Transcription

What’s up guys? Welcome to episode 88 of the Healthpreneur Podcast. Can you imagine that? 88 episodes so far. If you’ve been with me since day one, thank you because this has been a lot of fun. I hope you’ve enjoyed the journey.

Today we’re speaking with a good friend, another Torontonian. If you’re not from Toronto, that’s what we call ourselves here, Torontonians. Her name is Lori Kennedy. We went to the same school a couple years apart for nutrition, and ended up going on similar paths. We both morphed into serving the health and wellness business community.

Lori is a registered holistic nutritionist turned business coach for health and wellness experts. She’s the founder of The Wellness Business Hub, which is an online platform that delivers personal development and professional training for health practitioners all around the world.

Her real world, no BS style of teaching online business is built into her online courses and annual live event called The Wellness Business Summit, which I was fortunate enough to speak at a few years ago. This event is attended by hundreds of health practitioners. She believes that success is possible for anyone, and lives the mantra, “My life, my terms.” Good, right?

I’m excited to have Lori on the show because we share similar philosophies about business and some things that are important to succeed with your online business. In this episode, she’ll share the number one skill you need to develop to do well online.

What we’re going to talk about specifically as an overarching theme is taking what you do one-on-one and turning that into a group coaching model that frees your time and creates more impact, without compromising your revenue.

If you’re someone who’s currently doing a lot of one-on-one, whether it’s virtual or in-person coaching, what Lori’s going to share with you in this episode will be extremely valuable if you want to enjoy your life again. With that said, let’s welcome Lori onto the show.

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Lori Kennedy, welcome to the Healthpreneur Podcast. How are you?

Lori:                I am wonderful, Yuri. Thanks so much for having me.

 Yuri:                You’re very welcome. It’s always great to have fellow Canadians on the show. I think we’ve had a good balance of 50/50 Americans or international to Canadians on the show.

It’s remarkable.

Lori:                Nice. That’s awesome.

Yuri:                I think there’s a lot of amazing people in the health and wellness space who live in and around Toronto, so it’s a cool mecca/hub we have in this area. It’s always great to feature people like yourself who are doing some awesome stuff. Why don’t you share with our listeners what you’re up to these days and how you’re serving our community?

 

How and why Lori transitioned from one-on-one to group programs

Lori:                I started about a decade ago as a registered holistic nutritionist. I did that full-time for seven years. While I was working with clients, I realized that the only way to live a happy and healthy life as a mom would be to figure out how to scale my practice.

For those of you who are service providers, you know that our job is to work during our clients’ off time, and that means we have to miss out on a lot of our own family’s stuff. That just wasn’t okay with me. So, I turned my one-on-one practice into a group program, and that’s where everything changed for me.

Over the years, we turned that group program into a licensing program, and that has become the mainstay of what I do now, which is teach other health and wellness professionals, specifically alternative health practitioners and licensed professionals, how to create group programs and run them in their own businesses.

Yuri:                That’s awesome. I know a lot of our listeners, as well as some of our guests on the show, have a one-on-one type of coaching model, whether it’s life coaching or nutrition coaching. How did you make the transition from the one-on-one to the group work?

Playing devil’s advocate, if I’m a client and I’m working one-on-one with Lori and suddenly I’m part of a group of X number of people, how do I get that personalized attention? Do I want to share some stuff that I would only share in a one-on-one scenario?

Did you go through that mindset that I just described? Or how did you make that transition?

Lori:                First, I looked in our industry as to what other types of group programs were out there. And at that point, it was Weight Watchers. The idea came because I was working in a fitness club, and they were doing small group training with three or four people. I thought, “Well, I can do that.”

And at that time, it was starting to get a little bit frustrating for me as a practitioner because I felt like I was repeating myself repeatedly. Even though all the clients came to me with their own individualized symptoms and issues, the underlying fundamentals that I had to change for them before we could even personalize were all the same. Most people, then and now, don’t know how to eat on a fundamental level. They’re overwhelmed and confused.

That was the work that I was doing with them up front, and that’s what I turned into the group program. I found that by being able to put them in small groups and foster their confidentiality, community, and support, it helped them because they saw that they weren’t alone in their struggles, although they had their own symptoms. But the symptoms were generally the same.

The challenges in their lives felt unique to the client, but they were generally the same. This helped to create that level of community and support inside the group, and out. People just want to know and feel validated. They want to feel heard. And they want to know that they’re not alone in their struggles.

I looked at the common categories that I was coaching and the symptoms that people were coming to me with. I said, “I’m repeating myself too much.” That became the fundamental pillars of the program that I put together. Over the years I had to iterate and simplify it more than when I started so that my clients could get results.

Then the personalization came only after they followed through with those fundamentals. In my experience, I didn’t personalize dramatically at the beginning because they weren’t consistently complying with those core fundamentals that lead to changes.

Yuri:                How you heal anything is pretty much how you heal everything at a fundamental level. It doesn’t matter what the issue is. Get the bases covered and then move up from there.

Were you working with people in an actual in-person setting, in a group setting, or was it mostly virtual at that point?

 

Her legit sales funnel, streamlined process, and repeatable system

 Lori:                No. I had no idea what I was doing, so now when I look back on it, I had my own little funnel. I had urgency offers and sales and marketing strategies implemented, I just didn’t know what I was doing at the time.

It was offline, but it functioned very much like how my online business functions now. The strategy was: I created invitations and handed them out to all the members at the gym where I was working at the time.

I went into every group fitness class, for example. Some people would think, “Oh, you’re at a gym. You get lots of clients.” That’s not the case. I still had to hustle for every single one of them.

I created an event around this free seminar because I had to “sell” people. I had to “sell” them on coming to a free seminar, so I got them to the seminar, educated them, and entertained them. Then I invited them into this program.

People who were ready and wanted to sign up got a special deal. Those that weren’t convinced yet got a free consultation where I could nurture them a little bit more and help them decide in privacy. That’s how I would sell the group program.

I had a group program starting every eight weeks, one in the morning for the people that didn’t work, and one at night for the people that did work. I could see 24 people over the course of two hours a week, versus 24 hours a week, which dramatically changes the game. Right?

Yuri:                Just a little bit. That’s awesome.

What were some of the big learnings from that experience that you’ve taken forward into what you do now with your clients?

 Lori:                Having a streamlined process that you can track and improve upon is everything.

Until that point, I was randomly selling one-off sessions. I was randomly booking clients. There was no method to the madness and it felt like madness. It felt like what I describe now as playing Whack a Mole.

You know that game where you have the mallets and you’re trying to go here and there and everywhere? Once I could streamline the process, I was also able to delegate.

There’s receptionists at the gym. I could say, “Here’s what I need you to do and here’s what I need you to say.” I knew how many people I needed to show up to the free seminar based on tracking.

I put systems in place that freed up more of my time, but also made it more enjoyable because everything was streamlined. Everything was consistent. There wasn’t this frantic-ness or this pressure. There was no unpaid homework time, having to create these personalized protocols for people that they never followed. And it felt legit.

I think most of all I finally felt, like after years, legit. I had a system. I had business. Word was starting to get out. There was somewhere to send these people; it was my free talks that I had every week, just as I do webinars now every week.

It was the same system, and I think that was the biggest learning. It was a system, it was repeatable, and I was able to improve upon it.

 Yuri:                Nice. That’s awesome. If you don’t have a system, you essentially have a job where you’re reinventing the wheel every single time. That’s a great insight, for sure.

Knowing what you know now, if you were to start all over again, is there anything you would do differently?

 

The importance of email lists, self-investment, self-teaching, and mentorship

Lori:                That’s a funny question that I’ve asked myself so many times. My first instinct is to say no, because if I was to do it differently I wouldn’t be where I am. I’m so grateful for all the lessons, both the light and the dark ones. However, I would skip the first two years of that deep, hardcore struggle because that was hard.

And not start a career in debt. I would skip over that part. Knowing what I know now, I would absolutely have started my email list on day one. I can’t even imagine where I would be if I would’ve started my email list five years before I started it.

I probably would’ve invested in myself earlier, although I didn’t know that was even an option. For whatever reason, it didn’t occur to me that I could go to the library and pick up books on sales and marketing. I didn’t think at the beginning that I even had a business. It didn’t even occur to me that I had a business.

I was just an RHN and I knew stuff that people didn’t know about. So those things; start my email list, learn about sales and marketing – specifically direct response marketing – seek out mentors and coaches and just pay to be in the game, pay to learn as fast as humanly possible so that I could grow.

I could’ve grown faster than the way I did it.

Yuri:                That’s great. Great insight. It’s a catch 22, right? I would say that most the guests on this show have said having a mentor, or specifically hiring a mentor, has been one of the keys to their success.

It’s easy to say, “I wish I had done it sooner,” but at the time you think, “I don’t have the money. How am I going to pay for this?” You get to a point where you’ve got to take a leap of faith and make it happen. But, like you’ve mentioned, like I’ve experienced, and like a lot of other people have as well, you just have to. It expedites the process 100-fold.

That’s the key. That’s the ticket.

Lori:                Absolutely. For me, I had no idea how to do most things. All I knew were calories, macronutrients, and food. I didn’t know how to do most of the things that were required of me.

And I didn’t want to waste time figuring it out. The obvious thing to do was to go to the people that were doing it and say, “Hey. Can I pay you to teach me?” Just as I did when I invested in my schooling. It’s the same thing.

Yuri:                You went to CSNN. Right?

Lori:                Yeah.

Yuri:                We both went to the same school for nutrition. It’s unfortunate that whether it’s that school or any other school, they don’t equip you with anything to build a business. They give you the knowledge, but don’t teach you how to find the people to help.

Lori:                Right. I’ve taught at the Naturopathic College. I’ve taught their residents marketing. The way I see it is a two-step process.

They go to one school to learn their professional education and then they’re missing the second step, which is the most critical step. It’s the sales and marketing school. Then, we’re all left to our own devices to either figure it out on our own or, again, invest in a coach, mentor, or program to finish that level of schooling, which is the thing that really matters.

Most people go into the first step not knowing that they’re going to start a business, and they feel very scattered when they come out of school.

 

Copywriting as a necessary skillset

Yuri:                Just a little bit. Under the business-building umbrella, what do you think is the first place or the first skillset that someone must get a good grasp of to succeed in today’s world?

Lori:                My instincts are saying copywriting. You need to communicate in a way that pulls the people that you want to work with into your world. You need to learn how to structure content that guides them through understanding what their problem is and how you’re going to help them. You can have all the strategies in the world, but if you can’t communicate in a way that converts, what good are Facebook ads or webinars?

All the other strategies depend upon us being able to communicate in a way that resonates and moves somebody into decision.

Yuri:                I completely agree with you. I’ve seen this time and time again. So many practitioners, doctors, trainers, whatever, are amazing technicians, have a program, and it’s just not selling. You must understand the basics of this stuff.

I say, “Listen, guys. I’m not going to write the copy for you. You can hire someone to write the copy for you and pay a lot of money if you want to.” But at the end of the day, if that person leaves, you don’t have the skillset so it’s important to understand that.

What were some of the initial resources that helped you become better at writing copy?

Lori:                Dan Kennedy’s “Ultimate Sales Letter.”

Yuri:                That’s a good book.

Lori:                To be honest, it was doing what my mentors taught me to do, which was study other people’s content.

Print out sales pages and highlight the points that make you feel something. Look for consistencies across the board because it’s very formulaic. Once you understand copy and whatnot – I’m not a professional copywriter – but there’s a formula to it.

I think studying people like Dan Kennedy, looking at sales emails that we know are high converting that resonate with you, and trying to establish the patterns, language, and adjectives.

I was taught to create swipe files, which means putting together a folder on your computer of headlines, phrases, adjectives, emails, and sales pages that you can model that speaks to your market. I learn best by example.

It’s been helpful to see your stuff. You don’t fall into the traditional way of communicating because you focus a lot on food and different aspects like diabetes, heart conditions, and things like that.

Just paying attention and being a student. Always having that beginner’s mind and coming at it like, “I like this email. What do I like about it? What is good about it? What is making me someone who even knows about diabetes, why do I even want to click the link? What is the feeling that it’s initiating in me?”

I’ve never taken a formal copywriting course, although I’ve read books on it. I pay very close attention to how things are written. I always have something to learn. Especially where copy is concerned, you can always improve, tweak, and pay attention.

Yuri:                Moving from the B to C side to the B to B with Healthpreneur, as I develop a lot of frameworks and different components of business, it’s helped me a lot as well. You get to this level of unconscious competence where you do it so often that you say, “How do I do this again?”

It’s cool to dissect it and break down those formulas like you talked about, because then you can start to identify that much more easily in other people’s work. Then it’s a lot easier to communicate with other people.

It is such an important skillset. Modeling to see what works, creating your own voice, putting in the reps.

 

How to move from one-on-one to group programs, or have both effectively

Without giving your secret sauce and everything, how do you walk people through taking their one-on-one expertise to a group coaching type of platform?

Lori:                That’s a good question and this is the starting point: With one-on-ones, the way we were all taught – whether you’re a chiropractor, naturopath, trainer, or life coach – is not necessarily to create a narrow niche and focus on a singular problem to solve.

Now, in order to create a group program, that’s exactly what you have to do. You must first decide: What is the singular problem I’m going to solve? Then, from there, reverse engineer the protocol. Create the actual steps that the clients need to learn and do to have results or get rid of the problem that you’re solving.

One of the mistakes that I often see, even in sales pages, is people making lots of different promises like lose weight, gain energy, sleep through the night, get rid of bloating, etc. No one’s going to believe you because that can’t happen in six weeks!

Narrow it down. But then the mindset that comes with focusing on one thing, like headaches, is, “Well, am I going to be ruining my chances of getting a lot of clients?” And I say, “Well, how many people in this world have headaches? A lot, so I think you’re okay.”

It’s really about breaking it down step by step and focusing on the fundamentals. If this is going to be your base program, what we call a signature program, it’s fundamental. In my opinion, that one-on-one coaching, that higher level of accountability and investment, should only happen after somebody’s gone through and been compliant with the fundamentals. The personal attention doesn’t need to come at that point.

That’s how I teach people to do it, where each module, or each pillar, each week, or class, or whatever you want to call it, only focuses on the one thing that they need to learn and the one thing that they need to do to solve the health problem that you’re promising. And when you break it down like that, it helps to remove overwhelm from the client.

The mindset trouble that we get into as practitioners is that because we want to feel like we’re giving them their money’s worth, we tack on the to-dos. Every week, most practitioners are giving them five things to do. But most people don’t even drink water.

So, if most people don’t even drink water and you’re asking them to have apple cider vinegar, go work out for 20 minutes, and meditate, you’ve screwed them. Already they’re failing, and it’s done and it’s over.

We have to think about the singular problem that you’re solving and the point at which the client is at in their life. Not where you think they are, or where you want them to be, or where they think they are. Where they actually are.

Start from that place and literally give them one thing to do. Explain why it is they need to do it, so they can comply, do it, and not get super-overwhelmed and blame you because your program sucks and you failed.

Yuri:                It’s never about us. It’s about them, but we’ll take the blame. It’s all good. That’s valuable. With that signature course you’re really building out a signature system as well, like a proprietary secret sauce, a five-step process or whatever it might be.

Lori:                It gives you the ability to create consistency and measure it. It gets you out of that Whack a Mole. It gets you out of that frantic-ness and it gives you something to focus on over time, which is how businesses are built.

Yuri:                Totally. So just to recap: You start off with the signature course. Get people going through that at a fundamental level. It meets more of their needs. Then, once they’ve finished that, offer the right people the opportunity to work with you more closely at a higher price point if they wanted to, but don’t have to. But it would make more sense at that point. They’ve covered their bases before even spending time with you.

Lori:                Absolutely. For me and my business, the way that I used my program, it pulled double duty. If you have that system, if you have that core program, you can use it with one-on-one clients and in a group setting at the same time.

Of course, I had people that came to me and said, “Absolutely not. I’m not joining the group.” And I said, “Okay. No problem. Let’s do it as a 12-week program.” So they either paid in full or monthly. That way, I used my one program in my business for seven years and I didn’t have to create anything else. Most often, people would renew after 12 weeks.

I had clients stay for up to two years because that’s how long it took them to even get the fundamentals down. We’re not perfect. Life happens and we all fall off the bandwagon at some point.

It’s the accountability and support that they’re coming to you for. So, whether you want to do it in a group or as a one-on-one, just having that system and that structure in your business changes the game.

 

The Rapid Five

Yuri:                Awesome. Great advice, Lori. This has been awesome. Are you ready for the Rapid Five?

Lori:                I am ready.

 Yuri:                All right. Nothing to be scared about here. It’s all good. So ive rapid fire questions, whatever comes top of mind is probably the right answer. So here we go. Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

Lori:                Delegating.

Yuri:                Delegating. Nice. I don’t think anyone can relate to that. Number two, what is your biggest strength?

Lori:                Taking action and not being afraid. Just going for it.

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

Lori:                Creating funnels and understanding the strategy behind it.

Yuri:                It’s not just about slapping some pages one after another together, so that’s good.

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

Lori:                Drink coffee.

Yuri:                Every day?

 Lori:                Every day. 5:00 AM every day.

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

Lori:                I feel calm and I’m enjoying what I’m doing.

Yuri:                Wicked. Lori, this has been a lot of fun. Before we finish off, what is the best place for our listeners to follow your work online?

Lori:                They can go to the thewellnessbusinesshub.com.

Yuri:                Lori, once again, thank you so much for taking the time for being with us and sharing your journey and your wisdom. And thank you for all the awesome work you continue to do for practitioners in our space to help them get their business going and serving more people.

Lori:                Thanks for having me, Yuri.

Yuri:                You’re welcome.

 

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Yuri’s Take

So there you have it, Lori Kennedy. I hope you’ve enjoyed this one. If you run your own coaching practice, I’m sure what she was sharing will be valuable to you. If you can leverage your time and get your message out to more people, if you want to enjoy more than the one-on-one, what Lori’s talked about is the way to go.

When I initially started online, the holy grail was to start an online business, never talk to anyone again, make money while you sleep, etc. That happens if you do things properly. But you get to a point where you enjoy dealing with people and maybe miss those one-on-one sessions.

If that’s you, that’s totally cool. You don’t always have to move away from the one-on-one because there’s always going to be a place for that, maybe at a higher level. What you want to avoid is trading your time for money every day of the week. You don’t want to work 40 hours a week dealing one-on-one with clients all day long.

As Lori mentioned, you can find the fundamental truths and put together a curriculum that people can go through with you in a much less guided fashion. It helps them, it frees up your time, and it just makes a lot more sense. From there, you can have the right people elevate to work with you more closely and at a price model that makes sense for you.

That’s one of the beautiful things about running an online business where you have leveraged products and courses that do the work for you. You don’t have to work with people, and only the people you want to work with are determined by your own criteria. You call the shots and say how much it costs to work with you. If they don’t want to work with you, that’s fine because they have other things that they can do on their own at a lower price point.

That’s all for today. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Remember to subscribe to the Healthpreneur Podcast on iTunes. If you haven’t already, leave a rating or review while you’re there. If you’ve enjoyed the show, that means a lot to us.

And if you haven’t picked up your copy of Health Profits Secrets, you can do so today. It’s a great book. It’ll take you less than an hour to get through, but it gives you the fundamental truths about building a successful business online. Specifically, you’re going to uncover four secrets that all successful businesses in the health and fitness space have in common. And you’re going to get a scorecard inside that book so you can score yourself in each of those four areas and see if there’s a gap.

Then, I’ll show you how to close that gap so that instead of driving a car with flat tire, we can inflate that tire so your car runs smoothly and your business journey is that much more enjoyable.

We’re going to look at fixing that, getting you back on track, and getting you to the next level, wherever that might be for your business. I’ve covered the cost of the book for you, just help with the shipping over at Healthpreneurbook.com. Thank you so much for joining me once again. It’s always a pleasure to bring you these awesome guests and I hope you’ve enjoyed this one. Have an awesome day. Continue to go out there and be great, do great, and I look forward to seeing you in our next episode.

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Free Healthpreneur Health Profit Secrets Book

Transcription

Webinars are awesome. But do you know the one mistake to avoid with your webinars? Well, that’s what I’m going to share with you in today’s episode. If you’re thinking about creating a webinar or if you have an existing webinar, do not go anywhere because the one mistake I’m going to reveal to you right here could save you a lot of frustration and wasted money.

Last Monday on the solo round I talked about how we’ve stopped content marketing to double-down on our webinars. We only have one webinar, that’s it, in our Perfect Client Pipeline. That’s our business model, but as I mentioned, there’s a big difference between having a webinar and having a webinar that converts. I want to share a story with you to help this sink in.

 

Example of webinar that wasn’t converting: You don’t know what you don’t know

A couple years ago, we had a fitness coach/health coach come to one our workshops. Her webinar was not converting well at the time. She was selling a sugar detox and it just wasn’t working, so we opened the laptop and looked at the slide deck.

We looked through keynotes, slide by slide, and I started to see a pattern. I saw the problem. She was not aware of the problem because she didn’t know what she didn’t know. That’s why it’s so important to have the right plan, coaching, advice, mentorship, and guidance to help you go through this stuff.

The big mistake that she was making was that she was giving away all the content, all the answers, all the how-to on the webinar. That is going to kill your conversions, as it did hers.

We looked at her content and said, “We’re going to position it this way instead. We’re going to move a couple things around and tweak how we’re introducing the content.” Suddenly, she said, “Wow. This makes a lot more sense.”

She took it back, ran the webinar, and it did a lot better. The one mistake to avoid is just verbal diarrhea-ing. Is that even a word? Don’t diarrhea all your content all over the people watching the webinar. Specifically, don’t do so in a way where you’re giving them the exact roadmap, for what it is they want to do.

 

Framework to position your content properly: “Teach to sell”

There are a couple important ways to position your content properly in your webinars. I’ll give you a framework. When we do a webinar, or teach any content in general, there’s a spectrum. On one end of the spectrum, we have “no teach.” In that case, it would be all pitch, which is never good.

On the other end of the spectrum, which is what most people do, is called “teach to teach.” They teach for the sake of teaching. They give away all of this great stuff and everyone thinks, “This was such a good use of my time. This was tremendous. Thank you so much,” and nothing happens.

We want to go in the middle, which is our sweet-spot. This methodology that we’ve created is called “teach to sell.”

“Teach to sell,” means teaching in a way that leads to a sale, whether that’s an enrolling of clients or selling of a product.

There are a couple distinctions between “teach to sell” and “teach to teach.” The biggest is that with “teach to sell,” we talk about the what and the why, not the how. When you finish the webinar, what you want the prospects to be thinking to themselves is, “This is amazing. This is great. Now I know what to do, but how do I do it?”

That’s where you come in as the knight on the white horse with your program, your coaching, or your solution. That’s where you come in. Giving them everything in the webinar is a massive disservice because once they leave the webinar, they’re never going to have access to that information again.

They’ll have forgotten most of it, and they’re not going to act.

 

Build desire in the webinar and have an objective

We want to build the desire in the webinar to move to the next step with us. The only way to do that is by following this “teach to sell” framework, which is exactly what we walk through with our clients to help them build out their webinars.

If you don’t know how to do this properly, don’t even bother creating a webinar. If you don’t follow our Perfect Client Pipeline which is Facebook Ad, Webinar, Application, and Enrollment Call, then you can’t spend money on Facebook.

You can’t run ads if none of that is converting into paying clients. You must have each step of the process dialed in. The number one mistake, as I said several times already, is do not over-teach. Don’t teach for the sake of teaching on your webinar. Have an objective and know how to position that content effectively.

Content marketing, lead magnets, and “content congruency”

When we were teaching content marketing back in the day, it was the same situation. Why do most blogs get an average conversion rate from a visitor to an opt-in of only 1%? The number one reason is that they’ve given away everything in the blog post. That’s good because people are looking for that solution, but it’s bad because you’ve satiated their whole desire. You’ve scratched their itch.

Secondly, most people just say, “Join my newsletter,” or they have one opt-in across the entire blog. We started creating content that provided an amazing value and, in some cases, it gave away the how-to. In some cases, it didn’t, but either way, we would then tie that into a lead magnet that was specific to the content.

If they were reading a post on kettlebell training, we would have a free kettlebell workout lead magnet. That’s why our average conversion rate on our blog is 11% on the health and fitness site.

I don’t recommend spending all your time content marketing. But if you do, make sure you follow that approach so you have what we call “content congruency.” We take that same idea back to the webinar. Don’t give away everything because then you scratch all the itches.

It needs to be built in a way that moves them from prospect to client. Anything else is a disservice. If you think you’re being of value to people by giving away everything, you’re not.

They’re going to leave. They’re not going to enroll with you. They’re going to continue to suffer down their path and nothing’s going to happen. Does that make sense?

 

Health Business Accelerator Program and what’s to come

This is a quick episode today. We don’t need to belabor this point, but that’s the number one mistake you need to avoid with your webinars. If you’d like our help in building all this stuff out, we’d love to help you. Check out our Health Business Accelerator Workshop to see if it’s a good fit for you.

If it is, hit the “Apply Now” button and we’ll see if you are a good fit for us. That’s over at healthprenuergroup.com/workshop.

That is all for today. I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. This week, we’ve got some inspiring conversations with a good friend of mine, Lori Kennedy, and Daniele Hargenrader. Don’t go anywhere. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast, so you don’t miss any of this awesome stuff. I will see you on Wednesday. In the meantime, continue to go out there, be great, do great, and we’ll see you then.

Transcription:

Hey guys! Welcome to episode 86 of the Healthpreneur podcast. I’m excited to bring you an amazing interview to finish off the week. I hope you’ve enjoyed the week and had a great time going out and doing more of your awesomeness.

Today we are talking with my good buddy, Ben Greenfield. He is another one of the original gangsters, as we call them. He’s been in the online game for at least 12 or 13 years now, and has done some amazing things. If you know Ben, you know what I’m talking about.

He’s an amazing and prolific content producer, a great writer, has written some amazing books, has a great podcast, and is an all-around awesome guy. We’ve spent a lot of time together, hung out, traveled and done some cool stuff. I’m excited to bring him to you, because he has a great wealth of knowledge; not just from a health and fitness perspective, but from the journey that he’s gone through as an entrepreneur.

In this episode, we’re going to focus on the keys to lasting business success. It’s very easy to start a business online, but it’s another to successfully keep it going for more than a decade. Ben has been there and done that, and continues to do so.

He’s going to share what he’s learned along the way, what it takes in terms of where he was when he started, and how he’s morphed to where he is now. A lot of the takeaways and insights will be of extreme value to you as well, no matter where you are in your business journey.

Let me give a slightly more formal introduction to Ben Greenfield.

He’s got a long bio, so I’m not going to read the whole thing. I’ll sprinkle in my own things here and there. He was raised in rural north Idaho. He was homeschooled from kindergarten until grade 12. He’s a self-declared complete nerd.

He was the president of the chess club, played violin for 13 years, wrote fantasy fiction, and spent most of his childhood years with his nose in a book. When he graduated from his high school, even though he was homeschooled, he went in to study anatomy, physiology, biomechanics, all that good stuff, and completed an internship at Duke University.

That led him down the path of going deep into health and human performance, and he later got into some extreme sports. When I first met him, I think 10 or 11 years ago, he was the guy for Ironman Triathlon training. He’s competed in many different events all around the world, and he’s done some amazing things.

He has experimented on himself. He has brought his own discoveries to the world and to his audience.

I’m super excited to have Ben on the podcast. With that said, without any further ado, let’s welcome him to the show and dig into it.

Ben Greenfield. What’s up, brother? Welcome to the Healthpreneur podcast.

Ben:                       Thank you for having me on the Healthpreneur podcast, Yuri.

Yuri:                      You’re very welcome. I’m sure most of our listeners know who you are. Let’s go back to day one. We met, I don’t even know, it seems like 10 years ago. A Ryan Lee event, I think. You were talking about going to the grocery store to get avocados. I think that’s what I remember from our initial conversation.

How did you go from training people in person to starting this whole online journey?

Ben:                       Well, first off, you left out the part about us crashing the wedding at the hotel. No, it was a high school prom.

Yuri:                      Yeah, that was awesome.

Ben:                       At the hotel, posing as high schoolers. And believe it or not, 10 years ago, either of us would have passed for a high schooler.

Yuri:                      Seriously.

Ben:                       That’s a segue though. Actually, that’s not a segue. It’s a rabbit hole. I get the two mixed up. It’s a rabbit hole.

 

How Ben moved online after winning Trainer of the Year in 2008

I was a personal trainer. I ran brick and mortar personal training studios here in Washington and Idaho for many years. I’ve always been one of those guys who wanted to differentiate himself from a business standpoint, in terms of doing things other people weren’t doing, melding my quirky, creative side with my techy, science side.

So, in this case, I outfitted a lot of my gyms with things like high-speed video cameras for biomechanical analysis, and I invested a lot of the money I made from personal training back into equipment like indirect calorimetry equipment for VO2 max and metabolic rate analyses, and platelet-rich plasma injections for joints, and all sorts of things other things personal trainers weren’t doing.

I also reached out to a ton of physicians in the community. I wanted to work with doctors so that I had that stamp of approval and would be well-respected in the community as the guy to go to when nothing else was working, and the guy who doctors would send their patients to because they trusted me. I went out of my way to show my technical expertise.

As a result of that, a few physicians nominated me for the National Strength & Conditioning Association’s Personal Trainer of the Year award back in 2008. When I was voted the Personal Trainer of the Year, I started getting inundated with requests to speak at a lot of these fitness and fitness business conferences, and began to travel a lot more, which left me without too much time to run the brick and mortar personal training studios.

But I kept doing it. While I travelled, I started getting into writing, and launched a website. I began a podcast, and I started doing a lot of these things that went outside the boundary of just counting dumbbells and helping the 40-year-old housewife look good in a bikini.

 

Launching his first successful online product

I remember one of the guys – a mutual acquaintance of ours, I believe – Vince Del Monte, was a big guy in the bodybuilding industry. He called himself the skinny guy’s savior back then. I remember listening to a talk he gave about eBooks, information products, and how to tie those into affiliate launches.

I didn’t know what an eBook or JV was. I wasn’t familiar with any of that stuff. But I took copious notes. This was just before my twin boys were about to be born, and I thought, “Well heck, if I can figure out a way to not have to be at the gym all the time…” I was putting in a ton of hours as a trainer, and I was making good money, but just putting in a lot of hours. I figured, why not try this? Why not write and start a website, brand some affiliates, and launch an information product?

So I did.

I spent six months, after sitting in that talk that Vince gave, creating one of my first products. It was a triathlon training product that allowed people to do an Ironman triathlon – which I was very into at the time – with minimal training so they could spend time with their friends and their family, their career, and their hobbies. It was a smashing success.

I released it during the Ironman World Championships week, when everybody was thinking about Ironman, and I sold a lot of copies. It was a $97 digital and $197 hard copy product, and that wound up bringing me in somewhere between $40,000 and $50,000 over the course of about seven days.

Yuri:                      As you launched this, how did you build that audience to even launch it to in the first place? Was it through the podcast or blogging?

Ben:                       I used a lot of different mechanisms. I had my podcast then. Even though it was small, I had it, and because it was one of the first fitness podcasts in iTunes, there weren’t a lot of podcasts to choose from. So, I had a decent audience there.

I took my newsletter that I was already sending out to all the clients I’d personally trained for the past eight years at that point – there were several hundred people on that list – and by that time I had added an opt-in to a site that I had as a personal trainer.

Specifically, this site was tracking all my global adventures in triathlon, and it was just a rag-tag blog. But I did have an opt-in on it. I had, I think, close to about 3,000 people or so on an email list.

I hired my first virtual assistant as well, leading up to this launch. I had her hunt down the contact details of all the triathlon coaches in the U.S. and all the triathlon clubs in the U.S. She reached out to them, and offered them the opportunity to become affiliates of this product, which I had on Clickbank at the time.

That was one of the very first tasks I gave to a VA. I templated a letter and she sent it out to everyone and did follow-up emails. I wound up bringing on a lot of affiliates, and exponentially building a big audience in the triathlon community that way.

Those were the primary methods. I used my newsletter, I sent out emails. Those are some of the biggies. At that point, I wasn’t doing much on social media, so it was mostly affiliates reaching out to triathlon clubs and triathlon coaches, and just straight up newsletter emails from my website.

When I realized I could do that, I slowly began to phase out of personal training. I didn’t see myself having the bandwidth for both, and I didn’t have a desire to hire a bunch of employees and just have them run the company for me.

I shifted all my clients to other personal trainers in the local community, sold all the gym training equipment, and gradually moved into my house to begin the next chapter of my career.

This was essentially sitting at home in my underwear, writing books, working on products, shooting videos, podcasting, and traveling around the world to speak, which is the better part of what I do today.

 

Outsourcing and creating a team

Yuri:                      That’s awesome. What were some of the biggest challenges that you faced early on? And what’d you learn from those challenges?

Ben:                       One big challenge was time. I couldn’t fabricate time. I’d get home from the gym as a personal trainer for those first several months, and be tapping away on the keyboard until 2 or 3 AM while my wife went to bed. I was programming my website, building opt-ins, and creating training programs. I did all the layout for the book, and all the graphics.

I was just a workhorse. One big mistake I made was working myself into the ground by refusing to outsource. In my case, I was just cheap. I didn’t want to pay somebody to do what I could do myself. I didn’t realize that you should stick to what it is you’re best at; the things that you’re good at. And even if you’re decent at other things, it doesn’t mean that that’s your best purpose.

I wasted a lot of time. I would have hired everything from a website designer, book layout and formatter, writer, and VA – to run more things than my VA was running at the time – much earlier than I wound up doing.

I’ve realized that what really moves the dial in business is doing what you’re good at. Take any big ideas or visions that you have, and surround yourself with an amazing team of people who can execute on that vision.

It’s just like Gary Keller’s book “The One Thing.” Crush it on the one thing that you’re good at, and then let an amazing team that you surround yourself with take care of the rest.

Yuri:                      Totally. How big is the team that you work with now? In your current role, what do you do on a day-to-day basis?

Ben:                       My current team is 14 individuals. They run everything from Facebook ads, to affiliate campaigns, podcast audio editing, tech website design, and all that type of thing. I travel around the world and I speak, so I’m like the talking head of the company. I get up on stage and give presentations on everything from biohacking to living more ancestrally to customizing your diet, et cetera.

I freelance write for magazines like Men’s Health and Men’s Journal; publications that wind up getting us a decent number of eyeballs. I also write books and eBooks, as well as our main featured blog article for the week.

I love to write. I know some entrepreneurs don’t, but I love to, and I’m good at it. I recognize that words just flow when I write, so that’s something that I do in addition to the speaking.

Ben’s role in the company: Big vision, the “face,” media, writing, and speaking

I do a lot of our media stuff, so the podcasting and the videos that help people trust the company. I’m still the trusted expert and face of the company, although I’m in the process of building out clones of myself who can eventually do the same thing I’m doing without me needing to be in front of a camera or podcast microphone all the time. But still, I’m doing media, in addition to speaking and writing.

Then, finally, I’m the big vision guy. I was recently in Finland, for example, and I spent several days foraging. I foraged for everything; mushrooms, pine needles, bilberries, lingonberries, sea buckthorn, and beyond.

When I’m doing something like that, I’m generating ideas of how those types of ancestral compounds can be blended with modern science – like ATP, ketones, HMB, and things along those lines – to bring new products and new solutions to the market.

And it’s not just supplements. Right now, I’m working on some essential oil mixes and a nice essential oil diffuser that I want to bring to our company. I just finished a gratitude journal. I’m the big vision product guy who either creates the products or creates the product formulations. Then, my team helps to make those a reality and make them available to people.

 Yuri:                      That’s awesome! That’s the ideal place to be; only doing what you want to do, and surrounded by farmers who can extract the milk… Dean Jackson talks about the whole self-milking cow analogy. Have you heard that before?

Ben:                       I haven’t heard that one. What is it?

Yuri:                      For those of you who don’t know who Dean Jackson is, I’d say one of the smartest marketers. He invented the squeeze page. He has the I Love Marketing podcast with Joe Polish.

He talks about cows have milk, but can’t self-milk because they have hooves. They don’t have opposable thumbs. We, the entrepreneurs, the visionaries, are like the cows. We can’t extract our own milk in a way that’s going to satisfy the marketplace’s demand, nor can we.

What we want to do is surround ourselves with farmers who can extract our milk. This could be a project manager or team members who can take your ideas, your milk, and make them a reality in the marketplace.

Something I’ve found is that we have way more milk than people can even extract and put out into the marketplace. How do you pull in the reins on these ideas? Does your team tell you to slow down when you say, “We’re going to have it happen by tomorrow”?

Ben:                       Exactly.

Yuri:                      How do you find that balance?

Ben:                       Well first of all, I don’t like to think of myself as having hooves. I cringe. I just love the opposable thumbs so much. And I can actually milk myself, Yuri. I don’t know if you’re aware of that.

Yuri:                      I bet you can.

Ben:                       “You milk yourself, Focker?” Anyways, the idea is that you need a dreamcatcher. And for me, it’s a very simple dreamcatcher. It’s a Slack channel, which is what we use for communication. We have one Slack channel devoted to product development and another Slack channel for product ideas.

I know that if I put something in product ideas, Kyler, who helps bring some of these ideas to fruition and hunts down sources, Matt, my manager, and Angelo, my COO, will see it. They’re all members of that Slack channel. They will add that to our product timeline, and identify how it could potentially be brought to market.

Then, once the time is right, other people on different channels will be brought in. For example, Ashley, our content manager, will see which product we’re launching next; after we work with formulators and sources. She’ll contact me and say, “On October 30 and November 14, you’re going to do this blog post. We want you to cover this topic in a podcast.”

It’s all relevant to that product we’ll be launching. It all starts with getting that out of your mind, like the “Getting Things Done” book. You just need to pass it out of your brain, and put it somewhere where it can live. Not where it can live and be hidden, but where it can live and be acted upon. And for me it’s just a Slack channel.

Yuri:                      Cool. That’s awesome. When people in our space come online, they’re a great technician; an amazing trainer, nutrition expert, or whatever it might be. Then they realize, “Wow, I actually have to build a business.” So, they must put on a different hat and become more of a business builder.

For you, what were some of the initial skills or traits you had to develop from being a personal trainer to being a CEO of your own business?

 

Sticking to it, saying no, and learning to trust, delegate, and stop micromanaging

Ben:                       The biggest is learning to trust and not micromanage, which I admittedly still struggle every day to do. To trust that the headline I see when I visit my own website is actually being split tested. Even though I cringe when I see it, I trust that the headline is actually attracting people to our product, or to our website, or serving people. And recognizing that I’m not necessarily my audience.

My audience might think differently than me. They might not be a crazy, self-experimenting, immersive, journalist, masochist who does endurance races. They might be a 60-year-old woman who has acne all of a sudden and wants to figure out what to do about estrogen dominance.

I must trust that the folks to whom I’m delegating tasks are doing their job with excellence, which they are, not micromanaging it, and trusting the process. That’s a big one. Just being able to trust.

The other one is just learning how to delegate. And when I say learning how to delegate, I don’t just mean being a slave driver and telling people, “Do this, do that,” but really learning how to take a vision and voice that vision in a thorough and educated manner that allows people to act upon it.

I do a great deal of my communication with my team via audio, rather than written text. It allows me to succinctly and precisely voice what it is that I need accomplished, or what it is that I envision. I use, for example, an app called Voxer, to engage with the team. And I use another app called Recordify, which allows me to record things and send them straight into a Slack channel.

I often reply to emails using voice memo on my phone, and then replying to the email with that. That allows me to delegate more quickly. If you know that you’ve delegated well, then that sets you up to be able to trust that what it is you envisioned is being interpreted correctly.

Yuri:                      Totally. That’s huge. As you evolve in business, you get to the point where you’re focusing on the what and the why. Other people figure out the how.

And as you mentioned, being able to clearly communicate that vision is so powerful. And your team loves you for it and are thankful for the clarity so they can go make it happen and let you do what you need to do.

Ben:                       Right.

Yuri:                      What do you think is the number one skill or trait entrepreneurs must have for lasting success?

Ben:                       I don’t know whether I’d call it “stick-to-it-iveness,” or focus. I don’t know if I have a sexy term to give to it, but the number one problem I see with entrepreneurs is one I’ve seen in my father and in my brother, who are hardwired to be entrepreneurs like I am.

But they do this: They bounce. They identify the shiny penny, and they pursue it without asking themselves, “Hey. Is this a hell yes? Is this something that’s really going to move the dial, make me happy, satisfy my core, and fulfill my true purpose, or is this just a really cool opportunity?

I think that the biggest trait an entrepreneur can have, or at least a very, very big one that leaps to my mind immediately, is just the ability to say no. The ability to focus on what it is that you need to do, and to be able to, like a horse with blinders, ignore the rest.

It’s an art and a science. You don’t want to miss very cool little opportunities that might come your way that are hell yeses, but you need to teach yourself to be able to identify those and ignore all the other little things.

That, “Oh hey, could I introduce you to such and such?” “Hey, you want to grab coffee?” “Hey, here’s a business idea.” “Hey, can you throw $10,000 into this startup?” Suddenly, you’re going 20 different directions and you don’t get any deep work done.

Yuri:                      It’s true. It’s a challenge, too, because most of us entrepreneurs are very creative by nature, which is very distractive. Was that something you’ve learned over time, or were you able to say no to a lot of things right out of the gates?

Ben:                       You learn it over time. I’ve said yes to so many things, found myself spread so thin, and shut down so many side businesses that I’ve started, it’s not even funny.

Yuri:                      I’m always amazed at how many things you have going on. But I guess it helps when you have a team that can manage a lot of the stuff for you.

Ben:                       Absolutely.

 

Content quality over quantity and setting priorities

Yuri:                      If you were to start all over again, in a completely different market or niche within the health industry, what would you do differently, if anything?

Ben:                       I would focus more on quality, and less on quantity, when it comes to content.

The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve realized that to make great art, instead of just churning out a blog post that is SEO-friendly and allows you to meet your word count for the day, it’s better to do one absolutely kick ass piece of content once a month. It’s better to do an amazing podcast once every two weeks, versus one every day. This is to take great pride in well done, deep work, rather than just tick the boxes and check off what you identified as needing to be accomplished for that day.

My focus is this: When I sit down with a blank page and I’m going to write an article on, let’s say, the immune system, I want that to entertain and enchant people for 10 years. I don’t want it to just be a churned out, SEO fodder type of article that’s just there to drive traffic.

I want it to be something cool. Ryan Holiday talks about this in his relatively new book, “Perennial Best Seller.” You want to create something that you can be proud of, that’s not just another recipe cluster or basic ho-hum article. I want to create good, cutting edge, compelling content.

Yuri:                      I believe that there is a reversion happening, back to almost the Renaissance. This craftsman-like attention to products and detail, whether free or paid, is really creating an amazing experience. You just hit the nail on the head there with what you just said. And I think we’re seeing a lot more of that as well.

So, you’ve got two young boys. Well, young-ish. What has having kids taught you about business, marketing, et cetera?

Ben:                       That’s a great question. The thing that jumps to mind right away is to set your priorities.

When you have children, not only are you in charge of two little human beings who you can train to grow up to make this world a better place, but you also realize that dilly-dallying around in the afternoon, working from 6 PM to 10 PM to catch up on the stuff you dabbled in the rest of the day, doesn’t work when you have kids.

Then there’s family dinners, driving your twins to jiu-jitsu, and then you want to play Legos after dinner. You need to prioritize and structure your day when you have children. That’s one of the things that I found, if hanging out with your kids and being a family person is important to you.

The way I view it is this: If I were to wake up, and rather than it being an eight-hour workday I imagine it’s a four-hour workday, and I just want to compress as much productive activity into those four hours as possible, how would I structure this day?

There would be a lot of things that I don’t do because of that. I used to watch Hulu shows and Netflix shows during lunch time. Now I don’t do that. I eat a faster lunch, I Voxer with my team, I get some emails done, then I jump back into work. For me, I know that frees up an extra 45 minutes that I’ll have for my kids when they get home from school.

You make these little decisions to free up time here and there. I find myself becoming very, very good at fabricating time since I’ve had children.

Yuri:                      Yeah, I tell everyone: “If you want to be more productive, just have kids.” It forces you to not mess around anymore. There is your lesson for the day. Just have kids. It’s all good.

 

The Rapid Five

Are you ready for the Rapid Five?

Ben:                       Let’s do it.

Yuri:                      Let’s do it, buddy. All right. So, five rapid-fire questions. You have no idea what these bad boys are. Here we go. Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

Ben:                       Pride and arrogance.

Yuri:                      As in you have too much of it? Or too little?

Ben:                       My personality weakness is, if I’m not careful and I don’t ensure that I introduce lots of love and reminders to myself to be humble, I tend to be self-loving to too great an extent, and tend towards narcissism.

Yuri:                      Interesting. Other than being able to do handstands on the edge of the Waimea Canyon, what is your biggest strength?

Ben:                       I think it was a headstand. I don’t remember if it was a handstand.

Yuri:                      It’s close enough to death, so whatever it was.

Ben:                       My greatest strength? I am extremely persistent. I’ve done almost two decades of some of the most masochistic, hardcore endurance events on the face of the planet, and I think that’s lent itself well to success and persistence in the rest of my life.

Frankly, it’s also lent itself well to business. When I develop an endurance training formula, and people see that I’ve slogged out over 6,000 miles of adventure racing and triathlon and marathon, they put a little bit more trust in that product knowing that it’s been tested in the trenches.

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

Ben:                       Writing. I’ve been writing since I was six years old. Give me a topic – not saying this to sound arrogant or prideful – but I can churn out some damn good content on that one topic, within literally 45 minutes flat.

Yuri:                      Yeah totally. Well you’ve got some amazing content on your blog, so we’ll be sure to let our listeners know about that in a second. But first, number four, what do you do first thing in the morning?

Ben:                       Depends. As one of those guys who’s constantly experimenting, I guess the very, very first thing is I do gratitude journaling. I write down one truth that I discovered from the reading that I did that day, one thing that I’m grateful for, and then one person who I can pray for, or help, or serve that day. And that’s the entire basis of the journal that I just published; doing all three of those things. That’s it. Then, after that, it might be tai chi, yoga, or the sauna, whatever it is that I happen to be studying up on.

Yuri:                      Wicked. And finally, complete this sentence: I know I’m being successful when…

Ben:                       That’s a tough one.

I know I’m being successful when I wake up in the morning, and I feel as though someone has to hold me in bed so that I can do my breathing and my gratitude journaling. Because I so badly just want to jump up, rush downstairs, start making amazing content, talking to people, and getting things done. Not because I want to get work over with so quickly, but because I really, truly just freaking love all the opportunities that day has to offer.

Because if your work is your play and your passion, you’re gonna be pretty successful.

Yuri:                      Totally. That’s awesome, man. Good stuff, my friends. Ben, this has been awesome.

What is the best place for people to follow your work online and check out your stuff?

Ben:                       Just google “Ben Greenfield”. You’ll find my stuff. There’s not many Ben Greenfields out there, so that’s probably the best place to do it.

Yuri:                      Yep. Cool. And you’ve got a new site, getkion.com, and bengreenfieldfitnesscom. And your podcast is awesome.

Thank you for taking the time to be here and for being one of the original gangsters. You’ve been in this space for a long time doing some amazing work, and I value your friendship and all the awesome stuff you continue to contribute to our world.

Ben:                       To a fellow gang member, peace out.

Yuri:                      That’s right, bro.

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

Yuri’s Take

So, there you have Mr. Ben Greenfield, coming to us live on the Healthpreneur podcast. I hope you enjoyed this interview. Lots of great nuggets of wisdom, especially if you’re further along in your journey, or starting out and thinking ahead at what’s coming down the road.

One of the thinking exercises or challenges I want to leave with you today, is: Are you doing only what you are great at doing? Now I know that the answer to that is probably no in most cases. The challenge, as we build our businesses, as we develop as entrepreneurs, is to constantly be thinking, “Is what I’m doing the best use of my time? Is there something I’m doing that somebody else could do for me, or could do better than I can?”

The whole idea is to eventually get to the point where you are only doing what you are good at. Like Ben mentioned in this interview and like I’ve mentioned before, you start off by wearing all the hats. And that’s fine, unless you’re a venture capital-backed company and you’ve got millions of dollars to play with to hire X number of people right out of the gate.

But for most of us mere mortals, we’re doing everything out of the gates. But we eventually want to get to the point where we can start to surround ourselves with great people who can do the stuff that we don’t want to do, so that all we’re left doing is what, I call, our “unique genius activities.”

That’s the holy grail, because if you can build a business where all you get to do is do what you love to do, that’s a good place to be. In Ben’s case, it’s travelling around the world, speaking on stage, doing some writing, and everything else is taken care of.

That’s what I’d like you to think about today. Are there one or two things that you’re doing that someone else could do better? If you’re in the place where you can hire that person, do it. It’ll make a big difference in your own fulfillment, energy, and how your business moves forward.

So, that’s the deal for today. Thank you so much for joining me on the show. If you haven’t yet subscribed, please do so. Healthpreneur podcast on iTunes. Go over there, click the little purple button that says subscribe, and you will be all set. We’ve got 80+ episodes with some amazing people in our space.

There are hundreds and hundreds more to come over the next months and years because I’m not going anywhere, guys. I will be here for the long haul. I don’t foresee myself stopping these amazing conversations and bringing them to you, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

That’s all from me for today’s episode. Again, thank you so much for joining me. Keep getting on out there and serving people. Continue to be great, do great, and I’ll see you on our next episode.

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https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/

https://getkion.com/

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Transcription

How would you like to build a business doing what you love? To not just make living, but make an amazing living doing what you love? Well, that’s what we talk about in this podcast.

In today’s episode, we are speaking with Angela Argentina, who has mastered how to do this. It’s special what she’s been able to do after leaving a career in advertising once she realized that it was not her true calling.

She traveled around the world, had some cool insights and epiphanies, and transformed her approach to living and doing what she loves to do. Now, she’s a creative entrepreneur, an alternative healer, and she’s the founder of Kindred Kitchens and Kindred Spirits, which she’ll tell us a little bit more about in this interview.

What you’ll enjoy about her interview today is that she comes from a very intuitive place of growing her business and doing what it is that she feels that she’s here to do. And I think a lot of times, intuition is our best coach. You know, that gut feeling that tells you to do this, or not do that.

100% of the time, if we actually listen to it, it is the right guidance. Whether you consider that guidance from your higher self, or from guides that are invisible that are helping you along this journey, that intuition is going to always give you the exact right answer. It’s just a matter of listening to it.

Angela’s going to help us tap into that a little bit in this interview. She’s also going to share what she has learned from advertising and how she now applies it to her business in terms of messaging in her Facebook posts and writing copy that connects with people.

No matter what business you’re in, being able to communicate in an effective way is very important. She’s going to share a framework that she never even thought of until I asked her the question in this interview about how she breaks down that process. If you write that stuff down and work through it, your communication will be a lot more effective.

With that said, let’s bring Angela onto the show and dig into it. Angela, welcome to the Healthpreneur Podcast.

 

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Angela:                       Thank you for having me.

Yuri:                How’s it going? How’s life?

Angela:                       Things are good. Busy as usual, but I guess that’s not something to complain about as an entrepreneur.

Yuri:                It’s good, as long as you’re busy with stuff you want to be doing.

Angela:                       Exactly.

Yuri:                For our listeners who don’t know much about you, how do you describe what and why you do what you do?

Angela:                       I am a creative entrepreneur. I am an artist: a performing artist, a healing artist, and food to me is also an art. I do a lot of work with food, which is my newest business venture: Kindred Kitchens. I’ll tell you a little bit about that after, but I also teach yoga and meditations, and I’m an alternative healer and Reiki master.

Yuri:                Nice. Is most your work offline and in-person? Do you compliment that with stuff you’re doing online as well?

Angela:                       It depends on what you consider work. I do a lot on social media, which I guess constitutes as work in that it does get me business. But a lot of my work is meeting up with the community and working with people one-on-one. But sometimes, even with Reiki, it doesn’t have to be in physical contact with the person, so it is a bit of a mix-and-match. But yes.

Yuri:                It’s funny, because people ask, “Do you have an online business?” Well, it doesn’t matter. If you use the internet to grow your business, whether it’s online or offline, you’re still using the internet because that’s probably the most effective platform to be using.

What have you found to be the most effective way for you to use social media, or even your blog, to generate buzz and get people interested in working with you in-person?

 

Leveraging social media and attracting clients through your passion

Angela:                       To be honest, it’s more about what I do passionately than how I promote my business that gets me clients. I am active with yoga online, and I’ve got a big yoga following. I also post a lot of my food recipes and have three meet-up groups here in Toronto, so that also helps generate buzz and get people out. But people just generally see what I do and they’re inspired by it.

Yuri:                That’s the best way to attract people, because you’re just being yourself and attracting the right people because of that.

Angela:                       Yes, and word-of-mouth, but I do get random people messaging me a lot on either Instagram or Facebook, just because they see my posts through friends and stuff. It’s through the grapevine.

Yuri:                Very nice. That’s good. How did you get started in this space?

 

The transition out of advertising and into the healing space

Angela:                       About 10 years ago I was working in advertising, which was not aligned with who I am or what I want to do. I worked in another ad agency in Northern Ireland, and realized it really wasn’t what I wanted to do.

Then I started traveling, and I’ve been traveling non-stop. Well, I stop. I ground myself for a little bit and then I travel again. But it was during my travels that I started exploring more of what I wanted to do and not what I was expected to do. And it eventually led me to all these different opportunities, like the performing and stuff, which I probably would never have gotten into if I had done it here.

And my mother passed away about four years ago.

Yuri:                Sorry to hear that.

Angela:                       That was a big shift for me. I didn’t know anything about Reiki at that time, but even before I had discovered it, I had this ability to help heal people with my hands. When she was unconscious, I came down from Panama and worked on her to the best of my ability.

It brought her back to consciousness for a few days. I didn’t like the way that the hospital was treating her with medicine and not with love. That shifted me into a holistic mindset. The more I got into integrative nutrition and started going down that path, all these opportunities and people appeared and led me to where I am today.

Yuri:                Awesome. Everything happens for us, right?

Angela:                       Exactly.

Yuri:                We just make the most of it all. What are some of the big lessons life-wise or business-wise that you’ve learned from traveling to more than 30 countries?

 

Doing what you love, alignment, high vibrations, and positivity

Angela:                       To do what you love, because if you don’t do what you love, you’re just wasting your time and your energy. The more I align with what I’m doing, the higher my vibration is, and the more I attract success. I’m big on vibrations, personal frequencies, and chakras.

 Yuri:                Abraham-Hicks?

Angela:                       Yes, Abraham-Hicks, but I think it’s almost general knowledge now – the chakras and everything.

But just being positive. And how can you be positive if you’re going to work every single day and hating your job? You’re not going to be attracting all these wonderful things into your life. And while I was traveling, my first trip to Thailand was when I was working in advertising. I was trying to escape, and I first experienced all these serendipitous events, or synchronicities, which I thought was magic.

I had some life-changing experiences there, like having my passport, money belt, and everything returned to me. That opened my eyes to the magic of the world, you could say. The more aligned I am, and by doing what I love, these synchronicities happen to me so much that it doesn’t even surprise me anymore.

When you start noticing these things, that means that you’re aligned and you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing.

 Yuri:                That’s awesome. What advice to you give to someone who’s trying to figure this out? They’re not sure if they’re doing what they love, or maybe there’s a gnawing feeling inside of them. How do you guide them?

Angela:                       To get out of the situation they’re in. It’s so hard when you’re inside of whatever it is that is making you feel trapped. Maybe you don’t even realize that you feel trapped. But if something’s eating away at you, it’s because something’s not right.

A lot of us haven’t tuned into listening to our inner voice, or our subconscious, or even our gut. But when you’re out of that context, and just free, then you open yourself up to, “What do I want to do with my time right now?” Until you remove yourself from what’s expected, what’s normal, or your habits, I don’t think you’ll be able to find that. You’re just acting on what you think you’re supposed to do.

Yuri:                It’s true. You’re too close to the bark of the tree, so you can’t even see the forest. You need to step back a bit and take that time.

Angela:                       It’s like meditation. The art of meditation can be different for everybody, but it’s removing yourself from here and now and being objective. How can you be objective when you’re amidst it all? Even just going out and walking is enough to clear your mind and realize, “Wow, this is what’s bothering me.”

 

Angela’s advertising background and framework for communication

Yuri:                Totally. Were there lessons during your time in advertising that you brought to what you’re doing now and have served you well?

Angela:                       Yes. I’m totally immune to advertising now, which is awesome.

Yuri:                What does that mean?

Angela:                       It means that advertising doesn’t work on me. I can see an ad and it doesn’t affect me the way that it affects most people, because I’m so used to dissecting them. I know who they’re talking to and what they’re trying to say.

It also has helped me promote my business better.

Because I worked as an art director and a copy writer, and in that, we did multimedia campaigns and stuff, I’m very diverse in how I can communicate my message. I can do it verbally, but also visually. I have graphics skills, but also writing skills and the gift of gab.

Mainly, as an entrepreneur, the most important thing is to be yourself. At least for me. I don’t know the nature of everybody’s business. Mine is not super-formal, so I have the privilege of being myself, but I think that’s usually what people are attracted to. If you’re trying to find your niche, the best thing to do is just be true.

Yuri:                Well, it’s human to human, right? It doesn’t matter if you’re B to C or B to B anymore. People want to do business with humans, and you must be yourself. Otherwise, you’re just going to attract the wrong people, and it’s not going to be good.

Angela:                       Exactly.

Yuri:                So with your understanding of advertising and the creative process, when you have a message you want to communicate, what’s the framework that you go through?

It’s probably so natural to you now, but if you were to teach this to someone, or look at someone’s Facebook or Instagram post and dissect it, what are some of the elements that people should be considering with their messaging to be more effective?

Angela:                       It is very natural for me, so I don’t go through these steps anymore. But first you’d want to outline the key point and the message you’re trying to convey.

Then how you’re going to convey it. You must know who you’re talking to, because that’s going to determine your tone of voice and how you approach it. Know who your audience is and what they currently think and feel.

What do you want them to think and feel by receiving this message? And what do you want them to do? So, what’s the outcome?

As naturally as you can, form that up into one little message with some sort of call to action, and you have yourself a nice little ad. Put it on a pretty picture and slap on a logo or a website, and bam, there you go. Sold.

Yuri:                Awesome. With social, what do you find when you look at some of the posts that have been better received or successful than others? What are some commonalities?

Are there certain images that you use that are more native to the platform? Is there anything that you can, based on experience, forecast? Like, “Hey, I this I think will do better than something else?”

Angela:                       I find that the posts with the most engagement or reactions have me in them. So, people like me. It’s usually when I’m doing something like yoga, or when I was doing my fitness competition and constantly posting my progress. Things like that inspire people.

I have been told by many people that I have great energy, and people just like my positive outlook on stuff. There’s always some sort of positive spin to everything.

Yesterday, I made a post about how I’ve been flying at 100 miles per hour because I’m leaving for Bali next week. It was a post of me standing on my hands in a yoga studio. I said something like, “It’s really important to take some time to breathe, especially when you feel that you have no time to breathe. And this is what I do. I like to find my balance by standing on my head.”

Then I ask a little question as to what they like to do to find their balance. That was a good one.

Yuri:                That’s very cool. As you’ve moved from advertising to your current line of work, what has been one of the biggest challenges that you’ve had to overcome during the process, and what has that taught you?

 

The “security” of a steady paycheck, promoting yourself, and constant growth 

Angela:                       Well, the hardest thing in the beginning was dropping that security, which I don’t think that there was a security anyways. That whole security blanket thing is just an illusion that people have because somebody’s giving them a paycheck.

Yuri:                Which can easily be taken away, just like that.

Angela:                       Just run.

Just not having the security of a solid paycheck coming in was initially the scariest thing. I think you must be able to go out there and promote yourself, or have somebody do it for you. I’m good at that. I had a part-time job bartending when I first started doing it, and I got a lot of my clients who are still with me today from working in a bar.

I worked the day shift because that’s when all the business people would go in, and I’d have my business cards. There are always opportunities. You can go to different meetups or networking events. There are so many ways to get yourself out there, but you must do it. You can’t just sit at home and expect things to come to you.

Yuri:                No. In which case, you would just be working for somebody else.

Angela:                       Exactly.

Yuri:                That’s why we entrepreneurs are very different. We’re a different breed.

Angela:                       We are.

Yuri:                Have you felt this entrepreneurial spirit since you were young?

Angela:                       Yes. I always wanted to work. My first real job was when I was 16 and still in high school because I wanted to work. It was in a kitchen. It’s funny, because now I’m going back to that whole food aspect.

I learned early on that being a chef or working in a restaurant was not the career I wanted. But I didn’t know that you could do all this different stuff with food, which is what I’m doing now.

My longest job working for a company has been about a year and three months. I always take what I can. I grow. I move up in the company, go somewhere else, and learn more. That’s just my nature.

I’m always trying to improve my skills and upgrade. If you’re not an entrepreneur, that works against you, because then you become over-qualified. I think that I’m a forever student. I’m an entrepreneur, but I’m always going to be learning.

Yuri:                That’s great.

I don’t know many entrepreneurs that have done well for themselves that don’t have growth as one of their biggest values.

It’s one thing to rely on someone else to just give you paycheck to do the minimum every day. But like you said, as an entrepreneur you must grow, build your skill set, move on to bigger things, and add more value.

I think entrepreneurship is the ultimate spiritual journey. You learn so much about yourself and you grow. It’s awesome.

Angela:                       Yes. And it opens so many doors.

 

Time management, ambition, loving what you do, and hiring out for the rest

Yuri:                Yup. Absolutely. What do you think is the number one skill entrepreneurs must have for lasting success?

Angela:                       Time management and ambition. You must be self-motivated to get stuff done. It’s not just going to happen because you can talk to people or whatever. You have to be driven to go out and do something because you want to make it happen, not because you think that there’s some monetary reward.

A lot of the opportunities I’ve had have come from doing something else for something unrelated, and then that opened doors. You have to be, like you said, driven to better yourself. Along that journey is when all these opportunities will come and cross your path.

Yuri:                So let me ask you a question that I haven’t asked anyone, because I think you’re in a unique space to answer it. How do you balance the ambition to work hard with allowing the universe to provide what you want?

Talking about vibration and alignment, if you’re in alignment and high-vibration, things just happen, right?

Angela:                       Yes.

Yuri:                So how do you balance sitting around all day and doing nothing, waiting for that to happen, with the ambition to work hard?

The people that I know who are into the spiritual vibration stuff have this weird thing with hard work. I’m not saying hard work in a grind and hustle way, but I’m just saying that they feel they can just do whatever they want, without structure or anything, and stuff is just going to come to them.

From your perspective, how do you balance that “allowingness” to come into your life while still being ambitious and working hard towards what it is you want?

Angela:                       My answer for that is quite easy. I love what I do. So I’m doing it, I get excited about the end result, and that raises my vibration. And then I’m going out and doing these things. I don’t know anybody who leads their life in the way that I do.

I’m literally led by intuition; it helps me save so much money. It’s hard for me to even do colds for people, like in terms of food stuff, because I’ll go out and I’ll know to go somewhere, and then I go there, and everything that I need is on sale. It’s bizarre, but that’s just because I’ve been doing it for so long that it’s just become really strong.

When I get really excited about something, things literally just appear. And it’s because I’m aligned with what I want to do. The hard work is invoicing. I am so creative.

Yuri:                You don’t love invoicing?

Angela:                       I hate that.

Yuri:                It’s the best.

Angela:                       The little bits that slow me down actually cause a block in my flow because I hate doing it. And it’s not even hard. It’s just so tedious to me that I don’t want to do it.

I hired an assistant to do those tasks. She’s a virtual assistant, I found her on Upwork, in case anybody wants to find a personal assistant. She’s lovely. She sets her rate and stuff like that, but it has saved me.

She also helps with my social media. When I lost my phone, was traveling, and was posting a yoga challenge, I still had my computer so I could send her stuff and she totally saved my ass.

That’s how you can still do what you want to do, keep your vibration up, and just delegate.

 

The Rapid Five

Yuri:                Delegate and elevate. That’s what it’s all about.

This has been fun. I want to jump into the Rapid Five. So five rapid fire questions. You have no idea what they are, but our listeners might. They’re the insiders.

Whatever comes top of mind is probably the right answer, since your very intuitive anyway. Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

 Angela:                       My biggest weakness is that I try to do too much. I’m having to set my boundaries and be a little firmer about them because as an energy worker and an empath, and just humanitarian, I always want to help people. I will sometimes spread myself too thin.

And when I am spread too thin, I’m not at my best to be helping other people. It is completely necessary, especially as an energy worker or anybody that works helping other people, that you be firm and not take on too much. Love yourself first.

Yuri:                Totally. What’s your biggest strength?

Angela:                       I would say my positive outlook on life and creativity.

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

Angela:                       Let’s see. I don’t know. I have a few businesses on the go. But right now, I am focused a lot on my food. And I’m posting. I’ve got so many food things coming up. I’m hosting events and people are asking me for meal plans, so it’s kind of growing on its own. And I’m going to Bali to do raw vegan chef training.

Yuri:                That’s awesome. You’re learning or you’re teaching?

Angela:                       I’m learning to bring that skill set up. I was a line cook and I am just a very creative cook in general. But I haven’t mastered the raw things yet, and I just feel like that there’s a lot of potential there.

Yuri:                I was big into raw for a while 12 years ago.

Angela:                       Wow.

Yuri:                And the desserts especially, man, so good.

Angela:                       Yes.

Yuri:                So good. There’s a lot of good stuff. I’m sure you’ll enjoy that. Number four, what do you do first thing in the morning?

Angela:                       First thing in the morning I drink a glass of water with apple cider vinegar in it. Some people do lemon. I like apple cider vinegar. Before I go on the internet, I give myself a little bit of down time, plan my day, or just listen to some binaural beats to get myself grounded and channeled.

I also have an amazing view. I live in a penthouse, and I overlook the entire skyline of Toronto. I don’t know anybody with a nicer view than me. Bragging a little bit. But I usually wake up right before the sun rises. I’m a product of the sun. I wake up and do a time lapse of the sun rise every morning.

Yuri:                Like on your phone?

Angela:                       Not every morning. Sometimes. Yes, or on my iPad. It’s easy. I just set time lapse and then I post it to Facebook. And it’s like, “While you were sleeping.”

Yuri:                That’s awesome.

Angela:                       It’s a beautiful start to the day to just appreciate everything that’s around you.

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

Angela:                       When others are inspired to work with me.

Yuri:                Very nice. There we go guys. Angela Argentina, thanks so much for joining us on the Healthpreneur podcast.

Angela:                      My pleasure. Thank you.

Yuri:                Yeah, for sure. Where is the best place for people to follow you online and inquire about your services?

Angela:                       My blog is AngelaArgentina.com, and my Instagram handle is Angela_Argentina. And if anybody’s interested in awesome plant-based nutrition, workshops, catering, and all that fun stuff, KindredKitchens.ca is where it’s at.

Yuri:                Wicked. Angela, thanks again for taking the time to join us and bringing your awesome spirit and energy to this interview. It’s been a lot of fun.

Angela:                       Awesome, thank you. Have a great one.

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Yuri’s Take

I hope you enjoyed that interview. I know I did. I don’t know if you recognize this, but I’m a very spiritual person. I’m a big believer in vibration and energy. It helps that my wife is very much into that as well.

We’re always talking about this stuff. I believe that if you are doing things that are sucking the life out of you and your energy is low, you can’t attract good things into your life. More money, more success, more fulfillment, more joy, more happiness – those are all high vibration manifestations.

You need to raise your energy to raise your vibration. And one of the best ways of doing so is doing what you love. This is the balance of the modern human experience; how you balance doing what you love with what you need to do.

For instance, I’ve got three young boys. I don’t always want to do what they want to do. My higher self says, “Hey, this is what we want to do.” If you’re a parent, you can probably recognize that sometimes there’s a bit of compromise. But you want to get yourself into a state where you’re feeling upbeat, happy, optimistic, and joyful as much as possible.

When you feel that way, good things come to your life. And as Angela talked about in this interview, there are so many cool synchronicities that happen in her life now that they’re not even a surprise anymore. They’re just expected.

That’s what happens when you’re in that zone. You don’t have to follow the same beliefs that I have in respect to this, but that’s just the way the world works. That’s the way the universe works. Like brings upon like. The things that we focus on, we attract to us.

And if we’re happy, or joyful, if we’re doing something we love, then we bring more of that stuff into our life.

My challenge for you today is to, on a day to day basis, check in with yourself. Ask yourself, “Am I happy? Am I joyful? Am I procrastinating on things because maybe they aren’t the right things for me to be doing?”

That’s a sign that maybe somebody else should be doing it for you, or you shouldn’t be doing it at all. Do your best to follow your guidance, your internal compass, your intuition, to move you down that path of, “Yes, this is what I should be doing. This is what I love to be doing.”

For me, I segued from just doing the health and fitness stuff into Healthpreneur because I knew that’s where my evolution was going. I had to follow that, because I knew that there were only so many more times I could talk about the same health and fitness stuff.

I still create content for our business on the health and fitness side. But I also knew that at a deeper level, I was called to help other business owners in our space elevate themselves so that, collectively, we could help more people.

If I can help you become more impactful and build a better business, that helps more people.

If my selfish goal is to help a billion people transform their lives; whether it’s health, their life in general, or their business, I can’t do that alone. And that’s why I started Healthpreneur. To share what I know and coach the right people to a higher level, so they can impact more people and live the life they deserve in the process.

There’s no point of being a martyr. There’s no point in sacrificing your happiness or your life in the service of others.

You need to shine your lights. Don’t surround yourself with people who want you to dim it. You need to show up every single day, to the best of your ability, as the bright light that you are. When people around you are more dim and doom and gloom, continue shining bright because maybe that’ll rub off on them. And if it doesn’t, who cares?

Just kep doing you and that’s all you got to do. So that’s why I do what I do. I hope why you do what you do is because you love doing it, and because it makes a difference in people’s lives.

That’s what I’m going to leave you with today.

Two final things:

Subscribe to the Healthpreneur Podcast if you haven’t already. Click on the subscribe button on iTunes. And remember to grab a copy of Health Profit Secrets over at HealthpreneurBook.com. It’s the Bible, if you will.

Think of it as the short, condensed, one hour – not even one hour – read that will give you the fundamental principles, the secrets, that you need to know to grow a successful health and fitness business, especially in the modern day and age. Grab that for free, and just cover cost of shipping.

In our next episode on Friday, I’ve got my good buddy, Ben Greenfield, on the show. We’re going to have a lot of fun. It’s going to be a great interview. Ben’s an amazing guy.

If you’ve never met him, I think our conversation will bring that through. Next week, we’ve got a couple great guests, including Lori Kennedy, who is another amazing Torontonian doing some great stuff in the wellness business space.

Lots of great stuff coming your way. Don’t miss a beat. But for now, go out there, continue to be great, do great, and I will see you in our next episode on Friday.

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Follow Angela Argentina At:

https://angelaargentina.com/
https://kindredkitchens.ca/
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Free Healthpreneur Health Profit Secrets Book

Transcription:

Hey guys, I hope your week is off to a great start. It’s about to get a lot better. I want to be very candid with you in this episode. I want to reveal some stuff that maybe you’re not aware of, or maybe some stuff that you are aware of that I’m just going to go a little bit deeper on.

 

How I started out and discovered the need to evolve away from content marketing

Let me lay the foundation by telling you a quick little story. I’ve been online since 2006. Right out of the gate I had no direction, so I did everything. I did blog posting, SEO, link wheels, YouTube videos, and JV’s. I can’t even remember everything that I did, to be honest with you. I felt like I was working all the time.

I was focusing on the minutia that never moved the needle forward in a big way.

Over the years I hunkered down to build up a very big YouTube channel. Currently, we’ve got almost 200,000 subscribers and more than 40 million views. It’s been a lot of fun. I’m talking about the health and fitness business at yurielkaim.com, not Healthpreneur.

Our blog gets 700,000 unique visitors a month.

We’ve spent a lot of time building up these content platforms, and we had a whole workshop called The Content Mastery Workshop around this theme of how to build a content platform. But not just a content a platform, but a content platform that generates revenue for your business. We taught this up until early 2016 in Healthpreneur.

And then I had a bit of an early midlife crisis, an existential crisis, with this sense of what I was teaching the marketplace and what I was helping our clients do in their business. I had this epiphany several months after our last workshop on the content mastery stuff in January of 2016, because I quickly noticed something that left me feeling uneasy.

I found that the clients we were walking through this process with were taking a long time to see any appreciable results.

Going into it I said, “Listen, this is not an overnight thing. This is how to build your platform. It’s going to take some time. But we’re going to show you a way to monetize that in a much faster way.” The model that we were teaching is now, I believe, outdated. The model was: Create a lot of content, offer lead magnets that are congruent with the content, and then move people through an upsell funnel with a Tripwire offer, upsells, and so forth.

I like to spend a lot of time away from my business, whether I’m traveling, sitting on an airplane, or meditating. I asked myself, “Yuri, are you doing the best possible thing you could be doing for your clients by teaching this stuff?” It took me a while to answer this question because I was fearful of what I was going to say.

But the answer was no.

I took a hard look in the mirror and said, “If I don’t want to be known for content and I want to stop teaching content, what would be the best way to serve our clients?” I went through a journey over a couple months and looked at my own business.

 

Teaching a duplicable, proven business model through Healthpreneur

“What have I done in Healthpreneur?”

Healthpreneur was started from zero, and we grew it to $700,000 in one year. It has continued to grow since then. It had nothing to do with content. Maybe a little bit initially, when we first started the company, because I was doing YouTube videos and some blogs here and there.

I quickly realized that I didn’t want to do that again with Healthpreneur. I didn’t want to replicate my existing health and fitness business and bring all that complexity and nonsense.

I looked at what we had done to grow Healthpreneur. The one clear distinction was that we had a very simple business model. We had a core process with a few moving parts that were responsible for filling our workshops, filling our mastermind, working with clients closely, and predictable.

That’s something that excited me.

I thought, “What if we just started teaching this?” And that’s what we do. For over a year, we’ve been helping our clients turn their expertise into very successful group coaching programs that are delivered virtually.

This works for health entrepreneurs, coaches, or practitioners who want to move away from the one-on-one or clinical setting. They have an expertise that they use to work with a group of people and help them achieve an amazing outcome.

We help them build all that out, and help them attract those amazing clients on the front end. We use Facebook ads to drive all those leads into one pillar piece of content, which I’m going to talk to you about next. Then we invite the right people to jump on the phone with us to see if they’re a good fit for our programs. That’s our business model.

 

Why I stopped content marketing and created one pillar piece of content

The reason why I stopped content marketing with Healthpreneur is because I knew it was a three to five-year game plan. I knew that I wasn’t contributing to the marketplace in any meaningful way by continuing to put out 10,000-word blog posts that aren’t going to help people solve their problems.

On my health and fitness blog at yurielkaim.com, I have not published a new blog post for almost a year now. As a result, traffic has dwindled away a bit. Here’s the thing that I realized with content marketing: It’s an insatiable monster. You can never feed the machine enough.

If you’re playing that game, it’s all about, “How much content can I create? How quickly can I get it out there? How can I get more links back to it? Let’s drive up the content in Google so that when someone clicks on it, maybe they’ll spend a minute or so on my website, and maybe they’ll opt-in for this free thing that I’m offering. And if they do that, then maybe a few of those people will buy my $10 product. Which, if I can get a great upsell flow in place, might increase that value to $15.”

If you’re going to play that game, as you can probably tell, you’ll require a lot of volume. I don’t know about you, but a $15 average cart value is not paying the bills. How many $15 orders do you need to live the life you want to live? A lot, probably.

You’d probably need thousands of customers every single month just to make sense of what you’re doing. I got tired of playing the game. I got tired of feeding the machine. It was endless.

And you’re going up against very competitive websites that have millions of pages of articles and content. They’ve been around for years. It’s a long uphill battle. If you’re a solo entrepreneur and you think you’re going to build a great content platform by yourself, get ready to buckle down and spend a lot of time doing that, with very little to show for it on the backend.

This is the thing that bothered me. The number one reason why we started teaching our workshop on content mastery back in the day was because most people creating content had no way of seeing an ROI from that content. We helped them do that. But the second problem is the very fact that people are spending all their time creating content.

That’s the bigger issue.

We live in the information age. Adding more information is like adding gasoline to the fire. It’s not helping the problem; it’s making the fire bigger and more dangerous.

People are more confused and overwhelmed than ever. Do you think that your article, video, or blog post is going to contribute to them having more clarity and solving their problem? Maybe, maybe not.

What is most meaningful to me is creating deep, impactful change for the clients that we serve. That’s never going to happen when someone watches a five-minute video on YouTube, or reads – skims, to be more accurate – your blog post. That’s not going to happen.

So, I stopped content marketing, even with our health and fitness business. I’m not doing the blog anymore. Initially I thought to go full-out on YouTube, but now I’m not even sure I want to continue doing that. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense in terms of what else we’re doing.

 

The Perfect Client Pipeline and a converting webinar as a pillar piece of content

Instead of spending all my time content marketing, we’ve doubled down on our core process, our business model. It’s what we call the Perfect Client Pipeline. Now, in my health and fitness business, we don’t offer health coaching. I don’t want to do any health coaching for that business. What we do is drive Facebook ads to a webinar that sells our 14-day energy fix. It’s a system built around energy greens, and it’s beautiful.

We’re able to do that predictably.

Now we can scale that, and that’s all I want to do in that business. That’s it. I created one pillar piece of content, and that one pillar piece of content is a webinar. I will tell you that nothing even comes close to the conversion you will see from a webinar, other than one-on-one interaction.

There are a few reasons for this. In today’s day and age, the number one currency, I believe, is attention. If people give you their attention, that is a big deal. There’s a very big difference between somebody watching a two-minute video of yours on YouTube or a 59-second clip on Instagram, versus somebody registering for a specific time to watch a webinar and then sitting on that webinar for 60 to 90 minutes.

That is a day and night difference.

One of the reasons why webinars work so well is because of that commitment. Somebody commits to sitting in the webinar for 60 to 90 minutes. You now have that time to – with their undivided attention – share what I call your Kool Aid.

You have that time to indoctrinate them into your way of seeing the world and a specific problem. You have that time to break old beliefs that don’t serve them anymore and install new ones that will support them moving forward and give them a great experience. Even if they don’t enroll or buy your stuff, they’ll leave that webinar thinking, “Holy cow. This was an amazing use of my time.”

We have Facebook ads running right now where people thanking us in the comments for the webinar. They say it was incredible.

Yes, a webinar is built to sell something, but the beautiful thing about the webinar is that it’s built to serve.

When it’s done properly, it can lead to unbelievable enrollment rates. Our 14-Day Energy Fix sells for $197. We typically see about a 5% or more conversion rate in that webinar funnel. To sell $197 direct from a sales page is not going to happen, unless you’re selling to your parents.

Webinars are amazing because you have a captive audience. They’re in it to win it. You have the time to build a relationship, build your case, and lead people to the next step.

That’s all we do in our business; we create an amazing webinar. Now, what goes into a webinar is a whole other ball game, and this is exactly what we help our clients do. We go into granular details.

I’ll give you our business model. If you haven’t gotten this already from episode 60 where I talked about the Perfect Client Pipeline, here it is: Facebook ad to webinar, webinar to application, application to strategy call.

Now, what some people might say is, “Okay Yuri. You just gave me your whole business model. Thank you. I’m going to go and figure that out myself.” Good luck. You never will.

Here’s why: Most people focus only on the things they know about. They only focus on everything above the surface, the tip of the iceberg. But where the breakthroughs occur are in the things you’re not even aware of, the things that we do on our webinars that you’re not even conscious of that lead to the conversions.

We focus on everything under the surface. This is where the magic happens. This is where we help our clients understand how to position things properly, present content in the right way that builds desire to move to the next step, and introduce their offer so that people are on board instead of pissed off that they’re being pitched something.

There is a very big difference between having a webinar and having one that converts.

There’s a very big difference between having a Facebook ad and having a Facebook ad that leads to tremendous amount of leads at a great cost per lead and ROI. Especially in the health space, there’s a very big difference between having a Facebook ad and having your Facebook ad account shut down.

There are very specific things you can and cannot say in health and fitness that you need to be aware of. If you aren’t aware of those, your ads will get shut down, and your ad account will be banned. That’s not a good place to be in.

I’ve gone through the valley of death.

I’ve figured this stuff out over the past 12 years. I’ve invested over half a million dollars with coaches and masterminds and experts to fill in the gaps where I needed help. If people want to go figure it out, by all means, go for it. It might take you 10 years, but I can tell you that if you work with us you’ll get faster results a lot more quickly.

 

Determining your value vehicle, the Consistent Content Generator, and the Flight Plan

We don’t do content marketing in the traditional sense anymore, because all we’re doing is driving predictable traffic from Facebook ads to our pillar piece of content, which is our webinar. Now outside of that you might be thinking, “Well, I’m listening to your podcast, what’s that all about?”

Okay, well here it is: Part of the process we walk our clients through is to attract, convert and deliver. Those are the systems in any business. Part of the attract phase – we have a business accelerator – a component that moves your business forward, is what we call the value vehicle. What is one value vehicle you’re going to use in your business, outside of the webinar, that is going to add value to your marketplace?

For us, it’s the podcast.

We run our Perfect Client Pipeline, I spend most of my serving our clients, figuring out new ways to build our team, improve all that, then I do this podcast. I love it. I love doing this stuff and having interviews.

The podcast is then transcribed and turned into an article that’s put up on our blog or our website. That way, it looks like we have a blog or content, but I’m not producing it. If some people want to read, they can go there. If some people want to listen, they can listen to the podcast.

That’s our content, our value vehicle. Now, in addition to that, I do random Facebook Lives inside of our Healthpreneur group on Facebook.

That’s all I do. That’s it.

One of the things that we teach in our workshop is called the Consistent Content Generator. Then, from that, building out your content rhythm. This allows you to clearly identify the themes you want to talk about. How are going to present in terms of different angles? How are we going to build that into your schedule in terms of a weekly consistency?

When you have that dialed in, your whole content marketing plan can be divided in two pages. Those two pages – I’m looking at them right now and they’re part of our workbook for the workshop – is called the flight plan. Very much like pilots have plans for where they’re going to fly to, we have a flight plan that accelerates business to the next level.

Two pages build out your content marketing platform.

I’m going to contradict myself with something that I used to talk about. I used to talk about the fact that keyword research is very important. It is, if you’re doing content to play that content game and are trying to get ranked in Google. If people are searching for how to lose 10 pounds without exercise, you need to have keywords, or articles and videos built around those keywords.

That’s if you want to play that game.

But if you want to play the game of building a tribe and getting people to get behind you, then don’t play that game. Build content around what you want to talk about; your beliefs, your Kool Aid, the things you believe to be true, the things that you want to your business to be known for.

That’s where the power is if you’re going to share content.

If you’re going to write articles or create videos, that’s the type of stuff you want to build your content around, not “How to: The Top 700 Ways to Use Coconut Oil”. You’ll never be found in Google for that plain, vanilla content. Don’t play that game, okay?

We’ve completely pivoted. We don’t recommend our clients do that, because it’s not effective. It’s a long, long road with very small returns in the process.

 

Health Business Accelerator Workshop: Putting it all together

If you like this webinar stuff and you want to learn how to create an amazing webinar that converts, then by all means we’d love to help you.

In the workshop, I sit down with you, and we create your slides together. You get all the little details you don’t even know exist that make a webinar effective. If you want to learn more about our health business accelerator workshop head on over to healthpreneurgroup.com/workshop.

Have a look at it. If you feel it’s a good fit, apply. We’ll review your application and if you’re a good fit, we’ll have a quick follow-up call to confirm and you’ll be all set.

You’ll leave the workshop done. You’ll have a business in a box. You’ll have one pillar piece of content. You’ll have a very simple way of delivering value outside of that webinar. Again, for me it’s just this podcast and Facebook Live, and everything else goes to the wayside.

If that sounds attractive to you and you want to serve your clients at a deep level without playing the build-your-platform-online game, then this could be a good fit for you.

So, that’s the deal. That is why I stopped content marketing in the traditional sense. We still provide a ton of value through the webinar and stuff we’re doing through email, Facebook Live and so forth, but it’s very clean, simple, and not overwhelming.

Coming up this week, we’ve got some great interviews. Angela Argentina will be talking about how to make a living doing what you love, then my buddy Ben Greenfield will talk about the keys to lasting business success online on Friday. Lots of good stuff.

If you haven’t subscribed to the podcast, be sure to do so today so you don’t miss any of that. There are lots more great insightful solo sessions coming your way over the coming weeks, and some amazing guests that you won’t want to miss as well. That’s all for today. Thanks so much for joining me. Have an amazing day, continue to go out there and be great, do great, and I’ll see in you in the next episode on Wednesday.

Transcription

Welcome to episode 83 of the Healthpreneur podcast! Today we’ve got a great interview. But before we get into that, if you missed the last episode on Wednesday about how to charge premium prices for health coaching, listen to that episode. There’s some cool insights for you from my interview, if you haven’t listened to it already.

Today, we’re going to be speaking with Bobby Cardwell. Now, if you’ve been in the health and fitness space for any amount of time, you’ve probably seen these things called online summits.

A panel of experts come together. A host interviews one-by-one. In this 10-day to two-week time frame, participants get to enjoy amazing interviews for free, and then they have the option to buy them afterwards. Now, these summits have been a huge part of the health and wellness space online for the past decade now. I’ve been part of some of them and I’ve hosted one of them.

Today, our guest is Bobby Cardwell, the co-founder of the largest summit platform called Health Talks Online. Essentially, they take all the tech out of your hands. So, if you’re the expert and you just want to share your expertise, or if you’re the host of this summit, they’ll take care of everything other than the interviews.

Over the past five years, they have launched over 70 summits with a collective attendance of over three million people. Their goal is to change the world through information and education.

They’ve also recently launched a new platform called Health Means, which is like the Netflix for health. Bobby will share exactly what that is in our conversation today, and I think you’ll get a lot of cool value out of this. If you’re someone who wants to run your own summit, or if you’ve been part of summits and are wondering how they work and if they make sense, he’s going to share his experience.

He’s going to share exactly what the mistakes are that you want to avoid, the tendencies of the most successful summits, and what the future holds for summits. Are they still going to be viable a year from now, two years from now? Well, we’re going to uncover all of that in this episode.

Without any further ado, let’s welcome Bobby Cardwell to the podcast, and dive right in. Bobby, welcome to the Healthpreneur Podcast. How’s it going, man?

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Bobby:                  Excellent. Thank you.

Yuri:                      You’re very welcome. Thank you for being here. It’s great to connect with other awesome people in our space who are doing some cool things. As our listeners know already, you are the co-founder of an amazing platform that has made a lot of people’s lives easier. We’re talking about Health Talks Online.

Talk to us about why you guys decided to start that. You are t the forefront. There may have been a few summits going on before all this, but you guys made it accessible and seamless for a lot of other health experts to run their own summits. Why did you decide to create this platform?

 

Health Talks Online; introduction, inspiration, and beginnings

Bobby:                  Health Talks Online was the child of opportunity. I don’t come from the health space. My original background is marketing. I went to college for marketing and IT. Several years ago, I had been in the real estate space, so I was doing some stuff with that. When the market crashed, I pulled out and started my own internet marketing company and was approached by a mutual friend of ours, Sean Croxton.

He was interested in doing a health event online and needed someone to help with Infusionsoft. I stepped to the plate and said, “Sure. I could do this. I have lots of experience in Infusionsoft and that platform.” So, we did the first online summit in the health space as far as I know, the Paleo Summit. It was fairly successful.

We learned a tremendous amount on how not to run a summit, but it was still successful nonetheless. A few months later, he came back and said, “Hey, I want to do another one,” and things just kind of started to snowball.

Over time, after a couple of those, people started approaching him wanting to do the same kind of online event in different niche markets. He had his own business; he didn’t want to mess with the consulting side of it.

I stepped up and said, “Hey, I understand this from the start to the end. I think I can handle this. I think I can deal with people and handle the technical side of it, having already experienced it a few times.”

He started referring people to us. Within just a couple of months, we were booked almost a year in advance. The kind of demand that came out of that was amazing.

Along the way, I met my business partner, Bob Ross. He was a copywriter for one of the events that we did. It was the first consulting event. It was the Gluten Summit with Dr. Tom O’Bryan. After that event, we came together, collaborated and said, “Hey, there’s enough demand for this. I think that we probably should start a business.” It was just opportunity. We were at the right place, at the right time, with the right team put together, and we ended up creating Health Talks Online.

Now, almost six years later, we’re still booked about a year in advance. We’re doing documentaries, docuseries, master class launches, and of course, summits. Summits are still our primary focus, but our goal is to help as many people as we possibly can. Since our team and I are not necessarily gifted in the health space, this is our way of facilitating that and helping massive amounts of people without having to go to med school or receive formal training.

 

Trying to do it all yourself and the importance of cultivating the right relationships 

Yuri:                      It’s amazing. I don’t know anyone who, especially in the alternative space, doesn’t want to share their message. What you guys have provided is an amazing platform for people to do that, without having to worry about all the backend tech stuff. That’s the stuff that drains most experts. It’s a great example of filling a gap. Just look where there’s an opportunity and meet that.

You mentioned that when you were working with Sean initially, you’d made a bunch of mistakes and learned from them. What are some mistakes that people need to be aware of and avoid when it comes to summits?

Bobby:                  The number one mistake is trying to do it all yourself.

That was one that I learned very, very quickly. When I first started out, I was doing everything. I was doing all the coding. I do have a designer because design is not my strength. But I was doing all the IT background. I was trying to handle the affiliate tracking and all that kind of stuff: the order processing, customer service, etc.

I was doing it all myself and couldn’t sleep. There’s just no opportunity. Those kinds of events literally run 24/7 for the duration, and it’s not just the week of. It’s leading up to the event and all the promotions and everything else.

It just makes sense to have a strong team behind you. Having a team with experience is a huge piece of it. We have many people who have run summits or online events on their own, and they still come back to us. They’re looking for someone who has smoothed everything out and taken all those lessons learned, implemented them, tweaked the system, and tried to make it as fluid as possible.

Focus on what you do best. Do what you do best, and then bring in people to do all the other stuff.

Yuri:                      Nice. Is there anything else other than not doing everything yourself?

Bobby:                  That’s the biggest thing. I guess the second biggest one would be relationships.

This space is very promotionally driven. It’s referral based. It’s affiliate based. I don’t like the idea of affiliation. I know it seems like an oxymoron because I’m in this space, and that’s what built our business up, but it’s about the relationships deep down. It’s having those connections that are passionate about the same things that you’re doing.

It’s not about, “I’ll support you if you support me.” To a certain point it is, but at the end of the day it’s about helping people. It’s about changing their lives for the better. Surrounding yourself with the same kind of people is so, so important.

If you’re dealing with people who are only interested in the bottom dollar at the end of the day, that’s a short-lived program. You’ll be successful for sure, but usually those burn out quickly.

Yuri:                      Totally. Very true. One of the reasons I love these types of interviews is because, for me, it’s the beginning of a relationship, not just 30 minutes and have a nice life. I think the same with summits. You spend half an hour or an hour speaking with someone over the phone or in-person, and that’s an opportunity to cultivate relationships.

Sadly, in my experience, in some cases people just want you to be part of their summit because they know you have a big following and they want you to promote it. It should be more than that.

I think the key message is the importance of the relationship and integrity with how you do it.

Bobby:                  Thank you. We put that kind of mentality in place. We just recently turned down a potential host who had a decent following. The only reason he wanted to work with us was because we had affiliate relationships. We have a massive affiliate audience that we work with, but we built those relationships over time. It didn’t feel right since that was the only reason he wanted to work with us.

 

The future and evolution of summits and Health Talks Online

Yuri:                      Totally. What do you think the future holds? This kind of thing started off as tele-something way back in the day. Then, you reinvented the whole summit thing, which has been amazing. Now, we’re seeing people take things to the next level with docuseries and documentaries.

Are summits still going to be as in-demand in two or three years, or is there a barrier at entry now where you must be doing docuseries or something like that to stand out?

Where do you see the market going with that?

Bobby:                  That’s a good question. That’s one that we get quite often. I look at summits like any other marketing tool. There’s old style; long copy, web sales pages, and stuff like that. Those have been around for eons, but they’re the standard. They come and go in popularity, but are still there.

Summits have been around for a long time. They started out as the old stage presenter-style. You pack a room with a few hundred people, bring a bunch of your buddies across the stage, they give information, and you sell the DVDs at the end of the event.

It’s basically the same type of format; it’s just done online so you can reach many more people, and it’s obviously much more cost effective. We’ve already started to see summits taper off in popularity. Only from the production side, though.

The amazing thing is that from an audience, from attendance side, they’re still just as popular, if not more than they were five or six years ago. We’re seeing bigger audiences and more engaged audiences today than we did last year or the year before, even four years ago.

Part of it is probably tweaking and modifying the system and making it a little more efficient. But at the end of the day, people still like this format. That’s why we’re still booked a year in advance.

The demand is still there. The docuseries and documentaries are becoming more popular, but I see them as the shiny new thing. It’s the new thing that people are doing.

The only real drawback is just simply the cost. The cost for producing something like that. … You have to have some pretty deep pockets. You have to have some good financial backing to be able to produce something to that kind of scale, that kind of quality.

They’re extremely popular. They’re very effective. Obviously, we’ve seen people in the space that have revolutionized the way the information is given, which is amazing. But if you look at the cost to do that, it doesn’t make sense in most cases. I’m sure that there will be some new revolution of summits coming out, but from our perspective, it’s more about listening to the market, seeing what they’re after, and then adjusting and modifying.

Hopefully, by staying flexible, our business will continue moving forward, and we’ll be able to do what we need to do and what we’re passionate about.

The people who are so rigid on wanting to stick with one specific marketing technique are the ones that will have a hard time later down the road.

Yuri:                      Especially with how fast stuff changes technologically, you must be able to pivot, move, and be flexible. Otherwise, you’re toast. Over the past five or six years, what are some things that you have had to change or improve upon to stay ahead of the curve or create a better experience for the host as well as the participants?

 

Price increases, watching the market, and knowing what the market wants

Bobby:                  Basically, we are not the same company that we were five years ago. Not even close. We have new team members. We brought in lots more people. We got a full customer service staff.

Growing is number one, by constantly tweaking and modifying the system. We’ve completely revamped the undercarriage, if you will, of the entire platform from a technical standpoint. I mentioned Infusionsoft a little while ago. We no longer use that. We outgrew it.

It’s as simple as that. Our events got so big that when we dumped 100,000 people into that platform, it clogged up. It just bottlenecked and froze up.

We’ve moved to different platforms. We’ve cut and built a lot of things. Our affiliate tracking platform, for instance: we wanted something that was going to be extremely robust, handle everything we threw at it, and be able to grow with us as well as allow us to completely customize the entire platform.

So, that’s what we did. We went out and we bought a third-party product, and we completely customized it a couple years ago. Now, we’ve built that separate business. It’s just this affiliate module to promote not just our events, but other outside launches as well.

A lot of it is very minor. There are small tweaks here and there, like two-pay pricing. That was popular when we first started.

Everybody paid half now, half later. Well, via surveys and looking at the market and statistics, not many people use that, and the people who did, abused it. They would pay the first and then not pay the second.

So, we eliminated it. And guess what? Our sales were not affected at all. It was amazing. We had a couple of complaints, but for the most part, it was all the same.

The other thing is pricing. We are always looking at statistics. We’re always surveying the market, seeing what’s going on, and listening to what people are saying. A couple years ago, we increased the price across the board.

Now, typical marketing economics say if you increase pricing, demand goes down. Well, guess what: it didn’t. Price went up; demand went up. It was amazing. We all looked at each other and went, “Wow. That didn’t make any sense, but hey, it worked. Let’s keep going with it.”

Those are the kind of things it’s about.

We’re creating the change, but it’s not us dictating the change. It’s more about the market dictating the change and knowing what people are asking for.

Yuri:                      Are all the summits the same price? Do they have the same number of experts and the same pricing model?

Bobby:                  For the most part, yes. The pricing model is the same pretty much across the board. We do that because of repetition. There is a tremendous number of repeat customers. There are a lot of people out there that are – I hate to use the term – informational junkies.

They like getting as much information as they can. But for the most part, it’s about a sense of comfort. If you give somebody something that is very similar over and over, they’re more likely to attend.

We see that. About five to seven percent of our audience is repeat, being that they attend almost every single event. There’s a tremendous amount of overlap between those who have attended previous events.

One of the big factors why they attended the event is because it’s comfortable. They already know the flow. They know how it’s going to work. They know the sale. They know the encore and all that stuff.

Sure, marketing typically dictates to throw a curveball. Change it up a little bit. But honestly, it doesn’t make that much difference. We’ve tested it from a conversion point of view. From a business standpoint, it doesn’t make that much difference.

Yuri:                      Nice. Keeps it simple for everyone.

Out of all the summits you guys have done, what have you noticed about the few that have done well? Are there similarities or certain things that the successful ones have done?

When I say successful, I mean the size of the audience or the revenue on the back end. What have they done differently than those who haven’t done as well?

 

The metrics of online summit success

Bobby:                  There’s typically three standards we look at to determine the success of an event.

One, is just sheer attendance: the number of people who register to attend. Second is the actual amount of money generated off the sales of the products. Third is the sales conversion, which is important as well.

Sometimes it’s not necessarily about having the biggest attendance list, it’s about how engaged you are with the audience. That audience is who’s going to follow you later down the road. If they’re heavily engaged, it’s going to be more beneficial in the long term.

The biggest factor is knowing the audience. That’s number one. They know how to talk. They know how to speak to the audience. They know how to provide good-quality, high-actionable content and stuff that is relatable to the audience.

One of the biggest negatives an event can do is be too generic. We found out early on that doing general wellness or those types of events don’t work because they’re too generic. It reaches a mass audience.

A lot of people want to come in and hear, but the content is too thin. Maybe three or four points across the entire event relate to each individual contact, each individual person. They’re less likely to buy because they don’t feel like they’re getting their money’s worth out of it.

But if you do something like Lyme’s disease, which is very niche-specific, or thyroid disease or Hashimoto’s, it’s even more specific. You’re tapping that audience very close to the core. Now, if you get too niche, then you end up with the opposite effect.

You end up with a very narrow pool of people, so you don’t get as many registrants, but you end up with a very, very high sales conversion. Hashimoto’s and Lyme’s disease are two good examples of that. They’re two of the most active events we’ve ever done. Extremely high sales conversion.

One of those reached almost 15% sales conversion, which is outstanding. I don’t know very many people who can claim that kind of sales conversion. But the only reason was because it was so niche-specific.

We were also dealing with a much smaller registrant pool, like 35-40 thousand instead of our average 60-65 thousand, which is common. So that’s one big piece. The other piece is hustling and building relationships, and staying on top of them.

Just because you met someone at an event doesn’t mean they’re going to promote for you. It doesn’t mean that they’re going to participate and engage with your event.

My advice is this: you can’t really call it “a relationship” unless you have their personal cell phone number in your Rolodex, you pick up the phone, you dial their number, and they answer. If they don’t answer or you get their secretary, they’re not a deep connection. That’s kind of a good judgment factor there.

Yuri:                      That’s good. I totally agree with that. In our business, we have something called the JV7 analyzer. It’s a filtering tool we use before we do any business with anyone, and the first two criteria are, “Have I had dinner or lunch with this person?” and, “Do I like them?”

Those two must be met. It doesn’t worry about what the EPCs are and all that stuff afterwards. It’s a human-to-human thing first. I love the idea of having them in your cell phone and them actually picking up a phone call.

What’s been one of the biggest challenges you guys have faced over the past five years as you’ve grown this business?

 

The challenges that come with success; dealing with haters and numbers

Bobby:                  Probably our number one challenge is our success.

I know that sounds unusual, but we really came out of nowhere. Our company was founded by nonmedical people. We’re in a space that is fairly egotistical, to be frank. We grew very quickly.

I give all the blame, support, and everything to everyone that’s ever supported us over the years. I have more gratitude for the people that we’ve worked with in the space than anybody else, because I know that we would not be here if it wasn’t for them.

But at the same time, we were smart. We built a business. We saw an opportunity. We took that opportunity, we ran with it, and we were successful with it. Unfortunately, it did kind of rub a few people raw.

They didn’t like the fact that we built our success on their backs. Unfortunately, that’s the way success is built. There’s very few people out there that come up with a completely unique idea and are 100% successful on their own, without leveraging anything else. I don’t know of any company out there that’s ever done that.

Our biggest challenge has been overcoming the negativity of that. A lot of it has to do with us coming forward and promoting other people. We’d like to work with people that are good people. I like the comment you said earlier. We have a similar clause saying that we don’t work with people we don’t like. We’re the same way, but use different terminology.

Unfortunately, that is the biggest drawback, and it’s not just us. We’ve seen other people that are the same way, that have come from zero. They do an extremely successful event because they’re very good at what they do, the diamonds in the rough, per se.

They come out the other side of it and they get slammed with negativity, which doesn’t make any sense. We should be supportive of each other. That’s what this space is all about. But unfortunately, it does happen.

Yuri:                      Yes, it’s just the way it is. People love to support up until certain points, then it’s like, “Oh, you’ve become too successful. Now let’s pull you back down.” I think that’s just the way humans are.

But you know what? I think the fact that you guys have been so successful speaks a lot to the fact that you’ve done it in a genuine, authentic way. There’s also going to be haters, but whatever. Just move on.

What would you say to another business owner who’s experiencing rapid growth? Maybe something from your experience that can help them forecast what’s to come ahead?

Bobby:                  My biggest piece of advice is to watch the numbers. That’s very important. We learned that lesson the hard way early on. We grew too fast. We needed more people.

We just kept adding people and more stuff. Eventually, we hit the threshold where we couldn’t afford it anymore. We had to increase prices. We had to adjust internally. We had to make some drastic changes to stay in business.

After reading a few good business books, I understand that it is very typical to quickly overgrow. So be cautious of that.

Also, know what your market is demanding. We almost got trapped into trying to dictate what the market should be doing.

Listen to the market.

The market is going to do its thing whether you like it or not. Find out what it is people really want. Make sure that, whatever your business opportunity, it’s something in demand or there’s some way that you can create the demand. If there’s a need there, there will be a demand. They may just not know it yet. That’s probably the biggest piece of advice there.

Yuri:                      Nice. When you say creating demand for the market as opposed to listening to them, was that, for you guys, saying, “We should do this type of summit because we think it’s going to be cool,” as opposed to listening to the audience? Would that be an example of that?

 

Creating based on demand, using affiliates, and promotions

Bobby:                  Yeah, that could be an example. We do have events on rare topics that just don’t make any sense. We do that from time to time. I think that’s where our Health Means platform was built. Health Means is our new consumer spinoff.

It’s basically like Netflix meets the health base. It’s an online library that has, right now, about 1,500 pieces of content. It will be well over 2,000 by the end of the year. And it’s where anyone can come in, join, and for eight bucks a month they can get unlimited access to all this content.

There wasn’t a consumer demand, but there was a business demand. We had done over 80 events at that point, and everyone wanted an evergreen, which totally makes sense. You put a lot of time and hard work into producing and developing this kind of content. You want to be able to extend the life of it as much as you can.

Unfortunately, the summit model dictates a one-and-done kind of environment. Even relaunches are a little iffy because it’s hard to get enough traffic to them. But for the most part, it’s one-and-done. The real driving factor is the engagement of the audience. That’s what drives the long-term success or the short-term success of the event.

So, not having an evergreen model and no one cracking that code, we said, “All right. We need to create something. We know that there’s demand, or there’s at least one side of the demand. We can create the other side.” And that’s what we’ve done.

We launched this product beta in July, and today we’re at about 25,000 members, which is amazing. It’s just starting to take off. We still have lots of people who reach out to us saying they don’t understand what it is.

It’s amazing because Hulu, Netflix, and all these other streaming media platforms are out there. It’s the same thing. It’s just a massive health-based library.

Yuri:                      So you have interviews from previous summits. Do the hosts of the summits get a kickback based on how their content is being used through this?

Bobby:                  For the most part. It is strictly an affiliate-based system right now, but we’re doing lifetime affiliation on it. For the speaker, the biggest kickback is exposure. We’re building a massive audience.

They are coming in and putting their content in there. We’re able to feature it. We’re able to put it in front of a big audience, give them lots of exposure and, of course, redirect the audience back to their websites. That’s the biggest factor; the biggest advantage of participating in something like Health Means.

It’s also not limited to just summit content. We have a lot of one-off talks. We have a lot of independent, short three-part series – those sort of things – in the platform. We just started with summit content because that’s what we knew. That’s what we had access to.

On the backside of that, we do have quite a few people who have promoted the platform with lifetime commissions, and it is reoccurring. It’s only a couple bucks a month per user, but if you get a couple hundred people in there, it starts to add up quickly over time.

That stuff also falls over to all our other events. If you promote, someone comes in under your affiliate ID, they participate in another event later down the road, and they buy that event, you’re making commissions you don’t even promote.

We’re looking at ways to interweave a lot of this stuff. We understand that the affiliate platform is necessary. It’s a necessary evil. But we’re also trying to eliminate the need for people to have to promote as much.

Promotion is necessary, but if we can cut back on how much of the demand we need and have the audience then bring the content to the audience, that makes a lot more sense than what we’ve been doing for years, which is build the content and then hopefully attract the audience.

Yuri:                      It’s super smart. It’s a proven model. Businesses love continuity. Customers a little bit less so, but what you guys are offering for eight bucks a month is a no-brainer.

 

The Rapid Five

Are you ready for the rapid five?

Bobby:                  Let’s go for it.

Yuri:                      All right, buddy. Here we go. Whatever comes top of mind is probably the right answer.

Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

Bobby:                  Trust. I trust too easily, and I have been known to bring people into my inner circle that have stabbed me in the back later. I am working on that.

Yuri:                      That not a lot of fun. Number two, what is your biggest strength?

Bobby:                  Decisiveness.

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

Bobby:                  Well, it’s not customer service. That’s a tough one. Problem solving. Building systems.

Looking at a problem and being able to reverse-engineer it and come up with a solution to that problem.

Yuri:                      A true entrepreneur. A problem solver.

Bobby:                  Thank you.

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

Bobby:                  Clean up the house.

Yuri:                      Seriously?

Bobby:                  I’m a bit OCD, so my morning workout is to get up, make the bed, pick up the dirty clothes, and do all that. I work from home. I have my first child on the way, so it’s kind of a routine for me to keep everything neat and orderly. To be able to really jump-start my day, I have to have that organization.

Yuri:                      Nice. That’s cool. I guess clear space, clear mind.

Bobby:                  Yep.

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

Bobby:                  I’m happy and not stressed.

Yuri:                      Awesome. Before we finish off, let’s let people know where people can find Health Talks Online as well as Health Means.

Bobby:                  The easiest way is just visit the website: healthmeans.com, or healthtalksonline.com.

Health Means is the consumer side, if you’re just looking for great content. It’s not limited to consumers; we have a lot of practitioners that are in there using it as an informal extended education platform. Health Talks Online is our business-to-business side, so if you’re interested in doing master class, documentary, docuseries, a summit, anything like that, reach out to us. That’s the best connection point.

Yuri:                      There you go, guys. Bobby, thank you so much for joining us and for creating a platform that has been extremely well received by – who knows – millions of people by this point now in terms of lives touched. I’m grateful for the work that you guys have done. Keep up the great work!

Bobby:                  Thank you so much.

 

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Yuri’s Take

Yuri:                      I hope you enjoyed that interview. Before we finish off today, as usual, I want to give you a little challenge; a little thinking exercise. Today, it’s this: Ask yourself: Am I creating things that my market actually wants?

This is a very big distinction between what they need and what they want. The reason I say that is because, as entrepreneurs, our goal is not to force things on the marketplace. Yes, somebody needs to lose 300 pounds, but do they want to lose 300 pounds? Do they want to do what’s necessary to make that happen?

Very often, the answer is no. So, if you can spend more of your time in the world of wants, you’ll be a lot better off than if you spend a lot of your time in the world of needs. Trying to sell a pair of shoes to someone who doesn’t buy shoes is going to be challenging. However, selling a new pair of shoes to someone who already has 30 pairs of shoes is going to be a lot easier.

In your business, are you selling things that people want? If you’re not and you’re trying to figure out how to do so, simply survey them. Ask them what their number one challenge is in relation to whatever outcome they want.

Let it be open-ended. Let their feedback come in, and use that with your own creativity to come up with solutions to those problems.

For instance, recently we surveyed the customers of my health and fitness business, and I was shocked. We hadn’t surveyed them for about a year, and I discovered that 40% of our customers are older than 60 years old.

For me, that’s mind-blowing. How are we attracting people that are over 70 years old into our business? It flabbergasted me. I don’t even know.

That determines what we’re going to bring to market. We’re not going to be coming out with hardcore workout programs for our existing customer base. Yes, we can attract new ones through what we’re doing on YouTube, but there’s no sense in coming out with a kettlebell workout program for people who are 70.

In this case, if we look at their age and their survey responses, we know that their challenges are being consistent, lacking motivation, and exercise. With that, we can come up with a program that would be gentle, no-movement exercise, that is safe for the joints – like isometric-type stuff.

We’d have better results by doing that than by coming out with something I think is cool and want to do.

Bobby saw an opportunity and filled that gap in the marketplace. His is such a great example of what happens when you do that. Your business literally takes off like a rocket ship. That’s what I want to leave you with today.

How do we give people what they want? That is your homework for today.

Before we finish off, if you haven’t subscribed to the podcast, you can do so right now over on iTunes. Head over to the Healthpreneur Podcast page, click on the little Subscribe button, and you will be all set.

If you’d like to leave a review or rating for the show, that would be awesome as well. And how would you like to know the four fundamental secrets required to have and build a lasting successful online health and fitness business?

What if there were secrets that you didn’t know you didn’t know, but if you spent time in a room with other successful business owners, they’d share with you?

Honestly, it’s not always possible to surround yourself with a high-caliber group of people. The good news is that I have done this over the past 12 years. I’ve condensed everything I’ve learned, experienced, and built into my own business into these four fundamental truths called the Health Profits Secrets, and it’s all unveiled in my book, Health Profits Secrets.

You can grab it for free. I just ask that you cover the cost of shipping, which is literally less than a latte at Starbucks.

Get the book over at healthpreneurbook.com. It’ll make a big difference in what you’re doing, whether you’re just starting out or further along in your business. There are always things that can make a big difference just by picking up one nugget, one idea, one insight. That is what I’m encouraging you to do today.

That is all, my friends. I want to thank you so much for joining me on the show. It’s always a pleasure to bring you some amazing guests as well as solo rounds, which we’ve got coming up next Monday. In the meantime, continue to go out there and be great, do great, and I’ll see you soon.

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Follow Bobby Cardwell At:

https://healthtalksonline.com/

https://healthmeans.com/

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Free Healthpreneur Health Profit Secrets Book

If you would like a free copy of the Health Profits Secrets book,  you can get that over at healthpreneurbook.com.

It will show you the four secrets that really are the fundamental components to building a successful online health or fitness business.

Transcription

Healthpreneurs, what’s up? Welcome to the one and only Healthpreneur Podcast. This is episode 82. Today, we’ve got a great guest. His name is Nicholas Bayerle, and we are going to be talking about selling high-ticket health programs.

If you’ve ever found yourself in a rut thinking, “Oh my God, there’s a huge price erosion, and now people are selling eBooks for $10. How am I going to make that work if I don’t have a huge audience and I don’t have massive media buyers driving millions of visitors to my site every single day?” Well, Nicholas and this discussion about today will be inspiring because one of the things that he’s going to share with you is how to squeeze the most juice out of every lemon you have.

If you have a following of a hundred people, does it make sense to offer them a $10 service or product, or does it make sense to offer them something more bespoke, if you will? This will be a good thought-provoking conversation because it’ll challenge a lot of the things that you might think are possible with your business, no matter what type of business you have. Let this sink in and do some deep thinking about how this can impact you and your business.

Let me tell you a bit more about Nicholas Bayerle. He’s the CEO of The Billion Dollar Body, where they help men reach their ultimate state of health, power, and confidence. He’s an international speaker, coach, and was rated top 30 under 30 influencers.

He has coached some of the top male CEOs and is passionate about seeing men prosper in health, business, and relationships, and he’s also the host of The Billion Dollar Podcast, creator of The Billion Dollar live events, and has created a successful community of men called The Billion Dollar Brotherhood.

He’s shared the stage with people like Lewis Howes, Cole Hatter, Jordan Harbinger, and many others. With that said, let’s bring Nicholas on to the show.

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

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Why it’s important to be selfish

Nicholas:                             I’m doing great, man. It’s awesome to be here, and I’m looking forward to jumping into it.

Yuri:                      It’s going to be good times. Your business is called The Billion Dollar Body. You cater to male entrepreneurs, for the most part. Is that correct?

Nicholas:                             Absolutely. That’s what we focus on. Either they must have a vision of being an entrepreneur, or they already are. We vet beforehand what their business is and what they’re trying to do. All of us know that if people can be healthier, then they can go out there and make a bigger impact.

They won’t be so self-conscious, which is thinking about self, but instead think about others. If I could empower people to have a vision, a mission, and a product that’s going to help the world, and I can help the person behind that product, then I can help make a bigger impact as well.

Yuri:                      How selfish of you, man.

Nicholas:                             It really is. It’s really what makes me feel good. I would say that you must be selfish. I think that even Mother Theresa was selfish. She loved doing what she was doing, and so she went out and did that which made her feel good. Luckily, if we have the right form selfishness, then we can help a lot of people while we do.

Yuri:                      Yeah, totally. I think it’s a great business and great market that you’re after. It’s true, though. Everyone should be selfish because if you don’t take care of number one, you can’t give to others. I totally get that, for sure.

Nicholas:                             I’m glad you know that, too. There’s not many people out there that will say that. They always say, “You need to think of others. You need to think of others,” but there’s this weird thing where selfishness has been something we’ve been trying to stay away from. Like you said, if we’re not filled up, we can’t give anything. We can’t give what we don’t have, and so when we’re able to take care of ourselves, we go out there and take care of others. I’m right on the same page.

Yuri:                      I’ve got three kids, and I’m very selfish. If I don’t take my time for me, if my wife doesn’t take time for her, we don’t show up as the best version of ourselves for our kids. If there are any parents listening, it’s important to take your time to be selfish for a bit.

Let me ask you about your audience. Why did you decide to specialize in helping male entrepreneurs?

 

Catering only to men, needing connection with entrepreneurs, and the solution

Nicholas:                             Yeah, I wish I would’ve figured this out a lot earlier. I was 60 pounds’ overweight when I left high school. I graduated with a 1.8 GPA. I had a dysfunctional family life, especially from my point of view, so I left knowing that I couldn’t do anything being overweight.

I ended up dropping the body fat, dropping the weight, and getting into the health field around 18 years old.

I started studying and realized I couldn’t learn all that stuff on my own. I hired a coach when I was 19; a health and fitness coach with nutrition, exercise, a lot of mindset. He was out there learning and researching a ton. I realized that he would spend all his hours learning, and I would get all the good stuff that caused the results.

That was awesome for me. I went into the space and started a business. My dad was a business owner, my uncles were business owners, and I knew that was what I was going to do. I’d never drawn a paycheck from a job before, but I knew I had to go out there, make money, and make an impact. I went with my expertise, which was health.

The problem was when health wasn’t my only priority. It was up until that point. I woke up, went to the gym, ate healthy, and hit my goals, but as soon as I had the business and had to help other people, that quickly, with a new-found pressure, fell to the wayside.

I’m sure we’ve all experienced this before. When health is the only thing, it’s very easy to do. When you must juggle multiple priorities to go out there and make an impact, it’s not as easy. As a business owner in the health world, I got unhealthy again.

I saw six months go by and I only stepped foot in the gym once. I knew that had to change. At that point, I knew that there was a problem that I could solve, if I could figure out how to do it correctly. I wondered who I wanted to connect with to help me in the future. I knew that if I could band together a bunch of entrepreneurs, I could tackle any problem of building business because I would have a bunch of business builders all in my network.

I had a solution to an actual problem that was hurting the world; it was hurting families, causing higher divorce, and all those different things with entrepreneurs, and I also wanted to connect with entrepreneurs as well. It started with both male and female entrepreneurs, but I realized that I just was not able to reach the people I wanted to reach.

I had to speak to women and men at the same time. Being the face of the company, I didn’t feel like I could polarize and speak to one gender. The men wanted to be hardcore, and the women needed to be talked to a little bit more. I couldn’t portray both of those at the same time.

I thought, “I’m a man. I know what it’s like to be a man. I want to help these men because, as we know, most spenders in the health space, 70% minimum, is women.”

That means that all these women are out there are willing to improve themselves, but it’s usually the man of the house that’s not getting on board with the plans, eating healthy, and is doing everything for the family. But if we can transform the man, we can transform the house, the city, and the world. We focus on men first for those reasons.

 

Buying the result, mindset, and resources

Yuri:                      Awesome. I always love looking at businesses from a strategic point of view. I look at your avatar and know it’s a smart decision. When you look at people making health-related decisions, finances always become a point of resistance. Was part of the idea of working with entrepreneurs the fact that they might have more disposable income, so you could charge a little bit more and serve at a higher level?

Nicholas:                             Yes. It was part of the thinking. The other thing was the mindset. I could connect with that type of mindset. I knew I could transfer that mindset into building value for health, because the same things that it took for them to be successful in one thing I could just transmute to another.

They also have the desire to become successful. If I could translate how health would help them accomplish their goals in business, it becomes an easy investment. That’s where it came into perceived value; entrepreneurs we have that make $13 million or $50 million dollars a year, those people have a higher value for getting their health under wraps than somebody who’s making $50,000.

I knew that as well. I knew I could go out there, and if I could produce the result for a guy who’s making $50 million, I could charge him $25-$50,000 to get that result because, at the end of the day, the smartest entrepreneurs, the most successful ones, will always buy based on the result that they’ll get. They don’t buy the process. They’re not trying to buy perks.

In the fitness realm, there’s two types of people: There’s people that buy value. They want 50 DVDs, they want 45 videos, they want 65 plans. But at the end of the day, they’re buying based on the bulk and the value of things that they’re not going to use.

These are the people that buy 50 cans of beans that they never end up using because it was a deal. That’s not the type of person I like to work with.

I like to work a person that wants to buy a result. We build trust so they believe that the process that we have, whether it’s one video a month or 30 videos a month, is built to get them the result. That’s what they’re buying.

Yuri:                      It’s true, though. That’s one of the reasons I don’t read books anymore. I’m tired of reading 300 pages of fluff. Give me the one-page Cliff’s Notes and let me act on it.

Nicholas:                             What do you do for the books, then? Do you go to places where people break down the biggest points and you read that, or do you just not read at all?

Yuri:                      I used to read veraciously until I had kids, then my time just evaporated for that. I listen to most of my books. I do a lot of audiobooks, a lot of podcasts. The way I think about it, too, is I get more insight in one episode of a podcast than I will in an entire book sometimes.

That, for me, is how I consume a lot of my information. And through association. If I can hang out with friends or other successful entrepreneurs in my space, I can have a conversation with them we can share stuff. That’s extremely valuable. That’s typically how I do a lot of my learning.

Nicholas:                             And ask those questions face-to-face?

Yuri:                      Yes. I’m not devaluing books because I think books are very important. I think entrepreneurs have a different mindset where we want results. We don’t need 500 things. We just need the one thing. Tell me what to do, and we’ll go do it. I love serving entrepreneurs because of that mindset.

 

Books:  The Pros and Cons of Reading and Nicholas’s recommendations

Nicholas:                             There’s so many books out there right now being thrown into the marketplace, so I try to look at what books have stood the test of time.

50 years, 100 years, or more than a hundred years. How long have they been around and are they still being read? Most books that are coming out today are going to be completely irrelevant. They’re not going to stand the test of time in 20 years, so why waste your time trying to read those books all the time?

I agree with that.

There are a few classics that have the foundations, like “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” I haven’t finished that book yet because it’s kind of a boring read for me, but…”

Yuri:                      It’s an even more boring audio. It sounds like a 70-year-old person is reading it. But it’s true though. I’ve written three published books, and having gone through that, I know what the publishing industry is like behind the scenes. A lot of books coming into the marketplace, whether they’re business or diet books, are nonsense. Fluff.

I would rather go deep with a few books than narrow with a lot of books. I have a handful of books that I go back to time and time again, and those are the ones that I read if I’m going to read. Otherwise, it’s just skimming the surface.

Nicholas:                             I will agree.

Yuri:                      Speaking of books, what are some of the most impactful books that you’ve read?

Nicholas:                             From a health perspective or a business perspective?

Yuri:                      Both.

Nicholas:                             Some of the things that kicked me off on the health side of things was “The Primal Blueprint” by Mark Sisson. I was just hanging out with him the other day at the Bulletproof conference. That was a cool book at the beginning of my journey. “Paleo Solution” by Robb Wolf was a cool book for me as well. “Enter the Zone” by Barry Sears was a health book from the 1980s that helped with building meals. It helped a lot with that journey, portions, and things of that nature.

Those were some great books. Obviously, you could read the Bulletproof books, too. There’s always fun stuff to go and read. I even read the Bulletproof blog, not that I love the community that much, but because of the different angles and the controversial content that they’ll post. Those are some of the things that I’m always checking out and learning from; Robb Wolf and people like that.

Then, on the business side, there’s a book that’s called “Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got” by Jay Abraham.

He’s our business mentor, and I’ve been diving into his stuff recently. I think he’s one of the most underrated authors, teachers, speakers, and coaches in the millennial generation. Obviously, the crusher is Tony Robbin’s coach back in the day, but now I think he’s under the radar. His stuff has been great.

“Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill is obviously great if you’re trying to break through on financial income, and not just because you set out a goal. You say exactly how much money you want to make, when you want to make it by, what you’re willing to do, what you’re willing to give up, and you visualize that thing every single day until you become hungry enough to do it, realize the opportunities at hand, and go and make that income.

The first time I ever had a six-figure year was when I got that book. I had never made more than $20,000 in a year before that. I got that book, and still only made $30,000 from actual work. The rest of it came from hustling on the side because I was declaring that every single day.

Yuri:                      Nice.

Nicholas:                             We adopted that to whatever we were trying to accomplish.

Yuri:                      Love it. It’s just one of those mindset shifts. That’s a good book for kids to read.

Nicholas:                             Bob Proctor reads it every day. Isn’t that crazy?

Yuri:                      Jay Abraham is one of those guys that, like you said, millennials don’t know about. He’s older, he’s been in the space, but he’s a forefront leader when it comes to marketing. That book you mentioned is awesome.

I remember reading that in a park in Los Angeles and taking copious notes on the inside of the back cover and front cover. I’ve shared the stage while Jay spoke and thought he was very well-spoken. I remember taking notes in that book. They’re simple concepts, but so powerful: Three ways to build your business. There’s only three ways to build your business, and just narrow things down. I’m a huge Jay Abraham fan as well.

Nicholas:                             I just posted that on my Facebook from Jay. Within this last week, I posted those exact three ways to make money. Get more clients, get your clients to buy more, and increase your price points.

Yuri:                      That’s right. That’s it. Those are the only things you can do to grow your business. Those are the three things. Everything else we do just falls into one of those three categories.

 

The Billion Dollar Body Live event and what sets it apart

Nicholas:                             We mentor all these different leaders and consult many businesses to help generate billions of dollars. We helped with Tony Robbins’, and the cool thing that I can release now is that, at our live event, billiondollarbodylive.com on June 8^th-10th, we actually have Jay coming in and speaking at our event.

Yuri:                      Good for you, man. That’s awesome.

Nicholas:                             It’s sick because we don’t know how long Jay’s going to be out there, speaking, and doing these types of things. His time is, by far, his most precious asset, so it’s cool to have him come into Billion Dollar Body live.

This would be our second year. We usually cap it out. There are 150 men, and we create unique experiences. If you want to network with high-level men, if you want to create relationships with our speakers, they all stay. You’ll be around people that want to prosper in health, business, and relationships, and not just one of those things.

It’s not just a networking event where it’s like if you do business together, then you’re friends, and if not, then you’re not friends. There are multiple things to connect on even if one person’s in real estate and the other one sells paper. You still have other things to connect on because you’re trying to make an impact.

You want to have deep, meaningful relationships, and you’re going to have great friendships and chase fulfillment rather than just some carrot on the stick for what success looks like to someone else. Chase your own level of success.

All these guys are like-minded. They love connecting. If anyone wants to connect with them, we have the Billion Dollar Brotherhood Facebook group. You can ask the group how the event went and the results that people produced so that you’re not just listening me and taking my word for it.

Yuri:                      That’s awesome. That’s billiondollarbodylive.com.

As you’ve grown The Billion Dollar Body, what, from a business perspective, is one of the biggest challenges you’ve faced, and how have you overcome it?

 

Being duplicable from the beginning to scale and grow

Nicholas:                             I’ve always had a strength in connecting people, building deep relationships quickly, and then getting them to decide and buy. I’d say one of the biggest problems and things I see a lot of other coaches going through is that duplicating themselves is hard. They do everything in their business in a way that is not duplicable or easy for someone to take over in the future.

I look at myself and everything that our business needs to do, and I take over a lot of that in the beginning. Each one of those things – marketing, follow-up, email, etc. – that you must run, even if you’re good at it, you probably won’t do it as well as someone who can focus on it all the time.

The problem is that we don’t set it up as a duplicable system. Make sure that someone can get into that position, take over your email, and know exactly what to do and how to reach out to people. Have it set up in a way that’s easy for them to follow, rather than having Facebook Messenger like I did. Most people reached out to me there, and because of that, someone would have to log into my Facebook Messenger, which feels out of integrity.

I had to figure out how to get all the conversations that over the past two years from Facebook Messenger to email so someone else could follow up. It was not a good process. Because of that, I wasn’t prepared to duplicate and scaling myself, and have other people take over facets of the business so that we could grow, scale, and reach more people.

That was the number one problem, at least at the time. There have been plenty of problems, but if there’s something that people can do right now, it’s riding on the systems of how you’re doing everything. Every time you train or go through something, make a video of it.

That way, you don’t have to sit there live with everyone all the time. You have an actual video training each step of what you do.

Yuri:                      Yeah, that’s huge. That’s something I don’t think a lot of people want to do because it’s boring. But if you spend one hour doing it today, you’ll buy yourself one hour every single week for the rest of your life because you won’t need do that anymore.

Nicholas:                             Look at all the network marketing companies. What do they do? Bring them into a house, and say, “Okay, cool. Let me just press play.”

No one’s presenting. They just say, “Who wants to sign up?”

That was the first example of business that I ever had for myself. My family has always had businesses, but they were all service. When I saw that, I was like, “How can I duplicate this system? Everyone in the world can apparently do this. All they do is press play on a DVD or press play on a blender a lot of times, and they can build a business. How can I make it that easy in what I do?”

Yuri:                      Otherwise, you’re building yourself a job if you don’t have these systems in place. It’s very easy to go down that path, especially for health and wellness entrepreneurs who are great technicians. They’re great at putting together programs and working with clients. But if you do that, whether online or offline, and you’re doing one-on-one forever, you’re not building a business that is self-driving without you.

Nicholas:                             I don’t know anyone who’s just smart at something that has a huge business. You could be the smartest person in any area of health, but that will not translate over to bridging more people or building a big business.

There’s always going to be someone better than you in another area of health that you could bring in. If you brought them all in as experts in their areas, you could focus on getting it out there, reaching people, and getting them to make decisions.

Look at a simple thing: Bulletproof Coffee. It’s coffee, butter, and oil, that’s what blew up an entire brand, and the company could sell for $700 million right now. There’s hardly an expertise around that concept. It’s very simple. It’s not about mitochondria, even though they talk about that.

The gateway into the business is always very simple.

 

Yuri:                      What does your business model look like? How do you reach people? How do you get in front of them? How do you engage them as customers or clients?

Nicholas:                             That’s a great question. We’ve done it two different ways. We went full-on high-ticket first. Most people listening right now don’t have a reach of 100,000 or even 30,000 people. When you’re starting a business, you may have a couple hundred or thousand people that you reach on your email list. And you’ve seen how many people open that, which is not fun.

Having a high-ticket item was the way I started. I gave value through producing content on social media and presenting at small live events. I realized that if someone had a virtual training that I could give value to, if there were 20 people and I had a $3,000 or $7,000 offer, I could sell a few every single time, whereas if you have 20 people watch your Facebook Live, you’ll hopefully get a like and maybe one comment.

I would always scale it up from what’s making the biggest impact, then down. I knew that talking about my health journey transformation and what I have in-person, one-on-one, was going to be the highest converting. A group setting, in-person, was the second highest converting. Meeting people in-person was going to be the third highest, then selling them on the phone.

There were things that I would do to know I was creating the biggest impact. I’d get in front of people, speak my message, and get on a phone call afterwards. The follow-up, maybe a video call, walked them through the process of what it would look like to work together. Then, I’d close them for a high-ticket item. If I was selling a $29 a month membership, then talking to 20 people wasn’t going to make me much money.

The first opportunity was when I got to speak in front of 50 people. It wasn’t a huge event, and wasn’t out of anyone’s sphere of influence. I left, didn’t do any sales, did a tiny bit of follow-up, and we made $33,000 that week.

I thought, “Wow. This is a lot easier than trying to do the small-numbers game.” That’s the way we started out. Since then, we’ve scaled out to do free offers through organic social media and paid advertising.

We generally try to bring people in through our free item that would want other items. I wouldn’t say, “Hey, there’s nine exercises that you can do in five minutes,” if I was trying to attract someone who was trying to do Olympic weightlifting. I make sure that my free offer is something that’s going to be complemented by whatever program we want them to buy.

We work with men, so I do a lot of testosterone plans. We work with successful men, so we have a podcast where we interview business people and talk about how health impacts business. Now we have free programs that reach the masses. From there, they funnel through our system to higher-priced products.

At our live event, every person that came was $2,500. Not for a ticket. A ticket’s only $300 bucks. Because of what people do at the event and right after the event, each person, on average, spends $2,500, and they’re very happy. I know how much each customer is spending, which, thanks to Jay Abraham, I’m able to notice. I could spend a thousand dollars to get someone to come to my event for $300 because I know that each person is $2,500 minimum.

Yuri:                      That’s great. The other thing too is that it’s the same amount of work to create something for $10 as it is for a thousand dollars. It’s the same funnel. It’s the same thinking.

Maybe there’s more of a strategy call or a sales call to close that person at a higher price point, but I’ve built out funnels for $20 a month programs as well as $25,000 programs, and it’s the same work.

You brought up a great point. If you don’t have a big following, start high-ticket. You’re going to get open rates, so why not just get the lowest hanging fruit and work with people you want to work with at a higher ticket level?

Nicholas:                             If you have a small number of people, you should make sure that you’re getting your time’s-worth. You should think, if they pay me $500 a month, what type of service could I give them? If they pay me $5,000 a month, what type of service can I provide?

Would that service that you provide at $5,000 a month exceed what they get for $500? I try to look at my price points based on the amount of value that I can give for that price. At the end of the day, if you’re working with people one-on-one, you’re going to get them great results. You’ll be able to use to those results to get more referrals and more clients, and that’ll allow you to charge more.

Show off your skills and go out there. I started out at only $3,300 for six months, and now sell the same exact thing for $10,000. We’re able to provide a much better service. We’re able to tailor it a lot more. Our clients are a lot happier at that price point, but I started out less because that’s all I could believe in at the time. I was looking to get the result for the client instead of just trying to rush and get everyone to buy my $27 a month thing.

We work together one-on-one, make things happen, and I do whatever it takes to get them their transformation. I tell them, “I want you to track me down, wherever I live, for the rest of my life and try to put money in my mailbox because you’re so grateful for this transformation.”

That’s the way I went after it in the beginning. I did that for four years before I ever came out with a lower price point.

 

Owning a marketplace and learning from the past

Yuri:                      That’s great. I’m a big believer in that.

If you were to start things over again, knowing what you know now, would you do anything differently? If so, what?

Nicholas:                             Absolutely. I wouldn’t go so quick into, “I need to make money from this right now.” I would go out there and own the marketplace of the people that I have first. I believe there’s a scarcity where people say, “I need you to pay for this even though you don’t have a reason to yet because I’m not known. I’m starting all over.”

But you still want to get paid for it because you think, “If they don’t buy, who else do I know that’s going to give me money? If all my friends are getting it for free, how am I going to make anything?” That’s poverty thinking, 100%.

So, I would’ve gone out there, created transformations quickly, and owned the marketplace. Maybe I wouldn’t have charged, but I would’ve gotten some good names to go through and have them pay through action, pictures, videos, written testimonials, and referrals.

I would’ve started out with more of a long-term vision and not just, “I need to make money today,” but instead, “I want to own the marketplace today so I can make money tomorrow.”

I would’ve gone into it with more confidence; charging way higher prices and tailoring a plan with more belief in the results I was going to get for people. A lot of times, we only have the mindset to serve a client that is like us. The problem is, if you’re not making tons of money in your business right now, you only know how to spend like someone who’s broke. That’s not a good place to be.

I would’ve put myself in the shoes of the client more. I would’ve realized the transformation, my product’s value, and upped my price points a lot quicker. I also wouldn’t have been as scared to do things for free to show my expertise and show that it works. With that, I could own the marketplace today for free so I could make tons of money in the future, rather than trying to make a quick buck off the person in the very beginning.

 

Confidence and sales skills as necessary traits of successful entrepreneurs

Yuri:                      Nice. If you could distill down one important skill or trait entrepreneurs must have for lasting success, what would that be?

Nicholas:                             They must have confidence in themselves 100%, but then they have sell.

I don’t think there is entrepreneur without the word “sell” in it. There is no disconnect. Entrepreneurs must believe and convey that belief to people so they can decide to do something. You sell your employees on working, you sell the contractors on getting work done, you sell people every single day as an entrepreneur, whether it’s for money or action.

Sales is an ability entrepreneurs must have to get people onboard, whether it’s money to be a part of it or to submit to that vision and have submission to a mission. I believe it’s all about being able to communicate, sell, and have confidence in themselves.

Yuri:                      Totally. A lot of listeners are, obviously, health and wellness entrepreneurs who absolutely love selling. By love, I mean not love because they don’t like that slimy, salesy feeling. I’m hoping they understand that you’re always selling.

You’re always selling an idea, a position, a thing. What advice do you give to someone who is a little bit apprehensive of selling themselves, their products, or their services so they can become masterfully confident in doing so?

Nicholas:                             Never sell anyone that doesn’t tell you that they need your product. Jay Abraham said, “If you know the transformation that your product’s going to give someone, you have a moral obligation to sell them as hard as humanly possible, but it’s not about you knowing what it’s going to do for the person. It’s about them knowing what it’s going to do for them.”

Once they know what it’s going to do for them, you have an obligation as a coach and as a trainer to get them to make that step. Even if it wasn’t paid, if they were to tell you, “Man, health and fitness would transform my whole life. My whole life would be better. My wife/husband wouldn’t leave me. I would live longer.”

You then have an obligation to push them to do that. Too many trainers think it’s a slimy sales tactic because they’re trying to sell people that don’t want, need, or crave their product or service. It’s about first getting them to tell you what their life would be like and how different it would be if they did go through your program, service, or whatever it is.

Once they tell you that and they tell you how valuable that would be, then you have an obligation to get them to do whatever monetary investment, whatever physical investment it would take to make that happen. But not until then.

If they’re like, “Yeah, man. If I went through your program, it’d be worth at least 10 bucks to me. That’d be fun, but I don’t need it, I don’t think.” At that point, if you try to pitch a $10,000 program, you are a slimy salesman because they don’t have any value for the product that you’re selling. It means that you’re all about yourself. But if they’re sitting there and telling you, “Man, I would sell my car and my house if I could just drop this body fat and get off these medications. If I could just do that, I would do anything for that,” and you’re holding the solution to their problem, then you have an obligation to push them as hard as humanely possible into whatever the investment would be to make that happen.

The difference is them telling you and them recognizing a need for the transformation that you have to the keys to.

Yuri:                      And the distinction, just in case our listeners haven’t picked up on this, in the sense of them telling you what they want, is that you should be asking questions.

One of the biggest mistakes that I’ve made personally, and I know other people have, too, is talking way too much. Just ask the right questions, let the person sell themselves, and then just take the order.

Nicholas:                             I had one question come up that was really good. It helped me get the person to tell me exactly how much money they had.

I said, “I don’t believe in pills giving you an instant transformation, but let’s just say that there was one. What would that be worth to you? What would you pay for that right now?” They said, “Oh, that’s priceless.” I asked how valuable it would be to them; how much money they had, right at that moment, to spend on the pill. They said, “Well, it’s worth like 500 bucks.”

“Oh, 500 bucks? If you were to able to get this transformation, you’d only spend 500 bucks?” They said, “Oh, you’re right. I would sell my car for that. I’d pay $30,000 for that right now.”

Now I knew exactly how much they were willing to spend. They had $25,000 in their bank account and said they would drain the whole thing. Now, how could they deny the money thing? I said, “This isn’t going to cost you $25,000 because this is a mutual connection where we’re both putting in work and effort together.

If it was an instant transformation, it’d totally be worth more than $30,000. But because of the work that we must put in together, I guarantee we’re going to be able to get to that result. And it’s only $10,000.”

So, you already have them believing it’s worth $30,000. They know they must put in the work and effort together, so that’s why we sell it at $10,000. That was a big way for me to get them to talk about what it’s worth to them. When I was charging high prices or a high investment, I felt more confident because they were telling me, “I would sell a house.”

I would tell people, “Hey, on the next call, I need you to make sure you have $100,000 liquid cash just in case an opportunity comes where you’re able to get the transformation that you’ve always wanted.” On the next call, I’d be like, “Hey, do you have 100,000 liquid? No? What if I had a pill for your transformation right now? You should be ready for opportunity when it comes. I’m already coaching now.”

Then, when it comes to the pitch and it’s $10,000, they’re already thinking that it’s worth a hundred. When it comes to $10,000 it’s a drop in the bucket.

Yuri:                      It’s a great question asked. Doesn’t matter what you’re selling. It frames the price and gives people a relative point of reference. It’s smart. Nicholas, that’s awesome, man. Thank you for sharing that.

 

The Rapid Five

You ready for the Rapid Five?

Nicholas:                             Please. I’m looking forward to it.

Yuri:                      So you’ve got no idea what these questions are. Whatever’s top of mind is probably the right answer. Here we go. Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

Nicholas:                             Scheduling.

Yuri:                      Number two, what is your biggest strength?

Nicholas:                             Communicating.

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

Nicholas:                             Building friendships.

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

Nicholas:                             Drink water.

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

Nicholas:                             I’m making progress.

Yuri:                      Nice. That’s a good one. I don’t know if it was Tony Robbins who said this or someone else, but I remember sitting in LA traffic once, and I thought, “Wow, this really sucks.” It dawned on me that most of us feel happiest when we’re making progress. Even if it’s slow, I’m happy to just move a little bit faster than this traffic.

Nicholas:                             Up and down is what sucks, or straight down. Or ask someone, “Hey, if you just made a hundred dollars more every single month for the rest of your life, how would that feel?” That security of knowing that they’re always going up a little bit is so valuable.

Even people say, “Would you rather be given a million dollars, or $10,000 a week for the rest of your life?” Deep down, people are always saying a million because they can invest it and triple that shit – sorry – crap.

I think, “No, you couldn’t because you’d already have a million dollars if you could do that.” The reason we don’t have what we want right now is because of us. That’s why lottery winners go broke in four years. I would take the $10,000 a month, personally, even though I’d want everyone to think that I’m going to just take the million and invest it and blow it up into a billion bucks.

I would take the $10,000 bucks a week, and I would go with the constant little growth on top of that. I wouldn’t have to worry about anything. I’d be able to execute. It’s that constant little growth forward that makes me feel good. I don’t care if it’s a million dollars today and zero tomorrow. That would make me feel terrible. If I watched a hundred million dollars dwindle away in my bank account for the rest of my life, even if I had a hundred million, I would still not feel good about myself.

Yuri:                      Yes, seriously.

 Nicholas:                             It’s about the constant little bit of progress.

Yuri:                      I think a lot of entrepreneurs want freedom as one of their top core values, but I think, having worked with a lot of entrepreneurs, that most entrepreneurs want certainty. I would rather have predicable revenue in my business so that I can enjoy more freedom. If you don’t have certainty, how can you feel free? It’s a catch-22.

Nicholas:                             Oh, yeah. Having money does not make you feel freedom. I have had no money in my bank account. I’ve had a decent amount of money in my bank account that would’ve lasted me years, and still, it doesn’t feel any better when you see that you’re not making progress and you’re not consistently accomplishing something new.

You don’t even feel it. You will never even enjoy it because it’ll just dwindle away. Unless that number’s going up or you’re accomplishing something new, you will not enjoy that money.

Like you said, if you had certainty of income, then you know exactly what you can enjoy and what you can’t, but that’s part of being an entrepreneur. That’s why it’s not easy, is it? You won’t have that certainty. You won’t know if the effort that you’re putting in today is going to produce the result that you want tomorrow.

You can’t be 100% certain, which is why not everyone can be in this game.

Yuri:                      That’s right. Nicholas, thank you so much for taking the time, my friend. This has been very insightful. I have no doubt that our listeners will get a lot of goodness out of this. What is the best place for people to follow you online, check out your events, and learn anything else they should know?

Nicholas:                             I’m always doing Instagram stories, and a lot of times, I’ll be talking about the business side of things since that’s what I’m working on a lot. If someone wants to check me out on Instagram, I’m @nicholasbayerle. That is the place to go.

Then I hope to see you at billiondollarbodylive.com. I would love to be able to shake people’s hands. Obviously, it’s for men only, so I apologize for any of the women listeners. That’s how I’ve built my business, and that’s how I continue to want to build relationships; seeing people face-to-face, shaking hands, having conversations, and seeing transformations.

Yuri:                      Love it. Awesome. Just a thought, as a spin-off business, you could start a Billion Dollar Booty for women.

Nicholas:                             That is so funny. Cole Hatter told us to that a year ago.

Yuri:                      Maybe Amanda can run that for you.

Nicholas:                             I’d have to hire some other girl. Amanda’s got her hands full. She likes the freedom side of things.

Yuri:                      Yeah. Awesome.

Nicholas:                             But yeah, Billion Dollar Booty is exactly what Cole Hatter told us to do. Now I should buy it before this goes out so that other people don’t take it.

Yuri:                      That’s funny. Awesome, man. This has been a lot of fun. Thank you so much for taking the time and for all the great work you continue to do with the men that you serve.

Nicholas:                             All right, man. Thanks so much.

Yuri:                      Good stuff, you guys. Not too bad. Not too shabby at all.

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

Yuri’s Take

I want to challenge you today to consider your pricing. As Nicholas mentioned, when you charge a higher price you’re able to provide a better service, a better end result, and the client or customer is more invested in the process.

Why don’t we charge higher prices?

It’s a self-worth thing. That’s all it is. Instead of comparing ourselves to someone else, whatever it is, none of that stuff matters. What matters is owning your space, being confident in your ability to deliver a result, and charging a premium price for that because you don’t need to work with a thousand people. Maybe you do if you charge $10 per product, but instead of doing that, maybe you work with 10 people who pay you a thousand dollars each. Which one is easier logistically?

Less is more.

I’m not saying you must do this as your business model, but I believe that no matter what your business is, no matter what you’re selling, there is an opportunity for a more intimate, higher-level offering where you can give people the best of you at the pinnacle of the pricing model.

There will always be people who want to sit in first class. There will always be people, and I’m one of them. I will pay four to five times more for a plane ticket to sit in business or first-class. Why? Well, I could give you the logical reason, which is it gives me the space to think more clearly and get great work done, which is true, because every plane ride I go on I create some amazing things.

Second is, I get a meal. You can say what you want about airplane food, but sometimes it’s nice to have a nice meal with a glass of wine. This goes back to the core reason why we do things, which is emotion. It makes me feel special. It makes me feel good.

Third, I get to sit beside some better-quality people than if I was sitting in coach. Now, I don’t want to sound like a prick and someone who’s on a soapbox, but I’ve sat beside some amazing people in business class. By contrast, I was on a flight once, sitting in coach flying back from New York. My wife Amy and I were with one-year-old baby Oscar.

The guy beside me was drugged out or something for the whole hour flight. As we’re landing, he stood up and decided to pee on the seat in front of him. He stood as the plane was landing, whipped out his you-know-what, and pissed on the seat in front of him. It splashed all over the place.

Amy and I were like, “What the hell is going on?” I vowed, on that day, that I was never going to put myself in that situation again. That’s one of the reasons why I don’t like sitting in coach, not that that ever happens for the most part, but those are some of the reasons that I’m willing to pay a higher price. Again, at the core of all this is that we do everything we do because of how it makes us feel.

Tap into that and understand that there will always be people who want to pay more money. They want to feel more special; they want to feel like a higher degree, higher class, or whatever, and not offering that doesn’t allow you to tap into that segment of the market.

Anyways, it’s something to think about. If you don’t currently offer this, even if you’re selling $10 eBooks, put together some type of higher-price coaching program on the backend. I’m telling you, there will be people who take you up on your offer. That’s my challenge for you today.

My second challenge is that if you haven’t yet subscribed to the Healthpreneur Podcast, do so today, right now, immediately. Take out your iPhone, smartphone, or whatever it is you’re listening on, go to the Healthpreneur Podcast in iTunes, click on the subscribe button, and you’re all set.

We’ve got some amazing interviews and many more to come. I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to be here for a long time, and I hope you will be as well.

Lastly, I’ve got an amazing book called Health Profit Secrets that’s going to help you turn your expertise and knowledge for health and fitness into a thriving online business to create more income, more impact, and more freedom. Specifically, I’m going to show you the four underlying secrets that all successful health and fitness businesses have in common. Like driving a car, if you’ve got a flat tire, your car’s not going to go very far. If you got two flat tires, well, it’s going to be worse.

In this book, I’m going to show you four pillars of your business that you must have dialed in, and if you’re weak in one or more of those areas, it’s like driving on a flat tire. I’m going to show you how to correct the imbalances and fill in the gaps.

You can get the book for free. I’ve covered the cost of the book, just cover the shipping, which is only a couple of bucks. Less than the cost of a latte at Starbucks. You can get that over at healthpreneurbook.com. If you want the secrets to accelerating your success, this is the book to help you do that.

That is all for today. I want to thank you once again for joining me for taking the time out of your day to be with me, and I hope you’ve enjoyed this conversation. Until then, keep up the great work, continue to be great, do great, and I’ll see you in our next episode.

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Free Healthpreneur Health Profit Secrets Book

Transcription:

Today we’re talking about why coaching one-on-one is done, and what to do instead.

Welcome to the show, I’m excited to be with you once again. It’s warming up here in Toronto and I’m pumped because this is week two of our Health Business Accelerator online workshop. We run this workshop in two ways: We have a two-day live intensive, and a six-week online version that is also done live. This is the second week of the most current online program, and it’s a lot of fun.

I’m pumped to be working with the amazing health entrepreneurs, coaches, and practitioners that we have in the program, and helping them get a lot more clarity in their business and business model. We give them a business-in-a-box to help them attract their ideal clients, work with them at a closer level, and command premium prices for producing amazing results. It’s tremendous.

If you’re interested in joining one of our workshops, you can head on over to healthpreneurgroup.com/workshop.

The pitfalls of one-on-one coaching and why it’s done

Years ago, I fell out of love with one-on-one coaching.

I started out as a trainer, working one-on-one with clients, day in and day out. I had 12-hour days that were tiring and not fun. I did that for eight years. At the same time, I was the strength and conditioning coach for the men’s soccer team at the University of Toronto, and I enjoyed that for two reasons. Number one, I was working with athletes who wanted to be better, which was awesome. Two, I was working with a group, and I realized that I enjoyed working with groups of people.

There’s so much more synergy. It’s fun, it’s dynamic.

You don’t get into the psychotherapy sessions that one-on-one training or one-on-one coaching entails. If you’re doing any kind of one-on-one coaching, I promise you, you can relate to that.

There’s nothing wrong with people sharing their stuff. But you must stay on point. A lot of times, one-on-one coaching becomes an energy-draining therapy session, and that’s not what they’re for. We are there as coaches to keep people on track, call them out on their BS, get to the root of the issue, and move them forward.

I’m not saying not to be empathetic. Empathy’s very important, but we can’t sit in a stew of nonsense, stories, or stuff that doesn’t serve anyone, for half the session or even longer. That’s one of the biggest reasons people come to us.

They’re tired of one-on-one coaching. It’s wearing them down. They’re falling out of love with serving people, because they don’t want to do any more-one-on-one. We help our clients move from a one-on-one coaching model to a group coaching model, and this can be done in-person or online.

How to get into group coaching; identifying the target market and the problem

In order for a group coaching program to work, without working yourself into the ground in the process, you have to define a single target market and focus on solving a single pain or problem for them.

To serve 10, 20, 50, 100 people at the same time and make it feel like a personalized experience, it’s important to have everyone on the same track, going to the same destination. That way, you can create a dream come true system, a done-with-you program, that is the same for everyone.

If you’re a coach or a practitioner and you have some people who are trying to overcome diabetes, some people looking to build muscle, and some looking to get rid of back pain, now you’ve got three completely different train tracks and protocols that you would have to manage. That’s what happens when you don’t narrow things down. A problem I see in the health industry is that people fear alienation and want to help everyone.

You going to help everyone. You’re not even going to help yourself. It’s like going to a restaurant that is, “The Best Mexican, Italian, Japanese, American, and French food since 1995.” I’m not stepping into that kind of restaurant, but I’ll definitely go to the best Italian restaurant because it’s specialized. I know I’m going to get exactly what I want when it comes to Italian food.

In your business, first and foremost, understand the single target market you want to serve. How or who do you want to be known for? How do you want to be seen in the marketplace? Do you want to be the person that is known for helping people reverse Type 2 Diabetes, or do you want to be a health coach that helps people get healthy?

Building a program with a proprietary process with Healthpreneur

There’s a big difference. If people can’t clearly classify you out of all the different service providers, you’re going to have a tough time standing out and sticking in their minds. With Healthpreneur, we specialize in helping health entrepreneurs, coaches, and practitioners turn their expertise into thriving online coaching businesses.

That’s what I want to be known for. That’s it. I don’t want to help realtors or internet marketers. That’s not what I want to do. I’ve narrowly defined that market.

Another thing is that we don’t provide coaching anymore to people who want to sell information products. We’ve got a couple people in our mastermind who are still using that model, but in terms of attracting new clients, that’s not something we want to do. That’s not the model that we built out to help people.

If you’re selling an amazing supplement that we can position as an authority in the marketplace or a group coaching program, that’s our bread and butter. The first thing you need to identify is your single target market. Then, identify the pain or problem you want to help them solve. With that, you can build a program because the recipe, or the proprietary process, is the same.

We go through the steps to get people the results they’re after. But when you have all sorts of different clients, on all sorts of different tracks, you can’t do that. And you can’t scale that. In group coaching the way we teach it and help you implement it, you have your single focus, and you’re working with everyone on a single track towards a single destination. Because of that, you don’t need to customize a thousand different things.

The exception is someone, like a functional medicine doctor, who’s doing lab tests. In that case, you might throw in a one-on-one consult during your program to go over lab results and customize their program a little bit. But for the most part, if you’ve been training clients or seeing patients with a specific problem for years, you’ll generally prescribe the same protocol for all of them.

Your scalable deliverable and the client’s increased results

If that’s the case for you, then you have a recipe that can be duplicable and scalable. If you’re working one-on-one with someone and you can help them take the steps to overcome Diabetes, then that same process can be useful for a group of people doing the same thing. You can help 5, 10, 20, even 50 people at the same time with this type of process. That’s what we do, day in and day out, when we serve our clients and help them do that in their businesses.

The cool thing about group coaching is that it doesn’t take 40 hours a week to deliver. With the right setup, your deliverable, what you put into the business in terms of your coaching, is anywhere from two to four hours a week.

If you’re working with clients right now, one-on-one, and you’re burnt out working 30, 40 hours a week or more, I strongly recommend that you consider the coaching group model. It’s better for you.

You won’t deal with the one-on-one psychotherapy stuff. It’s better for your clients, because now they’re part of a group, where they’re accountable to each other and you, but they’re also having more fun. They’re making new relationships and friendships, and you never know what can happen.

The math behind group coaching: Better money and results, less work

I’ll give you a great example. In our February 2-day live intensive workshop in Scottsdale, the Health Business Accelerator, we had 15 amazing people. We had chiropractors, naturopaths, health coaches, and trainers. It was such a great group.

Something happened after the workshop that I never anticipated. This is why group coaching is so powerful. When we finished the workshop, they took it upon themselves to start doing group calls to make sure they were on track. How cool is that?

Just that alone is reason enough to move from one-on-one to group coaching. You have built-in support and accountability, and everyone’s working towards the same goal.

You can also scale this. One-on-one coaching, whether it’s done in-person or online, is not scalable. You can only work so many hours in a day.

Let’s use this example: Let’s say you could work a maximum of 40 hours a week, and you were charging $100 per person. For a lot of people, that’s still high, based upon the conversations I’ve had. That’s eight hours a day. That’s tiring. But let’s just say that’s that. So, if you’re working one-on-one with 40 people, that’s $4,000 of income. Not bad. Forty hours of work, so your effective hourly rate is $100.

Now let’s look at those same 40 people. Say we brought them to a group coaching program, and they are all working toward the same objective. Instead of individually telling them the same thing, you put together a program they all walk through that gives them the step-by-step towards that common outcome.

Instead of charging $100 per head, you charge $3,000 for an eight-week program to help them get the result that they want. Now you’ve got 40 people paying you $3,000 each. That’s $120,000 for the duration of that program. That’s over two months if we break it down by week. $120,000 divided by 8 weeks is $15,000.

If we do $4,000 a week one-on-one, that’s $16,000 in a month and $32,000 in two months. Now with a group coaching program, we’re saying it’s $120,000 in two months, but here’s the kicker: For two to four hours of your time per week. AND your clients are getting better results.

Please tell me why you would not want to do that! Even if we say it was four hours per week over the course of eight weeks, 32 hours, for $120,000, your effective hourly rate is $3,750. That’s a lot more.

To me, that makes all the sense in the world, so why would you ever want to do one-on-one coaching? People might ask if one-on-one coaching is more valuable for the client.  The answer is no, it’s not.

If the client is just whining and complaining the whole session, they’re not moving forward towards their outcome. But if they’re in a group of people with support, friendships, and relationships, they’re not going to waste everyone’s time by bringing up issues that have no relevance on group calls.

Now you’re moving forward, and everyone’s supportive. They’re accountable to you, they’re accountable to their other peers, and there’s no wasting time. You make more money, they get a better result, you have way more free time. Boom! Done!

Healthpreneur workshops and business model

That’s why group coaching is the way to go. If you want help building out your group coaching program, that’s what we do. That’s what we help you do in our workshop. If you want to apply to attend one of our upcoming workshops, go over to healthpreneurgroup.com/workshop, and we’ll give you all the information on the page.

If you feel it’s a good fit for you, apply. We’ll have a quick follow-up call and confirm your spot. We’ll literally hold your hand, step-by-step, and help you build out your program. We’ll show you exactly how to track clients, 24/7, predictably, how to deliver an amazing experience for them, and automate your entire business.

We’re moving people to an automated way of attracting leads. We use Facebook ads. We bring them into an automated webinar, and we get people onto the phone to enroll with you.

That’s it! Then you deliver on the backend. It’s an amazing business model. It’s exactly what we do with Healthpreneur and what we help our clients do. If you’re interested in that, you can make a lot more money in a lot less time, without compromising the results you’re getting for your clients. In fact, you’re promising better results and better experience for your clients. We’d love to serve you.

If that’s your interest, check out the workshop. In the meantime, thank you for joining me.

We’ve got a great episode coming up on Wednesday with Nicholas Bearly. He’s going to be talking about how to charge premium prices for health coaching. He’s doing some cool stuff with entrepreneurs, and you’ll be surprised at some of the stuff that he’s doing and charging within that market.

So, if you think your market won’t pay for what you want to do, just listen to Wednesday’s episode and go back to episode 72, where I talked about how to charge premium prices, even if you’re not a guru.

This is big stuff. So, subscribe to the Healthpreneur Podcast if you haven’t done so already. Head on over to iTunes and hit the subscribe button. You don’t want to miss any more of this goodness, do you? This has been a lot of fun; I hope you’ve enjoyed it. I will see you on Wednesday.

In the meantime, continue to go out there, be great, and do great, and we’ll see you then.