems.

I look to personality testing a lot. I do a lot of personality profiling to better understand myself so that I can teach how to do what it is that I do, not just to my students, but to my own clinicians. They’re my first stop for understanding what they are not getting.

It’s not their fault if they’re not getting something, it’s mine, because I didn’t teach it right. So, I’m constantly in this feedback loop of figuring out how to talk about things, because if I’ve talked about it now three times, and they’re still not getting that piece, what is it?

Yuri:                      It’s a great process. I’m very much on the same page as you with this, because I’m always looking at building to sell. Even if I have no intention of selling the business, I ask how I build so it’s not dependent upon me. It’s built upon intellectual property or a framework of the way we do things.

Edwards Deming said, “If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.”

Andrea:                                Exactly.

 Yuri:                      We become so unconsciously competent that we can no longer even describe how we do what we do. But as you’ve said, when you strip away those layers and you think of the steps of what you do, it becomes clarifying for you but then you can also hand it off to someone else.

Andrea:                                You can hand it off to someone else and you can educate your client or customer. That becomes a part of the language that you use to sell or articulate what you do.

Yuri:                      A hundred percent. That’s a big question, because a lot of people will want to ask how you do it; how you help achieve the outcome. You could say you have a five-step process. We do this, this, and this. It gives the potential client a lot more confidence because they can see the end of the tunnel.

This is a good practice for anyone listening.

When we look back at this journey and where you are right now, what was the defining moment in your business? Was there a pivotal moment or inflection point, or was it steady growth for you?

 

Passion as the driving force for success

Andrea:                                There were ways in which it was steady growth. Every year was growth.

It takes getting yourself out there and not being fearful of putting yourself where you see you can make the biggest difference. One thing that I don’t think we’ve touched on that is a huge ingredient in the recipe for success is a passion that moves beyond making the money or making a difference.

It is something that fuels you and encourages you to get up every day and do the hard work that’s necessary, trip and fall, and get back up again.

For me, that passion is what I experienced with my husband who was so young when he was diagnosed. I was pregnant when he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. He was given six months to live, and was not expected to see our child’s birth. He lived just under two and a half years.

I saw him in his early 30s, treated like a dead man. We traveled around the country to see all sorts of specialists and did all sorts of adjunct work, but I felt that it wasn’t okay for sick people to be treated like their diagnosis. He was treated like a dead man walking because he had a fatal brain tumor.

That fueled me. I think it’s unjust. We have a great medical system in certain ways that deals with acute care really well, and we have a faulty medical system that’s overlooking the needs of the chronically ill patient and that patient population, like I said, is on the rise because of a number of factors that are true in our world and environment.

That passion keeps me motivated and it keeps my goals on the top of the list. That’s a key ingredient that gets you through any of those pitfalls and they will come in every shape and size.

Yuri:                      They don’t go away. They only get bigger.

You just level up to become a better version of yourself to handle it. We’ve got three boys, and every stage has its challenges. The challenges don’t ever go away, they just become different. You evolve and become better so you can handle them. The same happens in business.

Andrea:                                You know, parenting is such a good example, Yuri. We don’t know what we need to learn until our kids show up and tell us what they need us to learn by manifesting some behavior, symptom, question, or whatever it might be.

Parenting must be adaptable and flexible like business. There’s some stuff you can anticipate and learn, and some of it is just responding. “Okay, this is in front of me now, how do I want to respond to this? What do I need to learn? How do I need to grow up and change?”

Yuri:                      Yep. Absolutely. So speaking of this, when you feel overwhelmed, unfocused, or off-track, what questions do you ask yourself to get back on track and focused?

Andrea:                                Good question, Yuri. It depends on the question, but I try to feel where I’m feeling things in my body and come into the place of quiet in some way, whether it’s through my yoga or walking out in nature. I try to take care of myself and walk my talk so that I can sit with the discomfort and take it apart.

I’m a problem solver, that’s why I’m able to do the deep physiological work. I know how to take a problem and dismantle it. Sometimes you just sit with the problem and know you’re not going to know the answer yet. There is no quick fix to that.

It’s less about asking myself a question then sitting with what’s coming up or what I’m not seeing.

Yuri:                      That’s good. give the advice, “Introspect instead of compare.”

Don’t compare yourself to other people. Don’t even have social media for all I care. Just stay in your lane and do your thing. Your ultimate answer is going to be you. Intuitively, how your body is feeling? If you have a deep pit in your stomach, maybe that’s a sense of fear or you’re worried about something. Be in tune with that.

It’s tough to do that when you’re always busy and going, going, going. It’s very tough to check in, so that’s great advice.

Andrea:                                Yeah, we must take the time.

Yuri:                      The other thing too is, as practitioners and health experts, it’s incongruent not to practice the message we’re trying to teach others, right? It keeps us accountable in that regard.

 

The Rapid Five

Andrea, this has been a lot of fun. This has been insightful for myself as well as our listeners. Are you ready for The Rapid Five?

Andrea:                                I am ready.

Yuri:                      Alright, here we go. She has no idea what these questions are but you guys probably do. Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

Andrea:                                I can be overly forgiving of others and hard on myself at the same time.

Yuri:                      What is your biggest strength?

Andrea:                                Compassion. So many things popping up, but I’m going to say compassion.

Yuri:                      That’s great. Number three, what’s one skill you’ve become dangerously good at to grow your business?

Andrea:                                Introspection. Always taking time to look back and learn.

Yuri:                      Nice. Number four, what do you do first thing in the morning?

Andrea:                                First thing in the morning, I take my compound thyroid medication for my Hashimoto’s. Then I walk and do a little meditation in the morning after feeding the cats.

Yuri:                      Awesome. Finally, complete this sentence: I know I’m being successful when…

Andrea:                                I know I’m being successful when I see my students having great successes in their life.

Yuri:                      Boom, there we go. Andrea that’s awesome, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. It’s been exciting to catch up, because it’s been a couple of years since we’ve spoken. Once again, you’ve got that awesome free gift.

Andrea:                                Yes. It’s fxnutrition.com/yuri and I think that’ll be a fun inspiration for everyone.

Yuri:                      Guys, go get it. Do it now. Andrea, thank you so much for being on the show, for everything you do, for helping elevate practitioners and coaches and equipping them with the tools to better and more effectively serve the people that they serve. Thank you so much for all you do. I do appreciate that.

Andrea:                                Thank you, Yuri, and thanks for having me.

 Yuri:                      You’re very welcome.

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Yuri’s Take

So, there you have it, guys. I hope you enjoyed that one. I know I did. Andrea’s a great person; I’ve known her for several years and she’s doing some great stuff in our space to elevate the level of practitioners and health coaches to impact our clients at a deeper level.

Now, if you want to impact your biz and take things to the next level in what you’re doing, we can certainly help if you would like.

We offer a free 45-minute result accelerator call to help you get clearer on how to attract your perfect clients more predictably, convert them into paying clients without feeling salesy, and honestly deliver an amazing result for them on the backend without one on one coaching, which can drain you and take a lot of time. It’s not scalable and, quite frankly, it doesn’t produce as good a result as a group coaching or a leveraged model can provide.

So, if you want help navigating how to scale your business, how to get more simplicity and clarity so you can multiply without overwhelming yourself; we can certainly help you with that.

Head on over to healthpreneurgroup.com/book and grab a slot today. Grab a time to chat with us and we will jump on the phone with you. It’s not a sales pitch in disguise. It’s simply servicing you and helping you get from where you are to closer to where you want to be.

If you want help in helping you get there, then we can certainly talk more about that at the end of the call. But, at the very minimum, you’re going to leave our call with good insights and a lot more clarity.

So, that is what we are currently offering for the right people. If you want to see if you qualify for that, head on over to healthpreneurgroup.com/book. In the meantime, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

I appreciate your loyalty and attention. It means a lot. More great stuff is coming our way in the coming days and weeks. Don’t go anywhere, I’ll see you soon. Continue to go out there, be great, do great and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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Transcription

Hey guys. I hope you’re doing great and your day’s off to a great start. Some people have a gift to transform someone’s health and life very quickly. Sometimes that is developed, and sometimes it is innate. Today’s guest, Marnie Greenberg, is one of those people.

There’s one big thing in this interview that we unravel that will make you sit up in your chair, if you’re sitting down, and make you think about what you’re offering your audience. If you’re having a tough time getting people to buy or enroll with you, then it’s going to come down to the offer.

Marnie and I are going to talk a little bit about how that pertains to your business and why it’s helped her become massively successful in her business.

Marnie Greenberg is the number one international best-selling author of the book, “Delete Stress and Pain on the Spot”. She’s an acclaimed insightful strategic advisor, author, speaker, and consultant with more than 20 years of experience in healing and natural medicine. She also provides consultation services to both individuals and traditional Fortune 500 and smaller companies. She’s a successful owner of a multimillion dollar company built in less than one year before the age of 30.

With that said, let’s welcome Marnie Greenberg onto the show. Marnie Greenberg, how’s it going?

Marnie:                       Great! I’m so excited to be here with you, Yuri. Thanks for having me.

Yuri:                You’re very welcome. It’s great to have you on the show. I love connecting. The selfish reason I have this podcast, I’m going to be honest with you, is because I love just connecting with people like yourself. There’s no business model that’s built on this. If you’ve got a podcast or anyone listening has a podcast, it’s a long-term game.

Marnie:                       I love your podcast. I love everything you do. It’s wonderful what you’re bringing to your listeners. All that you’ve done is impressive, and your energy’s amazing.

 

Marnie’s business model and how she helps her clients delete pain

Yuri:                Thank you. I did write the New York Times bestselling book on the topic, so I guess it’s fitting. What does your business model look like? There’s obviously overlap in some business models, but I’m curious to see how your business operates.

Marnie:                       I’m the co-creator of the universally acclaimed Yuan method and author of the number one international bestselling book “Delete Stress and Pain on the Spot.” I offer my services reflected in the book “Delete Stress and Pain on the Spot.” I offer live tele-courses and programs. And I also do consultations with Fortune 500 companies, professional athletes, and people from all walks of life.

My main mission is to improve the quality of people’s lives. So, I have many programs that revolve around that. I do high level consulting.

I also have a membership so my clients can stay regularly connected to me on a regular basis. I have coaching programs at different levels. “Pre-program your Life for Health, Wealth, and Happiness” is my basic program. And I also offer programs on ultimate rejuvenation and I go from there. They’re customized programs at a higher level. Then, I also do business consulting.

So, there’s a range of different programs.

Yuri:                So one of the first things that I noticed when I saw your content a while ago was that you have this ability, at least from what I saw, to stop pain very quickly.

Would you say that’s your superpower?

Marnie:                       Absolutely not.

I feel everyone has this innate ability and it’s all about finding your weakness and strengthening.

I use my insight to identify the true reasons, causes, and sources that created the problem in the first place. So, it doesn’t matter what kind of pain or stress you’re having; there’s always a root cause. I use my insight to identify what the true reasons, causes, and sources are.

More importantly, I delete it so that it no longer affects you. This is done instantly on the spot when I teach and train. I have thousands of people around the world who are trained to do the same thing.

Yuri:                That’s awesome. I want to jump in here for the listeners for a second.

We help a lot of health coaches, practitioners, and experts in our space create, fill, and scale coaching programs. One of the biggest things we ask them is, “What is the pain or problem that you’re solving?”

Secondly, “How long does it take you to solve that problem?” As you know, humans would rather have a problem solved quickly rather than in 12 months.

From my outsider’s perspective, when I saw your stuff, I thought, “Wow. This is working well for you because you’re able to create such transformation so quickly.” Would that be an accurate assessment?

Marnie:                       Yes. Absolutely. You’re right on the spot.

 Yuri:                So how does someone develop these skills? This is something you train, but are there one or two little tidbits that our listeners could take and start to build this insight on their own?

 

Deleting the mind and activating your higher intelligence

Marnie:                       I sell a strengthening and deletion audio program. It’s a course that you listen to so I can guide you through the process to develop it.

A second to what you’re asking, like how to do it right away, is that it’s something that you experience. It’s not something like, “Well, we all have insight, but how do you develop that insight so that it’s immediate and on the spot?”

We’re like a computer. In the computer language everything’s either zero or one, strong or weak.

We, as a human computer, are either strong or weak. You must get good at staying in, what I call, the neutral zone. I teach people how to delete their mind and activate their brain, their physical intelligence, by bypassing their mental intelligence. That is what confuses us and where all our problems are. In our mind.

So, I teach people how to link that to the universal intelligence. The universal intelligence has all the answers, but our problem is that we’re not connected. I always give the analogy of a computer because, right now, if I wasn’t connected to the internet, you and I couldn’t even talk right now on Skype.

You must have that connection to the universal intelligence to download those answers and you must be able to do it quickly. That’s why it all comes back to insight and the strong or weak principle that I’m describing to you. I teach people how to get neutral so that they can feel strong or weak. And once you’re in the neutral zone you can feel strong or weak and know exactly what’s right for you.

The problem that most of us are facing is that we’re processing so much information. You can Google anything and get instant information, but how do you know what information applies to you? How do you know what information is good for your business? We’re all given business plans or strategies, but how do you know if that same plan is going to work for your business?

You should use your own insight and have strength behind that plan, and have insight plus logic to get those results. Does that make sense?

Yuri:                Yeah. That’s great. Your best coach is your intuition, right? Or insight, wisdom, or however you want to define it. It’s lacking in so many people that they’re just jumping on the next bandwagon, the next shiny object, and they don’t have a clear vision of what they want to create nor do they have the internal guidance to say, “This works for me,” or “This doesn’t make sense.”

Marnie:                       Right. I always describe it as internal guidance myself. If you can GPS where you want to go, and you make the wrong turn, what does the GPS say? “Rerouting,” right? Instantly. It doesn’t wait two hours later when you’re at the wrong destination.

We must have our own GPS finely tuned. We all make wrong decisions and wrong business decisions, but if you know right away that you made the wrong turn and you reroute immediately, it just makes your life so much better. I don’t believe in mistakes or failures because if you can quickly reroute, that’ll bring you to success, which is what I’ve done in my life.

You’re always headed in the right direction and you’re in charge. And your insight guides the way because, even like Einstein said, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”

So how do you change your consciousness? You delete your mind. Your answer is not going to come from your mind. The answers for what you’re going to do in your company, or how you’re going to grow your business, or how you’re going to get to that level of freedom, that’s not going to come from your mind.

A lot of people are all about mastering your mind. I’m all about deleting your mind altogether and staying in line with higher intelligence to always make the right decisions be on track. And when you’re not, you fix it right away.

Yuri:                Nice. Does that look like spending more time in silent meditation and just connecting to that higher source as part of the process?

Marnie:                       Well, I started off with meditation years ago when I first got started with some world-renowned trainers, but what I realized is that it’s slow. And although meditation has proven scientifically to eliminate stress, it could take years.

I love meditation. And the goal of meditation is to be in the “no mind,” but what I’m about is how you do life. You can’t say in a business meeting, “Let me go meditate on that and I’ll be back with the answer tomorrow.” No. You got to live in action. I consider myself an action leader and I don’t have to say, “Well, I’m going to go meditate.”

When I start my day, I delete my mind. I activate my higher intelligence and I’m living in that neutral zone as much as I can. Sometimes it’s challenging to be there 100% of the time, but that’s certainly my goal and my goal for my clients. How do you connect to that and live in it?

Like I said, meditation is really slow. What you want to be doing is living in the “no mind” 100% of the time and stay active in it. Even with athletes. I’ve trained NFL players and got them back in the game. When they play the game from that level, it’s a whole different game.

We’re playing the game of life.

 

The mistake entrepreneurs tend to make that holds them back

Yuri:                Totally. That’s important especially in today’s day and age where everyone is so distracted or allured by all the stuff they see on social media, right? You’re on Facebook and suddenly you see a friend’s post and you feel shitty about your life because they’re more successful apparently than you are.

Or you see a Facebook ad for the newest little thing you need to be doing in your business and you’re jumping on the next track to do that instead of listening to that guidance.

Marnie:                       That’s right. That’s most people’s number one problem. They’re judging. They’re comparing themselves to others and I teach people how to delete all the judging. Delete all comparing yourself to others and bring out your authentic self because we each have our unique fingerprint.

You have your unique fingerprint in what you’ve brought out, but there’s not another Yuri. You’re the only one and it’s awesome that you’re living. I looked at what you’re doing in your podcast. You’re so in your authentic self and I love that about you.

I feel your energy and where you’re coming from. And you talk sometimes on your podcast about your group events that I’d love to come to.

You talk about the spiritual energy and how you feel so connected and it doesn’t drain your energy. It’s so cool when I heard you say that, because that’s coming from your heart. When you’re connected to that, you don’t feel drained. You feel like you could work 20 hours and you’re not affected by it.

Yuri:                Thank you.

I’ll give you some contrast. Before we jumped on, I had to fill out some paperwork for a new merchant account we’re setting up. I would rather poke my eyes out with needles than fill out paperwork talking about my assets, liabilities, and all this nonsense.

Just the thought of having to do that is draining. I’d rather do a three-day event. So, living your truth and authentic self. Are your clients aware of those situations?

Marnie:                       If you don’t mind, I’m going to stop you in your tracks because when you said that, I could immediately feel a dip in your energy. So many people have that. Let me ask you a question: What is it that you love the most?

Yuri:                I love connecting with people and teaching.

Marnie:                       Okay. Now think about that for a second. Okay? What I’m saying is more of an experience. Feel that in your body right now. You got that feeling?

Yuri:                Yep.

Marnie:                       When you’re doing what you love, do you feel that strength right now in your body?

Yuri:                Yes.

Marnie:                       Now, quick, let’s jump to the opposite. I want you to think about something that you absolutely can’t stand. Think about the merchant, setting up the account, the accounting, and the paperwork. Take a moment and think about that. You got that?

Yuri:                Yeah.

Marnie:                       And now do you feel a dip in your energy?

Yuri:                Yep.

Marnie:                       Okay. Now go back to the positive. What you love. Quickly compare the difference between those two. When you quickly compare, do you feel the difference?

Yuri:                I feel a fire in my core when I’m talking about the good stuff. But it disappears when I talk about the other stuff.

Marnie:                       So, that’s what I teach people. When you can clearly differentiate the strong versus weak, that’s where it’s at. When you think about what you love, that feeling, that’s your internal GPS. When things come your way, you have to check in with yourself immediately.

Not, “I should go meditate,” but, “Yeah. That feels strong.” Constantly move in that direction where things come to you. Whether you’re hiring employees, communicating with your employees, dealing with relationships, the finances, or paperwork, whatever it is, make sure to stay connected to the strength.

Make sure you feel that strength in your decisions. If you’re going to say yes to something, make sure it’s strong.

I can’t tell you how many entrepreneurs make the mistake of feeling that dip and doing it anyway. You’re never going to get what you want doing that. Ever.

Yuri:                So, it becomes binary. It’s a hell yes or it’s a no. Would that be correct?

Marnie:                       You’ve got to be good at firing that off.

A lot of people say, “You got to be good at saying yes.” I say no. You’ve got to be good, as an entrepreneur, to say no.

A lot of things are going to come at you. A lot of other business owners are bad at saying no.

Yuri:                We spend a lot of our time talking to people on the phone, seeing if they’re a good fit for our programs, and it’s our goal as coaches and a company to get to the truth.

We don’t care if they enroll or not.

We just want to have a very honest conversation. We’ll get to the point where we tell them about the program details and we’ll just ask, “Is this a hell yes or is it a no?” That’s all we want to know. We don’t need to sugar coat stuff. We don’t need to pretend.

What becomes frustrating for the prospect and for us is when people try to put on a veil. They say things are working out great and that they just want to think about it for the next five months. Let’s just get to the truth. If it’s a financial thing, that’s totally fine. If it’s not a fit for you, that’s totally cool as well. Let’s just have an honest, truthful conversation about it.

Marnie:                       Most of them are in denial though.

You know the truth about it. You just want to get to it, sign up, and show how you can help, but they’re in denial. So, it’s hard for them. You say, “I want to get to the truth with you,” but they don’t even know the truth.

That’s the problem.

 

Marnie’s crazy journey, challenges, and lessons

Yuri:                Exactly. The work you’re doing is, obviously, so needed. I want to talk about your business for a second. How did you get into this in the first place?

How did you start doing this and how did you build this bad boy up online?

Marnie:                       That’s a great question. When I first started, I met Doctor Yuen who’s the founder of the Yuen method. He helped me delete my back pain and he did it so fast. I suffered from back pain for my whole life and he just took it away and it never came back. At that point, I just jumped right into this whole healing.

My background’s in accounting, finance, and business, but my authentic self loves to help people and heal. I found it fascinating, so I jumped in to help him promote. While I did that, we were in a different state or country every couple weeks. I traveled and ended up being his business partner and getting promotions. I built this multimillion dollar business within less than a year. It was before I was even 30.

After years of co-leading with him and getting this miraculous method out there, I decided to go my own way. During that time, I thought I was free. You talk about financial freedom, I had it. I had an amazing relationship. I lived in a wonderful place. I went on a sabbatical to Sedona, Arizona and sure enough, one day, it hit me out of nowhere.

Here I was, a successful entrepreneur, having everything I wanted, and I woke up one day and it was my blind spot. I couldn’t eat without severe pain and I didn’t know what was going on. As a medical intuitive, I could sense something was off in my body. Eventually, I just couldn’t eat at all. I had a block.

I went to see about 14 different doctors in a six-month time frame. It was so frustrating, Yuri because nobody could figure out what was happening and I couldn’t eat.

To make a long story short, I had surgery. They put a J tube in me so I could get liquid food. Well, another long story short, that ended up coming out. I had to get rushed to the hospital and they put a new tube in. Turns out, I had a negligent surgery, so when they went to test to see if the tube was working, the radiologist put gastrografin into the tube, which is the contrast to test it. And instead of it going into my jejunum down, it went up into my peritoneum. It was like having fire fill through your body and I screamed at the top of my lungs.

Doctors flooded in and they pushed the emergency button.

I looked up and a crisis surgeon looked down at me and said, “She needs emergency surgery. Roll her in. She has peritonitis. This is going to kill her.” You have ten hours to live when this happens.

They rushed me into surgery and they suctioned everything out. When I woke up, I felt like a truck had run over me. I was in the hospital for three months. I ended up with Gastroparesis, vagus nerve damage, all these problems, and then I couldn’t eat.

It was one problem escalating into another. Once I finally got out of there, I ended up at the Mayo Clinic. There were teams of the top radiologist specialists, gastrointestinal specialists in the world.

I was at the University of Indiana, University of Michigan, then at the Mayo Clinic I was diagnosed.

Imagine going through all this without a diagnosis. The top doctor said, “You know what Marnie? You have a midgut mal-rotation of your superior esoteric artery and vein.” It’s so rare, the reason they didn’t know what it was is because it’s congenital. They usually find it at birth, but here I was in my mid 30s and nobody even suspected something like that.

It took a high-level specialist to figure it out. Well, they gave me five years to live and I was shaking and trembling in fear. Coming back to being an entrepreneur, I’m a go getter. I make things happen. I feel like there’s nothing I can’t do. That’s who I am.

You know you want something? You go get it and make it happen.

I’m very positive and optimistic. I looked at the doctor and said, “You know what? I’ll be back to prove you wrong. I believe in miracles.” I wouldn’t accept it.

So, I hopped on a plane. I went back to see Doctor Yuen, I handed him my medical records, and he threw them in the trash. He did a treatment on me that he did at a Washington D.C. seminar. Sure enough, with one treatment, he reversed the artery in my vein.

I could eat again in one treatment. It was a pivotal moment in my life. I share this with you because it fueled me to write my book, “Delete Stress and Pain on the Spot,” which hit number one best seller the first day it was out internationally.

I went from tortured rock bottom and given the death sentence to relaunching my life and recreating. I said yes. This is who I am. This is what I’m meant to do.

I wrote the book not to make it a best seller, but because I wanted to get it out to the world. It doesn’t matter how serious your health is. It doesn’t matter what disease you have. Everything and anything is reversible and I proved it. If I could do it, anyone could do it.

People said, “But Marnie you’re so insightful. You’re a medical intuitive. You’re a healer.” I’ve been healing people all around the world, and I couldn’t get myself out of it. That was another pivotal moment.

As great as you are, imagine there’s something that comes over you and you can’t get yourself out it. It was Doctor Yuen for that quick second. He reset my insight. He said, “Marnie, your mind is in your way. You’re so caught up with all this medical jargon. Delete your mind. Activate your physical intelligence, strengthen me to the universal intelligence.” He pinpointed my weaknesses which were coming from referred parts of my body, deleted the root causes, and the artery and vein was reversed.

Yuri:                That’s amazing. You went through that experience and you were sold. It works.

 

How Marnie’s experiences help her serve her clients

Marnie:                       Right. I have people coming to me all the time with 911 calls. They’re having a heart attack and most of them, honestly, own their own businesses. How many people own their own business and end up having a heart attack before they’re 60? Now I’m at the point where I look into my future and change me.

Every decade I delete the problem before I even get there. That’s how cool this method is. You don’t wait until something happens. This is preventative. I’m proactive. I tell people, “Come to me and you won’t have a problem. You won’t ever get a heart attack.” As entrepreneurs, we need our health. We need our vitality.

If you’re sick one day and you can’t go to work, or you must cancel an interview, or whatever it is, that’s money. It’s not good.

Yuri:                That’s awesome. Terrific stuff. I love this. Marnie, we’re going to jump into the Rapid Five in just a second, but before we do, where is the best place for people to learn more about this? I’m sure our listeners are saying, “Holy shit. This is amazing. I need to consider this.”

Marnie:                       Visit my website at marniegreenberg.com. I offer a free livestream. You can call in and talk to me live and I do it for free, twice a month. I offer that service so that people can experience it themselves. Put your name and email in. I already created marniegreenberg.com/Yuri for your listeners. If they want to come on over and have a free call, I’m all for that too.

 

The Rapid Five

Yuri:                That’s generous of you. Thank you. Guys and girls listening take advantage of this. If you’re thinking to yourself, “This is amazing,” just experience it yourself. So, with that said, are you ready for The Rapid Five?

Marnie:                       I am.

Yuri:                All right. Five rapid-fire questions. You have no idea what they are. Well, if you’ve listened to this show you may, but whatever. Okay. Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

Marnie:                       My biggest weakness? That’s a great question. I don’t have many weaknesses. I can’t say. I turned all my weaknesses into strengths.

Yuri:                That’s the second question. What is your biggest strength?

Marnie:                       My biggest strength is that I can immediately delete someone’s problem and activate their insight so that they’re so clear, calm, and their quality of life improves on the spot.

Yuri:                Nice. That’s a good super power. Number three, what’s one skill you’ve become dangerously good at to grow your business?

Marnie:                       If I make a mistake, I reroute immediately. I feel it and I reroute. I got rid of the one mistake knowing that there are no mistakes.

Yuri:                That’s right. Just learnings. Number four, what do you do first thing in the morning?

Marnie:                       Delete my mind and activate my physical intelligence. And set my priorities. I live from authentic self-knowing with a clean slate. I’m good at that. I do not hold grudges, negative emotions, or the stuff that happened the day before.

I take out the garbage every day with my thoughts, emotions, and experiences. That has helped me so much. It keeps me healthy. It keeps me vital. I have the five-minute rule. I don’t let anything piss me off, excuse my French. I don’t let anything upset me for more than five minutes. I just delete it.

Yuri:                That’s such a great way to approach life. So many people walk around for their entire lives with grudges and resentment, and for what?

Marnie:                       You wonder why you’re exhausted, that’s why.

Yuri:                Yeah. It’s not good. You’re on the right path for sure. Finally, complete this sentence: I know I’m being successful when…

Marnie:                       I’m listening to my inner guidance.

Yuri:                Awesome. It’s interesting, I ask this question every show and there’s two types of answers that come up. One answer is feeling successful when people say they’re doing a good job or give a testimonial, which is cool. The other variation of that answer is a very internal feeling, where they’re listening to internal guidance or feeling like they gave their best.

It’s kind of one or the other. It’s very cool.

Marnie:                       It’s so cool. I love that you interview all these people and I love what you do. It’s awesome.

 Yuri:                Thank you. Yeah. It’s a lot of fun. It’s created so many cool verticals and different types of business models.

Marnie:                       You’re so talented to just naturally ad-lib this whole thing. It’s amazing.

Yuri:                It’s what I love doing the most.

I love having conversations with the right people. I don’t just like talking. To be very honest, I’m a situational extrovert. I’m naturally introverted, but when I’m speaking with the right people I could go on forever. The selfish reason why I created this podcast was to connect with awesome people like yourself and have cool conversations.

Marnie:                       I love it. Good job.

Yuri:                Yeah. So, Marnie, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been a lot of fun. Again, for all you listeners, marniegreenberg.com/Yuri. Take advantage of the live session with her. This is cool stuff.

Marnie:                       Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure and I’m sending you lots of good energy right now so I hope you feel it.

Yuri:                Thank you very much. Thank you.

 

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Yuri’s Take

There you have it. How’d you like that one? Pretty cool. I want to go back to what I was talking about at the beginning of this episode, which was what I believe to be a big catalyst for Marnie’s success. It’s the fact that she’s able to solve a problem very quickly.

The offer is anything. The offer could be the invitation to a webinar. It could be the offer you’re making on the webinar. If you’re speaking to people on the phone, what is it that you’re offering in terms of your coaching program? Anytime we’re making an ask of someone we always want to think of how we help the person achieve the result that they want as fast as possible and with minimal stress and frustration.

The very fact that Marnie can help people delete pain on the spot, that’s a pretty compelling offer, right?

That’s a little bit different than saying, “Listen, we’re going to work together for the next 12 months and then, hopefully, the pain will be reduced.” I’m not saying that there’s no value in the longer-term coaching, because we have Luminaries Masterminds, the 12-month coaching program, and our whole promise is to get from six to seven figures with more clarity, simplicity, and a lot less stress.

We look at that as a three-year plan, with a one year commitment. We get everyone to work with us for 12 months and we work with them very closely over that period to help them create the necessary fundamental building blocks and breakthroughs in their business.

There’s that, but if you can help someone solve their problem quickly, that’s great. Whether it’s our mastermind or our workshop, we’re always thinking about how to help our clients achieve ROI, positive ROI, as fast as possible.

That’s an important question to ask yourself. If you’re helping clients achieve weight loss, health, or whatever it is, how can you help them get the results they want as fast as possible? In general, if you can go after a single target market with a single problem and help them solve that pain or problem as fast as possible, you can command premium pricing and people will be very motivated to work with you because you can solve their problem quickly and you’ve got a proven methodology for doing so.

I’m going to leave you with that today. If you want help figuring out how to do all this stuff for you and your business, then I would recommend jumping on a call with us. We offer a free 45-minute result accelerator call and the goal of this call is to help you get very clear on how to attract more clients predictably. No more leaving pamphlets in clinics and stuff like that. That’s just not going to happen. It’s not going to work.

Secondly, I want to show you how to convert those prospects into clients without feeling salesy and deliver an amazing result for them within one on one coaching.

So, are you tired of trading time for money and you want to scale your business, do the most impactful stuff in your business, and have a lot more predictability in the process? Then we can help you do that. On this call, we’ll give you a proven path that is simple, clear, and predictable.

If you’d like to book one today, head on over to healthpreneurgroup.com/book. Grab your spot because we have a limited number every week. I would hate for you to put your dreams on the back burner.

This is not a sales pitch in disguise. It’s just a free thing we offer for our tribe, for the people who are qualified.

Thank you so much for joining me once again. I appreciate your attention. I appreciate your loyalty and if this is the first time you’ve listened, head on over to iTunes and subscribe to the Healthpreneur Podcast because we’re awesome. We’ve got some great stuff coming your way.

We’ve got hundreds of previous episodes in case you’ve missed any of those and lots more to come to help you create a more impactful and profitable business that serves you and your tribe. So, once again, thank you. Continue to get out there and be great and do great. I’ll see you in the next episode.

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Transcription

Welcome to another solo round. I hope you’re having a great start to your Monday.

Today we’re talking about if your coaching business is leaking clients, thus, leaking money. Obviously, that’s not a good thing. I want to share an interesting perspective that will make a lot of sense for you.  A lot of businesses don’t focus on this and I don’t know why. It’s the nature of the way we are as humans.

Here’s the thing: Most businesses focus too much on acquisition and not enough on retention.

 

Examples of what to do and not to do if you want to retain customers

I’m guilty of this as much as much any business out there, and I want to share two stories with you. One, I was recently at Club Med in Ixtapa, Mexico. It’s a beautiful area and resort. I love going to Club Med because it’s a great place to take our kids. We have a lot of fun, I get to play tennis all day long, and the food’s amazing.

But there’s still room for improvement. We go to Club Med about twice a year and we’re some of their elite members, if you will. When we got there, our room was upgraded, which was great. We had all these perks, which were nice. I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining about stuff that doesn’t matter, but I look for opportunities to share messages that I think can be helpful for you.

So, while we were there, it was my wife’s birthday. They knew that because it was in their system, and on her birthday, they left a card inside of our room. Actually, it wasn’t a card; it was more of a flyer. The flyer said something like, “Happy Birthday, for your birthday we’d like to offer you 15% off at the gift shop.”

Initially we thought it was a nice gesture, but offering somebody a discount on your own products or services isn’t a gift to the person. That’s a gift for you. It’s like if you go to the airport, your flight gets bumped, and they say, “We’ve overbooked the flight. If anyone would like to give up their seat, we’ll give you a $200 voucher for a future flight with our airline.” That’s not a true gift, right?

I’ll give you a better example of this from the airlines as well. When we were flying to Morocco earlier in the year, we flew through Frankfurt in Germany with Lufthansa. Lufthansa had overbooked the flight going back to Toronto and they offered 600 Euros cash per person to give up their seat.

There were six of us, so we said, “Sure, we’ll spend an extra day going to Geneva and then you guys can fly us back.” So, we made 3,600 Euros, not a voucher for Lufthansa, because we actually flew back on Air Canada the next day. That’s a better example of how to treat your customers.

Going back to the Club Med example, a simple birthday card would’ve been a better gift for Amy. Maybe something like, “Hey, hope you have a great birthday. If there’s anything we can do to make your stay even more enjoyable today, let us know.” That would’ve been better than giving her a 15% discount in addition to the 50% discount we already have as gold members of Club Med.

If you’re gifting stuff to people whom you want to build relationships with, never send them your own stuff. Don’t give them a discount code to your own store. Don’t give them your own product. It’s too self-serving.

The second example I want to share with you is cell phone companies. In Canada, we have two big ones: Bell and Rogers. The only time they go above and beyond to “love you” is when you threaten to leave. That’s a terrible business model. You’re paying an arm and a leg for your cell phone and internet service, and the only time they’ll budge is when you’re up for renewal, your contract’s about to expire, or when you threaten to leave to another carrier.

That’s not a great way to love your clients, and that’s why I believe a lot of businesses suffer because they’re not focused on retention. This has been a very big focus of ours at Healthpreneur, especially since the latter quarter of 2017. I’m not perfect by any means. I’ve made some negligent errors that have cost us some of our clients. I’ll be very honest with you about that.

Looking back, knowing what I know now, these are things that I wish I would have put in place about a year and a half ago to avoid those things from happening.

Focusing on acquisition instead of retention and loving your current clients

What it all comes down to is that most clients stop doing business with a coach, provider, or business of any sort because they don’t feel appreciated or heard. Remember this: it’s human to human, whether we’re selling to consumers or businesses. They’re still humans. We’re not dealing with robots, and if you’re not doing things to make your clients feel special, appreciated, and not just like a number, your business is going to suffer.

Look at how long people stay with you or ascend to higher levels of business with you. If you’re not doing things to appreciate the individuals within your business, the clients as well as the team members, your business is going to have a tough time.

 

Why a high-churn business isn’t sustainable, even if you love the hunt

You’re going to end up having to focus on acquisition, acquisition, acquisition, because it’s a high-churn type of business. You get people, they pay you, then they leave, whether they get results or not. That’s never a good place to be in.

Again, I share this with you because this is a dilemma that I face myself.

I love the thrill of the hunt, like most people who enjoy selling do. We love closing or enrolling the client and sometimes the natural tendency is to think, “Alright, good. Next,” and move on to the next hunt.

I’ve had to catch and stop myself from doing this several years ago, so I could focus on the customer’s experience and journey. I started mapping out every single touchpoint they’d move through in our business so we could make it as amazing as possible for them.

 

Going deep instead of wide to retain your clients

Let me give you another example. Several years ago, we were at the Four Seasons hotel in Santa Barbara, which is one of the nicest Four Seasons. It’s amazing. I was there with my wife, Amy and our middle child. We have this tendency to take all our kids, one by one to Santa Barbara. I’m not too sure why. We just love the city.

Anyways, we were there with him when he was about six or eight months old and it was Amy’s birthday. Contrary to what we had experienced in Club Med just a couple months ago for Amy’s birthday, the Four Seasons did up our room with a bottle of wine and a beautiful basket. There was no, “Hey, here’s 15% off the gift shop.” It was just, “Here’s a bottle of wine. Here’s some great food. Here are some chocolates. Here are some grapes.” It was a nice gesture.

That’s the difference in thinking what could you do. The fun part about business is thinking about how to create a Disney-like experience for your clients.

Although we aren’t 100% dialed in yet, we’re constantly evolving and looking at how we can fill in some of the gaps and plug some of the leaks by making every single touchpoint as special as possible for our clients. We know that yes, we can go out and acquire clients, but it is so much more expensive to acquire clients than it is to retain the existing ones that you have and go deep with them.

Our whole Healthpreneur philosophy is to go deep instead of wide.

I don’t know what your business philosophy is, but I think that’s a nice approach, especially in this world where people easily switch between businesses, coaches, and providers by determining the difference between people and services.

A lot of it comes down to cost. If you can get something for cheaper with the same result, you’ll probably go the cheaper route. My challenge for you is to think about how to avoid becoming a commodity by providing an amazing experience and result.

 

How we can help

How can you focus on retention? How can you focus on the client experience instead of just acquiring new clients over and over again?

That’s what I want to leave you with today. Plug those leaks in your business. If you want help with this, we can certainly help you. If you’re at the point where you’re just figuring out how to get more clients, we can help. If you want to figure out how to create an amazing experience for your existing clients, we can work through that with you as well. The first step is to book a call with us.

So, if you want us to get on the phone with you, we’ll spend 45 minutes figuring out where you are, where you want to go, what’s holding you back, and we’ll put together a game plan that’s specific for you and your business. If that’s of interest to you, head on over to healthpreneurgroup.com/book to book your call today.

We look forward to chatting with you. We’ve got a lot of these calls every single week with health coaches, practitioners, trainers, nutrition experts, you name it. It’s amazing to have these conversations, build these relationships, and show how we can serve these awesome people and move their business forward.

That is all for today’s show. Coming up this Wednesday, we have an amazing interview with Marnie Greenberg. On Friday, we’re talking with Andrea Nakayama. These are two amazing guests that you want to tune in for this week. With that said, I hope you have an amazing day, continue to get out there, be great, do great, and I’ll see you in the next episode.