Transcription:

Hey guys, how’s it going? I hope you’re doing great. Welcome to the show. Today, we’ve got a cool discussion with Rachael Pontillo. We met a couple of years ago over dinner, and I knew we needed to touch base because I appreciate what she’s doing.

She was doing something specific, which was helping people improve their skin. It’s such a great niche. You’ll get to see exactly how Rachael transitioned from one-on-one aesthetic work in-person to building a thriving online business.

I’ll give you a little bit of her background. She is a bestselling author of the book “Love Your Skin, Love Yourself,” and the co-author of “The Sauce Code.” She is an AADP and IAHC board certified international health coach, licensed aesthetician, and natural skincare formulator and educator.

She’s also the president and co-founder of the Nutritional Aesthetics Alliance, and the creator of the popular skincare and healthy lifestyle blog Holistically Haute and online course, Create Your Skincare. She’s an avid herbalist, self-professed skincare ingredient junky, and lifelong learner.

Without any further ado, let’s welcome Rachael to the show, and let’s see how she went from one-on-one aesthetic work to building a thriving online business.

Rachael, welcome to the Healthpreneur podcast. How are you?

Rachael:                               I am great. Thank you so much for having me.

Yuri:                      You’re very welcome. We connected a couple years ago over dinner at an event. You had a good energy and you’re doing some cool things. I wanted to reconnect and see what you’re up to these days. I’m happy to have you here.

Rachael:                               That was a fun dinner. I remember it and our conversation, so thank you for remembering me!

Yuri:                      Absolutely. Can you give us the general overview of your business model and what it looks like?

 

Rachael’s businesses and journey to success

Rachael:                               I have two different businesses in the holistic and integrative skincare world. One is a private skin health coaching practice and online course that teaches people how to create and customize all natural boutique skincare products for themselves or for their business.

I also have a professional organization called the Nutritional Aesthetics Alliance, which works with skincare professionals and aestheticians. I work with health coaches and nutritionists who support skincare clients. We offer a membership program that provides educational opportunities through printed, online, and educational resources.

We support anyone who is interested in advancing an integrative approach to help the skin through that program, and we’ve got a certification program coming in 2019 as well. Both businesses are from my home, and I do them both with very small teams. My main business of coaching and online courses started first, and then as an aesthetician and health coach myself, I started wanting to see more integration of the nutrition and the topical skincare in the aesthetics world.

I was going to trade shows and not seeing much of that integration. In my own journey, I knew how crucial it was to have a healthy diet, a healthy topical skincare regimen, the right mindset, and the right lifestyle choices.

If you want to create sustainable change and lasting results with anything health-related, but specifically with skin issues, it requires a shift.

The nutrition people were saying, “You can do it from the inside-out. You don’t need topical stuff. You can just use coconut oil. All you need is a great diet.” Then the aesthetics professionals say, “Oh my God, coconut oil is terrible. It’s going to give you acne, and food doesn’t affect the skin. You can eat whatever you want, as long as you use all of these very expensive active ingredients and get all of these wacky treatments.”

It was hard for me because I come from the educational background from both sides. I got the good and the bad. I started to sift through what’s real and what’s hype.

What I saw was that you do need elements of both. I would say that you need to work on the inside-out more so, because skin cells are built inside. They’re not built outside, but we have to protect them once they do get to the outside. The skin itself is such an incredible, miraculous organ. It performs so many functions, and we continue to discover new ways that the skin integrates with other systems in the body, so it is so important to care for it properly on the outside.

But nobody was talking about this back in 2010 when I started putting these pieces together and making these realizations for myself. Then I started to duplicate the method that I use for myself with my clients in my practice at that time.

I started seeing the same types of results, so I was like, “Okay, this is not a fluke. This needs to be talked about in the professional market.” So, I spoke about this integration for the first time in 2012 at a holistic aesthetics conference. Even then, at a holistic market, people were looking at me and thinking, “What is she talking about?”

I decided to devote everything I could online – whether it was my books, courses, blog, or social media – to show the importance and integration of both. I wanted to create an environment for professionals who are also making this connection and seeing the impact that this connection has with their clients.

I wanted them to have a place where they could find their people, find resources, and build this practice together.

I’m all about collaboration. We constantly invite our members to do webinars with us, contribute to our blog, and get featured on social media. We are all about paving this path together. It’s not me dictating, “This is what nutritional aesthetics is.” It’s saying, “Come on you guys, you’re doing this too. You might have been doing this even longer than I have. Let’s do this together.”

I’m excited about it.

Yuri:                      I want to pick up on a couple things. One, you saw a gap in the market. You said, “There’s two views on this, and they don’t really jive. Let me bring my perspective to the market,” which is very smart, because you filled the gap of what you saw was missing.

The second thing is that you chose aesthetics, which is not something most people would do online. It’s like a massage therapist trying to do massage therapy online. It’s not very easy to do that.

How did you go about taking a tactile profession like aesthetics and turning it into a lucrative path online?

 

Why Rachael created an online business and the results she saw

Rachael:                               It came out of my desire to work from home so that I could be present for my family. Later, that became even more important because I homeschool one of my children. I fell in love with aesthetics because I had acne and struggled with it for many years.

There is nothing you can do to replace an in-person aesthetic treatment or a good facial massage. There is nothing that can replace that, but I practiced the way I wanted to practice. That’s number one. I wanted to be home with my kids, but I had a hard time finding a spa around me after I graduated with my aesthetics license that practiced how I wanted to.

Where I live in Pennsylvania, the laws currently state that if you want to practice with your aesthetics license, you must have your own business or be an employee. It’s not like some other states where you can rent a booth or room in an existing spa.

I was not in the position to start my own brick and mortar practice at that time, and no local spas hit the nail on the holistic head that I was looking for. Their definition of holistic was using safe, nontoxic products, and that’s about it.

Nobody was talking about food. Nobody was talking about some of the less invasive treatments. People were still into the, “Let’s scrub it, zap it, and burn it away,” type of mentality. That’s for some people. It’s not for me. It’s not how I practice.

I realized that I needed to find a way to get the message out there and teach about it. Also, I felt strongly about helping people. I started doing facials. I’m not going to lie. It was on the DL. I would have clients that were local come over or I would go to them.

I hope nobody on the state board is listening. I don’t do this anymore, but years ago, I did. I would practice on the sly.

I wanted to practice and test my protocols and modality. When I had local health coaching clients, I would infuse facials, facial massage, and I would make products for them. I would send them home with home care routines as well as their own facial massage protocols that I wanted them to practice.

It’s just like when you have a health coaching session and you send your client off with a few action steps and some goals to work on. What I saw was that they were getting results outside of whether I was giving them a facial or not.

Now, this is not to discount the value of a facial or in-person treatment. To me, there is nothing more valuable than allowing yourself to receive healing from another person whose only job in that moment is to give to you. That is the ultimate gift you can give to yourself. I encourage people to continue doing that.

I was giving sessions over Skype, over the phone, and in person, and the people I met with in person weren’t necessarily getting faster results when having actual facial treatments done. I started seeing that it was more about the consultation, relationship, time, trust, and accountability that they were getting.

We established that trust and were working on the food, mindset, and topical. Those became the three spirals of my methodology.

I made it work since I couldn’t find a place that practiced the way I wanted to practice, since I wanted to be flexible for my kids.

Yuri:                      That’s awesome. There’s a good lesson for the listeners, too.

Products and services are great, but for a lot of people who truly want to transform, like in this case, their skin, having that one-on-one and accountability from a professional makes a huge difference. They’re investing to commit to doing the work as opposed to just being passive and allowing you to work on their face.

There’s a lot of value to what you just said there for someone listening who might be into health coaching or virtual consulting.

What failure did you experience in business that set you up for later success?

 

Lessons learned: Know marketing, R&D, and audience before a product launch

Rachael:                               I wouldn’t call it a failure because I don’t believe in failure.

I am one of those people who believes that if you screw up, you just start over again and do something different. I don’t like thinking about things as failures. But one thing I did that I quickly retreated from and got off the drawing board was my own small product line soon after I started my business.

I was intimidated as heck. I had no clue what I was doing on the marketing and branding side of things back then.

I knew I needed a logo, and that things should match. I knew how things needed to be labeled legally. But creating a product that was needed, timed properly, and that people found value in enough to spend money on it at the time did not work out very well for me.

I worked with a lab that told me they made products one way, and I found out years later that the way they made products was not the way I was led to believe. So, that was not great. I learned a lesson to make sure I know very well and not just take someone’s word for it.

If I’m going to work with a lab, I’m going to go to that lab. I’m going to see how things are done. I didn’t do that. I was going off word of mouth recommendations, and it ended up not being great, so I ended up pulling the product line completely. The biggest problem was that I just wanted to get a product out there. I wanted it to be easy.

I thought, “I’ve got to have a product.” It’s not that I didn’t want to take the time to formulate something amazing. It was a cool product. It was based on something that happened in my life; a healing and transformative experience.

There was a story behind it, but I did not know enough at that time about the importance of market research. Like what we talked about earlier: gauging the market, looking for gaps in the market, and seeing what we can offer to fill that gap. Also, as I mentioned, people weren’t doing much online with this type of stuff back at that time.

Now, it’s everywhere. We have green beauty bloggers everywhere. We have so many brands to choose from. We have so many people learning to make products. It’s amazing. The market has shifted so drastically in a very short period, but back then, that hadn’t happened yet. It was still fringe.

I was so excited about this product. It was a couple of different products that I bundled together as a kit.

Like I said, there was a story and I was talking about it. But people didn’t care. There wasn’t enough social proof yet. It hadn’t gone mainstream enough yet, so that people had already seen it in a bigger publication than mine. That was a big wake up call, and made me want to learn more about marketing, gauging the audience, and identifying something with a story, a personal love, and that I want to share.

But something that people already get. It doesn’t have to be something that people have been doing for years already. I’m a big believer in innovation. I’m a big believer in introducing things into the market, but it helps if that market is already warm, and if there’s already some outliers who have started talking about it and are asking questions.

That curiosity is what you need. That’s what happened when I decided to shift my model primarily to coaching and education. There were already a couple of books written about making skincare products and using nutrition inside-out for skincare. There were already a couple of people writing about it in some way.

I just put the pieces together, started making that connection, and taught about it to the professional audience and consumer level. I believe in doing both. We need to have educated consumers and educated professionals, because when you have an educated consumer who goes to see an educated professional, the results are going to be much more effective. It’ll be a better experience for both the consumer and the practitioner when you’re speaking the same language.

That was a big pivot that I made.

I’m glad that I did, because if I would have sunk more resources into trying to get that product line out there or grow that product line, I probably would have had to close.

Yuri:                      It’s very tough to push a new idea into a marketplace without billions of dollars in advertising to raise that awareness. I see this all the time, especially in the health space. I made this mistake, too, when I was starting. I had an amazing idea and thought people would love it. Then, crickets. It’s nice to innovate, but it’s also helpful to ride a current wave. It makes life a lot easier.

With that said, in a marketplace where there’s a lot of awareness and competing products, what advice do you give other people to stand out when there might be a thousand others of the same type of thing?

 

Looking at your “why” and creating your avatar

Rachael:                               I’m glad you asked that. This is something that I teach in the professional edition of my course. It’s become an amalgamation of everything I’ve learned from various marketing courses, Ted Talks, and books that I’ve consumed.

We must look at a couple of things.

We must look at your WHY. I’m sure many of you listeners know the “Start with Why” Simon Sinek Ted Talk, which is incredible. If you don’t, go watch it. It’s amazing.

Your WHY is important because if you’re not connected to your why, you’re going to burn out. You’re not going to care about your own business after a very short time.

But it’s not your WHY that is important necessarily for the big picture. You need to know your potential client’s why, because your why and their why need to be on the same page or at least in the same room. They don’t have to be the same, but they should be close enough so that the logical connections can be made.

It’ll be very difficult if you’re working with completely different motivations both on your end and your potential customer’s end. That’s one thing. Know that well. Know your audience well. If you think you don’t know it, talk to people. Get on the phone. Meet with people for coffee. It’s okay to do that when you’re first getting started with something, whether it’s a new business, product, program, or idea. It’s okay to do that.

A lot of people have stepped away from doing that. They just crowdsource on social media or extending out surveys. People want human connection, and when we’re trying to connect with people in a human way in a digital format, we must have that human experience involved. We get that by talking to humans, by communicating with them.

The other thing I want to bring up is that we’ve got to talk about the ideal customer avatar. It’s turned into an online business cliché, and it’s not a bad thing. It’s very important. We need to know our client, but we also need to understand that sometimes there is an ideal client that we create that is never going to manifest into real life.

I encourage my students to come up with an avatar because it’s a great starting point. I like to have them write it as a character in a little play so that they can understand that person. Then, I make them find a real person who comes really close to that.

They don’t have to know them personally. It can be a celebrity. It can be somebody that they follow on social media, but don’t know very well personally. Then I make them study that person and get into that person’s head.

It’s a mashing of a few different philosophies, but it’s what has worked to scale my business, and my students are really taking to this blend as well.

Yuri:                      Nice. What I’ve found with the avatar exercise is that, a lot of times, people will create an ideal avatar that reminds them themselves or someone close to them. It’s important to pinpoint our target clients.

A lot of times we get into business, especially in the health space, because we want to solve our own issues. Or, we went through our own issues and want to help others avoid the same thing. A lot of times, we’re creating stuff for ourselves 10 years ago.

If it helps people given that they’re most focused on that journey, just focus on yourself or a family member if it’s someone you’re trying to heal from a distance.

Rachael:                               I’m glad you brought that piece up, because you’re absolutely right.

So many of us are in this because of our own personal experience. I certainly am, and I’m not going to lie, there are definitely versions of me in every single one of my avatars.

I think what’s important when you do that exercise is to be very honest with why it took you so long.

What were some of the hang-ups that were in your mind that held you back? Where did you self-sabotage? What objections did you give? Don’t just say, “She lives in this nice house, has her family, and blah, blah, blah.” That’s not the meat of what is going to get you inside of a customer’s head. That won’t help you find a way to inspire them to work with you or buy from you.

It’s important to know the stuff about yourself that maybe you don’t always like to face, if you’re using yourself as an avatar.

Yuri:                      Yup. It’s all about them. There’s a very big difference between asking someone, “Do you have acne,” and being able to paint a picture of sad moments in their life.

You can say, “Do you have acne?” Or you could say, “Did you wake up today, look at yourself in the mirror, and say, ‘Oh my God, this again?’” Getting into the obstacles, fears, and frustrations of your avatar, and portraying that message in a way where they think, “Wow, this is what I’m going through every single day,” immediately has them bond to you.

When you can tell people what they’re going through better than they can themselves, they find it immensely powerful.

What have you had to learn the hard way as you built your business over the last couple of years, and how can you help others avoid that mistake?

 

Knowing your numbers

Rachael:                               I’m going to be totally transparent, and say that you’ve got to be on top of your money. It is so important to know your numbers. Act like you’re going on Shark Tank and if you get asked for your numbers and you don’t know them, you’re going to get completely chastised by Mr. Wonderful or by Barbara.

Take control of your money even if you don’t like the numbers. Oftentimes, in the beginning of your business, you don’t like your numbers. That’s okay. You don’t have to like your numbers, but you’re not going to like your numbers if you don’t know what they are.

You’ve got to have that awareness. I recommend that people work with some sort of cash management dashboard. From the start, get your numbers up there. Know your accounts. Have your accounts separate. Work with the right types of professionals.

I recommend a good tax person. If money is not something that you have been on top of in your personal life, if it’s something that you don’t like to look at, or if you don’t like to talk about it, I recommend working with someone who can help you work through some of those mindset issues. If you don’t have the right money mindset and if you’re afraid to look at your own numbers, you can’t grow.

I had some money issues. I had some debt when I started my business. I still have some debt, but I know now what my spending is. All my spending is purposeful. I can see the numbers changing. I can see where every bit of money goes and to what areas of my business now. In the beginning, I was blissfully blind to all of it.

I thought, “Oh, it seems like a good thing to invest in, and the money will come later.” It was probably a very immature way to go about starting one’s business, but like many of us when we start a business out of need rather than out of being an entrepreneur or having a business background, we don’t always know these stickier topics.

If we’re people who have had a negative money story, experience, or conditioning, it’s something that can stop us and trip us up later down the road. If that’s a challenge for you, I 100% recommend getting some support in that area. If you’re starting your business or you’ve already started and you’re not there yet, pause and take control of your numbers.

Know your money like you know your kids. It’s so important.

Yuri:                      That’s great advice. This is especially true if you’re running physical products like skincare or supplements, because cash flow and inventory changes the nature of your business in a big way.

If you have this stuff thought out ahead of time, it helps. Even if you’ve got a CPA, accountant, or CFO doing this stuff, it’s important for you to have a good understanding of your numbers. Get the most important metrics. Have a look at your cash flow every week, because I’ve seen bad things happen when the entrepreneur delegates finances and never looks at anything.

That’s when people lose money. that’s when people get stolen from. Not good.

 

The Rapid Five

Rachael, this has been very illuminating. Thank you so much for sharing everything you’ve shared with us. Before we finish, I have The Rapid Five, which I forgot to warn you about.

These are five rapid-fire questions I ask all our guests.

Answer whatever comes top of mind. It’s nothing incriminating. It’s all good. Are you ready?

Rachael:                               I’m ready.

Yuri:                      What is your biggest weakness?

Rachael:                               Oh my gosh, time management.

Yuri:                      What is your biggest strength?

Rachael:                               Innovation.

Yuri:                      Nice. What’s one skill you become dangerously good at to grow your business?

Rachael:                               Web design.

Yuri:                      What do you do first thing in the morning?

Rachael:                               I wake up my kid.

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

Rachael:                               I know I’m being successful when I wake up, wake my kid up, and check my email, because I know that there is going to be lots of payment notifications waiting for me.

 Yuri:                      Nice. That’s always good. Rachael, this has been a lot of fun. What is the best place for our listeners to check out what you’re up to online and stay in touch?

Rachael:                               My main website is rachaelpontillo.com. My online course is createyourskincare.com. If you are interested in learning more about integrating nutrition and aesthetics to advance an integrative approach to help the skin, the Nutritional Aesthetics Alliance website is nutritionalaesthetics.com.

Yuri:                      Awesome. Rachael, thank you so much once again for sharing your journey and your wisdom with us. It’s been a lot of fun to reconnect. Keep up your awesome work.

Rachael:                               You too! Thanks for having me.

 

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Yuri’s Take

I hope you guys enjoyed that interview. I know I did. It’s always great to speak with entrepreneurs. Our speakers are doing unique things with their businesses, niche, products, and services. That’s what this whole podcast is about.

It’s exposing what’s possible and the different opportunities that arise. You don’t have to be overwhelmed or try to do a thousand things, but maybe there is one thing that resonates with you the most.

I hope you enjoyed today’s show. If you have, then remember to subscribe to the Healthpreneur Podcast on iTunes. Click the little purple subscribe button on your iPhone. If you care to leave a review or a rating, that would be awesome as well.

If you’d like to speak to me or our team, we have a great 45-minute free session called the Result Accelerator Call. If you would like us to help you take your health business to the next level, and specifically figure out how you’re going to attract more clients predictably, how you can convert them without feeling sales-y, and how to deliver an amazing result for them, then we’d be delighted to help you.

If you want to grab a spot, head on over to healthpreneurgroup.com/book to claim your spot today.

We only have so many of these calls every week, so don’t wait. Why would you, right? It’s your future. It’s your business. If we can help accelerate your progress, then why not? Just so you understand, this is not by any means a sales call.

It’s a call about you, your business, and the results that you’re looking to achieve. If we get to the end of the call and you want us to support you in any way, shape, or form, then we’d be delighted to tell you about how we can do so. If not, that’s totally fine as well.

That’s all for today’s show. I want to thank you so much for joining me. I look forward to seeing you in our next episode. In the meantime, get out there, continue to be great and do great, and I’ll see you on our next show.

 

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Follow Rachel Pontillo At:

https://rachaelpontillo.com/

https://createyourskincare.com/

https://www.nutritionalaesthetics.com/

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Transcription

Hey guys, welcome to the Healthpreneur Podcast. Yuri back with you once again, and today we’re going to be talking about whether you have self-neutered your future.

 

Frog in a jar analogy

Let me share a little story with you. Imagine a jar, and inside this jar we have a frog. The frog’s natural tendency is to jump several feet into the air. That’s what it’s able to do.

Now, it’s confined in the jar and the jar has a lid on it. The frog is wired to jump. He jumps and guess what? He hits the lid. He falls back down and tries again. He jumps back up, and once again, he hits the lid. He hits his head, and it doesn’t feel good.

He does this a few more times, and slowly but surely the frog learns that the higher he jumps, the more he gets hurt.

Thus, his journey of playing life at a smaller level begins. He has essentially limited his ability based on his environment. His environment, which is now this jar, had limited his potential to jump high.

Now, here’s the sad thing. The frog is then taken out of the jar and allowed to roam freely. You’d think that the frog would just jump right back up to several feet in the air as it normally could. No. The frog has learned by being inside the jar that it can only jump a few inches high. Thus, that is the extent to which the frog believes it can jump moving forward in his life.

The moral of the story is that our beliefs determine our future.

 

Our beliefs determine our future, and we can either stunt or create our dreams

Sadly, most people have limiting beliefs that hold them back from achieving their biggest dreams. We see this every single week. We get on the phone with a lot of people every week and we see the limitations of their mindset and their belief systems. It’s very frustrating and it’s sad, because you know these are the people that have said they want help but they’re so stuck in fear and limiting beliefs that they can’t move forward.

We had a call with a lady recently who, when we asked her, “If you could create anything in your business, what would you want to have in terms of income, freedom, lifestyle, and impact?” all she could think about was putting food on the table and not having to sell her house. That was the extent of her vision.

I understand that everyone has different goals and ambitions. Some people just want to pay off debt and that’s fine. But I want to challenge you like we challenged her to think bigger. If you only think about taking care of basic needs, that’s all you’re ever going to get.

I would rather recommend shooting for the moon so at least you hit the stars, as the saying goes.

Borrowing beliefs and surrounding yourself with people who are living big

Remember this: Your beliefs determine your destiny. If you’re having a tough time getting out of your own limitations, I’m going to give you one extremely simple and powerful way to build your beliefs. I call this concept borrowing beliefs.

You simply surround yourself with other people who are playing life at a bigger level. That’s it. That’s as simple as it needs to be.

If we go back to our frog in a jar, he jumps up, keeps hitting his head, and eventually learns that he shouldn’t be jumping high anymore. If you take the frog out of the jar and put him on his own, he’ll only jumps a couple inches.

But what happens when the frog is put back into the environment with other frogs that are leaping three feet into the air? Very soon, the frog will learn that he can, too, even though he was conditioned to only jump a few inches. Slowly but surely, the frog will jump three feet again.

The challenge with humans, is that we’re conditioned to act in certain ways, believe in certain things, and have a specific mindset that’s based on our upbringing, for the most part. It’s unfortunate that we can’t rewind and do things over again, but it’s never too late.

There’s some interesting research that was done that showed that, up to 25, you can change who you are at a pretty profound level. After 25, the research suggested that humans require some type of traumatic event to stimulate that change. Otherwise, we coast with our default setting and make small improvements here and there, but nothing game changing in terms of becoming the best possible person we can be.

When we speak to people in their 40s and 50s who are just starting their career in health coaching or have been in business for a long time and they want to get to the next level, a lot of times what holds them back is their pre-programmed conditioning. It tells them, “Listen, this is what’s possible, this is what’s not possible.” To overcome that wiring, you need to rewire and reprogram yourself.

It starts by surrounding yourself with people playing life at a bigger level.

This can come in a few different forms. Number one, it can come in the form of this podcast. You can consider me your virtual mentor if you like, because I want to give you belief and hope that whatever you want to create you can create, no matter what stage of life you’re in.

 

Success stories that were never thought possible

Ray Crock, famous for building out the McDonald’s franchise, stumbled upon McDonald’s in his 50s after working as a door to door salesman for 30 years. Louise Hays, who sadly passed away about a year and a half ago, started Hay House in the second half of her life.

There are people who believe it’s too late. They think, “What’s the point?” They retire and just want to put their feet up at the beach and just kick back.

It’s never too late. You can be 90 years old and start something. Don’t use that excuse. The key is to surround yourself with other people who are doing what you want to do; to show you and remind you that it’s possible.

You need to borrow their beliefs. Listen to inspiring podcasts. Listen to audiobooks that are going to uplift you. Surround yourself with people in person that are playing at a higher level.

When you surround yourself with people that are playing life, taking risks, building great things with their business, supporting a lot of people, and have big dreams and ambitions, it rubs off. We are wired as humans to not be unlike our tribe, because if we are, we will be ostracized.

Tribal mentality is a fundamental need of all humans. If your tribe consists of poor people, guess what? You won’t want to be wealthy because your tribe isn’t going to approve. If you hang out with wealthy, successful people, you are more likely to become like them because you simply must level up.

In sports, players play against better players and that’s how they get better. They must. Otherwise, they don’t continue. If they played players that were worse, they would get worse. We see this all the time, whether it’s an individual player or a team sport. They always play down to their competition, but they rise to the occasion when they’re playing a competitor that is leagues above them.

A couple years ago, a friend of mine knew a guy who was a pretty successful offline health celebrity, if you will, in Canada. He spoke on TV. He started an online business back in the day, but spent a lot of money building out a platform that did nothing. Eventually he learned the basics of direct response, how to build a successful business online, and now he has one of the most successful products on the market.

He’s a great guy and lives in Toronto, which is even better. Maybe I’ll have him on the podcast.

My friend was at a mastermind, and sat beside a mutual friend of ours. He is one of the godfathers, if you will, in the online fitness space. He does eight figures a year selling a couple eBooks. It’s amazing. He was at this mastermind, sat beside our mutual friend, and was leaning back in his chair. As he leaned back in his chair, he caught a peek of our mutual friend’s computer screen while he was checking his stats.

My buddy almost fell off his chair as he was leaning back and observing, because what he saw on the computer screen was something he never thought possible.

He saw the daily revenue that our mutual friend was making. $15,000, $20,000, $34,000 every single day. This wasn’t a one-off launch. Every single day he was bringing in these types of numbers. My buddy said it completely transformed his view of what was possible.

In an instant, his belief system was shattered and reprogrammed. He said, “Listen, this is happening. People are doing this. A buddy of mine right beside me is doing this every single day. I can do this too.”

 

Healthpreneur Live event to up level your tribe

When you surround yourself with people who are at that level, it’s going to rub off. Naturally, borrow their beliefs. If you don’t have your own, say, “Listen, I’m going to borrow your belief that this is possible and I’m going to do this, because you’ve done it, they’ve done it, she’s done it, and he’s done it. If everyone else has done it here, well, I’m not that dumb. I can do it too with the right support, coach, and strategies. I can make this happen.”

Do not neuter yourself by spending the rest of your business life in isolation. If you don’t have a mastermind, coaching group, or coach, get yourself plugged in. If you don’t, you are going to struggle.

If you want to be surrounded by 150 amazing people in the health and fitness space, then you may want to check out Healthpreneur Live, which is our annual event. It takes place September 20^th through 23^rd 2018 in Scottsdale, Arizona.

We’re almost sold out, so if you want to apply to attend go to healthpreneurgroup.com/live. Once you’re on the page, scroll down and click the red button that says, “Yes, I’d like to attend,” and fill out the application. We review all the applications that come through.

This is an application only event. It’s very curated, very vetted, which means you’re going to be surrounded by great people who are doing great things in their business to support their clients, live their bigger dreams, and not take no for an answer.

If you see the value in surrounding yourself with other frogs, metaphorically speaking, that can help you jump higher, then this event is where to be. If you qualify to attend, we would love to have you. It will change your life and business, just like it has for hundreds of people that attended last year.

That’s all for today. I hope this message finds you well, lifts you up, and inspires you to surround yourself with great people.

Don’t be the frog in the jar. Do not self-neuter your future.

I look forward to seeing what’s possible in your business as you surround yourself with awesome people to help elevate you to the next level. Thanks so much again for joining me for today’s podcast.

If you’ve enjoyed it, head on over to iTunes, subscribe if you haven’t, and leave a review if you’d like. It’s always greatly appreciated. In the meantime, continue to go out there, be great, do great, and we’ll see you on Wednesday for a special interview.

Transcription

What’s up Healthpreneurs! Welcome to the Healthpreneur Podcast. This is going to be a great episode, because we have the founder and creator of JOGA, Jana Webb. That’s not Ron Burgundy talking about yoga, that’s actually the name of the company.

It’s such a cleverly branded name and it makes sense. JOGA is a yoga system for athletes, designed for the athletic mind and body. She is a Ted Talk presenter, keynote speaker, and just an overall influencer in the health industry.

She’s going to talk about her journey creating this company, which has become, in my eyes, the yoga brand in the world, as far as I’m concerned, for athletes and high performance. It’s cool stuff. She’s also grown a network of JOGA coaches to over 350 certified coaches across North America. They train NFL, NHL, MLB, NBA, and CFL, which is the Canadian Football League, teams. And they’ve recently opened a flagship JOGA House in Toronto.

Jana is amazing. She went through a bit of a personal trauma about a year ago, which she’ll tell us about. It’s scary, and I didn’t even know about it until we got to talking before the interview. I’m excited to have her on the podcast because she’s doing some amazing things. What you’ll get out of this is inspiring to take what it is you do to the next level.

So, without any further ado, let’s bring Jana Webb onto the Healthpreneur podcast.

Jana, welcome to the Healthpreneur Podcast. How’s it going?

Jana:               Good, how are you doing?

Yuri:                I’m doing great, and I’m on a mission to highlight and connect with every amazing health entrepreneur in Toronto. I think we’re doing a good job. Obviously, you’re the crème de la crème of movers and shakers in our space who also lives in Toronto, so I’m excited to have you on the show.

Jana:               Thank you for having me, I appreciate it.

Yuri:                You’re very welcome.

For the listeners who are not aware of what you’ve done, I’ve gone through your bio and introduced you a little bit. How do you describe to the everyday person what you do?

 

Jana, JOGA, and her journey towards finding a yoga for athletes

Jana:               JOGA is the brand I’ve created in the space of yoga. It’s a hybrid of what we all can benefit from yoga, like breathing and relaxation, with biomechanical sport. We train athletes and teams, and traditional yoga postures don’t make sense for how athletes move, train, and/or how they even understand information.

We transcribed yoga and made it more accessible to the athlete.

Yuri:                That’s awesome. I was the strength and conditioning coach at the University of Toronto for seven years. One of the things we did with the men’s soccer program that made a huge difference was yoga three times a week.

I was doing high yoga for many years. I tweaked a couple things and brought it to those guys. I remember the university guys saying, “Yeah, yoga, whatever,” but it made the biggest difference in their performance; in their ability to reduce injuries, improve mental clarity, and focus.

By no means am I comparing what I did with you, but I can’t speak highly enough to the value of this as a former professional athlete myself. What you do for these athletes makes a huge difference.

How did you get into doing what you do and working with these teams and athletes?

Jana:               My journey’s an interesting one. I used to work in marketing. I was in a car accident many years ago, and was introduced to yoga to help rehabilitate and manage the chronic pain and soft tissue damage.

There was something about it that made me feel good, so I became very curious. I did every yoga class I could possibly get my hands on. I tried Ashtanga yoga, hot yoga, Bikram yoga, and all these different things. It was a love, hate relationship.

I was an athlete growing up as well, so I loved the idea of not making a play and just being on the mat and learning about my body. The breathing was very special.

But every time I left yoga class, I injured myself more. I am the typical athlete; I have tight hamstrings, tight hips, and because I’m used to being coached my entire life, I also have that monkey see, monkey do attitude.

If there’s somebody in front of the room teaching me, whatever they’re doing, I’m going to do it, even if I shouldn’t be doing it. The yoga positions that were being offered to me probably weren’t the most beneficial for my body type.

But I kept going back to it. It’s like a bad relationship.

Then I thought, “Why isn’t there anything out there for people who are injured or have tight bodies?” I couldn’t find anything. I eventually went to Japan and learned this style of yoga called ISHTA yoga, which translates into individual or personalized movement, breathing, and meditation based on your Ayurvedic Dosha.

That was interesting.

So I studied over in Japan, and this individual style of yoga, and then that’s when my journey into creating JOGA started.

Yuri:                That’s awesome.

How did you go from, “I’ve got this concept,” to working with NFL, NHL, and NBA teams? A lot of people in our space are good trainers or nutritionists, but they’re not working with these teams.

How did that even happen?

 

Jana’s background and building her company

Jana:               Well, it was very organic. I didn’t set out to be a yoga teacher then train athletes. That wasn’t my trajectory.

It was all reactionary, to be honest. I started to teach, and because I was an athlete, I started to adapt the positions, or the postures, to make more sense for my body. Then, when I got asked to train the CFL, the Calgary Stampeders.

I failed miserably my first class. It was awful. I was trying to make athletes yogis, which is not the right intention.

That became a conversation, and I literally got a second chance, then a third and fourth chance, which led me to conversations with athletes. I asked, “How did this make you feel? Did this help you pregame? Did this help you sleep at night?”

What I understood was these athletes needed something different than yoga. If you think about it, in yoga, a lot of the postures are long static holds.

And I always give this example: I’ve never seen a soccer or football player stop midfield and do tree pose. You know what I mean? It just doesn’t make sense for the neurological needs of the athlete.

So, I started to manipulate the postures and make them more biomechanically focused on sports movement. Then I added in a layer of cadence as well. Athletes are always in movement.

How could we bridge that gap between yoga and what these athletes need? That got started with the CFL, to answer your question, and we had a lot of success there. It brought me to Toronto. In that space, when you hit that level of pro sports and you’re good at something, your name gets passed around quickly.

This was long ago though, almost 15 years ago. Yoga and sport was not trending at all.

Only a few others and I were out there pioneering this at the time. I didn’t have the intention of ever working with athletes, but Henry Burris, one of my very first clients – we won a championship together – attributed a lot of it to this new thing he was doing.

He said, “You have to call this something. You should brand it. It’s not like anything I’ve ever done before. It’s not yoga, it’s not Pilates…” Then we started to brainstorm, the name jocks, my name’s Jana. So, that’s where JOGA, that brainchild, was born; sitting, having a conversation with a football player in my studio at the time in Calgary.

It’s interesting because a lot of people go the other way. They have a plan they execute, whereas mine always unraveled very organically.

Yuri:                That’s cool. It’s important for our listeners to remember this: The quality of your product is the best marketing. You’ve done a remarkable job at producing results for people, and because of that, they simply tell others.

I want to go back to the marketing thing for a second. A lot of people in our space, the technicians like yoga teachers, health coaches, trainers, and so forth, are great at what they do but they don’t like marketing. They feel slimy asking for money.

There’s a bit of a mindset shift that needs to happen there. But, if like you, someone creates a great product and result for people, it becomes easier for people to want to do business with you.

Jana:               Absolutely. It’s interesting to hear you say that, because I had the head trainer for the New Jersey Devils at the JOGA House last night. He’s said, “You know, your website’s great, your space is beautiful,” but he also said, “And your product’s awesome.” We have all these pretty things – great marketing, great branding – but it means nothing if your product doesn’t align with it.

So, my whole thing about marketing is to be very honest; if you’re passionate about what you’re doing, that comes out in your product at the end of the day.

Yuri:                So do you find that having a background in marketing was helpful as you started your business?

Jana:               I do, absolutely. At a very young age I learned how to cold call, the value of loss leader, the value of hassle, and that not everyone’s going to yes, and that’s okay.

JOGA’s not for everybody, and that’s okay. I believe that people, things, and experiences place themselves in your life in the exact moment that they’re supposed to.

It’s the same in your business. You must approach your clients, your target market, with a plan, and you should know where you’re going. But along the way, it’s okay that not everyone’s going to like what you do.

Yuri:                Yeah, if everyone likes what you do, you’re probably doing something a little bit too vanilla.

Jana:               That’s true! People have called me a disruptor. I like that. I like to be known as a disruptor in sport and in my industry.

Yuri:                Absolutely. As a point of clarification for the listener’s sake, can you define a “loss leader” and give us an example of how you use that in your business?

Jana:               I always describe a loss leader like Groupon, which is probably the easiest example. They utilize other people’s services to get people in the door and show them the experience, the product, and hopefully capture those people to get some return business.

In my business, sometimes it’s going to a team and offering a free demo. Not charging out front, but letting them buy into it first. Once they’ve bought into it and have had an opportunity to educate, then there’s an opportunity to sell.

There is a sales cycle involved. You can’t go asking for money if they don’t even know what they’re buying.

I find loss leaders, in all businesses, are the best way to capture the audience that you want.

A lot of people want to try stuff on for size, especially these days. There’s just too much for free out there, so you almost have to.

Yuri:                It’s so important though, and maybe this changes a little bit nowadays with being able to buy clothing online, but typically if you want to buy a pair of jeans, you try them on first.

Jana:               Exactly.

Yuri:                If you want a scoop of ice cream, people want to give it a taste first. There are so many analogies in everyday life like that. You might say, “I’ve got this cool program, buy it,” and everyone thinks, “Well, I don’t know about that.”

 

Organic growth and representing the JOGA brand

Jana:               Exactly. When I started JOGA, we got busy, and we created our certification program, one of my biggest mandates with our team of coaches was to make them feel valued. I had given so much away for free, but there’s balance.

I love what I do so much, so I was giving too much away for free. But that’s okay, because I did that for the sake of building something bigger and giving the coaches in our coach academy a platform to be of value.

You’re working with somebody’s energy all day, every day, so there must be value there.

I think dealing with and helping human beings is the most challenging thing that there is to do. It’s not a button. There’s no algorithm. You’re dealing with real things, real emotions.

A big philosophy when we created our certification program was: How can I bring these people into our academy, and give them a tool, a foundation, so they can go out and say, “No. My fee’s $100 an hour. That’s what we’re charging.” So they’re not out there running around the city making $20 here, $30 there.

And having the intention to help people.

Yuri:                Yeah. That’s smart.

I know certifications are a big deal in the health and fitness space. Walk us through how you, as the creator of one, think through and deliver that.

Jana:               So, again, very organically.

I was training the Toronto Argos at the time. We won a championship and The Toronto shared an article about what this team was doing: JOGA. After that, I got an influx of emails about teams and athletes wanting JOGA. I couldn’t keep up with the demand.

There were two girls that I was working with at the studio where I was teaching at the time. They’d come to my classes. Vanessa was one of them. She said, “You should create a certification program.” I thought that sounded cool.

She helped me put together the JOGA program. We did a photo shoot, she helped me write up a manual, she recorded all my classes, and transcribed them into literature. We put a sign up at the studio that said, “Looking for JOGA trainers, sign up here.” We had seven people sign up for the first one.

Now, since we’ve obviously grown that business, we have over 400 trained Jogis in Canada which is exciting.

 Yuri:                I love how you call them Jogis. That’s nice. Awesome.

Another thing I want to point out is that a lot of times, from a tribe-building perspective, having your own language is very powerful.

Jana:               Absolutely. Brand identity. There’s definitely a JOGA look. When you meet a JOGA trainer, you know that they’re JOGA; they’ve got a snap back on, they’ve probably got some mesh in their tights, and they look different than a yoga teacher. That’s something that we educate in our certification program.

What is the brand we’re representing? It’s important that the brand is consistent throughout all the coaches.

Yuri:                That’s super smart. How have you used or leveraged the internet to spread your business?

Jana:               Internet, meaning social media, or media itself is our biggest tool. Similarly to a lot of different health experts out there, you get spots on TV shows. People in different rural parts of Canada will see JOGA or me on TV, jump on my website, and see what I’m doing. That feeds more business.

The site says, “Do you want to be part of the team, click here.” Or, “Are you interested in what we’re doing?” For us, it’s probably the most important tool.

 

Resilience, perseverance, passion and hustle

Yuri:                Totally. Over the journey from a business perspective, can you remember a challenging time where you didn’t know if you were going to make it? Was there ever financial trouble or a big pivotal moment in your business trajectory?

Is there one that stands out for you, and if so, how did you get through it?

Jana:               There are a few. I’ve been doing this for almost 15 years, and the actual business for almost 10 years. There were points along the way where I bootstrapped the business, until last year.

That moment was last year when I was in my car accident. I broke by back, had a concussion, and had just signed a half a million-dollar lease in Yorkville with no physical or financial means to do it.

That was stressful.

Thank God I had started some conversations with an investor and had sought investment for almost a year prior. One month before my accident, I had an investor agree, over the phone, that they would invest a certain amount of money. That person did stick by me after the accident, even though the person he invested in was broke. He stuck by me and that’s what got me through to where I am now.

He saw the perseverance in what I was doing. Even while I was in the hospital, I was giving construction orders. I didn’t see my space until after it was built. I did everything via phone and email.

Yuri:                That’s remarkable.

Jana:               But, you know, it’s one of those things. When you’re an entrepreneur, it’s your livelihood, your whole life.

So, there’s always a way. My dad taught me that no matter what, when you do things with good intention and passion, everything will always work out. I truly believe in that.

I don’t try to manipulate people. I’m a good person, and I truly believe that the universe takes care of people who are like that.

Yuri:                Absolutely. And just for everyone listening, if you live in Toronto, you’re a good person.

Jana:               All Torontonians are, well, we’re Canadian. We can’t be that bad.

Yuri:                Exactly, we’re all good. So, speaking of entrepreneurship, what do you think is a skill or a trait that entrepreneurs have to have for lasting success?

You’ve been at this for a long time. It’s not just a year and done.

Jana:               Resilience.

You have to be so resilient to everything. You have to be resilient to competition. You have to be able to wake up in the morning and find another path, if one path’s not working. Perseverance, too.

Yuri:                I agree 100% with you. I call it delusional optimism when you get so many no’s, so many failures relative to the successes, that you just want to fail to get to the yeses faster.

Jana:               I love that. That’s an even better way to look at it.

Yuri:                What I love about entrepreneurs is that we play these games in our head where it’s like, “How do I make the most out of this situation,” right? A lot of people just think, “Oh, they said no, I’m done, this is not going to work.”

If you went on Shark Tank or Dragon’s Den, you pitched an idea, and they said, “Oh, this is never going to work, you’re a cockroach,” some people let that destroy them.

Other people say, “I’m going to show them and build something amazing.”

Jana:               I have that little thing in me, too. When somebody says, “no,” I say, “Really? Watch this.”

I have “watch this” playing in the back of my head all the time.

I remember when I first started this, my goal was to have JOGA mandated by the leagues like NHL and NFL.

People thought I was crazy and that it would never happen. And I will get there. I look at it this way; when I first started to work with the Detroit Red Wings, they only had a strength and conditioning coach for seven years. In the scope of sport, even strength and conditioning was new only 10 years ago.

There is no governing body of yoga in sport. There’s no one out there setting standards. It’s just, “Oh, our strength coach used yoga. That’s good,” so they just send their athlete to a random yoga class with no education or understanding.

There’s no governing body holding that space, so we’ll get there. If a strength coach wants yoga – that modality in their training protocol – the next question would be, “Are you JOGA certified?”

That’s the next evolution of what we’re attempting to do.

Yuri:                That’s awesome. A random question: Do you think that taking more action is better than quality of action, or do you think they’re interrelated?

Jana:               More action over quality of action.

For the first five years of my business, I would say “The hustle is real.” You have to hit everything that you possibly can, because that’s where you’re going to get most of your learning.

After you’ve proven yourself and have had some successes, then I think it turns into choice. Quality. Because you have the confidence, the know, and the experience to make that decision.

Yuri:                That’s an important distinction. There’s the whole Gary V. grind and hustle, work 27 hours a day approach, and others are all about working smarter and not working at all.

In different seasons of life and business it varies. If you’re just starting off, you have to put in the groundwork and the hours.

Jana:               Absolutely. I always said that if anyone ever comes to me and says, “You’re lucky,” I might kick then in the face. I’ll say, “There is nothing about luck here. This is working hard, every day, for a long time.”

But, in the same breath, I like that. I grew up on a farm in Alberta so I’ve been working since I was 12 years old. So, I also don’t have the distinction between work and rest. I just knew that when I grew up, you just work until the work is done.

Then I played sports and it’s the same kind of mentality. These attributes may just be in me. I don’t know what the shift would look like if somebody went into work Monday to Friday then decided to be an entrepreneur.

Yuri:                Yeah. It’s tough. From my perspective, I think being an entrepreneur is innate, somewhere in your DNA, and can be developed or revealed over time.

But I think growing up on a farm, with that work ethic, creates a huge unfair advantage for athletes that naturally leads into entrepreneurship. The things we experience like hard work, discipline, and teamwork, create an awesome foundation.

So, if you’re listening, you’re 40 years old, and you have none of that, sorry guys, it’s too late.

Jana:               Yeah, don’t even try it.

Yuri:                Well, I don’t think it’s ever too late, right?

Jana:               No.

It’s bravery. People have ideas or things in the back of their mind that they talk about. I always say, “Just try!” Life is too short. You just don’t know.

I’m always trying to be that person of inspiration that says, “Please just live your passion, please just wake up and enjoy what you do every day.” If that’s working at Starbucks and making the best cappuccino ever, amazing!

There’s a role for everybody. Just be passionate about it.

Yuri:                It’s true. Have you seen The Founder? The McDonald’s story?

Jana:               No, I haven’t.

Yuri:                It’s amazingly inspiring. He was a guy who was a door to door salesman back in the 50s, I think. He’d been doing that for 30 years or so, selling everything under the sun. He did okay, but was in his 50s when he discovered McDonald’s.

Jana:               Wow.

Yuri:                And within a few years, he became the wealthiest man in America. It’s a cool story to see that, no matter what your age, if you keep going, never give up, and are passionate about what you do, the first 30 years could just be the first chapter, right?

Jana:               Right. Or you’re learning what you need to learn to do what you’ll do next.

 

The Rapid Five

Yuri:                Absolutely. Jana, this has been a lot of fun. Are you ready for The Rapid Five?

Jana:               Yes.

Yuri:                Okay, roll up the sleeves, here we go.

Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

Jana:               Saying yes.

Yuri:                So you say yes too often?

Jana:               Yes.

Yuri:                What has that cost you in your business or life?

Jana:               I over extend myself mentally, physically, and emotionally. I’m a yes person and it gets me in trouble sometimes.

Yuri:                Yeah. Cool.

Number two, what is your biggest strength?

Jana:               Saying yes.

Yuri:                Inspired by the Jim Carrey movie, Yes Man. Awesome.

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

Jana:               Educating.

Yuri:                Spreading the message, teaching?

Jana:               Educating on human movement. Before I teach I always say, “My role here is just to educate you and give you something, a piece of information about yourself that you don’t know.”

Yuri:                Nice.

Jana:               It’s powerful when your intention is always to educate.

Yuri:                I couldn’t agree more.

Number four, what do you do first thing in the morning?

Jana:               I look for coffee.

Yuri:                Look for coffee?

Jana:               Manically. If it’s not in my house, that’s a problem.

Yuri:                Do you have a favorite coffee place, or a favorite drink?

Jana:               I do. I like a cappuccino, or drip coffee with some half and half.

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

Jana:               I know I’m being successful when I get a lot of messages from my team saying thank you. Thank you for creating this opportunity.

Yuri:                Awesome. Those are better messages than having to put out fires. That’s great.

Jana:               When I get to change someone’s life, that’s the best feeling ever.

Yuri:                That’s great. Jana. Thank you so much for taking the time with us today.

This has been inspiring. I acknowledge you for the amazing brand, and movement you’ve created with JOGA. It’s amazing to see what you’ve done with athletes and certifying professionals to spread the word.

It sucks to be injured and not perform at your best, even if you’re not an athlete, so I just wanted to thank you for doing everything you’ve done.

Jana:               Awesome. Thank you for that. So generous.

Yuri:                You’re welcome.

Before we finish off, where’s the best place for people to follow you online and learn more about JOGA?

Jana:               Go to JOGAWorld.com. Come find us!

Yuri:                Jana, once again, thanks so much for taking the time, and I hope you guys enjoyed this one.

Jana:               Thank you, Yuri. Have an awesome day.

Yuri:                You too.

 

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Yuri’s Take

A great interview with the one and only Jana Webb from JOGA. J-O-G-A, a pretty cool name. When I first heard about it a little while ago, I thought, “Wow, this is such a cool brand.”

One of the things I want to leave you with, which we talked about earlier in the interview, is the notion that if your product is great, that’s the essence of your marketing. There are ways to market a bad product, and there are great products that never see the light of day because they’re not marketed properly.

But the marketing of anything becomes so much easier when you have a great product or service. By great I mean this: It’s not that it looks cool or has nice branding. All that matters is that it produces a result that is meaningful to your clients or customers.

That’s it.

The thing is, we get so caught up in how cool our stuff is. “Oh, it’s so beautiful, and we did these professional videos.” Who cares? That does not matter.

People need to get down off the perfectionist platform and focus on if they only got paid after producing a result for a client or customer. What would have to be true for your product to do that?

Think about this: A realtor sells your house, right? They don’t get a commission before selling your house, they get a commission after they sell the house. But in our industry, in our space, we accept payment before producing anything for a customer or client. That’s a little bit backwards, and that’s why, in general, transactions are heavily burdened, in terms of risk on the customer.

They’re getting into something where there’s a certain amount of blind faith. They don’t know if they’re going to get results by working with you or buying your thing. But there’s a certain amount of faith that goes into that.

If you think, “What do I have to create? What do I have to do in my business, in my product, in my service to create?” then it becomes impossible not to succeed. Be fanatically focused on that, because when you do, and you focus on creating outcomes for people, and helping them achieve their goals, people will start talking.

They will spread the word, and you’ll get more business through word of mouth than you can handle.

Facebook ads are awesome, SEO is great, and YouTube is cool. But at the end of the day, if you can’t produce a result and you’re making big promises that aren’t backed up, your business will suffer.

So, focus on the results, focus on the outcome, and focus on what people want, not the features of your product.

Now, with that said, there are just a couple housekeeping things before we finish off today. As always, if you’ve enjoyed this podcast, I would greatly appreciate if you subscribed if you haven’t already. Go to iTunes, and if you’re listening on your phone, you can just hit the little subscribe button.

I’ve got lots of amazing episodes coming your way, with lots of great interviews and solo sessions. There have been about 100 amazing episodes so far. I can’t even reference any specific ones because they’re all good. Sift through the feed, see which ones jump out at you, and give them a listen.

It’s inspiring stuff.

That’s all for today, my friends. I hope you have an amazing day. Thank you so much for joining me. I appreciate your attention, loyalty, and all the amazing work you continue to do in the world. It matters. Never forget that.

With that said, continue to go out there and be great, do great, and I’ll see you in our next episode.

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Follow Jana Webb at:

https://www.jogaworld.com/

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Transcription

It’s a beautiful day here in Toronto at the end of May. I hope you’re having a great day. I have another amazing guest; someone I’ve known for several years. He is a physician, a medical doctor, who has challenged the status quo. Wait until you discover what he’s been up to the last couple years.

His name is Steven Masley. He is a physician, nutritionist, trained chef, author, and the creator of the number one all-time health program for PBS. Just wait until he shares how much money they raised for PBS with his PBS special. It’s crazy. He’s done three PBS specials.

This is not something you can sign up for and walk into. He’s going to walk us through how to get a PBS special and if it’s right for you, your brand, or your offer. He’ll share what he learned from being the most successful PBS special, one he lost quite a bit of money on, and the differences in this interview.

What’s cool is that, like so many doctors listening to this podcast, he simply started off as a family physician. What I love about working with the health industry is that it doesn’t matter if you’re a trainer, doctor, naturopath, or anything else. You’re seeing people in person and repeating the same type of information that you’re sharing with them on a regular basis.

Steven is going to share what he did to go from seeing patients one-on-one to getting to where he is now. I’m not saying that you should do a PBS special. I sure haven’t, and I don’t think I’d want to. However, there are some major lessons learned here about what works at that level and how you can bring it down to the smallest of businesses.

Most importantly, how you go from one-on-one to a much more leveraged practice or business that serves a lot more people.

I’m excited to bring him to you. He’s a great guy, well spoken, and knowledgeable. Without any further ado, let’s welcome Steven Masley to the Healthpreneur Podcast.

Steven Masley, welcome to the Healthpreneur Podcast. How’s it going, buddy?

Steven:                 Hey, I’m delighted to be here with you today.

Yuri:                      I’m excited to have you on because you’ve been a mover and shaker in our space for many years. You’re a physician, nutritionist, trained chef, author; but it didn’t all start out that way. Can you take us back to why you wanted to get into medicine? What were some of the realizations you had along the way about impacting people’s lives and seeing patients one-on-one in person?

 

Steven’s medical background, how he became an author, and how he got on TV

Steven:                 As a physician, I’ve had a unique exposure to healthcare. I grew up in a family where my dad was a surgeon. Everybody in town knew my dad. He was their doctor. To see my dad, I would ride my bicycle to the hospital, because that’s where he was all the time. He left at around five and got home at ten.

I could wander into surgery and put on scrubs. Usually I had to do a couple stitches if I got to talk to him, or I might find him in the intensive care unit. He’d make me pull out someone’s NG tube.

I had a very different perspective. I thought we sent people to the hospital to be tortured as a kid.

Yuri:                      Sure.

Steven:                People loved my dad. He saved lives but I thought he was the mass inquisition guy.

From a child’s perspective looking at what we did to people – obviously not my dad – but what we do to people in hospitals, I grew up wanting to be a doctor that would keep out of the hospital.

Yuri:                      What a concept, right?

Steven:                When I got to medical school, I had this belief that we should be keeping people out of the hospital. A lot of my medical student colleagues didn’t appreciate that.

They wanted to be surgeons and do these amazing treatments. I thought we should be preventing all that stuff. That was my introspect in the 80s. Fortunately today, no hospital in Canada, US, UK, or any place would let kids in there. That’s totally banned and probably a good thing. What I got away with back in the 60s should never have happened.

But times have changed.

Yuri:                      I think it also provided you with the perspective to say, “You know, maybe there’s a better way of doing this.”

Steven:                 Well, I thought so. But when I got into medical school, it was all about what drugs to put people on, what surgeries could we offer, and what devices could we give them. There was nothing about nutrition or fitness.

I naturally gravitated to family medicine because it seemed the most preventative related.

But it wasn’t until I went overseas and worked in 15 different countries. I worked in refugee camps. I worked in India, Pakistan, Ecuador, and Kenya. All over the place.

I realized that people were healthy if they just ate simple food, were fit, managed their stress, and avoided some poisons. I mean, they were in super good health. They were healthier than all my people at home.

I realized, “Wow, it’s nothing about the drugs or the hospital care that makes a difference. It’s all about the lifestyle that makes the biggest difference between sick and healthy, and feeling full of vitality or feeling sick.”

That was transforming for me.

Yuri:                      I bet. Travel allows you to be exposed to those different cultures. It’s great to be able to do that. Walk us through how you went from family practice to venturing online and authoring books.

You’ve been on PBS. How did that happen? Was there a point where you said, “I need to figure this out,” or was there an initial mentor who gave you an inkling to the possibility? What did that look like?

 

How he started seeing patients in groups

Steven:                I was frustrated just trying to see 30 people a day. I had the idea to see 10 or 20 people at a time, in groups. I was one of the first two doctors in North America to offer group visits for diabetes, heart disease, or menopause. I started doing group visits in my practice.

I was preparing material and answering questions. A lot of their questions had to do with supplements, nutrients, diet, exercise, and sleep. I gradually became more knowledgeable as I studied these and answered my group patient visit questions. I wrote up lectures, and eventually people said to me, “You could just write a book.”

This was not a plan.

I created a program to reverse diabetes, to reverse heart disease, and to improve health. I ended up with a book of material. I transferred it into my book, “The 28 Day Antioxidant Diet”. I self-published it. I didn’t even try to get a publisher back then. This was in 1996.

That had a huge impact on my career. I self-published a book. It’s not a major deal. It was about a healthy diet to improve health. Having the title as “author” transformed my career.

It wasn’t a plan, but if anybody wants to transform their career, I would say that’s a good plan. Be an author, even if it’s a self-published book. It somehow gave the perspective that I was an expert on this topic.

People wanted to hear from me. They were more willing to listen to me. That started it. From there, I started doing more research. I published studies on how my program could help prevent heart disease and help reverse diabetes.

Once I had a couple publications, I got invited to be the medical director at the Pritikin Longevity Center. That was another quantum leap. That was big.

That got attention. As the medical director for Pritikin Longevity Center, and because I had done previous research on how could we measure aging and things like that from my prior clinic, I got invited onto a Discovery show to do a program called ‘Ten Years Younger.’ That was another huge quantum leap in my reach.

Five million people watched the program. Then they wanted me to write another book, which a publisher picked up, called “Ten Years Younger.” Then it just took off. From there, I needed a website. I needed to start writing a blog. I needed a supplement line to support people.

It went from passively thinking, “Okay, I’m going to be an author.” Then I published a couple studies, got the job as the medical director at a health center, got an invite to an international TV series, then a big book offer.

It’s just taken off from there.

Every step was unanticipated. I wasn’t planning going forward, but if I were to give someone advice on how to do this, those would be important steps I would want them to focus on.

 

Squashing limiting beliefs, increasing your reach, and knowing your audience

Yuri:                      That’s good, and inspiring as well. Were there moments when you were self-publishing or going down that road where you thought, “Who am I to write a book? Is anyone going to read this?” What were some of the limiting beliefs that you had to overcome as you were starting to build momentum here?

Steven:                 Oh, I absolutely had those limiting beliefs.

My wife would laugh and say, “You’re going to be an author? Who’s going to read your book?” She was kind and sweet hearted about it, but that’s was what I was hearing in the back of my head.

I said, “Oh well, we’ll see.” I ended up selling 10,000 of those self-published books.

I did little talks. I would go out and speak at community events. I would apply to speak at book fairs. It was a busy time. I was probably doing a couple community talks per week, in addition to my job.

But it gave me quite a bit of experience. I had those self-limiting beliefs, but I think we must learn to get over that if we want to make a difference. I think no matter what, in every step along the way, my goal has been to try to make a difference for other people.

I’ve wanted a shift in the paradigm on how healthcare is provided on a large scale. If we want to change that, we’ve got to get over these limiting beliefs and be more mindful about our potential.

Yuri:                      That’s great advice. Those 10,000 you sold, that’s amazing. You gave talks at smaller events locally, which I agree is one of the best ways to get your message out and connect with your audience in a very real way.

Was there anything else you were doing that helped get the message out and get the book in front of more people outside of those talks?

Steven:                Blogging helped, and working with affiliates and other folks who’ll interview you for their work, or share your message somehow. There’s always sharing going on in this health entrepreneur community. For me, the quantum leaps occurred with just writing a book, for one.

Two, working for a national medical center.

Three, that Discovery show.

Four, having a published book on a national level. That’s quite a leap.

Then, with the next book, I get something unique. I was in a mastermind group. I think you know most of the people who were in that group at the time.

We were going around the room asking, “How would you ten times increase your reach?” We’d plan and you had to have the potential with your plan. So, if we want to reach 10,000 people, then your plan should include something that can reach 100. My goal was to reach 100,000 people, which means I had to reach a minimum of a million to have a 10x plan that was built in.

I went around the room asking what could I do and how, like write a blog and get something published.

Somebody in the room said, “Why don’t you do a PBS show?” I didn’t even know what was involved in that. I’ve always watched public television and liked it.

I said, “Sure,” not knowing what it would cost or anything. That was my plan. I’ll do a public PBS show.

I committed myself with my group. I wrote it down as my plan, and by gosh, I was going to do it. Well, that turned out to be a major project. With that PBS show, I ended up raising $12 million for PBS. We had more than five million viewers watching my two-hour program. That was the biggest career leap I ever had.

Yuri:                      That’s amazing. Do you mind talking about what that looks like? The financial commitment and some of the nuts and bolts that people might not be aware of if they’re considering doing something like that?

 

What it takes to create a program that’ll air on public TV and be successful

Steven:                 Those are good questions. If you’re going to try and get a show that could go on public television, one, you want to make sure you’ve got the right audience. I had a book called “The 30 Day Heart Tune Up: How to Tune up Your Heart,” and our data had shown that we knew how to erase artery plague.

That’s an older audience. 30 or 40 year olds are not worried about heart disease. There are many other things on their mind. That’s not one of them.

My audience matched that. The topic of that book would be of interest to people who were 50, 60, 70, even up to 80s. PBS is two thirds women, and their peak audience is say, 55 to 75; 65 probably being the midpoint on that list.

One, is that your audience? 55 to 75-year-old women? If that works for you, then that’s a potential. If you want to have a show that they could air, it’s got to be good quality. They’re not going to air something that’s done on your cell phone or videoed in your office.

We had to rent out a huge studio. We had about seven cameras. We had to have an audience that was interacting. We built a unique stage just for that show, then they throw it away.

You’ve got to have a unique stage built, an audience brought in, a whole camera crew, and all this editing. It takes quite a team, so I ended up hiring a production company who did an awesome job, I should say. Thank you Ellion and Alan. They were the people I worked with to put this together.

The price was at least $250,000 to produce a show of good enough quality to go on public television.

Yuri:                      That’s not even with a guarantee that you’re going to recoup that investment, correct?

Steven:                 There’s no guarantee. You are guaranteed to have a nice DVD. That’s what you’re guaranteed.

Yuri:                      That’s awesome.

Steven:                 You get to use that in any way you want. You can use it digitally. You could break it up. You could do infomercials on TV with it in time you buy.

You could ask if the public television shows want to watch it. If they watch it, they show it during pledge time. Here’s the other caveat that I didn’t understand, but you need to understand if you’re thinking about something like this.

You are pitching and trying to raise money. They’re using your show to raise money with donations for PBS. You put together a package. You can’t sell supplements or ingestibles on PBS. It’s just things like educational material, cookbooks, reading, or additional material related to the content.

For the heart program, I put in a heart rate monitor as a gadget. I wanted to have a gadget. I did an extra three hours of recorded video time. I did a couple hours of audio recorded time. We had shopping guides and a heart rate monitor. That was my package. I was pitching during the pledge drive.

I felt like Jerry Lewis. I grew up watching Jerry Lewis raise money on TV.

That was a good cause, public television. I went for it and we raised $12 million for PBS. It was the number one health and wellness show that’s ever been on public television.

 

Finding a big problem, a simple solution, and crafting a heartfelt message

Yuri:                      I think you nailed it with your audience. There’s a perfect match for that demographic. Other mutual friends of ours have done a lot, and several others have done PBS specials. Why do you think yours was such a big success?

Steven:                 There are several things. What’s important is how we get our message out, whether it’s PBS or not.

I came up with a script from the heart. I didn’t put anything in there that wasn’t genuine to my core. I didn’t compromise at all on my message. It’s everything I believed in and was passionate about it. That was one.

Two, I had a heartfelt story. I told the story about my step-father who got chest pains the day after he retired. They took him to the hospital. He had a cath. He had a massive stroke from that procedure in the hospital, a side effect.

We should be able to prevent that, and I felt badly that I didn’t do more. I wasn’t his doctor. I cried when they were recording the show.

I said, “Okay, cut. We’re going to delete that, right?”

They looked at me and said, “Oh no, we are keeping that. That was a heartfelt message. You exposed something raw in yourself. You made yourself vulnerable, and people going to connect with you.”

Then, I had a pretty solid plan. My plan is something I’ve used over and over in my clinic. I’ve done a couple randomized clinical trials. I’ve published and proved. I’ve shown that we can shrink artery plaque. I’ve published that. It was credible.

Share something raw from your heart and experience, so you can connect with your audience. Have a solid plan and be completely credible and upfront about it. When you put all that together, that was the secret to that success.

 Yuri:                      It sounds so simple, right? Just be genuinely real, have a plan that is proven, and just do your thing. It’s so funny how we get so bogged down in details.

It comes down to what you just mentioned; the core fundamentals of connecting with human beings. It’s awesome that you’re able to enjoy that level of success based on being you and not compromising on that.

Steven:                 Here’s another part. I’ll give you a comparison.

Heart disease is a big problem. I portrayed it as I had a simple, easy to follow solution. That’s powerful.

Then, I thought, “Okay, I had the number one success all-time for health and wellness. Let’s just do another one.” We popped out another show with my next book, “Smart Fat: Eat Smart Fat and Get Healthier.” I did “Smart Fats to Outsmart Aging.”

Well, that’s a concept. It was a good show. Several people said that the production was better, my lines were better, and I spoke better. It was still me speaking from the heart.

But the big problem wasn’t clear and it wasn’t an easy solution. It was a complicated seven-step plan.

That was an average PBS show that we lost money on. We probably lost $100,000. Which, if you’ve ever done one of these things, is a good thing. If you have a good show, you might lose $100,000 on it. It’s a huge marketing opportunity.

We had several hundred thousand people watch that show. We bought product for it. We probably lost $100,000 in the end.

Yuri:                      Interesting.

Steven:                We got a lot of exposure from it, but it didn’t do nearly as well. The big difference was that I didn’t have the experience, the raw experience, where I broke into tears on the subject line.

“Smart Fats to Outsmart Aging” sounds like a great idea, but ideas don’t sell. Fixing people’s problems is what sells. An easy solution to a big problem. Boom.

Yuri:                      That’s such a good takeaway, on a big level with a lot of risk involved. For everyone listening, is this a “must-have” or is this a “nice to have”?

I think with the first one being so successful, it was a must-have. You were entering the conversation in a lot of people’s minds. The big idea was so simple for people to grasp. It was tangible, and it was something they could see themselves doing. Whereas maybe in the second one, it was more complex and less tangible.

The big idea wasn’t as compelling.

If you’re listening to this and you’re writing a book, creating a product, or offering anything, that is important to remember.

Steven:                 Even though our execution was better. Like you said, trying to pick the color on the landing page. All that stuff was better. The production of the show, the language, the scripting, and thinking about the back end. All that was better but it wasn’t nearly as successful.

Now I’m doing my next PBS show and my newest book coming out in 2018 called, “The Better Brain Solution.”

I’m trying to go back to the original design. Here we have a big problem: Memory loss. It’s the most expensive problem in America today. It’s the scariest disease today. I have a five-step easy plan.

My research has shown that if you follow it, you can improve your brain processing speed and function by 25 to 30%. I’m going back to a big, huge, urgent problem and a simple, easy to follow solution with a heartfelt message.

Yuri:                      That’s a great recipe right there.

If you just write that down, that’ll save you years of frustration. I’ll be the first one in line. I created a lot of stuff when I started my business years ago that no one cared about. It was an idea that I had I thought was going to be cool.

But when you’re dealing with something like dementia and memory loss, those are big top of mind conversations. If you can solve that in a way that’s simple, that’s awesome. It’s great that you have this.

Steven, you’ve cracked the code of book, to PBS, to mass audience reach, which is awesome. I want to commend you for all the amazing stuff you’ve done with that.

Steven:                Well, and learning from people like you and others on how to craft a message. That’s the real critical part. The genuineness of the message is so important.

The Rapid Five

Yuri:                      Absolutely. Steven, this has been awesome. Are you ready for The Rapid Five?

Steven:                 I’m ready.

Yuri:                      All right, buddy. Here we go. Five rapid fire questions. Whatever comes top of mind is probably the right answer, and you have no prior knowledge of what these are. Here we go. Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

Steven:                 I’m not very patient, that’s what comes to mind first.

Yuri:                      Number two, what is your biggest strength?

 Steven:                 I persevere. When I decide to do something, I’ll do it. Whatever it takes, I’m going to get it done. If I say I’ll do it, I’ll get it done.

Yuri:                      Your ability to take and handle calculated risk is unique. I don’t think a lot of people in your shoes would have invested that money to do a PBS special that is un-guaranteed. What was your belief or mindset that allowed you to say, “You know what? I’m going to do this.”

Steven:                Well, it was part of being in a group. Another important part of raising your level of entrepreneurship is to surround yourself with people who are trying to achieve greatness.

If you’re hanging out with people who are being mediocre, you’ll probably end up mediocre. When I think back 10, 15 years ago, if we had a list with 10,000 people, we were thinking, “Awesome!” Now we’d think, “No. At least 100,000 is starting to be pretty good.”

Most of the people in that room now have 100,000 person lists. I was hanging out with people who wanted to make a big difference in the world. When I shot out my idea, it was, “How am I going to do a problem that it’s 10 times my goal?”

I got their input and that’s when I decided to go for it.

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

Steven:                Connect with my audience.

Yuri:                      That’s great. That’s a good one.

Steven:                 On television, that’s critical. You’re not talking to a whole bunch of people. You’re trying to connect to one person in the room through that screen.

Any time you’re doing video recording, connect with one person at the end and think about the one person you want to reach.

Yuri:                      That’s great advice even for writing emails, recording a podcast, or doing a YouTube video. It’s the same thing, right? Number four, what do you do first thing in the morning?

Steven:                 I get up and have a cup of coffee. I drink my shake, then go to the gym for about an hour to workout. It’s routine.

Yuri:                      Nice. Are you an early riser?

Steven:                 Cup of coffee, shake, workout. That’s how I start my day. I get revitalized in the gym every morning, getting my heart rate up, and lifting some weights. I’m ready and energized all day long.

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

Steven:                 The greatest thanks I ever get has been when people say, “I forgot how great I could feel. Thank you for giving me my life back.”

I think I’m successful when people say I transform their life. That, to me, makes it all the work worthwhile.

Yuri:                      That’s great, man. This has been a lot of fun, Steven. Thank you so much for sharing what you’ve shared in this conversation. Before we finish off, what is the best place for people to follow your work online, check out your books, and see your PBS special?

Steven:                Visit the website. I’ve always got gifts there to read and do, and free items at Www.DrMasley.com.

Yuri:                      Steven, thank you so much once again for being with us and sharing so candidly. Most importantly, for being a game-changer. Think about the people you’ve impacted from the initial decision to create that first self-published book to what you’ve done now over several years. It’s truly remarkable.

I just wanted to acknowledge the work that you’ve done and the impact you’ve had on people’s lives. I look forward to seeing how you continue to transform the world as you get your message out to more and more people.

Thank you for doing what you do.

Steven:                Thank you, Yuri, for this chance today.

Yuri:                      You’re welcome.

 

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Yuri’s Take

Talk about an amazing interview, right? He was a physician, a medical doctor in family practice, doing one-on-ones with patients. Then, he morphed it into group coaching, seeing patients in groups, which is very unique.

I’ve never seen a doctor do that. Then, he self-published a book, wrote another one, got a PBS special, and continues to impact millions upon millions of people. Most importantly, his beliefs have expanded.

If you are like Steven or I were, when you first started, you were on your own. Maybe you had ideas for a bigger future, but then you had limiting beliefs like, “Oh my god, can I do this? Who am I? No one knows me. There’s a lot of other stuff that’s already like the stuff I do. There’s a lot of other people doing what I do. Are people going to listen? How do I stand out?”

Listen, I get it.

I’ve been there, okay? Everyone’s been there. What Steven mentioned, which is absolutely a game changer, is you don’t go from that belief system to a PBS special. You’ve got to get around other people who are going to raise your standards and your beliefs.

Here’s the thing: You want to borrow other people’s beliefs. You may want to write that down. Borrow other people’s beliefs. If you don’t believe that you can do something, speak to someone and hang around someone who has done that; because they believe it can be done. All you need is to borrow their belief because they’ve already done it.

Roger Bannister was the first man to run the four-minute mile. Before that, no one believed they could do it. Within a year of him running that, I believe there were 13 other people who ran the four-minute mile.

They were borrowing his beliefs.

It was now possible. But for that to happen, you need to be in a group of people who are living life, leading their businesses, and serving people at a higher level. You can’t hang around the people you’ve been hanging around with if you’re not where you want to be.

Now, I’m going to say that with a word of caution. I mean this in the nicest of ways, but basically what I mean is this: Most people don’t get what we do. If you have an online business, most people have no idea what you do, right?

So how can you expect to explain to high school friends that you’ve got this big vision and expect them to support you? Sure, they can encourage you and stuff, but they’ve got no idea. They’ve got no idea how to support you business-wise or belief-wise.

However, if you can surround yourself with other people who get it, who’ve walked the path before you, and know your standards, what’s possible becomes infinitely greater.

Steven talked about how his thinking was 10x-ed just by being in the right group. That’s one of the reasons why I love leading my Luminaries Mastermind. We’ve got such an amazing group of health and fitness leaders – naturopathic doctors, medical doctors, health coaches, supplement company owners – who are all challenging the status quo and pushing each other in a positive way to grow, help, and serve.

I want to make a distinction here, which is this: You must be part of a group that you pay to be a part of.

I’ve invested more than half a million dollars in coaching masterminds and live events over the past decade. I don’t say that to brag. When I joined my first mastermind, I didn’t have the money to join it. But, I knew that after struggling on my own for three years, what I wanted to achieve was not going to happen doing what I was doing.

What got you here is not going to get you there. That’s a big thing to remember. If you’re at a million dollars, to get to 10 million dollars, you’re going to have to do some different things. If you’re not making any money, don’t expect to make more money by doing what you’re currently doing.

You need to be surrounded by people who get it and who can encourage you and support you, but you need to have skin in the game.

I’ve been a part of masterminds that I haven’t paid for. I informally put it together with some friends. It just doesn’t have the same impact in terms of accountability, structure, and results. Those masterminds, groups, or coaching sessions that I’ve paid for have skin in the game. As the old saying goes, “When you pay, you pay attention.”

I don’t care what group you’re a part of. Whatever group is going to support you best, right? Find a leader who jives with your core values.

For me, I’m not going to aspire to be like someone who has a lot of success business-wise, but has had three marriages, never talks to their kids, and is 100 pounds’ overweight. That’s a complete disconnect for me. I seek out other people who are like me.

They want to be successful in business. They are great people. They’re a family man or family woman. They have a great relationship and take their relationship seriously with their spouse, girlfriend, or boyfriend. These are the people that I resonate with.

If you are looking for a coach, that’s important. Look for someone who emulates the values that are important to you. It’s not so much about the bling-bling, it’s the values that are going to make a difference in terms of being able to work with someone who understands you and who you understand.

That’s the first thing. Again, you want to find a group of people that can support you in your business. Being part of a group of health and fitness entrepreneurs would make sense. If they can send business your way and vice versa, that’s a cool synergistic environment to be part of.

That’s what we’ve created with the Luminaries Mastermind. If you’re interested in seeing if you’re a good fit for our group, you can email me personally at [email protected]. I’ll send you an application to fill out. If you’re a good fit based on our criteria, then I’d be happy to jump on a quick call and see if we can make it work.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. I’m going to remind you again, because it is the secret to success, to find a mentor. Get around and work with great people who are going to raise your beliefs and standards.

Everyone floats everyone’s boats, right? The rising tide floats all boats. Move with people who are moving in a great direction. That’s the secret. All the strategies and tactics will come by being in the right environment.

That’s the lesson for today.

I’m going to get off the soapbox. As I come down, I’ve got a couple final remarks. If you have not subscribed to the podcast, please do so. Go to iTunes, Healthpreneur Podcast, and subscribe. That’s the first thing.

Second, if you’ve enjoyed this episode or the podcast in general, I’d love a rating or review. Obviously, it helps my ego. Most importantly, it helps others find the podcast because that’s just the way the world works.

 

Once again, thank you so much for joining me today, and for your attention, loyalty, and doing what you do in the world. It really makes a difference. Continue to get out there, be great, do great, and I will see you on Friday.

We’ve got an amazing guest on Friday. She runs a yoga company. It’s phenomenal stuff. She lives in Toronto, so she’s a Canadian. That is awesome. She’s going to be the guest on Friday. You’re not going to want to miss that one, so be sure to tune in for that.

For now, have an amazing day. I’ll see you then.

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

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Transcription

You want to know the fastest way to destroy your business and your reputation? That’s what I’m going to share with you in today’s episode of the Healthpreneur Podcast.

I hope you’ve been well. I have a little anecdotal story to share with you.

 

Example of an outdated, high-pressure sales tactic

I was out for dinner with some friends a couple weeks ago and one of them told me that he went to good old Grant Cardone’s three-day sales bootcamp.

I’m not going to mention my friend’s name. I love him dearly, and the way he does things is up to him. I do things differently and I don’t resonate with Grant Cardone. If you don’t know, he’s all about closing the sale at whatever cost, achieving at the expense of relationships and moral ethics, and all that stuff.

Anyway, so that’s him. My buddy was at his event and told me about it. He told me that, on the first day of the event after the first session, he went to the bathroom. One of Grant Cardone’s clones, one of his sales guys, came up to him and said, “So, we going to get started? What are we going to do today?”

My buddy said, “I’m good, thanks.” The closer replied, “Are you good or do you want to be great?” You can see where this is going, right? He said, “Well, I’m good. I’ve got a coach.” The guy said, “Well, if you got a coach why are you here?”

It just kept going down.

There’s a lot to appreciate from the directness of those types of questions, but in that boiler room-type closed environment, I don’t know if there’s anything that makes us feel more uncomfortable. Even if you love selling, nobody likes being sold to like that.

At least not in my experience. You see, from a selling perspective, we must learn how to sell in a way where buyers want to buy. There’s a huge discrepancy in the way that a lot of people sell things nowadays, whether selling through video sales letters, products with sales copy, or enrollment calls with people.

 

The old way of selling: The good, bad, and ugly

A lot of sales training and methodologies used are outdated.

I’ll speak specifically to the way people render calls because that’s what we do every single day. The way we approach things is very different from a lot of the approaches you’ll find out there. To be very honest, it’s the opposite of Grant Cardone’s high pressure experience.

If you like Grant Cardone’s style, you can do that. That’s totally cool. It’s just not the way I want to be perceived in this world, so we don’t do anything like that.

The old way of selling was the typical image of a used car salesman or the cold-calling stock broker on Wall Street who’s makes cold calls all day long. The Wolf of Wall Street type stuff. Those are the images that come to our mind when we think of selling; the guy who’s coming to our door to sell us some widget, cold calls from whoever about whatever they’re selling.

We all love the telemarketers who call us directly at 6:30 at night while we’re having dinner, right? If none of us liked that experience, why would we emulate it and try to sell to our clients using an outdated model?

Sure, they work. They’re tried and true principles, and there’s ways to use that to your advantage to learn from some of their elements.

Putting people in a situation where they feel extremely uncomfortable and do business with you out of fear, remorse, guilt, or to just stop the pressure is why most companies who are selling like that see high refunds to the tune of 20 or 30%.

Remember the episode where I was talking with you about my buying experience in Morocco? It was horrific in terms of how we felt on the receiving end of that. I would never want to subject our prospective clients to that.

If you want to tarnish your reputation, brand, and business, please go out and sell like that. I promise you, as a health coach and health expert, if you try to do that, it’s probably not going to fly.

 

A better way to sell: Serve

In this market of helping people with their health it’s a very different prospect. It’s one thing if you are a stockbroker selling options, futures, and stuff like that. It’s a different culture. But if someone’s coming to you because they have a health issue that you can solve and you’re bullying and high pressuring them to buy or do business with you, that’s a sketchy way of enrolling clients. That’s the way I see it.

I believe that that methodology is not only ineffective, it’s disrespectful. It’s disrespectful to the people you’re serving and it’s not the best way to start a good relationship with people you’ll work with closely. You don’t want people enrolling with you if they’re going to leave the phone conversation or feel worse than when they started.

Instead, come from a place of service instead of selling.

When you focus on serving, you don’t need to sell. When you focus on building the relationship and getting to know what the person’s fears, frustrations, and desires are, you make the “selling process” all about them and not your stuff. It becomes a whole lot easier to figure out if you can help them, if you want to help them, and if they’re a good fit for you, too.

They’ll see the benefit and value in what you’re providing and it’ll be a whole lot easier for them to say yes during the process.

 

How the internet has changed the way we sell

When we talk about selling in 2018 and beyond, we must consider that, back in the day when a lot of these high-pressure tactics were developed, the internet wasn’t around. If we’re talking about the 1980s – with the big shoulder pads, funky hairdos, and all that stuff – no one had the internet.

Nowadays, if you are engaged in a conversation, a discovery call, an enrollment call, a strategy call, whatever you want to call it, and you subject someone to that kind of beating, guess what might happen? They might go onto Facebook or other social media outlets and start spewing bad stuff about you. That is the last thing you want to have happen.

One of the things I’m most proud of in our business is the fact that we run Facebook ads every single day. Here’s something interesting: To my knowledge, as of this recording, none of our ads have thumbs down, negative reviews, or spam complaints.

That is a very big deal because it reflects the way we go out and attract clients in the first place; the messaging we use, the images we use, and the promises we make.

If we went out and started creating stuff that was over-hyped and hardcore, it would piss people off. People don’t like seeing that stuff. Like Dan Kennedy famously said, “You want to be a welcome guest not an annoying pest.” Think about that.

 

Preserving your reputation by selling with integrity and service

When you’re appearing in somebody’s news feed through a Facebook ad, you’re about to call someone, or you’re sending your audience an email, you want them to think, “Yes, thank God I’m getting an email from this amazing coach,” not, “Oh man, what’s he going to sell me now? What’s the latest thing?”

You have a lot of assets; your website, your client base, your assets, your income, you have all of that. When that’s all stripped away all you have left is your reputation. Do not compromise that because it’s your name, your brand. It’s you.

If that reputation becomes tainted, if it becomes ruined, everyone will know. People will search for you online and see some bad stuff. When that stuff creeps up it’s never a good thing.

That’s a quick lesson I want to share with you today. The old way of selling – with high-pressure and hard closing – is done. It’s done.

Please don’t start doing calls to enroll people with those types of scripts. It’s not about the script. You don’t need a script to follow, you need a framework. You need to understand the logic, the flow, to lead somebody through a call or discovery process.

You don’t need a word-for-word script to follow. We give our enrollment coaches a script but we ask them not to follow it. We ask them to get comfortable with it but follow the structure. We have an 11-part structure to our calls, and the most important part is the step-by-step. The flow is important but if they’re reading from a script it sounds so canned and phony.

It’s not about that. It’s about speaking less and allowing the client to speak more, which goes back to what we talked about in our previous episode about how to be a better coach.

 

An open invitation

That’s the message for today. If you enjoy this type of stuff and want to go deeper to figure out a game plan that takes your business to the next level, then I invite you to attend our Seven Figure Health Business Blueprint.

It’s a free online training. I’ll walk you through a new way to quickly build a high six or seven figure coaching business without one-on-one coaching or high pressure nonsense. If you want to attend, you can go to Healthpreneurgroup.com/training. Grab a spot that works best for you in the next two days and we’ll see you there.

In the meantime, I want to thank you for joining me again today. If you haven’t done so, please subscribe to the Healthpreneur Podcast.

I do this to share what I know and help you move things forward with your business, live the life of your dreams, impact more people, and feel great about what you’re doing on this planet in a way that make sense to you. I want you to have the income and the freedom to live life on your terms.

Thank you once again for taking the time to join me. Continue to go out there, be great, do great, and I’ll see you on Wednesday.

Transcription:

Hello, Healthpreneurs! Welcome to the Healthpreneur Podcast. Today we are talking with Tanya Zuckerbrot. I think you’ll enjoy this conversation because Tanya and I both have a passion for nutrition and have a good discussion about entrepreneurship. She’s a natural-born entrepreneur, and that has impacted her business. She’s a great example.

She is a registered dietician. One of hundreds of thousands of dieticians, most likely, around the world. So, what separates someone like Tanya from every other dietician out there? That’s what she’s going to share in this episode.

In case you don’t know her, Tanya’s an internationally-known dietician and the creator of the renowned F-factor diet. It’s the only dietician-created program for weight loss and optimal health that is based on scientifically-proven fiber-rich nutrition.

She’s worked in private practice in Manhattan with the who’s who of that society for more than 20 years. Her success has been profiled in the Sunday Style section of the New York Times and elsewhere.

She’s the author of two bestselling weight loss books, “The F-Factor Diet: Discover the Secret to Permanent Weight Loss,” which was published by GP Putnam & Sons; and “The Miracle Carb Diet: Make Calories and Fat Disappear,” which was published in 2012 by Hyperion. In addition to that, she has appeared on national television channels like NBC Today, CBS News, Live with Kelly, the Dodge Ross Show, The View, Rachel Ray, and more. She’s been on pretty much all the big shows you can imagine.

She holds a master’s degree in nutrition and food studies from NYU, New York University, and completed a two-year dietetic internship at NYU’s medical center. She’s got lots of great accreditations and experience, but I think you’ll find our interview inspiring because what she did out of the gates is extremely powerful to remember.

 

If you’re a dietician, nutritionist, health coach, trainer, or work with people and want to stand out and be successful in your respective market, this interview will find you well.

So, without any further ado, let’s welcome Tanya onto the show, and let’s get into it.

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

Tanya:                   I’m great, Yuri. How are you?

Yuri:                      I’m very good, thank you. I’m excited to have you on the show. We were shooting the breeze for a few minutes before we got started, and it was great to connect with someone that I’ve never met before. That’s part of the reason why I have this podcast.

It’s a selfish way to have cool conversations with people like you. I like to think that I’m very well-connected in this space, but there’s always new people that I love meeting. I’m excited to have you here.

So, what’s new and exciting in the world of Tanya Zuckerbrot?

 

F Factor, why it works, and how they’ve been successful

Tanya:                   So much. I’m excited to say that, despite being in this space for 20 years, there seems to be a genuine new interest in F-Factor. I think it’s important because the “F” in F-Factor stands for “fiber,” and fiber was misunderstood and not that exciting for most people.

People thought about fiber only for its health implications, or its ability to, say, lower cholesterol. But now people are beginning to understand the power of fiber for weight management. We all recognize that there’s an obesity epidemic in this country.

At any point, on any given day, 70% of women are trying to lose weight. Now that people understand that fiber not only has health benefits, but amazing weight management properties, there’s been this newfound interest in F-Factor as a company and as a program I’m trying to educate people about why F-Factor works, and its four liberating principles.

Yuri:                      That’s awesome. We’ll get into your story in a second, but I want to ask you: How have you gone about making fiber sexy?

The image that comes to mind for a lot of people is Metamucil, or perhaps psyllium husk. What have you done that has worked well to get this message in front of people in a way where they say, “Oh, this is cool”?

Tanya:                   I think people’s interpretation of fiber is misunderstood. No one has taken this nutrient and made it seem relevant. In part, I think the relevancy is due to my company’s marketing. We have a very young company with attractive young women, and that natural, fun, lifestyle sexiness came across in our social media.

Whenever we would have appearances somewhere, there was an energy that came with our company, but in addition to that, it is the science. That the science has caught up and taken fiber out of the clinical space where it was only thought of for its medicinal properties, and brought it to the forefront, where almost every single health magazine and segment on television is talking about the benefits of fiber for weight management.

People are desperate to look and feel their best without compromising their lifestyle. That is where F-Factor has become this amazing solution for hundreds of thousands of people.

Yuri:                      That’s awesome. Walk us through what your business looks like, so the listeners have a better understanding of how your business operates.

You have a great book. You’ve got the program. You’re still seeing patients or clients in the clinic as well. Walk us through how that works for you.

Tanya:                   Sure. We have different verticals of revenue, different arms of the company.

One is our center here in New York City, the F-Factor Center, where I have four dieticians who work underneath me. I am proud to say that we are the highest-earning private practice in the country as far as nutrition goes. Frankly, I think it’s because we deliver such an exceptional product.

It’s a very high-touch service. We’re available 24/7 to our clients. We are dealing with the who’s who, but more than that, F-Factor works. We have a private practice. We have books. I’ve authored two books which include the F-Factor program.

Additionally, we are now launching our app, the F-Factor app, which will allow clients not only to keep track of their net carbs, fiber, and calories and track their success on the F-Factor program, but there’ll also be able to look up restaurants in their area that offer F-Factor-approved dishes. Our clients will feel prepared to dine out successfully at any point of the day.

Then we have F-Factor products that will be coming out.

Yuri:                      That’s awesome. Very cool and comprehensive.

A lot of people in our space traditionally get into practice, they take a room in someone else’s clinic, and are just a dietician or trainer. That’s very limiting sometimes.

How did you get started? I know your mom’s Columbian, your dad is from Brooklyn, and food has always been a big part of your life, from what I’ve seen. Was that a big trampoline into this space, or did you have your own health challenges that motivated you to figure things out for yourself?

 

Tanya’s inspiration to help others and F Factor’s proven methods and principles

Tanya:                   I think my interest in this space was less about my own anecdotal experience, but I will speak to that. I did have a struggle with weight, but I don’t have one of these stories where I lost over 200 pounds.

My interest in being a dietician stems from a passion for food, but more than that I have a passion for helping others. Whether as a dietician or not, I think I would have found a career path where I would work with people one-on-one to enhance their quality of life in some capacity. The reason I fell into nutrition was, like many college students, I gained the freshman 15.

Upon coming home, my mom being a Jewish mom, commented on the fact that I’d put on some weight, and suggested that I take it off. My mom knew that during my entire childhood, I was always cooking.

My mom tells stories that she would leave me at home with the babysitter when she’d go out on a Saturday night, and when she would come back, the babysitter would be asleep on the coach and I would be in the kitchen with Julia Child’s cookbook making crepes Suzette, at age 10.

So, I have always had an interest in food. But because my mom was Columbian, my mom never dieted. We always had home-cooked meals, but I did not grow up in a household where calories were ever mentioned, so when I went to college, that’s why I gained so much weight.

I was never conscious of dieting and intake. As a freshman, you can make a sundae for your breakfast if you want, because you have complete autonomy when you’re in that dining hall. When I came back and my mom suggested I lose the weight, it wasn’t through dieting, but through healthy cooking.

By cooking healthy recipes that summer I lost the weight, and that’s when I had this “aha” moment. As I say it now, it seems so obvious, so forgive me for your listeners, but it was basically, “Wow. What you eat can impact your weight.”

Yuri:                      What a thought.

Tanya:                   I know, who would have thought? From there, I started to become interested in nutrition for weight management and health. I thought upon graduating, I went to University of Michigan undergrad, that my calling would be – because of my love for healthy cooking – to open a healthy gourmet shop. I thought that was going to be my legacy and how I would give back to the world, by making healthy food.

I looked for continued education after my undergrad degree. This is when I was still at Michigan, and there were two schools that were of interest to me, two programs. One was the Culinary Institute of America, and the other one was the food and nutrition studies program at NYU. But because I was in Ann Arbor for four years, and I wanted to return to a big city, the Culinary Institute was in upstate New York wasn’t as appealing to me.

The issue was that I misunderstood the curriculum. I misunderstood that the food and nutrition studies program was more than just studying kale and apples. It was a science-based program, so when I arrived to NYU and I received a list of prerequisites which included anatomy, physiology, inorganic chemistry, organic chemistry, and biochemistry, I was flabbergasted.

I did not have a science background, nor did I think I was interested in science. But I stuck it out and at the end of my education at NYU, including my residency at a hospital, I found that I was inspired to understand that nutrition is more than just vitamins and minerals. It’s more than just calories in/calories out.

Food is medicine or it’s poison. Hippocrates said it way better than I just did. I just paraphrased him poorly, but I had this great appreciation that I could apply nutrition intervention to people’s lives, and not only help them to become healthier and manage a healthy body weight, but to improve their quality of life, have better energy, sleep better at night, and, of course, look and feel their best.

The issue for me was, how can we encourage people to be healthy without making them feel that we’re compromising their quality of life? That’s the push/pull. When people think of healthy food, they think of tasteless food. When people think of weight management, they think of deprivation and denial. They think of being hungry.

That’s why I’m so proud to say that F-Factor provides a solution. We are changing lives every single day, improving people’s health, and helping people lose weight without hunger or compromising people’s quality of life. That’s because F-Factor is based on four disruptive principles, which I mentioned at the beginning of this interview.

Our four disruptive principles are counterintuitive to everything people have been encouraged to believe in the weight loss space.

Right now, if you’re trying to lose weight, I’m sure someone at some point has encouraged you to cut out carbs, alcohol, and dining out. They probably recommend that you adhere to a rigorous gym regiment.

And you know what, Yuri? Even though people are attempting to embrace those recommendations, maybe one of them and sometimes all four, the result is, as a nation, we are fatter than ever.

So, we know that cutting out curbs is not the solution. We know that working out harder is not the solution. We know that having to give up alcohol or dining out is not working. F-Factor is delivering a system that allows people to live their lives, but, more important than live their lives, it’s changing their lives.

Even though our four disruptive principles sound counterintuitive, when people challenge me, I get excited. I can substantiate all those principles with published journal studies or science that explains why we believe some of those faulty premises are wrong, and why F-Factor’s principles produce health and weight loss that no one has ever seen before.

 

The X Factor for success, mentorship, strategy, and inherent entrepreneurship

Yuri:                      That makes sense. That’s awesome. You’ve created this amazing system, which is the F-Factor approach to health and losing weight without being obsessive. If you were sitting down with a dietician who just came out of school and starting their own practice, what advice would you give to them if they were thinking of writing a book or coming out with a program?

As you know, it’s a very competitive space. You’ve done a great job differentiating yourself and standing out. What advice would you give to that RD, or any health professional for that matter?

Tanya:                   It’s funny because I hire RDs here and I always say that there’s an X factor – no pun intended – with the F-Factor. This X factor makes people exceptional caregivers. We all know certain doctors who are brilliant but have a horrible bedside manner.

What makes a dietician successful is, yes, you need to have that formal education. You need to be able to speak with authority. You need to know the science, and that’s because you need your clients to have faith in the instructions you’re providing them, or believe the advice you’re giving them is credible, authentic, and based on science.

So, education, obviously, is paramount.

After that, there needs to be the characteristic to provide tough love, yet be wildly sympathetic and nonjudgmental. Especially in the space of nutrition, we know that emotions can override logic. How do we know this? Because many people at this point know that they should be eating more apples and less ice cream, and yet, we still see the way that people are snacking and eating.

Even though there’s a logic to this, emotionally, many people respond to food, because of the kind of day they have. Therefore, as a counselor in this space, you need to be sympathetic and caring.

I think it’s a certain personality type. But when you ask what makes someone successful, I think it’s knowledge. You also need to know how to market yourself. That, unfortunately, is something that’s lacking in the curriculum of many health practitioners.

We learn biology, but we don’t learn marketing. We learn anatomy, but we don’t learn PR. Therefore, there are many people who are in my space that want to have a greater reach, but they just don’t have the skill set. How do they build their own brands?

Yuri:                      I couldn’t agree more. It’s a disservice to the practitioners, because it’s like, “Hey, you’re equipped with all this stuff. Good luck finding clients now! Let us know how it goes.”

Tanya:                   Right, 100%! So many people say doctors are the worst businessmen. Well, of course they are! Here they have this altruistic motivation to help others. Here they have in-depth science background. But they were probably never taught how to do QuickBooks. It’s just not part of the curriculum. I would love to see some of these medical schools offer more business classes.

I think the reason why I got ahead of the pack as far as the women I went to school with, was because I’m inherently an entrepreneur. If you ask me what my childhood business was, you’ll crack up because I always had a different business. I used to sell bracelets. I sold barrettes.

My first business…ready for this? I sold rocks. I went to my backyard, I took rocks, I put them on a table in my front yard, and sold them.

I just think some people have this predilection for wanting to create something and start a business. Therefore, when I went into private practice, I hired a consultant. Because I hired a consultant, I recognized where my skill sets lacked to build this business. Do you want to hear who my consultant was?

Yuri:                      Yeah.

Tanya:                   Her name is Maye Musk. Does that name ring a bell to you?

Yuri:                      Is she related to Elon Musk?

Tanya:                   It’s his mother.

 Yuri:                      Wow.

Tanya:                   I didn’t know it at the time, because, first, I’m not that big of a car person. I’m not even sure where Tesla was as far as car manufacturing at the time, but Maye Musk, his mom, was one of the top dieticians in the world. She was the chair of the Greater New York Dietetic Association, and she was doing modeling on the side. She’s drop-dead gorgeous.

She was elegant, well-spoken, and understood the business side of nutrition more than most people in my space. I was attracted to her because I’m also a very visual person and she was very stylish. I didn’t see a lot of that when I was in school.

This woman was such a mentor to me, and she helped me create my business model. A lot of dieticians just charge by the hour. She was the one that instructed me to create packages, saying, “Tanya, everyone just wants the diet. Once you give it to them, people think that they’ll follow them on their own and lose weight on their own. They’re not going to be accountable to you and it’s going to be very damaging to your brand. If you’re handing out diets and people aren’t following through, it’s your reputation on the line.”

If people buy a package, you control and guarantee their success. They’re going to win because they’re going to get everything out of it that they want. Also, in the follow-up visits, you’ll be able to constantly provide them with more tools, tips, and solutions to enhance their experience.

By having packages, you ensuring that you’re building a rapport with these clients. Of course, you’re generating revenue by having them come week after week, but it’s more about guaranteeing their success. And successful clients are what has fed my business. It’s always been a word of mouth business.

To anyone that is going into the field, if you feel that your school curriculum did not pre-qualify you to have the tools you need to be a successful entrepreneur and businesswoman, invest in yourself. Hire a consultant to help you create a business plan, so you’ll have some direction.

With my clients, I say, “Map out your day. Write down everything you’re going to eat for the day.” Because that’s a closer guarantee to success. You know you’re going to write down something that’s going to support weight loss. You’re not going to write down “a fudge sundae” if you’re thinking clearly about the day ahead of you.

So, when you just go into business blindly and you don’t map out a strategy, what are you working towards?

Yuri:                      You just mentioned so much good stuff there, so I want to break a couple things down. First, for everyone listening, if you’re offering any kind of coaching – life coaching, nutrition coaching, or fitness coaching – what Tanya just mentioned in terms of packages instead of one-off sessions, is a game changer.

That’s such a great piece of advice, Tanya, because I’ve seen so many people who say, “Here’s what it is to work with me for one hour.” But then, as you mentioned, it doesn’t serve the clients. It’s the same reason I don’t do one-on-one coaching or consulting. We work with people over 12 months because that’s how I know I can produce maximum benefits and results for someone.

It’s the same for you. So smart. Listeners, if this is the first time hearing this, let that sink in. It’ll be a big game changer for your business. Tanya, thank you for sharing that.

The second thing you mentioned was being a natural-born entrepreneur selling rocks. If you can sell rocks, it’s like selling ice to Eskimos, right?

Let me ask you this: Do you believe that being an entrepreneur is in your DNA? Is it in people’s DNA, or is it something you can learn? Or is it in there with a bit of a twinkle and, over time, you have to unleash it as you go through life?

Tanya:                   I think it’s just in you. Being an entrepreneur, there are aspects that are exhilarating and exciting, but anyone who’s an entrepreneur will also tell you that it’s gut-wrenching and scary because your success is based on many outside factors other than just how hard you’re willing to work.

You need to be resilient, and as an entrepreneur, since we’re creating our own road map, we’re often learning on the job or through trial and error. There is no direct path to success. I think you can be inspired to become more entrepreneurial, but some people like the safety of a 9-to-5 job. They want to check in and check out.

They value other things. For example, a better work/life balance. Well then, being an entrepreneur’s not for you. There’s no such thing as getting to work at 9:00, being at the gym by 6:00 and being home for dinner at 8:00 when you’re an entrepreneur. You need to be prepared to live and breathe your company, and that is not for everyone.

 

Work/life balance as an entrepreneur parent

Yuri:                      That’s very true. I totally agree with you. Let me ask you about the work/life balance thing, because you’ve got three kids, correct?

Tanya:                   Correct.

Yuri:                      How have you run and built this business while having kids, and how do you juggle all that?

Tanya:                   Some days I juggle it well, other days much less so.

I’m divorced, and I recently just got married, but there was a period where I was raising my kids, working full time, and trying to be social by showing up for charities, lunches, dinners, and friends’ birthdays.

People would say to me, “How do you do it all?” I would laugh and say, “What do you mean?” They’d respond, “Well, you’re doing it all.” I’d say, “Oh, you assume I’m doing it well. I’m just showing up, people!”

I think that’s where I should learn to be more forgiving of myself. The truth is, any person that works hard will tell you, when you’re working that hard, there’s a pull to be at home. Then, when you’re at home, you feel guilty that you’re not at the office.

 

“Doing it all,” managing expectations, having support, and leading by example

So how do I do it all? I think it’s about matching my expectations. I will say something that even applies to my clients: All you can do is try your hardest. I can’t compare myself to anyone else. It’s about being my personal best, but being where you are.

I’m not one of those people that I keep the pictures of my kids behind me at the office, because if I’m staring at them all day, I’m going to feel guilty. I’m going to be constantly reminded that I should be home. But when I’m home, I want to put my phone down and give my kids 100%.

What I will say is that it’s not so much quantity as much as quality. I’m not home as much as many stay-at-home moms are, but when I am home, I try to be as wildly present as possible. When I am putting in long days at the office, I can give 100% to my clients and my team here. But as far as juggling it all, I don’t think anyone can have it all.

It’s about being okay with whatever the outcome is. I always say that in life, we regret the things where we didn’t give 100% or could have done it better. When you regret that you could have done something differently, you’re suffering in the present for something that happened in the past that you can’t change.

That’s why I try to help my clients live with less regrets, so I can empower them more. When we talk more about F-Factor and the diet we can speak to that, but just as a person who’s trying to juggle work and life balance? It’s just about being okay with the outcome, knowing that I couldn’t have done more in the situation.

Does that make sense?

Yuri:                      Yes. It totally does, and I think that’s a sign of introspection and maturity that not a lot of people have. Guilt and shame are rampant, obviously, in everyone’s life, so it’s great that you brought that up.

Tanya:                   I don’t want to give myself too much credit because I have a great support group to tell me it’s okay. I have probably the most Type A personality you’ve ever met. Nothing’s ever good enough for me.

While you were saying that, I thought, “Wow, I sound really healthy.” That’s not me at all. I think it’s all the people in my life that are looking out for me because I am so hard on myself. I’m constantly beating myself up. I guess the response is to find good people to support you and let you know that it’s okay.

Yuri:                      Totally. You’ve mentioned a few things, like how you had a mentor/consultant as you got started, which made a big difference for the way you built out your practice and your programs. You talked about getting the right social support around you. That’s so important.

That’s one of the most common themes that’s come up repeatedly in this podcast. We’ve talked with some very successful entrepreneurs in our space, and time and time again they talk about the importance of mentorship and the importance of surrounding yourself with great people. You become a product of your environments, and if you’re surrounding yourself with the wrong people, that’s who you’re going to become.

I wanted to ask you one more question about the kids, because I’ve got three young boys and I’m always fascinated by parents who are entrepreneurs. What has having kids taught you about business, or influence, in general?

Tanya:                   As a mom, you try and lead by example. I say this to parents a lot when they bring their kids here, even for weight loss. I’ll say to parents, “What are you eating?” They’ll say, “Well, this isn’t about me.” And I’ll say to the mom, “You can’t expect your kids to eat carrot sticks if you’re eating potato chips, so it does start with you.”

The apple doesn’t fall from the tree. As much as people think they look up to celebrities or supermodels, your children look up to you. The work I do makes such an impact on people’s lives. At least that is my motivation; to make the world a better place, to inspire people to be their personal best, and not just through weight.

I see F-Factor as something much bigger. It’s the recognition that you never have to settle for mediocrity in life. Not in your health, not in your weight, not in any aspect.

We can speak to that in a minute, but I think my children see that I have a very altruistic motivation to help others, and therefore, they’re so understanding when I’m not home. It’s not like I’m out selling clothes at a department store for a commission. I think they see the value in what I’m doing, and I think that they’re inspired and recognize that we all can help others.

And as far as being a mom to daughters, I want my daughters to see that they can juggle family and career. I want my daughters to be empowered to be financially independent, but I want all three of my kids to find career paths where they’re extremely passionate. We know success follows, especially as an entrepreneur, when you must live and breathe it.

I mean, this comes out of my pores. I love F-Factor so much. I could talk about it all day long.

One, because I live it. I follow the program and that’s the authenticity of it. Speaking to anyone that has their own brand, you need to believe in what you’re doing more than anyone else. But it’s that passion. I think my children see pride when I’m successful at something. I think they’ve learned resilience.

They have seen me come home very late at night looking depleted, but they also see me get up the next day, resilient, and wash my face to go back to work. Whether you’re a dad or a mom, the lessons that we experience and the highs and lows of being in business, teach our children hard work.

They teach our children resiliency. It shows them drive. It also teaches them to create plans, so that they can be actionable and always work towards their goals.

Yuri:                      That’s great advice. You talk about authenticity and leading by example.

That is the best way to lead others. You can’t say stuff and not do it. You have to walk the talk, and it’s very transparent that you do that. Tanya, this has been awesome. This has been very illuminating.

You’ve touched on so many things, so for everyone listening, go back and listen to this again at .5 speed and take down a couple notes if you’ve missed anything. There’s some good stuff that I hope you’re picking up.

 

The Rapid Five

Tanya, are you ready for the Rapid Five?

Tanya:                   Let’s do it.

Yuri:                      All right, here we go. Five rapid fire questions. You have no idea what they are. Whatever comes top of mind is most likely the right answer.

Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

Tanya:                   Potato chips.

Yuri:                      Cool. In business, what’s one of your biggest weaknesses? Unless “potato chips” is applicable there, too.

Tanya:                   I can’t multitask. I would like to learn to not be so myopic. I literally cannot even look at my phone and hear someone speak to me. I would like to figure that out.

Yuri:                      Second question, what’s your biggest strength?

Tanya:                   I’m wildly self-aware, for better or for worse. I know what’s exceptional about me, I know what sucks about me, and I know what’s mediocre.

Yuri:                      I’ll just say something about your “weakness.”

I think having that myopic focus is a big advantage, especially in today’s day and age where there’s so many shiny objects and distractions. So, I’d give yourself a little bit of leeway on that one, because I’m sure that’s served you very well.

Tanya:                   Well, thank you. I don’t give one of those canned questions when you ask someone in an interview, “What’s the worst thing about you?” then it’s the best thing.

Here’s another weakness. I think people are surprised by this, because I could be so disciplined with what I eat, because obviously, I’m a dietician, but I’m not always disciplined with what I allow to fall out of my mouth.

I’m very reactive, and I would like to be a little bit more thoughtful with my words, especially with my team. I take everything here so personally. It’s my brand. It’s my name.

My message is correct, but my delivery’s not always as soft as I would like it to be. So, I need to work on that.

Yuri:                      Well, thank you for sharing that. That’s not easy for anyone to admit, so thank you.

Tanya:                   That’s a big vulnerability. There you go.

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

Tanya:                   I believe that I’ve become much better at hiring people. Before, I always hired with my heart and not my head. If I liked you during the interview and could see going out to lunch with you, that was enough for me, because it’s such a small company.

At the beginning, I wanted to build a company where I enjoyed everybody that I worked with, but that didn’t necessarily qualify someone for being right for the job. I never cared about references. I think I’ve become more thorough in looking for success in someone’s past that qualifies them to help build my company.

I think I’ve become better at identifying what makes a good candidate. Before I was much laxer with that. I would defend it by saying, “Character can’t be learned but skills can,” but that just put my company in such a poor position because everyone was learning on the job.

Yuri:                      It’s a fine balance really, because you want to hire up, right? You want to hire people that are better than you, but a lot of people don’t have the revenue to support that. They bring in people that they have to train for years, so it’s always a fine balance, but that’s a good perspective.

Number four, what do you first thing in the morning? 

Tanya:                   Coffee.

Yuri:                      Are you an early morning person or do you sleep in a little bit?

Tanya:                   I am. It’s funny, because I don’t even think it’s the caffeine. I think it’s the Columbian in me. I go for the coffee. I think if you were to give me decaf, I’d enjoy it just as much. But I have the routine. Get up, grab my phone, grab a cup of coffee, and have breakfast with the kids.

Yuri:                      Yeah. I wonder if you had blood drawn, if it would actually be coffee… This is obviously a terrible stereotype, but…

Tanya:                   No, mine would be wine if my blood was drawn.

Yuri:                      Nice! Red or whites? What’s your favorite wine?

Tanya:                   White, but I’m not too picky.

Yuri:                      Yeah. Nice, very nice. Finally, complete this sentence, I know I’m being successful when …

Tanya:                   The people around me are happy, both my clients and my team. To me, when my clients are successful and the energy outside of my office is a positive one, that means I’m good at my job. That means I’m creating a work environment where my team feels empowered and inspired.

It means I’m treating them well, so as a businesswoman, I feel successful. But as a technician, as a dietician, I know that I’m succeeding at what I’m being asked to do.

Yuri:                      Awesome. Love it! Tanya, thank you so much for joining us today on the podcast. This has been a great interview.

Where is the best place for people to follow your work, check out your book, or see you in practice if they live in New York?

Tanya:                   Visit our website, which is http://www.ffactor.com/. Follow me on social at TanyaZuckerbrot and F-Factor on Instagram. Our two books are available on Amazon.

Yuri:                      Very nice. Tanya, once again, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us. I just want to acknowledge you for all the amazing work that you’ve done and for all the impact you’ve had with clients locally and around the world. Just keep on keeping on, because you’ve got great passion.

You’ve got a great message, and I’m excited to see what the future holds for you. It’s looking pretty bright!

Tanya:                   Thank you, Yuri.

Yuri:                      You’re welcome.

 

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Yuri’s Take

Great interview, right?

You can tell she’s passionate and you can sense the energy. One of the things I want to bring home in this post-interview ramble, if you want to call it that, is one of the things that she did right out of the gate. She hired a mentor.

Elon Musk’s mother, right? Maye Musk. She had Maye as her mentor right out of the gate as a consultant to show her how to build out her business. Again, it doesn’t matter what business you’re in. To have that type of guidance is imperative for success.

Now, yes, you can obviously achieve success all by yourself and you can figure things out all on your own, but wouldn’t it make sense to piggyback on someone else’s years of mistakes, lessons, and learnings?

It does. It absolutely does. I’ve seen this time and time again. The people who succeed, whatever success is for you, have a mentor. Success doesn’t have to be monetary, but those that achieve the level of success they want get there faster when they’re piggybacking on someone else’s coattails.

They’re hiring a mentor. They’re hiring a coach, and that’s what I do with Healthpreneur. The highest level, the first class of service I provide for our Healthpreneur community is through our Luminaries Masterminds. We’ve got an amazing group of health and fitness leaders who are in different verticals: naturopathy doctors, medical doctors, health coaches, trainers, you name it.

What I provide for them, in addition to great resources, templates, and proven processes to grow their business, is just giving them guard rails by saying, “Listen, guys. Stay on this path, because it’s very easy to get distracted by the next thing, the next shiny object, and if you don’t have someone to reel you back in, it’s easy to get off course.”

One of my big objectives with the people that I work with is to say, “Listen. This is what you want to work on in the next 90 days, right? Let’s focus on that. Just turn the blinders on to anything else that comes up.”

That’s tough to do when you’re on your own. I work as a business strategist overseeing your business, to some degree, and I can see what you can’t. Oftentimes, as the business owner, we’re so close to the bark of the tree that we can’t even see the forest.

But it’s very easy for me to sit on top of the mountain and look down at the forest and say, “Hey, listen. Did you know there’s actually a cliff coming down the road?” You’re unaware of it because you’re looking right in front of you. You’re in the trenches. You’re in the weeds of your business, and that’s why it’s so important to have someone else’s perspective.

But not just anyone else’s. Someone who’s actually walked the path, who’s accomplished what you want to accomplish. That’s important when hiring a coach or a mentor.

If you’re interested in seeing if you would qualify to work with us in the Luminaries, you can email me personally at [email protected], and I’ll send you more information. I’ll send you an application to fill out, and if you’re a good fit, we can discuss that.

The message today is to find that mentor. You’ve heard it time and time again if you’ve been on the podcast for a while. I would say that 80% of the people we’ve interviewed advise the same thing: Surround yourself with great people and find a mentor. Everything else takes care of itself.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this interview. If you have, and you haven’t subscribed to the podcast yet, please do so today. We’ve got some awesome episodes coming your way. We’ve got lots of amazing episodes and solo rounds that we’ve already created that are ready for you to download right from iTunes. Go to Healthpreneur Podcast on iTunes, and just hit the little “subscribe” button. You’ll be all set.

That’s all for today. I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. Thanks so much for joining me, for your attention, and for your loyalty. I appreciate all the work you do in the world. Even if I don’t know you personally, I know that you’re listening to this because you have a gift.

You have expertise and wisdom that can transform people’s lives, and I want to commend you for going out there and doing what you do. Continue to be great, do great, and I’ll see you in our next episode.

 

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Transcription

What’s up Healthpreneurs? Welcome to the Healthpreneur Podcast. I hope your day is going great. Before we jump into today’s episode, if you missed any of last week, we interviewed Dr. Josh Axe about how he created one of the largest online health brands in just four years. We also spoke with one of the most amazing and intuitive energy healing coaches, Deborah Wayne. She discussed how to get unstuck. So, if you missed any of that stuff go back to those last two episodes.

Today, I’ve got a great treat for you once again. We’ve got a great guest. Her name is Alicia Streger, and I’ve known Alicia for a short time, mostly online. We’ve never met in person but we’ve jived because we have very similar energy and philosophies as to how we approach business.

Like me, she serves other fitness business owners to help them turn their businesses around and impact more people, make more money, and enjoy more freedom. It’s great to see how she’s could do that over the past couple of years.

She started off as a trainer. She’s going to share her journey as to how that metamorphosis happened and how it all started with a tiny classified ad in the newspaper.

If you’re a trainer, chiropractor, or anybody doing one-on-one work and you want to learn how to leverage your time and serve more people, this episode is going to help you out. There are a couple distinctions that Alicia and I bring up that are important to understand if you want to build a business instead of having a job.

Let’s be very honest. If you’re training clients and trading time for money, one-on-one, you essentially have job.  We’re going to look at when Alicia realized what a big difference it makes when you step out of things to create a business that helps a lot of people.

Alicia Streger is a fitness business owner turned business coach, who specializes in helping fitness business owners magnify their impact and streamline their businesses.  She works closely with people to help them build businesses that give back to the world, while creating both financial and time freedom.

She’s built multiple offline and online businesses from the ground up and now teaches her success strategies and systems to other fitness professionals. Her website is fitproessentials.com. Check it out after this episode.

Without any further ado, let’s welcome Alicia onto the show.

Alicia, welcome to the Healthpreneur Podcast. How are you?

Alicia:                   I am good. Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be here.

Yuri:                      Yes, you are very welcome. It’s great to have you here. The real reason I do this podcast is because it gives me an excuse to hang out and have conversations with people like you. It’s an easy way for us to generate content and have cool conversations.

I’m super pumped to have you here. You’ve been doing some amazing stuff in the fitness space for the last couple years; helping other fitness professionals expand their presence and grow their businesses. Take us back to how it all started and walk us through how you got into the fitness space.

 

Trading dollars for hours and the energy in group training

Alicia:                   Absolutely. First, thank you for all you’re doing, too. Your message is incredible and I see the way you’re connecting with people. Thank you for the value that you’re adding to the industry.

I started like so many people start in the fitness industry, I was doing one-on-one personal training and my degree is in exercise sport science. I wanted to become a personal trainer. I jumped into one-on-one personal training and loved it. I loved the connection I was making with people and the impact that I created, but I got burnt out quickly after a couple years of doing that.

I realized that I needed to make a shift. I was sitting in my car driving from home to home and my diet started to slack and I was skipping workouts. It was the opposite from why I became a personal trainer.

11 years ago now – this is not the route I would recommend people take to grow their business – I took out an ad in our local community paper. We had six people sign up for our first outdoor boot camp class here in Orlando, Florida.

It was amazing. It was so much fun and we grew. We grew a lot through referrals. I had no idea in the beginning what I was doing for marketing. I threw some things against the wall and saw what would stick. Then, I finally started investing in mentorship and coaching and watched my business explode.

I started doing some direct marketing and that was a game changer for me. We grew. Fast forward a few years later, and we had four locations, two indoor and two outdoor, and full-time staff. I sold my business about two years ago to an amazing woman who’s a professional soccer player.

Now I spend my time coaching fitness professionals and connecting with amazing people.

Yuri:                      That’s awesome. I’m not going to ask you who that professional soccer player was. I’m curious because I played pro soccer and I love the whole space.

I don’t think anyone can relate to your story, by the way. I don’t think any trainer out there doesn’t look at their watch and think, “Oh my God, another five minutes.” Or, “I’ve had 10 clients today. I think enough is enough.” We can all relate to that.

When was the moment you said, “This has got to stop”? You said you took out a classified ad in the newspaper. How did you even get the idea to do that?

Alicia:                   The tipping point for me was when I moved down to Florida and started dating my husband. I’d known him for years, so I moved down to Florida. I said I was never going to do the long-distance relationship thing and I did, it wasn’t working out, so I moved. And I was still never seeing him.

I never saw him. I was in my car all day long and I knew it had to change. I knew I couldn’t do the one-on-one thing anymore. I was capping my income because I was trading dollars for hours. I wanted to have a different type of lifestyle.

I had no idea what I was doing, so I just tried an ad in the local paper to see what happened. It was just like throwing it up against the wall and it stuck. Six people signed up. I’d never trained groups before. It was amazing.

The energy was crazy and it was so much fun. Some of those clients I had for the nine years I had my business until I sold it. That was the tipping point. I needed to make a change. I didn’t want to continue living that way. That was my route.

Yuri:                      Awesome. I completely agree. I don’t enjoy one-on-one coaching whether it’s fitness or business because I find it very limited. As you mentioned, there’s so much more energy in a group. You have synergy and the energy’s so much greater.

With what you teach now, do you find that your audience, as they’re looking to grow their business, are looking to do more than one-on-one? Are they looking to do more group coaching? Or is it a combination of both?

Alicia:                   It is a combination of both. Most people want to transition from one-on-one to group because it’s scalable. You can have a lot more leverage and it’s not solely dependent on you the trainer. You can hire other people to teach groups and whatnot.

You can make a lot more income that way as well. But there are people that are amazing at one-on-one. They connect at that level and that’s where their sweet spot is. They absolutely love it and that’s awesome.

There’s no one size fits all. Whatever the best is for that person is where they’ll focus. But I’d say that the trend is moving into groups from one-on-one training; specifically, small-group and even semiprivate now.

Yuri:                      Awesome. You guys have an amazing Facebook group and community of fit pros. What do you find is one of the biggest challenges they’re dealing with as they try to grow their business?

 

Biggest Limiting Factor

Alicia:                   Awesome question. I think everybody’s trying to do too much themselves. I would say that’s probably their biggest limiting factor. As entrepreneurs, we’re all control freaks. You can’t relate to that all, right?

Myself included! That’s why we’re entrepreneurs. We have a great way of doing things and we have a high level of expectation and quality. It sometimes takes a long time to teach somebody a skillset where you can just do it yourself a lot faster. But in the long run, it makes so much sense to be able to teach somebody something.

Invest that time, energy, and resources to train somebody and free up that space going forward for yourself. That’s the only way to grow and scale without losing your mind.

Yuri:                      Totally. What are some of the things that business owners in our space should get off their plates?

Alicia:                   It depends on the person, what they love to do, and their strengths. In most cases, I would say hiring a part-time admin person will be one of the biggest, most freeing experiences of your life.

You don’t need to be chasing people down for payments or entering data into the computer. Even help answering the phones and following up with leads on the front side is helpful. If you’re getting a massive amount of leads, it’s just not possible to do it all yourself. The part-time admin is usually huge.

If you’re coaching every single class 5-10 hours a day, maybe hiring a part-time coach would be the best fit for you. But I would say free up the admin hours because we love people. We love surrounding ourselves in that energy that you get from coaching. Sometimes sitting at the computer, even if it’s for 45 minutes or an hour a day, drains us.

Whatever you hate doing the most, that’s what I would look to outsource the best.

Yuri:                      I’m looking forward to the day when we can clone ourselves. Hopefully that’s not too far away because that’d be cool.

Alicia:                   If you figure that out I need to be the first to know.

Yuri:                      I know. That might be a little bit trippy. It would be nice to have complimentary skillsets. You’d want to clone yourself with a couple adjustments, maybe.

Alicia:                   Yes. If there was another one of me I think my husband would go crazy.

Yuri:                      Exactly. Totally.

Alicia:                   That would be a little scary.

 

The importance of systems, processes, and the client experience

Yuri:                      As you’ve grown the business and look back over the years, what’s the biggest challenge that you’ve ever faced in business? A holy shit moment; a real pivotal moment. Things could’ve gone either way.

Can you recall a time like that? How did you go through that experience?

Alicia:                   For sure. Our first outdoor location was going amazingly and we were making great money. My team was awesome. I thought I’d open a second location and it would be just as amazing.

I did that thinking it wouldn’t be twice the amount of work. I didn’t have the system set up and I thought I’d double what I was doing with the first one. But I didn’t have double the amount of time in a day. I learned the hard way. We had that location open for about five and half or six months before I realized that it was incredibly hard to manage both locations. That was my turning point.

I realized I was not going to be able to have multiple locations just by doubling what I was doing. I needed to create systems. I needed to have processes in place. I needed to streamline what I was doing to make it more efficient.

It set me back months in my business, but I went back to the drawing board. I rebuilt my processes and systems, and that’s what allowed me to scale, take my business to new levels, hire a team, and do it in a streamlined way that was efficient and profitable.

Yuri:                      Nice. Let’s talk about processes and systems for a second. This is not the stuff most people love doing. What do those processes and systems look like? How do you approach that? How do you know when something should be turned into a process or system that someone else could deploy for you?

Alicia:                   I believe everything in your business needs a process or system. And it has one. It might not be efficient and it’s probably up in your head. It’s just a matter of getting it out of your head and onto paper.

Then, when you see what it looks like, you look at how it relates to the clients, which most of things that we do in our business do. I ask, “What is the client experience from this? How can I make this better? How can I make it more efficient, more streamlined?”

And always think of the client first. Does this serve the client in their best interest? Is this easiest for them? And that’s the perspective I go with.

But once you write it down then you can track it. Even if you’re the one that’s following through with the system, it’s just a matter of literally writing, step-by-step, everything that you do. Then see what you can eliminate.

See what you can possibly even automate to make things go faster. Then, down the road when you are ready to bring on a teammate that can take over that responsibility, you have a process to train that person.

Yuri:                      I didn’t think about systems and processes for years. I can’t even remember the point where I was like, “Wow, this I something I should probably be doing.” Was there a moment for you where someone showed you the light by saying, “Hey, this is something you should consider doing.” Or did you just stumble upon it and realize it yourself?

Alicia:                   It came out of necessity. I know that I’m not going to be here in Florida forever. My husband’s in the fire department, so I knew my endgame. I knew that, since we’d be moving, I wanted to sell my business one day, or hire a general manager to take over.

At this point I didn’t know exactly where I was going to end up, but I knew I was never going to be able to do that if I didn’t have this stuff in place. That’s when I started drilling down and putting down the step-by-step so I could delegate everything to somebody down the road. I was planning and that’s when this stuff started to take shape.

Yuri:                      That’s such a good point. I just want to highlight that for our listeners. If you’re listening to this and have no intention of selling your business, ask yourself that question anyway.

What would have to be true if I were to sell my business? If someone were run it for you, what are the things they would have to know? If you don’t have that stuff documented, start documenting it.

That’s the one thing I wish I had done from day zero in my business. It makes everything else so much easier and you can transition to other things much more effectively. That’s good advice.

Alicia:                   100%. You never know. If you want to go on vacation, you don’t feel well, or you get sick for a time, you need other people to step in if you want your business to be there when you get back.

That stuff’s so important.

Yuri:                      Otherwise, you just have a job.

Alicia:                   Exactly.

Yuri:                      I look at it as we’re creating McDonald’s franchises but healthier. McDonald’s is run by teenagers for the most part. How is that possible? They know exactly how to put the burger on, put on the lettuce, and two tomatoes. They’re so structured and systemized that anyone can do it. It’s a nice analogy to think of with this type of stuff.

Alicia:                   Absolutely.

Yuri:                      So if you started in a completely new market or new business within the same market, what’s the first thing you would start doing?

Alicia:                   The first thing I’d do is find a problem and create a solution for that problem.

You can have all the great ideas in the world, but if it’s not going to connect with somebody and solve their problem, you’re not going to make any progress. So finding a critical problem that enough people share and creating a solution for that.

Yuri:                      What do you think is the big problem you’re solving with the fitness pros you’re serving right now?

Alicia:                   The biggest problem that I focus on solving is systemizing, honestly. That’s the biggest thing. I think many people have so much clouding in their head. They’re doing so many things. It’s just a matter of organizing it, prioritizing it, and getting processes in place.

That’s the biggest thing that holds people back from being able to scale. They’re doing so much they don’t even know what they’re doing. They don’t know what they should be doing. They need to get real clarity, prioritize, organize, and then systemize.

Yuri:                      That’s great. I’ve noticed some of the products you have. They’re easy but done-for-you type of things for your audience, which is amazing. I assume it’s a system you created for yourself that you’re giving other people now.

Alicia:                   Absolutely. The transformation challenges are all the things we used in our business, tested, and refined over years before releasing them. These things we use with our clients and they’ve done well. They were great resources for us, so I thought they would be great resources for other people.

Connecting with people and maintaining that connection online or off

Yuri:                      What motivates you to build the business you’re building?  What’s the big vision? What excites you when you get up in the morning?

Alicia:                   I love people. I seriously love people. I love connecting with people. Just this past weekend I had some clients fly in. That’s what keeps me fired up.

When people reach out and say, “Hey, this changed my life.” Even in fitness and coaching, it’s all the same. People are people. You’re making an impact in their life. You don’t even realize how deep it goes. Sometimes marriages are saved and relationships with their kids are better.

Everything in their life changes when they don’t have to be burdened by financial strain. That changes everything for people. That’s what keeps me going. I’ve been fortunate. I’ve reached my financial goals along the way.

I freaking love people and I love helping them and that’s what keeps me going every single day. I have goals to grow and impact more people, and that’s what keeps me fired up because I freaking love it.

Yuri:                      That’s wicked. What’s so cool about our industry is that most of us get into this business of training or working with clients because we enjoy people. We love connecting and serving them. The irony is that, at least when I started online 12 years ago, the Holy Grail was having an online business.

All these trainers came online and now they’re printing eBooks, sitting behind their computer all day, looking at stats, and thinking, “Man, I hate my business.” It’s like, “Hey dude, maybe you should reconnect with people again and reconsider the way you’re running your business.”

That’s something I dealt with a couple years ago. Is that something you’ve dealt with as you’ve been online more?

Alicia:                   100%. It even happened in my fitness business. I got totally all on board with the messaging at the time. I said, “I need to work 100% on my business and pull myself out of it. I don’t want to be training with my clients anymore. I just want to work on my business all the time.” I did that, but then I was so disconnected from my clients. I felt unfulfilled and, at that point, as the business owner not seeing clients every day, the only things escalated to you are issues.

All I did was put out mini-fires and I wasn’t connected. That’s when I started jumping back in my business and realizing, “I love these people.” I don’t know how I let myself pull out so far, but I got back in. I started teaching more and I fell back in love with it. That happened to me.

Yuri:                      And it’s probably more enjoyable when you have the systems in place. There’s a big difference. I remember when I was training clients there was the feeling of having versus choosing to.

I don’t think there’s a right or wrong way to do it. A lot of people think they’ve got to be 100% online. You don’t have to be. You can tell people, whether you have an online business or not, that you’re still using the internet to grow your business. Whether it’s a boot camp, clinic, practice, gym, or online business, it’s all the same stuff for the most part.

Where do you see the industry moving in terms of trends or things that are coming? What do you forecast coming down the pipeline?

 

The future of the health industry, perseverance, passion, and clarity

Alicia:                   Great question. Obviously, everybody is moving into online training. I see that growing massively. I see that getting a lot more competitive. I see the offline fitness business owner, the brick and mortar, being able to dominate their space again because there are going to be floods of people moving into the online space.

I see a lot of trends with the obstacle course races. Ninja warrior is becoming massive. They’re popping up everywhere. So, those little subsets and specialty types of fitness populations are growing. Obviously, MMA is still incredibly popular.

But the focus is back on the individual, like the semi privates and small groups. People love real connection and attention. If you’re connecting with your clients, whether online or offline, that’s where you’re going to have a real competitive advantage.

Yuri:                      Totally. That’s what it’s all about.

With that said, what do you think is one of the most important skills or traits entrepreneurs must have for lasting success?

Alicia:                   Passion. You’ve got to love what you do. This is a labor of love. There’s going to be ups and downs and not everything is going to convert off a Facebook ad. You must have perseverance and resilience. You must love what you do and love your clients.

Yuri:                      If someone has been training clients offline for a while, and they’re ready to step out of that and get into online or group training, what advice would you give them to get started? Do they print a program? How do they get in front of people? What advice would you give to someone if you sat down to have coffee with them?

Alicia:                   I would reinforce having hyper-clarity on what they want. There’s more than one tactic to get to that result, so don’t get too caught up in the tactics. Just get clarity on who you want to help and what the problem is that you’re solving.

Then go out and connect with people because you will do well if you have that approach and just get your message out. Don’t be afraid to get out there.

I pushed myself to get on video and I’m still not comfortable on video. It’s just not one of my favorite things, but I still do it because that’s the way that I connect with people. Get your message out there, get in front of people, and don’t be afraid to be authentic and genuine.

Yuri:                      Awesome. That’s why there is ample space in this industry even though it’s very competitive. If you just be yourself, no one else can be you. If you’re trying to be someone else, that’s when you run into problems.

Alicia:                   Exactly.

 

The Rapid Five

Yuri:                      Very cool. Alicia, this has been a lot of fun so far, and it’s about to get better. Are you ready for the Rapid Five?

Alicia:                   Woot, woot! Let’s do this!

Yuri:                      So, you’ve got no prior knowledge of these questions. Whatever comes top of mind is probably the right answer.

Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

Alicia:                   I’m a control freak. It’s hard for me to delegate tasks if I do them myself. I need to get out of my own head, look at the big picture, trust my team, and follow through with this. I consider myself a recovering control freak.

 Yuri:                      Do you have kids?

Alicia:                   No kids.

Yuri:                      Do you plan on having kids?

Alicia:                   Not really. My mom’s very upset about that but, no kids.

Yuri:                      I commend you for that because there’s no right or wrong answer to that. I’ve got three boys and I would say control is probably the thing that I’ve learned most about relinquishing with them.   I wasn’t sure if you had kids and have experienced that as well. A lot of that stuff creeps up; your kids will mirror back a lot of your own BS.

Alicia:                   That would be scary for me.

Yuri:                      I guess you have team members which are like kids, to some degree. Depending on the team member. What is your biggest strength?

Alicia:                   I love connecting with people. I’d say that has always been relatively easy for me because I love and meet people where they are. That’s always been intuitive for me.

I can get to the heart of what’s going on with somebody quickly. I show up fully present and they can connect with that. I never judge, so we end up having great conversations.

Yuri:                      That’s great. This probably spills over into your marketing as well. I think a lot of times, and I was guilty of this as well, we create stuff that we think people want instead of realizing where they’re at and what they want.

Do you find that you have a nice intuitive approach to deliver on what people really want?

Alicia:                   Yes. Exactly. When you get to know your clients and their needs, and you’ve been doing it long enough, you have a solid understanding of what people need.

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

Alicia:                   I would say I’m still not 100% great at it, but I’ve been able to get my message out there in a bigger way through my Facebook group than through my email list. So by asking certain types of questions and responding in certain ways on Facebook, it’s been pivotal for me in my business.

I would say learning how to effectively manage, too. In the very beginning, it sucked up all my time. Now, I do it in a much more strategic way, and I’m able to get my message out there through Facebook a lot more effectively.

Yuri:                      That’s awesome. And you probably get better engagement than from your emails.

Alicia:                   Oh, for sure.

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

Alicia:                   I drink a giant glass of water. Well, I get up and feed my dog. That’s first because he stares at me until I do that. Then I’ll have a giant glass of water and do my morning ritual.

I’ve got my meditation, supplementation, and I’ll read my business mission statement every single day.

Yuri:                      Nice. That’s important to do because it’s very easy to get off track. If you review those goals and that mission, it helps you come back to what your purpose is, even just for that day to be more focused.

Alicia:                   It’s so easy to get stuck in the busy-ness and that helps you refocus.

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

Alicia:                   When I feel connected with my clients. You know the five love languages? Time is one for me.

When I’m spending time with my clients, and this is from a business perspective, I’m happy. When I’m spending time with my family, I’m happy. When I feel fulfilled is when I’m spending quality time with the people I care about.

Yuri:                      Awesome. Alicia, thank you so much for joining us today on the podcast. This has been a great conversation. Where’s the best place for people to follow your work and stay in touch with you online?

Alicia:                   Oh, you’re amazing. Thank you so much for having me. My website is fitproessentials.com. My Facebook group is Fitness Business Freedom Formula.

Yuri:                      You’ve got a great following in there. It’s pretty substantial.

Alicia:                   We just passed 9,000 members, which is cool.

Yuri:                      Good for you! Check it out, guys. Good stuff. Alicia, once again, thank you so much for taking the time. I just want to acknowledge you for all the amazing work that you’re doing in our space to elevate other entrepreneurs and fitness business owners to impact more people. Thanks for making it a little bit easier for them to do so.

Alicia:                   You’re a total rock star. Thank you so much for having me on and for all you do for the fitness industry. You’re amazing.

Yuri:                      Thank you so much.

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Yuri’s Take

All right guys, there we go. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Alicia.

Most of us in the health and fitness space enjoy connecting with people in person. And that’s one of the reasons why I do so many workshops, speaking engagements, and annual live events. It’s my opportunity to connect, bond, and get to know you guys at a deeper level.

It’s much more fulfilling to me than just giving a course or book that you can download or buy. It’s great to do that, but for me, personally, I feel most juiced up and jazzed up when I’m in the flesh with people.

Our Healthpreneur Live event was last September, and our next one is September 20th to 23rd. Mark the dates, because we’re almost sold out. It’s by application or invitation only.

So, if you want to join us, go to healthpreneurgroup.com/live for more information. It’s an amazing event.

We did our first big one last September and I don’t even think I ate for three days. I did, but I was so energized I was floating. I was levitating for three days because I was in my element.

And I want you to experience that same thing in your business, whatever that might be for you. If you love hanging behind the computer and cranking out content, awesome. If you enjoy doing videos, great. But if you want to connect with people, you must do that in person.

Whatever is most meaningful to you, be honest about it and find ways to make that more a part of your business. Even if you’re selling products online, there are ways you can connect with your customers so that you feel fulfilled and they get a better service.

There’s all sorts of cool ways to build a business that is reflective of your core values and what’s most meaningful to you. That’s something I want you to think about today.

As always, if you’ve enjoyed this episode, great. If you’ve been subscribed to the podcast for a while, then you know all the goodness that is coming your way. And if you’re a new listener then welcome to the Healthpreneur Podcast!

It’s been a lot of fun bringing this to you. Just to let you know, we release three new episodes per week. Mondays are solo rounds where I give you some in-depth teaching. Wednesday and Fridays are all about interviewing amazing people like Alicia who are in the health and fitness space doing great things with their businesses.

The whole podcast is about helping you take your business to the next level by inspiring you, highlighting other entrepreneurs, showing their journey, and addressing what is involved in building a sustainable business. I hope these conversations light you up and inspire you.

That’s the whole premise. So, if you haven’t subscribed yet, just head on over to iTunes and search for the Healthpreneur Podcast. Click on the subscribe button and you will enjoy 90+ episodes so far.

We’ve got many, many more to go. You don’t want to miss any of them. They’re good.

With that said, I hope you have an amazing day. I want to thank you once again for joining me and for your attention. I appreciate you. I appreciate the work you’re doing in this world. As always, get out there, continue to be great and do great and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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Follow Alicia Streger at:

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Transcription

Good day, and welcome to the Healthpreneur Podcast! I’m excited to be back. Today I want to share a cool resource and epiphany that I think will help you become a better coach. Whether you’re coaching clients or communicating with people, kids, or anyone else, this will impact and improve many aspects of your life as they pertain to communication with others.

 

A tip to improve your communication and the book, “The Coaching Habit”

This was inspired by a book I recently read called, “The Coaching Habit” by Michael Bungay Stanier. It was a quick read; I finished it in a day. I love actionable books. You get the point, you don’t need 500 pages of nonsense, and it’s useful. The whole idea in this book is that we, as the experts, tend to spend too much time talking and spewing out advice too quickly.

The reason I read this book is because I know that, for me, becoming a better coach is extremely valuable. For me, as a parent and coach, I help equip others with better coaching skills, too. I’m all about learning and growing, it’s just part of who I am. It’s part of my DNA and probably yours, too.

I’ve been known to, when someone asks a question, jump in with advice. I say, “Hey you should do this,” or “I’ve done this,” or, “This has worked well for me,” etc.  If you’ve ever found yourself in the same boat, welcome to the club of overachieving advice givers. Let’s just call it that.

The book explains that, when you jump in to give advice too quickly, a couple things that happen.

 

Creating overdependence with advice vs. asking more and talking less

When you give advice too quickly, you immediately create overdependence. That is powerful because I’m all about empowering people to figure out their own solutions. I want to just guide them to that answer.

But what I find myself doing quite a bit, whether in business or health, is giving them the answer a lot of the time.

What that’s doing is training them to not think on their own, but to come to you for the answer. And as a coach, that’s a bad thing. It’s not the greatest thing because, although it’s nice for people to rely on you for support, it also means they rely solely on you for moving forward with their stuff.

So, whether you’re helping someone on the health side of things or in business, you must be able to empower people and challenge them to figure out their own solutions. The whole premise of the book is to ask more and talk less.

We have strategy calls – we call them result accelerator calls – with prospective clients, and we’ve always had guiding principles for the way we do these calls. And the number one thing I wrote way back in the day was, “Ask more, talk less.”

It’s funny we tend to fall back into old habits. Yes, we ask questions, but there are times on those calls where I spend way too much time talking. And when I spend too much time talking, the other person tunes out.

The way humans work is, “What’s in it for me?” We love hearing ourselves speak. Maybe I have a podcast because I like talking, I don’t know. But when you’re speaking with someone else, it’s important to ask questions, let them speak, and just be quiet.

If you observe most social interactions, the tendency is to ask a question, and allow the person to respond while thinking how you can jump in next. “Well that’s what happened to me when I was…” and the other person responds, “Oh, totally. I remember this one time when I…” It’s always about us. We’re just kind of one upping the other person.

It’s never about going deeper with questions, right?

 

What smart coaches do to empower others to figure out solutions

You know you’re in a bad conversation when the first couple sentences or the first couple words are, “You should.” Whatever comes after “you should” is nonsense because advice is about to come.

Smart conversationalists and smart coaches, instead of going down the, “you should” or, “here’s what’s worked for me” route, ask a follow-up question.

A follow-up question might be, “What’s the real challenge here for you?” Or, “What else?” Asking questions that go a little bit deeper allow the person to elaborate on their problem and help them figure out a solution.

I want to give you an example of how this came into my life a couple days ago. One of our Mastermind members posted inside our Facebook group about a couple different headlines that he had for some new articles. He said, “Three headlines. What do you guys think of these?”

Old Yuri would have said, “Okay, number three is good but here’s how I would change it.” That’s what I would have done because I thought it would serve him best to give him the easy path. Instead, what I did was reframed it into a question. I said, “This one sounds good but I think you give away a little bit too much in the headline and reduce some of the curiosity, so how can you rephrase this to increase curiosity to get the click more effectively?”

That’s how I rephrased it. So instead of giving him the answer right out of the gate, I ask him to go back to the drawing board, think it through, and figure it out with a little bit of guidance. When we allow someone to answer their own question, it creates deeper learning, meaning, and retention for them.

When they come to their own discoveries and conclusions, it will be a thousand times more meaningful to that person.

When someone comes to you with a problem, you might say, “Here’s what you should do.” You have the solution. You want to help people. But I want to encourage you to ask more questions. If you need help with that, start off by picking up the book, “The Coaching Habit.”

 

Learning how to ask better questions to get better answers and examples

It’ll give you some quick questions to add to your arsenal if someone’s come to you with a question or a problem. For example, you might start off by saying, “This is great. I’ve got a few ideas. But what’s coming to you, first and foremost?”

Get a little feedback from them. Or if they come to you with a problem, you might say, “What’s on your mind?” Then, “What else? Is there anything else? What specifically do you want?” Help them get clear by figuring things out.

Several years ago, when I was working with Strategic Coach and Dan Sullivan – great program by the way – one of the things he said was, “You can’t change the way a person thinks, but you can give them the tool that helps them change the way they think.” That tool, a lot of times, is simply asking questions.

That thinking deepened and seated itself in my brain. A lot of the worksheets, frameworks, and thinking tools I provide for my Mastermind members all stem from that initial learning from him. Now, for instance, if we’re doing one of our Mastermind meeting hot seats, people don’t just sit in the hot seat and start spewing information.

They fill out a one page sheet called the hot seat helper. That one page, in five minutes, will give them extreme clarity on where they need help and the specific question to ask. When they get up on that chair, we’re not spending an hour on their stuff. We’re spending twenty minutes, cutting to the chase, getting deep in their issue, and figuring out a solution.

But the solution is only as good as the question, right? So if we want better answers, we have to ask better questions.

 

How asking questions will improve your business and personal life

If you are in a better position of looking for help, get extremely clear on the question. I have people that come to me with questions. One of our Mastermind members emailed me a few things like, “It would be really helpful if you could show me some stuff on this, this, and this.” I thought, “Dude, that’s a lot of stuff. There are a lot of different things in what you just asked me there.”

It would be like throwing the Yellow Pages at him. I said, “What specifically do you want? What’s the first thing that we can look at and move forward from there?”

So, the message here is to ask questions more, talk less, and allow others to express themselves so they can come to their own conclusions. As a coach, you’ll help them create deeper, meaningful breakthroughs, and as a human you’ll connect with people at a better level because you’ll show you care by asking questions and letting them talk.

If you’ve enjoyed this, great! Remember to subscribe to the Healthpreneur Podcast if you haven’t already. And if you want to take your business to the high six and seven figures in the health and fitness arena, then I invite you to join our Seven Figure Health Business Blueprint. It’s a free online training. It’s a terrific 75 minutes that will open your eyes and give you some key insights to help you move forward in a big way, instead of wasting a lot of time with a thousand things that don’t.

If you’re interested in that, head on over to healthpreneurgroup.com/training. Grab your free spot over the next day or so at whichever time works best for you. I look forward to seeing you. Thanks for joining me. Keep going out there, do your awesomeness, be great and do great, and I’ll see you in our next episode on Wednesday.

Transcription

Welcome back to the Healthpreneur Podcast! I’ve got a treat for you today.

Today, we’re finishing off the week on a great note because I’ve got my good friend Dr. Josh Axe on the podcast with us.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, Josh Axe has the most popular website on the planet when it comes to health, functional medicine, and all that good stuff. Draxe.com gets 15 million visitors per month. That’s significant.

He is a best-selling author of a book called “Eat Dirt”, he’s a co-author of “Essential Oils: Ancient Medicine”, and is a regular guest expert on the Dr. Oz Show. He’s also the co-founder of the Ancient Nutrition Company providing Bone Broth Protein, which is delicious, and certified organic herbal supplements.

In 2015 and 2016, his company ranked on the Inc. 500 as the third fastest growing company in healthcare and 35 of all businesses. Here’s the cool thing: What you’re about to uncover is that all of this has happened in less than four years. Yes, four years.

He’s going to share the journey. He’s going to share how it all started, some of the pivotal moves that they made to get to where they are today, lessons, mindset shifts, and things that moved the needle for his company. He’ll share one of the most important things that each one of us needs to be doing in our businesses to move the needle forward.

It’s one thing, and if you’re not doing it, it can severely hold you back.

Without any further ado, let’s welcome Josh. Dr. Josh Axe, welcome to the Healthpreneur Podcast, how is it going, buddy?

Josh:                      Hey, great, thanks for having me, Yuri.

Yuri:                      It’s great to connect. I know it’s been a while since we’ve spoken, so I’m happy to have you on the show. I think everyone in the health space knows who you are. If someone is listening to this, and they’re an aspiring online entrepreneur in the health, fitness, or wellness space, I guarantee that they have seen your website, Draxe.com, at some point through Google searches or YouTube videos.

This will be a real treat for our audience. Talk to us about how this all started, because the growth that you guys experienced in the last few years is astronomical.

 

Josh’s beginnings and the growth of his newsletter, website, and company

Josh:                      Totally. If I dug way back, a big part of why I became a physician in the first place was my mom being diagnosed with cancer. She went through the medical system, got so sick, and eventually was diagnosed again. She took a more natural route, which saved her life. She’s healthier now more than ever, she’s in her 60s and water skiing, which is just great.

Things started with having a real passion for teaching people how to be healthy. When I was in my practice, I knew my favorite part of practice was teaching workshops, like nutrition lectures or that type of thing.

I remember being at John Maxwell’s seminar, and him saying, “You need to spend time trying to get to a point where you’re doing what you can be the greatest in the world at. What’s that one thing?” I remember writing down creating content; writing, creating videos, or teaching a live workshop. Teaching and creating content, that was my favorite part of even being in practice.

I would write a weekly newsletter that I would type out and hand to all my patients. Each week it’d be something like, “The Five Steps to Reverse Heart Diseases with Nutrition,” or something like that. I had a patient come up to me and say, “Hey, I’d really love to send my aunt, have it online, and get it emailed to her.” I thought that was a good idea.

My assistant at the time was married to a web designer, and I asked him to make me a website. I started the website, and posted my weekly newsletter online on my website. That’s a big part of what kicked it off.

I was surprised, over time people said, “Oh, I’ve read your newsletter,” so it continued to grow over time. That’s what started this, I was just doing it as a service to my patients out of my clinic.

Yuri:                      Amazing. I think the first time we connected was through a mutual friend named Isaac a couple of years ago. To see what you’ve done and how you’ve grown since that first interaction is phenomenal.

Walk us through that journey. Was there a moment in time or decision where you said, “You know what? I want to grow this to be a massive business”? What was the point of commitment when you decided to do that?

Was it just organic as it continued to grow?

 

Doing what you’re best at and building a team to do the rest

Josh:                      I would say it’s a combination of both. I was talking with Evan Tardy, my company president, about four years ago. I remember telling Evan, “You know what, Evan? I don’t know that we need to get much bigger.” We had four people; him, me, and two others. I said, “You and I could probably just keep doing this like we’re doing it, do really well, and help a lot of people. We don’t need a big team.”

Then, I remember talking to somebody just a few weeks later. I had the misconception that the bigger your company is, the more stress and the more work you do. That was my perception.

They said, “No, actually, it allows you to get even more in your zone, to where you’re doing only what you or God made you the best in the world at.” I thought, “Okay.”

I’m a big believer in prayer, meditation, and visualization. I spent some time praying and saying, “What’s the impact I want to have in the world? What’s the significance?” I felt myself, in my own mind, and God saying, “You know what? I’ve got big plans for you.” I just thought about how I want to impact the world in a positive way.

That’s also when I started thinking about the number one thing I wanted to teach: How to use food as medicine. I wasn’t going to put a cap on myself and say, “I only want to have five employees maximum,” or, “I don’t want to do this.”

Anyway, I had that misconception. I had a breakthrough and realized that business doesn’t have to be that way. I’ve found over time that the more team members I have, typically, the more I get to do what I can be the best in the world at, which is creating content.

I’ll tell you, Yuri, the growth that my company has had surprises me, too. Three and a half or four years ago, I was writing all my articles, editing, and dealing with the legal stuff. I was creating infographics and memes. I was doing it all.

It was crazy. It wasn’t even that long ago. Then, Evan and I, over time, started to scold each other. We’d say, “What are you doing? You shouldn’t be doing that. You’re not great at that, you’re good, but you’re not great.” We eventually got to the point where we hired the right team members.

I used to feel like other people couldn’t do certain things as well as I could. I realized that if I hired somebody, like a writer for example, that person just needs to do it about 80% as good as me. They don’t have to do it 100%. Over time, if I train them right, they can eventually be even better than me at writing or creating certain types of content.

Now, I work with my writers. We have a very specific template. We created a template so if we’re writing an article on turmeric, black seed, or ashwagandha, for instance, it’s very specific to the questions we answer throughout the whole thing.

I want to work with my writers and editors. It is my voice exactly because I wrote down all the questions they must answer in the piece. I know that’s a little off topic, but that’s the way we did things. We’re big believers in creating playbooks, so we make sure when a job is done, it’s done excellent every time.

Yuri:                      Yeah, that’s huge. I’m a huge believer of that as well. If you do something more than once, it must be documented and put into a playbook. Otherwise, you would probably still be writing out your own articles to this day.

I think a lot of people get into business and end up creating themselves a job. They’re doing everything in their business and they’re not documenting anything so the can get to the point where they can hire people to take on those roles. Doing that would free them up to do what it is they want to do.

If we go back three and a half or four years ago when you determined what you’re doing, the stuff you’re not too crazy about, and the stuff you love doing, how did you guys determine which were the key initial hires? How did you go about getting those people?

Josh:                      We looked for wise counsel. We asked people. That was the start. In fact, I think I asked you at one point, another colleague, and some others. We had Evan and myself. Evan essentially was a Digital Marketer, we had a personal assistant, and that was our team.

Then we said, “Okay, what are some other things we need to do?”

We needed a writer. We decided to hire a writer. We needed somebody who did operations of the business. We looked to wise counsel and other organizations who had something similar going on, or were where we wanting to be.

One, it was modeling. Two, wise counsel. Three, Evan wanted to focus more on the marketing side of digital marketing, and less on the tech side. We hired a tech person to take the stress off Evan. Then, we hired a writer, so I didn’t write as much and started editing more. Then, we hired a graphic designer.

We built the team around Evan and my strengths, so we got to do more of what we were great at.

 

Moving past perfection, using programs for cash flow, and product sales

Yuri:                      That’s awesome. What was one of the biggest challenges that you have faced as you were growing? I know a big one – I don’t know if it’s a mindset shift or just a reality, as people want to grow – is wondering, “Do I want to pay someone X and limit our cash flow?”

Is that something you dealt with? Was there another big challenge that you dealt with as you guys were growing?

Josh:                      No, that wasn’t a challenge for us. If anything, we had a few challenges that I had to break through. One was that I was afraid to sell, or oversell, to people.

Number two is I felt like before I put something out, it had to be perfect. Like everything had to be perfect.

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

Josh:                      Yeah, exactly. Now, we’re the opposite. Another thing too, and people don’t realize this, is that three and a half years ago we didn’t have our own product line at all. We launched it exactly three and half years ago.

I had sold my clinic, then my money was tied up in something I’d invested in. Part of it I used it to launch some of the new projects I was trying to launch. We were at a point once three and a half years ago where we had about $10,000 in the bank. I didn’t know if we were going to make it in the next couple months. That was three and a half years ago.

Then, we launched our first program called The Secret Detox Program. That did well. We launched a supplement line, and once I started getting that pressure on, I realized that I was putting out the best content, programs, and products out there, and they were going to save and transform lives.

I needed to get the message out to people.

We started sending more regular sales emails. We started being more strategic in how we sold. We started following the launch formula in terms of how we do our email sequencing. But, the biggest thing was that I realized that my stuff didn’t have to be perfect.

The first time I put out a free eBook, it was called “Superfood Super You”, it took six months to create. I spent hours and hours on it. Here’s the amazing thing now. We put out another freebie, a shopping list that took me about an hour to make, and we got more opt-ins with that than with the book that took me six months to write.

Honestly, if I could go back now, we would’ve just started by throwing things to see what stuck rather than trying to make everything perfect before we launched anything.

Yuri:                      Totally. That’s awesome. Now you guys have a whole suite of products, supplements, and information stuff as well. Do you guys sell information, or is it mostly the supplement stuff now?

Josh:                      Early on, what got us to a certain point were programs. It was all content. We had a Secret Detox Program and an Essential Oil Program. Those were, by far, our largest income maker in terms of profitability. Programs can be really profitable.

We needed to have consumables, so we started doing supplements. Today, it’s probably 80-20. We probably make 80% off our supplements, and 20% off our programs, currently. In the future, it’ll probably be more like 85-15. That’s the current ratio.

We had to do programs because, I’ll tell you, if you’re trying to launch supplements without programs, it can be difficult because of cash flow. Unless you already have a lot of money or investors.

For us, the only thing that’s allowed us to scale the business on the supplement and retail end, is the program side of things. It’s essentially what has created the cash flow for us to do supplements in the first place.

Facebook Ads Pipeline and SEO

Yuri:                      It’s super smart, because then the supplements also act as a nice back end to those courses or programs too, which is a beautiful mixture.

A lot of people who are on Facebook see your ads for webinars. Are webinars the major “selling platform” for a lot of your courses and supplements now?

Josh:                      Yeah, they are. We follow the launch formula. We typically have a few things, but webinars are huge. Webinars are number one. In addition to that, we do training videos. We typically do two to three training videos on a topic; we have a video sales page with a video of me in a sales letter beneath that.

The biggest driver is the combination of the webinar and the launch formula.

 Yuri:                      You also have storefronts on the site. We have recognized with the people that we work with and our own business, that people tend to go back to storefronts if they’re repeat buyers. This is as opposed to cold traffic customers who have no idea who you are.

Is that something you have noticed as well? What’s the whole store strategy as opposed to going direct to an offer that’s more singular?

Josh:                      We found that as our web traffic increases, our store sales go exactly in line with it. We’ve focused a lot in search engine optimization and ranking well for articles, because that’s the gift that keeps on giving.

It’s just one of those things. Once it’s there, you’re not paying month after month for that. Yeah, the SEO engine has been a big part of our business online as well.

We make sure we’re nurturing our audience as well. We’ve got a good ratio of adding a lot of value for people, too.

 

Josh’s Advice on Content Marketing

Yuri:                      That’s great. I believe that if you are not producing content in a great way, your business is going to suffer in the future. Even if you’re buying paid traffic, you’re not adding value to people in the advertising of it, unless it’s going to a webinar for instance.

You have a great foundation of thousands of articles that you can turn to. It’s such a huge asset.

What advice you give to people who are making content marketing part of their big strategy, but they’re not seeing the results they want? Maybe a little bit more the long-term game as opposed to having a profitable funnel you can drive Facebook ads to.

What words of wisdom would you give someone who may be a bit discouraged because they’re putting all this time into their content, but they’re not seeing the ROI from it?

Josh:                      I would keep a few things in mind. One thing I’m going to come back to is “wows and purple cows.” That’s not the first thing, but I think it’s important.

I was in the same boat when I first started putting out content. A lot of people in my clinic read it – like my patients – but that was it. It was nothing.

Keep in mind that it’s a snowball effect. Our content traffic has gone up 25 times in three years, but it was because we built a foundation. Know that you’re building a foundation right now, and take the stress off yourself a little bit.

Maybe you start writing articles, create a template, then have another writer who’s getting it out there. Maybe you’re doing the editing, and creating the outline. That sort of thing.

If you’re passionate about it, then continue to do it. But I think there’s a time and a place to hire a team member to support you in getting this content out there. But, the other big thing is that if you’re on social and you put out a good article, the organic grass-fed cream always rises to the top. So you’ve got to be putting out the best of the best.

I tell my content team that if our article is not the best article out there on turmeris or ashwagandha, we need to take the article down. We need to go back and make it the best, most comprehensive, most engaging, most active article that causes people to make changes or use turmeric in a certain way.

We’re really big into creating a wow experience and creating purple cows: things that really grab people’s attention.

People need to remember that if you’re going to put something out, do your best to make it awesome. It does take time. That’s the thing, especially the first two years. I’m looking to my bookshelf right now, and I’ve got “Crush It!” by Gary Vaynerchuk. A lot of people don’t know this, but when I first started out, I would go to other people’s health sites and answer questions for them, because no one was answering them.

I’m not afraid to say this, but I went on certain sites that would be considered colleagues and friends of mine, but still competitors. They would have a Facebook page and post on chia seeds. People would be asking 50 questions like, “What’s the best chia seed? What about this?”

I would go on there and answer everyone’s questions.

I would do that for about an hour a day. I did that because Gary Vaynerchuk told me to in his book. I started getting follows and likes on my Facebook page, because I was giving good answers to questions.

People started following me.

 

Scaling Up, scorecards, and finding the right team members and process

There was a lot of guerrilla marketing and grinding early on that people have no idea I did. Eventually, once I got to a certain point, I created the template, the playbook, and handed it off. Evan’s father is a multimillionaire, a successful business entrepreneur, and they implemented something called Scaling Up in their business, the Rockefeller Habits.

We’ve done the same thing. We’ve followed the Scaling Up principles of playbooks, scorecards, and scoreboards. In fact, we’ve got big flat screen TVs in our office for our customer service team, there’s a big flat screen TV that has a live, up-to-date scoreboard. It’s the same with our program and product division.

Every time a program is sold, it’s a live update. It creates an awesome culture and environment.

I almost forgot what you asked me. I know I’ve gone off on a tangent here, but there are some thoughts.

Yuri:                      No, it’s great. Speaking of the scorecard stuff, I love the whole idea of having that in an office. It brings up morale, incites friendly competition, and is a lot of fun.

What do you suggest for people or teams who are virtual?

Josh:                      It works just as well. We have scoreboards, and scorecards. The scoreboard I even did in my clinic, my brick-and-mortar practice. On a weekly basis, we would all see the scorecard. We’d see total patient visits, total revenue, new patient appointments, and all those things. We have those in the office, so everybody would get the report that Friday afternoon or Monday morning.

Now my executives go over scorecards either once a week or once a month. There’s a great book by Marcus Buckingham, it’s called “First, Break All the Rules.” He goes through the most important things for winning as a team.

When you ask a team member what’s most important to them, there are two top things. One, they feel like they’re working with some of their closest friends. Two, they want to know if they’re winning or not.

Your team member, especially somebody who’s good, wants to know if they’re winning. So, we’ll sit down, and maybe somebody scored on three different areas.

Let’s say I sat with Evan early on, and he oversaw our program sales.

I’d ask how The Secret Detox program was doing, and when we were finishing the Healing Leaky Gut program. I’d ask about the progress in finishing out the new launch formula on Infusionsoft? Something like that.

I’d say, “Hey, Evan, how would you grade yourselves in these this week?” He’d respond, “Well, the program launch went great, I give myself an A-. This could’ve been a little better, I got a B there, and a B there.” Then I would give him feedback on the grades he gave himself.

I would say, “Evan, you’re totally right, man. A-, we could fix that. You gave yourself a B, I would give you a B+ there, because, hey man, this thing happened that we couldn’t have foreseen. I thought you did a great job.”

This is how we operate as a company. We have scoreboards – even virtually – because we have team members in California, in Austin, Texas, and on the East Coast, Philly, and New York. Our whole content team is virtual. We do a content call once a week, where we go over the scoreboard.

Yuri:                      That’s awesome. Are you guys using any technology for that, or is it simply within Google Sheets or a custom platform?

Josh:                      With our content team, he puts it out in an email once a week as a Google doc. That’s what we do with our content team. We do the same thing with our social team.

Now, with our marketing department – we have some real tech savvy people there – my answer is I have no idea what they do. But, I know that they’ve set up a software so things are popping up live on everyone’s computer across the board. I know that they communicate through Slack.

But I’m not tech savvy at all. In terms of what they’re using, I could ask Evan, and we could get you a link.

Yuri:                      That’s fine. It’s great to be at a point in your business, in your journey, where you don’t even know what half the people do. You’re just doing your thing, they’re accountable for specific KPIs and metrics, and everyone is moving on the same wavelength.

What does a day in your life look like now compared to three or four years ago?

 

Daily routines, letting go, and surrounding yourself with the right people

Josh:                      Right now, my morning routine is still the same. I wake up, pray, and get grateful for a little bit. Then, I do a quick workout. Back then, I would’ve called Evan and said, “Hey, what’s going on today?” We would’ve done a quick huddle, and then I would’ve started working on content.

I would’ve worked on articles, interviews, or something like that. I would’ve prepared and worked on that stuff throughout the day and maybe done a few networking calls.

That’s it. I would’ve worked on content, done some networking, and worked with a couple of my core team members. Right now, my schedule is more set in stone. Mondays and Wednesdays, I go in and record Facebook Lives.

I used to create some of the PowerPoints, but now I have a graphic designer who’s creating all the PowerPoint slides for me. I pretty much just show up, our film crew films me, then I leave.

Mondays and Wednesdays, I wake up, record in the morning, do a team meeting with Jordan, Evan, or certain team members, and eat lunch. In the afternoon, I have business calls, that type of thing, and am usually home by 4:00 or so.

It’s different now. I do a lot less of the technical side, like creating a PowerPoint or creating an article. It’s bigger picture stuff.

I’ll call Ethan from our content team and say, “Hey, Ethan, I don’t really like the way that we’re doing this with the recipes. I think we need to add a couple more pictures like this.” When I’m talking to my content team I’ll say, “Hey, what are the numbers this week? Okay. Hey, why do you think those are down a little bit? Okay. Hey, let’s try this.”

I do a lot more connecting with my leaders now. I give them directive on things I think we need to do to improve the company.

Yuri:                      That’s great. If you’re listening to this, this serves as inspiration for what is possible. This is a very similar journey for most successful entrepreneurs, where you get to a point – like you’re talking about, Josh – where you work on the bigger picture stuff and aren’t in the trenches as much anymore.

If you’re listening to this and you’re thinking, “Oh, man, I don’t know if I could ever get there.” I think it starts with having a vision and surrounding yourself with great people to help you do that.

Was there a mindset shift that you had to go through in terms of limiting beliefs you had to overcome? Was there anything you had to develop personally to grow your business as you’ve grown over the past three and a half years?

Josh:                      Yeah, I think there’s a few things. One of the first things that comes to mind is feeling like I had to be in control of everything. I had to have my hands on everything, doing a lot. This is repetitive, Yuri, but I’m telling you, if people are not doing scorecards and scoreboards, keeping score, and looking at analytics on a regular basis, it hurts the company.

Sometimes you think you’re winning, or things are going well. I’m obsessed with numbers. We look at analytics every single week to see how things are doing. Four or six years ago, when I was on Facebook or did a YouTube video, I would study why certain things did it do so well.

I would break it down, deconstruct it, reconstruct it, and learn why a certain Facebook post did so well or totally flopped. Then, I’d be strategic about creating content in the future. I’d use the winning principles and strategies that I needed to put together to make something great.

If there was a shift, here’s a couple: One, you’ve got to be number one. If you’re going to put something out and you can’t be number one now, work towards putting out the best quality product. The other shift was this: When I was first in my clinic, I just hired people that met the criteria of a good office manager, graphic designer, or writer that met the criteria. They just got the job done.

Today, I want the A+, five-star, team player who takes initiative, works extra hours, is self-motivated, wants to crush it, and is committed to excellence. My biggest life lesson is that you become who you surround yourself with.

If I’m networking, Yuri, I’m talking to guys like you, Isaac Jones, Jordan Rubin, and people who are big movers and shakers. But it’s the same with your team. People ask, “How do you hire?”

I dig. It’s like mining for gold. I’m calling everybody I know, sending emails on LinkedIn, and finding the person.

If somebody’s working for another company and I feel like they’re a fit, we just reach out. We reach out to whoever we feel is the rock star out there. When you’re hiring at first, sometimes you’ll hire somebody that starts getting the job moving and going.

But long term, rather than always be closing, always be hiring and looking for A-team players. That, coupled with our scalable systems, is a big one. It has gotten us to where we are now.

 

The Rapid Five

Yuri:                      Great advice, man. Josh, this has been a tremendous. I’m sure we could talk for hours about this. But, it’s time for the Rapid Five. Are you ready?

Josh:                      All right, let’s do it.

Yuri:                      Five rapid fire questions. Whatever comes top of mind is most likely the right answer.

Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

Josh:                      My biggest weakness is probably being too hands-off. I tend to work on one project for a month, then come up for air. I’m the farthest thing from a multitasker anyone’s ever met. Sometimes I think that hurts me a little bit.

I’ll come up for air like a month later and say, “Where are we at with this?” when I should’ve checked in a week later.

Yuri:                      Nice. What’s your biggest strength?

 Josh:                      Being able to see trends. I’ll give you an example of this. I know that Facebook and YouTube are on Netflix, they’re on reality TV, and they want to take over television. Right now, we’re videoing. I have a video crew follow me around on trips, everywhere I go. We’re creating our own reality TV show that’ll be on YouTube Red and Facebook, like more personal content from me.

Seeing trends, big picture things, and developing a strategy around those things are probably my bigger strengths.

 Yuri:                      Super smart. That’s one of Gary Vaynerchuk’s super powers, and it serves him well.

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

Josh:                      Developing leaders. One of the things that we did in my clinic, I still do. We did this with my staff, and we do it once a month now. A few months ago, I taught them all how to make a vision board. I did a whole training on visualization last month, and we did a whole training on goal setting this week.

On a regular basis, we’re developing leaders.

Yuri:                      That’s great. That’s the sign of a good leader. I think a great leader wants to develop more leaders instead of having followers. What do you think is the number one skill or trade entrepreneurs must have for lasting success?

Josh:                      Perseverance.  When I first started doing content, no one was listening. But I kept doing it, because I believed that the world needed the message and I could be the best in the world at it. Not giving up is key.

The second is coachability. A lot of times people try to reinvent the wheel and do it all themselves. There’s a lot of ego there. I believe in wise counsel. I’m not afraid to go and ask somebody who’s great at something how they did it.

I’m not afraid to try and figure out how something is successful. I think that’s another important skill to have, too.

Yuri:                      That’s huge. Finally, complete this sentence, “I know I’m being successful when…”

Josh:                      I know I’m being successful when the people closest to me continue to think that I have a great character.

Yuri:                      That’s awesome. Good stuff. Josh Axe, thank you so much for joining us on the Healthpreneur Podcast. Where is the best place for our listeners to follow your work online and stay in touch with you?

Josh:                      Check out my website draxe.com. I do a lot on Instagram and Facebook, my handle on both is DrJoshAxe. My wife Chelsea has an Instagram account, and she’s good at fitness and that type of thing. To see more of my personal life, Instagram is a good spot.

Yuri:                      Yeah, you’ve got some cool stuff on there.

Before we finish, Josh, I wanted to personally acknowledge you for the amazing work that you’ve done in our space to raise the bar. Not just from a business perspective due to the quality of your content, but also for the people and lives you’ve impacted. It truly does make a difference.

That’s what we’re all about here at Healthpreneur; highlighting amazing people like yourself who are making a big difference in the world.

Thank you for all the amazing work you’ve done and the people that you’ve touched and will continue to touch in the future.

Josh:                      Thanks a lot, Yuri, it’s been great catching up.

 

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Yuri’s Take

Wasn’t that an amazing episode? Josh talked about seeking wise counsel.

That’s part of what I do in this podcast. I bring people like Josh and other successful entrepreneurs in our space who have climbed the mountain so they can report back and say, “Hey, here are the things that we’ve learned. Here are some things you should consider.”

Really, you’re getting a crash course in how to build a successful business from some of the most successful people in the entire health industry. I want to leave you with this idea: If you haven’t done this already, create some type of scorecard or scoreboard for your business.

If you’re a solopreneur, that’s totally fine. If you’ve got several people working with you, if you have your own physical establishment, or if you’re online, the same thing applies. Don’t worry about the tech or getting things all crazy. I’m going to give you one technology that is interesting if you want to check it out.

But, before I do that, I’m going to share what I do. Basically, I use a Google Sheet. Our Google sheet will look at a couple key metrics, without overwhelming us with too much data.

Your goal is to figure out the three to five key metrics in your business and look at them every single week. There are two ways to look at metrics. I’ll do a solo episode about this, but I’m a huge believer in looking at proactive, or leading indicators, not just trailing or reactive.

A trailing indicator is like revenue. It’s answering, “Okay, here’s how much money we made.” But, what that doesn’t tell you is how you made that money. A leading indicator is a metric that, if the number goes up or down, it will impact the trailing indicator.

In our Luminaries Mastermind, every single person has one key metric that they’re looking to move the needle on over the course of 90 days. That’s something that is out of your direct control.

Let’s say you want to make $1 million. You can’t control making $1 million. That’s an outcome. That would be the one key outcome that we focus on in terms of what we’re tracking. However, what we do focus on, what we can control, are the things we have 100% control over.

In that case, it might be, “I will shoot and upload three videos to YouTube every single week. I will email my list every single day.” These are the things you control, and if you do them consistently, they should move the needle to the bigger outcome. If they don’t, that’s fine, you can swap those out with something else.

So, identify three to five key things that you want to track. Maybe it’s visitors to your website, maybe it’s revenue, maybe it’s your opt-in conversion rate or number of new clients. Track whatever is most important for you in your business.

Then, identify one or two things you have 100% control over that’ll move the needle for that metric.

If you want new clients or customers, you can’t control that. What you can control is picking up the phone and calling people, or sending emails. That you have control over. Whether they respond or not is out of your control.

That’s my little challenge for you today.

If you want a cool tool – I believe it’s free – it’s called Klipfolio. It allows you to set up an online dashboard. It’ll pull from your different accounts like Facebook and YouTube, with all sorts of different API integrations. It can pull data from whichever system you’re already using and give you a clean dashboard that you can customize however you want in a seamless fashion.

I think they have a free trial, or it’s a couple bucks a month. It’s something that we’ve used and it’s cool. Check it out.

That is all for today. I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. If you have, remember to subscribe to the Healthpreneur Podcast, because we have lots of amazing episodes coming your way. We’re approaching the 100th episode. Can you imagine? That’s crazy!

We’ll be here for a long, long time. Lots more amazing guests will be on the show.

Until our next episode, which is a solo round airing on Monday, have an amazing weekend. Continue to be great, do great, and I’ll talk to you then.

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