Transcription:

Healthpreneurs! It’s episode 80 today, and we are joined by the co-founder and co-host of Ultimate Health Podcast, Marni Wasserman. I hope you’re having a great week. It’s been an awesome week on the Healthpreneur Podcast.

We had a great interview with Adam Lloyd just a few days ago. If you missed that episode, it’s episode 79. Grab it on the iTunes feed, and subscribe to the podcast if you haven’t already. It was a great interview about how he built the number one rated gym in a town just outside Toronto out of 217 competing gyms in that area.

Whether you have a physical facility or not, it doesn’t matter. The fundamentals we talked about are applicable to any business, online or offline. Check that out if you missed it.

Today, we are going to shift gears and focus more on podcasting. As you can tell, you’re listening to a podcast right now. I’m a big fan of podcasts and I’ll be very honest with you, I’ve started and stopped four different podcasts in my health and fitness business.

I thought maybe I had an issue with consistency. But I recognized that the process I had created for myself wasn’t well thought out. I was doing way too much work inside the podcast, but it was still a medium. I still believe that a podcast is an amazing intimate experience that is unparalleled.

I don’t know where you’re listening to this from, but maybe it’s in your car, maybe you’re walking your dogs, maybe you’re working out, or maybe you’re just chilling outside. Either way, this is one of the only ways you can connect with people in an uninterrupted fashion.

If you’re watching my YouTube videos, you might be distracted. You might see other videos in the side bar and you might click on those, or if you’re reading a blog post or a Facebook post, you might be distracted by another shiny object and clicking off to somewhere else. A podcast is unique and I want to acknowledge and appreciate you for listening to this podcast, whether it’s your first episode or your 80th episode.

If you’ve been with me since day one, thank you. I do this for you. Yes, it’s a great way for me to connect with amazing entrepreneurs, but I love to inspire and show you what’s possible with your expertise, knowledge, and business. Every week, we bring great entrepreneurs to your front door to help you do that.

So, today’s episode is with Marni Wasserman of the Ultimate Health Podcast. I was fortunate enough to have been a guest on that show about a year ago. I’m going to ask some questions about what it takes to build a successful podcast. They’ve been doing this for three years, and there must be some highs and lows and some lessons learned that she can share with us in this episode.

If you’ve no interest in podcasting, it doesn’t matter. There’s always common threads. It doesn’t matter if you’re YouTubing or blogging, there are commonalities that are applicable to any value vehicle as I call them in my workshops. Your value vehicle, the thing you use to produce your value to the world, whether it’s a podcast or anything else, has the same fundamentals.

There’s little nuances that Marni will get into, but nonetheless, it’ll be valuable for anybody in our space. She started off with a physical brick and mortar business and she’ll share with us how she transitioned out of that into being online full-time.

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

Marni:                  It’s going great. Thanks for having me.

Yuri:                      You are very welcome. You are a podcast star yourself. We’ll devote a good chunk of this episode to the podcast journey. It’s an amazing platform for connecting with your audience and providing an intimate experience with great content. Why did you start the Ultimate Health Podcast, the one that you and Jesse have been running for so long now?

How the Ultimate Health Podcast started and how it has gained momentum

Marni:                  Well, I do have to give credit where credit’s due and that is to Jesse. He was the podcast junkie well before I was, so he was always a consumer of podcasts. He had a podcast before we started ours and when we first started dating, about a year into our relationship, he kept pulling me to start a podcast.

I was so busy with my food studio and teaching cooking classes, I couldn’t wrap my head around it. I didn’t know much about it. I had listened to a few of them and said, “I don’t know. I don’t know if this is going to work.”

He eventually convinced me and we started the podcast. With his commitment, diligence, persistence, consistency, and teaching me about the power of the podcast, I fell in love with it and we started doing it. We started getting guests on. We were doing some of our own shows and I started to see the reach this podcast could have, how we had the ability to get into the ears of so many different people across the whole world.

It was so different than blogging, so different than YouTube, so different than working with people one on one, which I’ve been doing for so many years. So, seeing the potential of this platform got me excited and here we are, three years later.

Yuri:                      Awesome. For the listeners who may not know the power of the podcast, can you share the data or the cool byproducts that have come from the podcast?

Marni:                  First, and you know this too, you get the chance to connect with so many amazing people, whether they’re people that are already in your community or in your world. You get the chance to have deeper conversations with them. People who you’ve always looked up to and have been inspired by can be welcomed on your show so you can take that conversation deeper. Because we’re under the umbrella of health, that covers so much and we have done that over the years. We’ve tackled everything from yoga to meditation to mindfulness, to nutrition, sleep, on and on, and that’s allowed us to connect with so many amazing people.

Through those conversations, not only do Jesse and I get this unbelievable experience, this one on one continued education, but we are also reaching so many people. Because it’s available through iTunes and it’s free, it makes it so accessible. So again, I was not a listener of podcasts. There was some friction. Now of course, Apple’s made it so easy with the podcast app. People can download it, click a button, and listen to it.

Through that, social media, and SEO from our website, we’ve had the ability to gain momentum by using the right keywords, connecting with the right people, and having them share the show.

Yuri:                      Amazing. Like as you said, it’s such an amazing opportunity to spend half an hour to an hour with awesome people. I don’t know of any other opportunity, unless you’re a reporter for a news station, which is tremendous.

Marni:                  Exactly.

The back-end work behind podcasting, sponsors, and social outreach

Yuri:                      What are some pieces of advice or common potholes people should avoid as they’re starting their journey into podcasting?

Marni:                  The first thing people need to know is that it’s not as easy as it appears. It’s not as easy as just clicking play and putting on an episode and putting it out to the world. There’s a lot of backend stuff going on.

If people are looking to start their own podcast, they need to find out from someone else who’s podcasting exactly what’s happening. I’ll try and give you some tidbits here. Having the right equipment depends on how savvy you are, and Jesse and I are very savvy about audio quality. We made sure we had good quality mics and sound. Invest in that, and if you can’t invest high in that in the beginning, just get something simple.

Yuri:                      So what do you guys use?

Marni:                  Now we’re getting into Jesse territory. I know we have the Audio-Technica mics and that’s our beginner mic. I know we’re looking to upgrade from here, but they’ve been great with a pop filter.

That’s key for starting out. Then having some of the right switchboards for making sure it’s connecting through Skype properly, and we’re now also using Zencastr. We’re making sure we get two backup recordings to get that quality, just in case there are any glitches or Skype has any sound glitches. That always happens.

We’ve upgraded that as well. Make sure the room you’re in is enclosed and you add some cushioning in there. Those are all things you can do if you’re doing them like we are. A lot of our conversations are Skype interviews. When we do them in-person, we allow that flexibility for whatever the environment might be, because we have the benefit of having an awesome conversation with someone in-person. We plan on doing more in-person conversations down the road.

So, equipment for sure. Then consistency would be my next thing.

We made sure we were getting a podcast out every single week from the get go. We dabbled with a couple early on, two times a week. We let that go for a bit and now we’re back to two times a week, where we have a guest interview once a week and Jesse and I do our own little mini show called Focus Friday once a week, where our audience gets the chance to know us and our life. We talk about things in the realm of health and wellness.

Yuri:                      Very cool. So, have the tech and the consistency. A lot of people say not to expect anything in the first year of a podcast, to allow it to gain traction. Did you notice that it took a long time to get traction and build momentum?

Marni:                  It did take a while to build a huge momentum, but it did continually go up. We had our nice, steady hockey curve going up over the first year, and into the second year, we started to increase. That allowed us to gain our first sponsors for the podcast, and allowed us to break into other platforms early on.

Jesse got us into Google Play and a couple other ones early on because of our stats. It was interesting to see that trajectory, but that comes down to the consistency and social sharing as well. We made sure that we were building the other mediums to get the podcast out. That allowed us to reach more people.

That’s where I step in quite a bit, as I help with the community and the outreach through social media, Instagram, and Facebook. That has helped as well.

Listener support, affiliates, and appropriate advertising

Yuri:                      Awesome. How do people become aware of the podcast? When you have a guest on the podcast, what does that look like in terms of having them share it? What types of initiatives do you guys put in play to get more exposure for each episode?

Marni:                  We always hope that our guests will share it. When we send our initial email and follow-up emails to the guest, we give them our social handles and request that they share it with their newsletter or whatever else. We’ve had many share it. We’ve had many not share it. We get it, everyone’s busy and they have lots of other things to share.

If we make it easy, they can share it off our page on Facebook and just click it over. That’s helped too. If I can tag them on Facebook they can share that way. Twitter’s been great. That’s usually a very easy share for a lot of people because Twitter’s quick and fast; it’s just a short link. Instagram’s been a huge platform for us, too.

So, we ask, but then do our best to make sure we’re tagging appropriately and letting people know. Our listeners have been a huge part of our sharing. We have built an incredible, loyal tribe of listeners who are loving it.

I think they’re loving it because we’re very down to earth. We’re very real. We are a couple and we’ve got the yin and yang. We’ve got two different perspectives, we bring the conversation forward, and we both have had a following from our previous careers.

We’ve been very lucky to have a loyal following. Through their social media, our listeners are sharing the show all the time, which is amazing. That’s been very helpful.

Yuri:                      That’s awesome. You talked about sponsors. Has that been the main monetization model for the podcast?

Marni:                  Yes, that’s been the early, initial form of monetization. We’re going to continue with that for a little bit, but we’ve been very careful about doing that. We want to make sure that we’re aligning with sponsors that we value and use. We would never bring anything onto the show, pitch, or sell anything to anyone without being fully behind it.

It took us about 50 episodes to get our first sponsor. Because I had an existing relationship with Sunwarrior as an ambassador for the company, that was a great first step for me.

They didn’t know much about podcasting either, but they believed in me and us and saw the power of it. They’ve been with us ever since.

Over the years, we’ve accumulated five or six sponsors. A couple of them are on rotation, and a couple of them are every show and it’s been great. That is a source of income. They’re paying for a spot on the show and we also have affiliates with them, in addition to affiliates with other companies that are on our resource page on our website.

Yuri:                      That’s smart. Some podcasters say they’re weary of bringing in sponsors because it detracts from the listener experience. I’ve never found that to be true. If I’m listening to a podcast and someone says, “Hey, this is brought to you by so and so,” I’m cool. Have you found any kind of pushback for sponsors from your listeners, or has it been seamless?

Marni:                  Of course there will always be some people who are turned off by it.

As a listener, when they’re pitching something, I know it can be annoying. But I think it matters how you do it and when you do it. Jesse and I have played with this now that the show has grown and we’re up to four sponsors in a show.

We originally had them at the front end of the show, which when you have four of them is a little too much. Some podcasters do that. Now, we get right into the show and have two breaks in the middle.

We space them out and, right from the beginning, we’ve gotten feedback that we do them authentically. We do the ads. It’s not a read blurb that they’ve sent us. It’s not prerecorded. I try and make it real. I try and make it something tangible.

If it’s a product, I give people a recipe or some new way to use it. Even if I’m talking about a similar product repeatedly, I try and bring something new to it each time, so that the listener is wanting to hear those ads and wondering what else they can do with that product.

There will always be people who’ll skip through it, but overall, we’ve gotten good feedback that our ads are exciting for people to listen to.

Yuri:                      Yeah. What a thought, right? Just be normal and conversational about something you enjoy. Right? Instead of, “Insert canned thing here.”

Marni:                  Exactly. And you can’t help it when you’re talking about a product. Of course, your tone might change and be like, “Oh, now a word from our…”, and you sound like a commercial.

But then when you start to come down from that, get real, and talk about the actual product and experience with it, that’s when you get a chance to connect with the audience.

Growing the business side of the brand and maintaining long-term partnerships

Yuri:                      Totally. What’s been one of the biggest challenges you guys have faced as you’ve built this podcast over the past three years?

Marni:                  Making sure that trajectory is going up. You want the listener count to keep going up. You want more subscribers all the time. I wouldn’t say that’s a challenge, but that’s something that we’re always watching because that’ll help with future collaborations or different sponsorships that we may want to get on the show.

Other than that, I think just growing the business side of it. Jesse was doing a lot of the editing in the early days and that was challenging because it was such a time sucker. Again, this happens if people don’t know what they’re getting into and don’t have the right things in place.

Luckily, Jesse was tech savvy enough to be able to do that and get most our shows out, but it got to a point where if he was busy doing that all week, we couldn’t keep growing the brand. We eventually got an editor to do that and free up that time.

Just like any business, it has growth and you should hire on people and delegate different things. That was a challenge because it was hard for Jesse to let go of his craft

And you can only do that when someone can do that job better than you. We were lucky to have found someone to do that job. He and Jesse work closely together to make sure that the show quality has stayed the same, if not gone up.

That’s been a big thing. Right now, we are funded by sponsorships, and we want to keep those relationships going because that is our source of income, especially now that we’ve given up our day jobs. We want to make sure we have some long-term partnerships with companies that we value and that value us, so that we know we can work together in a healthy way.

Getting guests on the show and having a backlog of episodes

Yuri:                      That’s great. How do you find guests to come on the show? How do you go about getting those people to come on? Is it cold outreach, introductions, or a combination of both?

Marni:                  It’s a combination of both for sure. A lot of our early guests were cold outreaches or people in our network that we knew. We’ve had a lot of people that I’ve worked with or been in touch with over the years. Then over the years, as you start to get good names and some VIP-type people, you leverage that for other people you want to get.

We’ve also gotten emails from these people, and sometimes from very important people, who’ve reached out to us saying, “We’d love to be on your show.” Now that the show’s doing so well, we’re in some top rankings. If a person has a new book coming out, they or the publishing company might reach out to us to get on the show.

So, it’s been a combination.

Yuri:                      It’s so cool because podcasts have become the new talk shows.

When people go on Letterman or the Late Night Show, they are there to promote a new movie or something along those lines. I think podcasts offer people, especially authors nowadays, that same opportunity.

If you’re in the ear of tens of thousands of listeners, that’s a pretty captive audience. That’s a powerful way to move the needle for whatever it is, whether it’s a book, an event, or anything else. It’s cool.

Marni:                  Yeah. It’s just been interesting to see this medium grow. We’re always amazed. When Jesse gives me the stats, I’m amazed at how many people are listening every week. They’re waiting for that new show and wanting to listen to it. On the flip side, the authors and guests that are on get huge exposure and reach.

It’s nice to see that this is getting traction.

Yuri:                      Yeah, totally. If you guys were to start all over again knowing what you know now, is there anything you would do differently?

Marni:                  Good question. I’m stuck. It’s hard to say because you never know what you don’t know, right?

Maybe doing more recordings ahead of time so we always had podcasts in the bank would be good. We’re trying to do that now, too, to make sure that we have a continuous roster of guests ready to go. Some weeks we’re guest-to-guest. That would be a good thing to start it off.

Other than that, I can’t say much. I think we’ve followed the organic process of building this up and have reached the right milestones at the right time. We got the sponsor at the right time and everything’s just worked in our favor.

Yuri:                      Great. That’s awesome. Is there a lesson that you guys had to learn the hard way? Was there a moment like that or something that happened over a period of time?

Marni:                  I think we’ve gotten to know ourselves and the type of guests that we want on the show.

There have been times when we’ll have a guest on or have something recorded. If we decide that it’s not the right fit for our audience or they are not projecting what we thought they were all about, we’ve learned that we can’t put something out because of who they are and what they stand for.

If it doesn’t resonate with us and our audience, even though we thought that they would have, we’ll let that go. We choose what is the best possible delivery for the podcast and for our brand.

We’ve tuned in with that. That’s important to do because you can’t just get the guest on for the sake of the guest. If you think they’re going to be a great hit and they’re not, you’re just seeing through them. We’ve been very weary of that.

Yuri:                      Totally. That hasn’t happened to me on this podcast.

I had a previous podcast in the health space. I was interviewing a very popular doctor that we all know, I won’t mention his name, and it was one of the worst interviews I’ve ever done. The whole time he was on the interview he had his camera on, so I could see that he was on his computer typing.

Marni:                  That’s exactly what I’m talking about. We had a few guests like that. We had to call them out and say, “You’re talking about mindfulness and mediation, but you are not present right now.”

It’s just about being of integrity.

Yuri:                      But the cool thing is that you learn a lot about people when you speak to them. Even if it’s for half an hour. It’s very interesting.

What does the future look like for the Ultimate Health Podcast? What’s coming out of the pipes?

The Ultimate Health brand, products, and live events; an entire health space

Marni:                  Because the podcast has grown to a certain point and will continue to grow to other astronomical points, we hope, I want to build out the brand.

Now that I am fully immersed in this, my big goal is not just to focus on the podcast, but to focus on the Ultimate Health brand. I want to develop products, do live events, and grow out our website in a way that can reach more people, whether through products, blog posts, or whatever it might be.

I want to create a whole wellness space, not just the podcast. The podcast will be there, but it may be just part of the puzzle we intend to build.

Yuri:                      Nice. When you talk about products, is that information products, physical products, or a combination of both?

Marni:                  A combination of both. I just launched a grain-free eBook a couple of months ago. It did well because people love recipes and want desserts, and an eBook is an easy tangible thing to grab. We got to test that out on our audience. That was our first custom product and it did very well.

We’re open to all products, whether it’s more e-digital products, physical tangible products, or live speaking events. Jesse and I have been doing a little bit of live speaking and we’d like to get in front of more audiences around the world.

Yuri:                      That’s awesome. Are you asking for feedback from the audience, like what they want to see or what they want you to develop? Or is it more intuitive on your part to come up with stuff for them?

Marni:                  A bit of both. We have a close-knit Facebook community group. Those are super-fans. Some people who want to give back to us share, know what’s happening in our lives in between episodes, and we get a chance to ask questions. We ask what they want, what they want to hear, how they liked the last episode, and what they thought. They’re giving us feedback so we’re using that to our advantage.

The transition from a brick and mortar to an online business and the challenges

Yuri:                      Awesome. Before and during the podcast for a bit, you had a brick and mortar business. It was a kitchen, a food studio, right?

Marni:                  Exactly.

Yuri:                      How was that transition?

Marni:                  It was interesting for sure. I taught cooking classes for 10 years. It started off in my parent’s home, which was nice because I wasn’t paying rent, then it moved into my own space as my business grew.

I wanted to take it to a totally different place, physically, for the business’ sake. So, I opened a food studio in midtown Toronto. That was open for about four years and it was amazing. I was running cooking classes, living out my passion to educate people on how to cook and eat well, and it was wonderful. During the last couple of years of that jaunt I experienced the podcast with Jesse.

We started it. We started to get it out there and I started to see the potential of what that could bring. I also started to look at my life, what I wanted to spend my days doing, and where we wanted to go.

We want to start a family and travel. With a brick and mortar business, you can’t necessarily do that unless you have a large team or a manager, someone who can take that on. I didn’t have that. I had staff but no one who could run it without me.

I had to make that call. After doing what I was doing for 10 years, I slowly started to have a change of heart. I felt like I accomplished that mission, teaching cooking classes. It was great but I was done with it. I was ready to develop into something new, and I fell in love with podcasting as we started to do that.

It took time to make that decision because I was still amid a lease. I had to make sure I found the right person to take it over and make that transition as smooth as possible, and I was very lucky to have that happen. But it’s not as easy as what I’m describing. It was a lot of behind-the-scenes paperwork and things to figure out and how to make it all fit.

But it worked out and it’s great. Jesse and I also decided to make the move outside the city. We’re living in Windsor, it’s a little bit quieter and calmer, and there’s more space. We have a dog, so we wanted a backyard. This was all part of the decision-making process. It’s the lifestyle we wanted to live and I couldn’t do that where I was.

Yuri:                      No kidding. You said that, over time, you felt this urge to stop doing the offline brick and mortar business. Was there one moment in time where you said, “You know what? This is it. I’ve had it.” Was there a pivotal moment or was it just the accumulation of things over time?

Marni:                  It was an accumulation.

I did get to a breaking point, but it’s hard. You go through the day-to-day of what you’re doing and it’s so tough running a business and all the logistics. But then when I showed up for my cooking classes, I had my rose-colored glasses on.

I loved it. It was my passion. I had people coming into my space and experiencing what I offer. But then I had to close everything up, take the garbage out, and pay the bills. It allowed me to see what it took for me to have a full class, and it was hard to let go of my passion.

But at the same time, I realized that I could take that passion and pivot it into a completely different direction. It was an accumulation, but I got to a point where the lifestyle came into effect. I got fed up with living right in Midtown, Toronto, with traffic and noise and an apartment that wasn’t conducive to our health.

We knew we needed to get out of it because of mold and all kinds of other things. So, I thought, “This is it. I’m just going to do this all at once. I’m going to change this all up.”

Yuri:                      Was there any kind of disillusionment in it at any point? A lot of people, including myself, who start an online business think, “It’s going to be great. I’m going to have all this freedom and it’s going to be awesome.” But then reality hits. Did you ever experience that for yourself?

Marni:                  Yes. There was a big change in my day-to-day. I went from being so busy every day to not. Now that we’ve moved and the podcast is growing, I’m so much busier again. But there was a transition period where I knew we had to make some money and get things going. I also didn’t have the same expenses, so there was that shift, too.

The studio was generating a lot of income but there were a lot of expenses. I had to shift that. But the online world is still very competitive, as we all know. If you’re listening, you’re an entrepreneur, and you’re online, you know that whatever product or podcast you have, there’s a lot out there. There’s a lot of saturation.

You must figure out how you can differentiate and rise above it, or keep going with whatever you’ve got started. Luckily, we had our brand. I didn’t make this transition then start from scratch. I had the Ultimate Health Podcast, which was a growing brand.

So, I asked how I could make it better. What else could I do? What could I contribute? Jesse’s good at the editing, tech, and the behind-the-scenes. How could I help the brand grow? I had the chance to re-shift and take some to leverage my talents and bring them to a new platform. I’m still doing that now.

And that’s just it. Because of the competition you have to find different ways to make it shine.

Yuri:                      One of the things I feel like you touched on was that most of us are coming from a one-on-one or one-to-many background in-person. We already have the technical ability and now we have somewhat of a captive audience that we can nurture online as well.

I think we have an unfair advantage to some degree because a lot of internet businesses and marketers are just getting into businesses and don’t have prior experience like we do.

If you’re a doctor, you’ve dealt with patients for decades. If you’re a nutritionist, you’ve dealt with people one-on-one and now you can bring that same knowledge online. A lot of people are doing surveys and other stuff, but I’ve been having conversations with real people for the past decade.

You get all this intel and it’s a great asset to utilize. If you already have a following, now they can listen to your podcast and follow your stuff online. It’s a nice starting platform.

Marni:                  You bring up a good point. If you don’t have a marketing or advertising background or you’re not a social media savvy person, you learn all this as you go. For someone like me, I didn’t have that. Even running my brick and mortar business, I didn’t have a business background. I didn’t go to business school. I learned it as I went.

That is the real work. And with social media, you just learn it as you see what’s going on, stay persistent, and see any trends. You should be on top of it.

Yuri:                      What’s been the one area from a business or marketing perspective, that you were completely wet behind the ears in and you started to master it?

Marni:                  Engagement. Making sure you’re finding different ways to engage your audience and get people to respond and comment. My blog got a lot of views and reads, but it didn’t have that much engagement. It didn’t have comments and responses. What was missing?

It taught me a lot about how I was writing, the ask, or the way I was talking to my audience before. Now, through social media, Instagram, and Facebook group, I feel like there’s a different language and connection with people.

Less is more. Getting down and real with people and asking, “What’s going on,” shows you the difference in how people want to engage with you. That’s been a big one for me.

The Rapid Five

Yuri:                      Awesome. Good stuff Marni. Are you ready for the Rapid Five?

Marni:                  I am.

Yuri:                      All right. Here we go. You’ve got no knowledge of these questions. I’ll just fire them off and whatever comes to mind is probably the right answer.

Number one, what’s your biggest weakness?

Marni:                  Thinking too much. I think too much about what I should say or do and don’t speak fast enough. That comes up in different areas of my life.

Yuri:                      Cool.

Number two, what is your biggest strength?

Marni:                  Engaging with people and connecting people together.

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

Marni:                  Getting real and vulnerable with people.

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

Marni:                  I have a beautiful one to two-hour routine. I won’t take you through all that but the first thing I do is hydrate and write my five-minute journal.

Yuri:                      Sweet. Good old five-minute journal. Number five, complete this sentence. I know I’m being successful when …

Marni:                  When I’m feeling fully empowered, committed and happy.

Yuri:                      Very nice. It’s cool because this question elicits two types of responses. One is something like, “When people tell me I’m changing their lives.” But the second response relates to a feeling.

Marni this has been a lot of fun. Thank you so much for sharing your journey and your podcast expertise. Our listeners who are interested in podcasting will find a lot of value in this. Where is the best place for people to find out more about what you two are up to and follow you online?

Marni:                  You can follow the Ultimate Health Podcast and go to the website and Instagram. We also have a Facebook group. Search on Facebook for the Ultimate Health Podcast community group. We’d love to have you.

Yuri:                      Marni, once again, thank you so much for taking the time to join us and for sharing so candidly. I appreciate you having me as a guest on your podcast and for being here with us.

Marni:                  My pleasure. Thank you.

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Yuri’s take

Cool stuff, right? If you’ve got a podcast or you’re thinking about podcasting, hopefully this episode has found you well. I want leave you with a thinking exercise for today. Whatever it is you’re doing in your business, are you taking the long game approach or are you looking for the short-term win?

I ask that because it’s very tempting and easy to be allured by the stuff, nonsense, that we see on Instagram. Don’t look at the person in the private jet, which they don’t even own, or the car that they’ve rented. Turn the blinders off. That kind of nonsense messes with your mind.

The reason I’m bringing these interviews to you is because these people were in the trenches and now they’re doing it. They are in their business, working on it, growing it, failing, and succeeding. All of them understand that success takes time.

Marni talked about how building a podcast takes time. If you go into podcasting thinking you’re going to have a hundred thousand downloads in a month, unless you have a massive following and a big platform already, that’s probably not going to happen. Give yourself time, like a farmer who plants seeds.

Be realistic about the natural course of things. Manifest and create. Yes, you can set the intention to do XY and Z, but allow the universe and the process to unfold as it’s supposed to. You can’t rush the results.

Ask yourself, “Am I giving myself enough time? Am I approaching this with a long-term point of view?” How long are you willing to see no results before just shut down shop? If you don’t see results from what you’re doing, you should evaluate that.

If you’re running Facebook ads and you’re not seeing results, stop wasting money. But there are things like podcasts, building a YouTube channel, building a blog, that take time. Anything that’s organic and content driven is going to take time.

If you want to accelerate your results, you can spend money on advertising and hope for the best with a lot of tweaking and optimization. If that’s you, fine. If not, understand that it’s a process. If you want to build your brand, expertise, and become a celebrity in your niche, it takes time. There are ways to accelerate that but it’s not going to happen by next week.

With that said, a couple housekeeping notes before we finish off.

Number one, subscribe to the podcast if you’re still hanging on the fence. Go over to iTunes and click the subscribe button. Do it right from your iPhone and you’ll get all these amazing episodes that we have produced and that are coming your way.

This is episode number 80. We’ve had some amazing conversations with amazing entrepreneurs in our health, fitness, wellness, and nutrition space. It’s been a blast. If you’ve been with us since day one, you know what I’m saying. If you haven’t, then subscribe today so you don’t miss out.

Number two, if you don’t know about it, I’ve got a great book I want to give to you called Health Profits Secrets. I’ve covered the cost of the book, so just cover the cost of shipping, which is literally a couple bucks. Less than a latte at Starbucks, to be honest.

Inside the book, I’ll show you the four secrets to building a successful online health or fitness business. These are the four things that I’ve recognized over the years having built a multiple seven figure business myself, having worked with others in our space, and having seen other businesses do well.

These are four fundamentals that all these businesses have in common. You’ll be able to score your business in each of these four areas, to see where you might be deficient. Then we can fill the gap so you can go from where you are to where you want to be. Get the great results you deserve and grab that book over at healthpreneurbook.com. That’s all for today my friends. Thank you so much for joining me and I hope you have an amazing day. Continue spreading your awesomeness, impacting more lives, and enjoying the rewards that come from that. Now go out there, be great, do great and I’ll see you next week.

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Follow Marni Wasserman At:

https://ultimatehealthpodcast.com/
iTunes
Facebook
Instagram

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Free Healthpreneur Health Profit Secrets Book

Transcription

Good day, Healthpreneurs! Welcome back to the Healthpreneur Podcast. Yuri Elkaim here, and today I’ve got a treat for you because we’ve got another fine young Canadian on the show.

I’ve got to balance things out, right? I’ve got to keep Canadians coming on the show because we’re doing some awesome stuff, and so are the Americans and internationals. It’s all good. We’re all in the same boat.

Today we’re speaking with Adam Lloyd, who has been in the health and fitness industry for 13 years. He’s maintained a successful coaching business since he was 20 years old, taking a hybrid approach from day one to include online and in-person work.

He’s worked with some of the top athletes in the world including Mitch Marner, Max Domi, and Jason Spezza, some NHL players, just to name a few. He has been heavily involved from an apprenticeship perspective, working with Dr. John Berardi from Precision Nutrition, who we had as a guest several episodes ago.

He’s learned through experience and by being surrounded by great mentors, and he currently owns the number one-rated gym in Hamilton, Ontario. It’s a 6,500-square-foot hybrid cell facility. What I love about it is that there’s no TVs. No TVs.

It’s a higher-priced model. They know who they’re after, and they have consistently been rewarded with awards and accolades. Out of 217 gyms in Hamilton, they have been ranked number one. Adam is going to share with us why that happened.

If you run a training facility, gym, or any other business, online or offline, what Adam’s going to share with you here will be 100% applicable. If you want to learn more about what he’s up to at his facility, go to Alptraininginstitute.com. If you’re wondering where Hamilton, Ontario is, it’s about an hour or so outside Toronto towards the border at Buffalo. That’s where all the goodness is happening for him and his business.

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

Adam:                   I’m doing well. How about yourself?

Yuri:                      I’m doing very well. I’m excited to have a chat here because you do some amazing stuff with your training facility out in Stoney Creek. Adam is an awesome Canadian strength and conditioning coach.

We got to hang out a little while ago at our buddy Giovanni’s event, Archangel Summit, in Toronto. We spent the day together, had some great conversations, and I knew I wanted you on the show. What’s new and exciting these days with the facility? What you guys are working on?

Rapid growth, a focus on being genuine, and what makes them stand out

Adam:                   Thank you for having me on the show. I was stoked when we talked about it. What’s going on right now is just evolving the business. We grew so fast, which was a great problem, but it was kind of unexpected. We hit the ground running, so we knew we would have quite a bit of stuff coming in, but it evolved far beyond our original 3/6/12-month business plan.

Right now, our biggest thing is being patient. We grew so quick so we kind of expected all these quick things to continue happening.

Things start to slow down for the winter months, which is great. We get to revise stuff. But when you’re used to things moving quickly then they suddenly slow down, some people, including myself, can start to think, “What’s going on? What are we doing wrong?”

In fact, it’s nothing. We did so well in the beginning, but you can’t expect it to continue like that forever. Now we’re just evolving, refining, continuing to grow, and having fun while we’re doing it.

Yuri:                      That’s awesome. Your gym’s in Hamilton, and you guys were voted the number one gym in Hamilton out of 217 gyms in the area. How does that happen?

Adam:                   That’s a good question. Probably quite a few things. The biggest thing is that we identified our core values and our mission right off the hop, and we made sure all our staff knew so everybody could behave accordingly.

It was a streamlined message that we just wanted to be genuine. You mentioned that there’s 217 gyms in Hamilton, and on any given day there could be one or two opening, ten opening, or five or six closing. There’s so much competition, which is great, but it can also dilute things.

We wanted to stand out and challenge the industry standards, especially in the local scene. Let’s face it, a lot of businesses out there, a lot of gyms out there, are very money-driven. All they think about is how they can they make more money off each individual client or member.

Of course, we have metrics and dollar amounts that we pay attention to – we can’t have a business without that – but we wanted to build it based on being genuine, and that I think is probably one of the biggest things people talk about. Everybody feels supported when they come in; from our coaching staff, to other members, to other clients.

In the Hamilton area, so many other gyms miss that, so it’s helped us distinguish ourselves and stand out. When we’re in people’s eyes, we do a good job. I think that’s what’s allowed us to get to where we are.

Pricing in the top tier, avoiding comparison, and finding your market

Yuri:                      Awesome. I think we talked about this when we hung out. I used to work at GoodLife Fitness which, for anyone listening, I would guess is the largest franchise or chain of gyms in Canada. People would walk into the gym and the people behind the reception would just say, “Do you have your card,” and that was it. There was no, “Hey, good to see you, John,” none of that. It’s a simple thing to do that makes a big difference in people’s lives, and it’s sad that they’re missing the boat on stuff like that.

Adam:                   You got it. It is a very simple thing when you can do it on a specific scale. One of the challenges with GoodLife, LA Fitness, and GlobalFit Gym, is that they’re great at what they do in their area, but it’s challenging to know people by their name or know what they’re up to when you have thousands upon thousands of members and continual turnover with staff.

I think they do great in their certain area; they have their space. But I think that’s why we could vault them.

I think there are roughly four GoodLife’s in Hamilton and a couple of their smaller subsidiaries, the Fit4Lesses. While our price point is higher than theirs, we go far above and beyond in any area we can. Knowing people by their first name and welcoming them by saying, “Hey, Jim,” instead of, “Hey, dude,” goes a long way.

Yuri:                      Speaking about price point, whether someone’s selling something online like an info product or a product in general, or selling training in a gym or even virtually, what kind of advice do you give to people when it comes to pricing?

You have chosen a premium model. Was there ever a mental block when you thought, “We’ve got to look at what the competition is pricing at and then be competitive with that”?

Adam:                   It’s a big question. I’ve been fortunate to have smart people in the network that have helped identify things like price positioning and profits.

Of course, we want to see what the competition’s doing. You’ve got to know what they’re doing. But we didn’t want to compare ourselves on price point, or say, “They’re offering $60 for this, let’s offer $58 because we’re just a little less.” It’s comparing apples to oranges. I would say to be confident in your product.

When you look at other people’s prices and start thinking about positioning yourself below that with a lower price point, there are no profits. The three P’s. You’ll have a challenging time growing and sustaining over time, and I’ve seen that at some of the gyms I’ve worked at.

The strategies in play were to reduce our price, get cheaper, and be the cheapest. I’ve seen those businesses start failing. One of the businesses I was at two years ago, I got out of because I saw it happening.

You see what’s happening to them now. They’re fading quickly in the market, so they positioned themselves with the cheaper price and their profit margin is very low, if anything.

Yuri:                      Yeah. People might say, “My market’s different. People here don’t have money to pay for that,” and it’s really, “No, that’s a belief you have.”

There’s money in any market, no matter where you are. You guys are proving it, because Hamilton has pockets of wealthier individuals and pockets of less-wealthy individuals, and it’s not like only wealthy individuals are coming into your gym.

There will always be people who want to pay a premium price because they’re going to get a premium experience, which is what you guys provide.

Adam:                   For sure. It’s identifying what matters to people. If it matters to somebody, the price isn’t the issue. It’s about acquiring the correct people too, so we’ve positioned ourselves to say, “Hey, we are not for everybody. If you’re looking to come to the gym a few times a month, walk on a treadmill, watch a TV, hey, that’s awesome. We would love to see you do that, and do a bit more if you can. We’re just not the right facility for that.”

We have zero TVs in the gym space, because we’ve identified what kind of clientele we would typically want to work with. Because it’s important to them, the price doesn’t matter nearly as much as the other type of clientele.

Yuri:                      When you told me you have no TVs, I thought, “I want to come to your gym.” I get so frustrated going to the gym. Even just warming up on a treadmill, there’s a TV on the treadmill. I want to avoid the thing. I just want to turn it off, you know? I just want to do the work.

Adam:                   Or when you’re there and the TV doesn’t work and you’re trying to get the TV to work. That happens at all the places. Then the cable kicks out, because it’s a challenging situation in certain gyms, even with satellite reception. The TVs will go down and people complain. I ask, “Didn’t you come to work out?”

Yuri:                      I know. It’s like complaining about Wi-Fi in airplanes. Just appreciate what this amazing machine can do for us. Don’t worry about the Wi-Fi for a few hours.

Accepting the natural ebb and flow of business

In this journey so far, what has been one of the biggest challenges that you’ve faced, and how have you overcome that? What did you learn from that experience?

Adam:                   It’s tough to pinpoint one, because there was so much change so quick.

While I’d been planning to open a facility for the past decade, I never knew when it would happen. It’s ironic that it happened when it did, because I’m in such a shift. I still seek mentorship and guidance from professionals, and now I’m offering guidance and mentorship. I have a mentorship program for college students in our local area.

One of the challenges for me, as an entrepreneur, is being in that middle spot.

On the business level, I would say the challenge has been being consistent, staying levelheaded, and continuing to stay true to our mission statement.

We won so many awards in such a short period, and we’re up for quite a few more that’ll be released in the next couple of weeks. It’ll be great to see how well we’re doing, but a lot of times that can create complacency. Then you can get passed.

Our success is one area of concern, only because it’s impossible to maintain the same success forever on a continual line. We must understand that there’s going to be waves, and that’s totally cool. While I get that, certain people on the team have certain challenges. I’m trying to share that message with them and say, “Hey, no, it’s totally fine. Don’t get too discouraged. Continue to try. Failing is great. We learn from that, and that’s how we grow.”

Yuri:                      That’s part of what makes you a great leader. You’re realistic about that. I think a lot of people might not be realistic. If things are going great, they’ll either continue to go great or go bad.

No matter where you are, there will be peaks and troughs. You should be realistic and know that “this too shall pass.” There’ll be good times and bad times, and just accept that like there are four seasons in nature. That’s wise of you to be able to impart that on your team.

Adam:                   Thank you. Our business is seasonal, so April, May, June, July and August are when we hit our absolute peak strengths. We have a very large off-season hockey program through the summer months, so when typical gyms slow down, we pick up, and that’s our very busiest time.

Our traffic through the gym doubles, if not triples, for those three months, so it’s a seasonal thing. We totally understand that. October, November, December slows down for our style of facility, whereas commercial gyms may start picking up throughout those periods of time. It gives us an opportunity to grow and develop and help with those learning lessons.

Word-of-mouth, social proof, and marketing strategy

Yuri:                      Sure. You guys have worked with NHL players and some pretty high-level hockey players. Has that been through word-of-mouth, or have there been specific strategies from a marketing perspective that have been helpful, not just for those players but for growing your business in general?

Adam:                   A little bit of both. We’ve worked with young kids just getting started, to people identifying that they’re elite-level athletes or would like to be elite-level athletes, to professional athletes that have been playing at the professional level for decades.

Word-of-mouth has been and will continue to be our biggest source of acquiring new clientele or growing and showing the success. We do some social proof, too. We would prefer to demonstrate the results that our client would get and have them speak about the program. It’s just word-of-mouth but we’re strategizing that word-of-mouth and using it a bit more specifically.

Facebook advertising is something we’ve started to get into. Luckily it worked well for us our first year. Through the winter months we did a lot more of it, because in the summer we are so busy.

We learn from what guys like Nicholas Guzman, who was at the Archangel event, John Goodman, and guys like yourself are doing. Those are the strategies we employ, which is nice because it’s more of a system, not copying. We identify our specific marketing message for whatever service, and we identify that area or that niche market strategically.

Even though the service is the same for four, five, or six different niche markets, we can market it to acquire the interest of that person, instead of getting lost trying to acquire everybody all at once.

Yuri:                      Totally. Would you mind sharing what that Facebook campaign would look like? Is it an ad for a free session?

Adam:                   In the beginning, I just boosted things I thought people would like, and it worked.

We generated quite a bit of awareness out of it, but that’s not something that would work for very long. Knowing that the cost of Facebook advertising is going to go up as it starts to get used more, strategic marketing is much more important.

Now we essentially do the three to five gives before an ask. That’s the whole system model. We’re starting to give content that we know helps people get closer to their goal. We want to identify that market with a specific message and give them the magnet.

I was listening to Nick and John a couple of times when they were chatting about the 3 M’s.

It’s simple, really. We marry the message we want to send out to the market we want to get to, then we give them the magnet, the tip or info, that’s very, very short. We don’t want to take up a lot of their time because time is valuable. So, we give them a quick little two-minute snip that is probably going to help them get closer to their goal.

Then, after doing that three to five times, we ask if they’re interested in our service, or if they know anybody that would be interested or could benefit from our service. We generate a lot of word-of-mouth referrals that way.

Yuri:                      Awesome, I love it. It’s smart.

Adam:                   That’s where the whole genuine aspect came from. It’s the word I want to be remembered as at the end of the day.

At the end of the day, my business is me.

The whole “ALP” thing started as Adam Lloyd Performance, and has now evolved to the gym, the ALP Training Institute. It’s a perfect time to release the message, but ALP has evolved from “Adam Lloyd Performance” to now “Active Lifestyle and Performance.”

I’ve removed my name from it, but it’s still the same logo and same brand. And it’s always about helping people live a more active life so they can perform optimally. Whatever that performance is to them, business or sport, the best way to generate a relationship with people is to be genuine.

That’s the word: The genuine generosity, the genuine approach so that people know they’re not being manipulated, cheated, shaded, or anything like that.

Learning necessary lessons, taking the leap, and trusting your mentors

Yuri:                      That’s great. If you started all over again, knowing what you know now, would you do anything differently?

Adam:                   I would have opened the gym a lot sooner. No, I shouldn’t even say that. To be totally honest, I would have to have known a decade worth of failing to get to where I am now.

Had I known a decade worth of failing, I would have opened the gym up earlier. But I still would have needed to go through a decade of failing. It’s a catch-22 question.

I remember when I was 24, I wanted to open my first gym, and that’s when I met John Berardi. He, luckily, became my mentor at the time and still is to this day. At the time he told me, “Dude, you’re not even close to ready.”

He told it straight, open, and honest. At the time, I was at St. Catherine’s and just coming out of university. I thought everything was great, I thought I knew everything and that my shit didn’t stink, so I was ready to get into it.

I was a little bitter at the time, and looking back, he was so right. I still hold that message to myself today, because now I’m telling other people the same story; that they’re not ready for the jump that they’re trying to make. Although I want them to jump, I want them to remember that you can fall too far, and that could be a problem, too. Trying and failing is important, but you still should be realistic in what you’re able to do.

I would still need to get all those years of experience from working at commercial gyms, directing other high-performance facilities, working with thousands of clients both online, in person, teams, athletes over in Europe. I still needed all those cumulative experiences to understand systems, people, behavioral change, and what kind of effort I could put out without burning out.

Experience, “putting in the reps,” taking action, and learning from failures

Yuri:                      Totally. It’s not like you were just writing a book on the side. Opening a facility is a big endeavor, right? It’s good advice to say, “Maybe you should hold off on that for a while.”

Adam:                   It’s so true. A lot more than I thought it would be. Looking at the other businesses that I worked for, I thought I could do it. When I did it, I totally could have made it a lot smaller and it would have been a lot safer, a lot easier, and a much smaller return.

Instead of getting a 3,000-square-foot facility, I went with a 7,000-square-foot facility, and the rent was significantly more than I anticipated. It was a nerve-wracking situation, but because of the planning over the years, the experience, and the belief that it was going to work, it wasn’t such a big risk for me personally.

Now, since I’ve done it, I’ve had many local people contact me and say, “I want to do the same thing, I want to open a gym.” I ask them what they’ve done, and they say, “Oh, man, I just got out of school and I’m really passionate about this. I think I could do great.” I respond, “Well, I think that’s fantastic. One day, you probably will. But dude, you’re not ready yet.”

I had a guy call me one night and ask for my entire business model. We didn’t even know each other. I said, “Hey, I’d love to take you out for coffee one day to chat, versus this phone call at 9:00 at night.” I told him, “You’re not ready, and I don’t mean that to be rude. I mean that to protect you.”

The goal is get out there and experience. Coach more people. Go work for a gym. If you’ve never worked for a gym and you’ve never owned a business, opening one is going to be challenging.

Yuri:                      You’ve got to put in the reps, right? I don’t think there’s any replacement for that. Even my kids, ages 6,4, and 3, still sleep in diapers.

We say, “Listen, if you can go tonight without wetting your bed, we’ll do one more night. But if you wet the bed, we’ve got to keep the diapers on for a bit because that means you’re not ready to move to the non-diaper bedtime yet.” It’s the same thing with the gym or anything. Put in the reps. Prove what you can do, then when you’re ready to move to the next level, it’ll be more appropriate.

Adam:                   You got it. A decade ago John was telling me exactly that. We were talking about the girlfriend I was dating, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to move to the next step and get a bit more serious.

He said, “Test it, evaluate it, retest it, evaluate that, retest that, evaluate that, and then continue to move forward. But never make that jump too big.” That always stuck with me. I evaluate the previous failure, learn from it, apply, adapt, and I’m able to make a very calculated attempt at the next opportunity. If I fail, I’m excited because I know I’m going to learn, and next month will be even better.

Yuri:                      Totally. There are so many analogies and parables. With pole vaulting in the Olympics, you’re not going to go from seven feet to twelve feet, right? You can go from seven feet to 7.1, then, if you do that, to the next level.

If you could boil it down what is one skill or trait that entrepreneurs must have to have to have lasting success?

Adam:                   Consistently act.

There’s more that goes into that, because you can consistently take bad action towards a bad behavior and won’t go very well. So, refining that statement, taking consistent action towards a calculated positive outcome.

The reason I say it that way is because I would often get paralyzed with thoughts that it all had to be perfect. I don’t know why; that was never the way I liked to do things. You can ask my wife. I like to do things 80 percent and get it done.

Consistently take action and don’t worry if it’s perfect. If you trust yourself and you’re doing okay, you’re probably going to be able to do okay. Just get it done. Learn from whatever wasn’t the best and apply it to the next attempt, but continuously take action towards a calculated positive outcome.

The Rapid Five

Yuri:                      Great advice. Adam, this has been awesome. Are you ready for the Rapid Five?

Adam:                   I think so.

Yuri:                      Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

Adam:                   My biggest weakness is that I put too much on my plate.

It’s something I’ve worked on for a long time, but I always have a lot of things on the go. I like it. I enjoy it. I know it’s a weakness, but I think it’s also a strength. We could probably talk about that for a while.

Yuri:                      The follow-up question is, what your biggest strength?

Adam:                   My biggest strength is the ability to understand when enough is enough and when I’ve got to rest a little bit.

I’ll have so much on my plate. I’ll push, push, push, and go for a long time. When I hit the point that enough is enough, I rest and recover. I understand and learn during that time. I take time, I think, and then I come back stronger, ready to push again.

Yuri:                      That’s a huge strength. I need to say that, because it hits home for me. My wife is training for a half-marathon now, and I’m trying to encourage her by saying less is more.

Adam:                   Right.

Yuri:                      We went for an easy recovery run the other day, and our bodies felt tired. I knew it was a sign that we should not do anything for a little bit. That’s so true in business and life in general. Slow down and have the wisdom to acknowledge that. It’s easy to push through that and think more is better.

Adam:                   Having a system or filter to identify and know that. Opening the gym has helped me with this, and it’s helped me with clients immensely.

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

Adam:                   Identifying the limiting factor or the key metric that needs to be worked on.

Right now, it’s identification. One thing I want to get better at is delegating that, so somebody can take care of it and we can move faster.

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

Adam:                   A morning ritual. First thing in the morning, I wake up and kiss my wife, whether she’s getting out of bed to go open the gym or whether I’m getting out of bed to go open the gym. From there, I journal. I start with three things I’m grateful for.

I’ve got a list of my “CETs;” my calls, emails, and tasks for the day. I lay out the three most important things, and I build from there.

No matter what comes up that day, I’ll go back to that journal. That first 5 to 15 minutes, I’m sitting and reflecting on what I did the last day. I reflect on how I’m feeling, what’s going on, and what’s coming up, and I identify anything that could get in the way and needs to be done, so I can prioritize.

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

Adam:                   When it feels right. That’s open-ended. We have the emotional side of the brain and the rational side. The emotional side doesn’t have language so you can’t explain it, it just feels right. I’ve tuned into that gut feeling or that limbic brain, which is another strength, I guess. You feel it, you see it. It’s touchable, palpable, and others will experience it and feel it, too.

When you feel others are positive around you, chances are you’re pretty successful.

Yuri:                      That’s a good perspective. I’ve noticed that health and fitness entrepreneurs, or just people who are more kinesthetic, tend to relate to that stuff. They’re naturally more in tune with their body, based on years of training, sports, and stuff, so they talk a lot about that kinesthetic feel. They feel it.

They don’t know how to describe it. They’re in the zone or in the flow, or, as you describe, it just feels right. Does that make sense to you at all?

Adam:                   I understand that. I call that psychological flow. You’re not questioning things, you’re just doing. You’re confidently moving with grace and ease, and without a lot of restraint and confliction.

I guess that would be that feeling. That’s what it feels like to me. Shoot, we just put words to it! Nice.

Yuri:                      Adam, this has been tremendous. You’ve offered lots of great insight and wisdom, so thank you. What is the best place for our listeners to follow your work online or find out more about your gym in Hamilton?

Adam:                   Our social media, Facebook and Instagram, and our website. Our website’s https://www.alptraininginstitute.com/. The Facebook and Instagram are on there. We’ve never put a lot of time and effort into it, because like I said, we wanted to build our relationships first. Now that that’s organically grown, we’re putting some time and effort into the website.

We’ve got quite a few things coming up to launch our online coaching program in a more streamlined way. It’s been a very short-coming service, but you’ll see a lot more. In the coming months, we’ll also have our own podcast. Hopefully you can come on sometime.

Yuri:                      Absolutely. I can talk about the gym I don’t own. I’d be happy to. Adam, once again, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. I respect the work that you’re doing and the way you are raising the bar in terms of experience and results. You’re so in tune as a person, too.

Adam:                   Thank you very much. I appreciate that.

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Yuri’s take

One of the things I enjoyed about this conversation is that Adam is very wise for his years. Some of his answers reflected that, like how he knows he’s successful when he just feels right. That’s an ambiguous yet meaningful statement.

He talked about his ability to recognize when he’s maxed out and when to slow down. That’s an important trait and skill to develop.

My challenge for you today is to recognizing when you need to slow down. Heidi Hanna, the stress master several episodes ago, talked about this as well. Recognize when you’re at high output and slow down. If we don’t, we are going to burn ourselves out.

Think about this in your life, when it comes to exercise, business, or anything else. Are you going, going, going? Are you able to identify when enough is enough and slow down? Remember, more is not better. It doesn’t matter if we’re training, eating, or doing business, it’s all the same thing.

People talk about putting in the work, putting in the reps 18 hours a day. Yes, we must put in the reps. But that doesn’t mean you should be doing 18 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

Maybe that’s 18 hours a day for a few days because you’ve got something big you’re working on, and then you take some time off. You’ve got to slow down and shut down.

For me, batch a lot of interviews on the same day. I’ve recognized that for me, it’s best if I do four interviews in a day. If I do more than that, I start to feel it. It wears me down by the end of the day.

I’m putting a hard stop at four interviews, and between my interviews I’ll take five or ten minutes to decompress. That makes a big difference.

This doesn’t have to mean fishing vacations or sabbaticals from your business, even though that stuff is awesome. On a day-to-day basis, a moment-to-moment basis, how can you become more conscious, present, and aware of when you’re hitting the red line? Can you pull back a little bit and slow down?

If you’re into fitness, you know about periodization, right? Periodization training means you build, build, build, then rest. Then supercompensation pops in. That means after that rest period, that recovery week, you come back stronger and fitter.

That’s the same thing that happens in business.

Think about your business and your life. Are you incorporating enough rest and recovery so you can supercompensate to become better and more powerful moving forward? If you’re not, I’m going to challenge you to build that in, starting today.

A couple housekeeping notes before we finish off: Subscribe to the Healthpreneur Podcast on iTunes. It’s doing great, guys, and I want to thank you so much for listening. All your listens, downloads, and support makes a huge difference.

If you want to drop me a note, you can join me on Facebook and Instagram. It’s @Healthpreneur1. Drop me a line! We post stuff about the show, inspiring quotes from our guests, and cool stuff. If you’re not following it, you absolutely should. You can also follow us over at the blog. Get all the show notes at Healthpreneurgroup.com/podcast.

Finally, if you haven’t picked up your copy of Health Profit Secrets, it’s a great book. I’ve covered the cost of it. Just cover shipping, it’s just a couple bucks, and it will be sent to your front door. Inside the book I’ll share four secrets that are the fundamental pillars to growing a successful online health or fitness business.

It’s like driving a car on a flat tire. It’s not a smooth ride. It’s bumpy and unpredictable. That’s how business is if you’re lacking in one of these four areas. If you’re sluggish in more than one area, imagine driving a car with two or three flat tires.

That’s what I’m going to show you how to fix inside the book. Get that over at Healthpreneurbook.com.

Once again, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day, out of your week, to join me. We are back in just a few days’ time with another awesome episode, so don’t go anywhere. In the meantime, continue to be great, do great, and I’ll see you then.

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Follow Adam Lloyd At:

https://www.alptraininginstitute.com/

Facebook

Instagram

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Free Healthpreneur Health Profit Secrets Book

 

Transcription

In today’s episode, I’m going to tell you why comparison will kill your business. I want to share a little story with you to give you some context.

Example of comparison and why it’s dangerous for business

My wife is awesome, naturally. She’s driven and runs an amazing business on Etsy. If you want to check it out, it’s called Beloved Crystals. and she makes amazing bracelets using healing crystals and gemstones. It’s very tough for a spouse to give another spouse business advice, so I don’t do it very often, only when she asks. If you’ve got a spouse, you probably know what I’m talking about.

My wife and I are very much alike. We’re not very complimentary in the sense of working together. She’s had this amazing business on Etsy for two years, and she’s got 7,000+ sales and around 1,800 five-star reviews.

One of the things that I’ve told her before is this: “You put so much love and care into creating these bracelets. Why are you comparing your prices, and what you do, to other bracelet companies on Etsy or elsewhere?”

And it’s not just her. Everyone does this, and it’s a problem. When you compare yourself to anyone else, you automatically become a commodity, if you implement based on what you’re looking at. There’s a distinction here.

There is looking at what other people are doing to see what’s working and what isn’t. But on the flip side, which is not as healthy, is, “Man, they’re selling these bracelets for $35 dollars. My bracelets need to be $35 dollars as well.”

I’ve seen this game played in a very big way, especially when it comes to information products. Everyone sells their thing for the same price, using the same technology.

They’re using the same platforms, and everyone is the same. That’s a problem. If you are doing that, you will suffer if you continue. Now, there’s very little room at the top of the mountain. Let’s use that analogy here, okay?

The mountain analogy: Why play at the bottom?

Let’s say we’re climbing Mt. Everest. At base camp, or ground zero, there’s a lot of people, right? There’s a lot of people who say, “Yeah. Let’s do this, we’ve got the Sherpa, tents, camps, and everything ready to go.” Let’s just say there are a thousand people ready to scale the mountain.

So, all thousand people, look at each other thinking, “We can do this, we’re all the same.” They get up to Base Camp One, which, let’s say, is at 10,000 feet. Now, some people are starting to feel the effects of altitude sickness and some people don’t have the level of fitness or aerobic capacity to continue.

Let’s say half the people drop off. Now 500 people are left and they’re going to make their way up to Base Camp Two. Suddenly, when they hit Base Camp Two at 18,000 feet, let’s say, people are starting to feel it. Some people have bloody noses and aren’t feeling good. Some people are throwing up and have constant headaches.

Half the tribe drops off again. There’s only 250 people left. They’re going to continue up to Base Camp Three, let’s call that 25,000 feet, and now we’re getting into the Dead Zone, where there’s almost no oxygen. The true survival of the fittest comes into play. Some people don’t know if it’s worth it and don’t want to put their health or life in jeopardy. They back down.

And so, out of the 250 people, only 20 continue. And those 20 people make it to the summit.

We started with a thousand people at the bottom, and only 20 people made it to the top. The point of the story is that there’s always less room, less competition, at the top of the mountain. So why would you decide to play at the bottom?

Pricing, looking for proof, and owning the magic you possess

We’ve talked about pricing on episode 72, “How to Charge Premium Prices, Even if You’re Not a Guru” a few weeks ago. The thing about pricing is this: You either become the cheapest or the most expensive. If you’re anywhere in between, you’re a commodity.

I call that the dead zone. So, either you become the Walmart or the Costco, or you become the Rolls Royce.

I don’t recommend becoming the Walmart. When you price things very inexpensively, you need a massive amount of volume for it to make sense. To have a massive amount of volume with very small margins, you must become maniacal about data and tracking, and you have no wiggle room.

That’s not a lot of fun to operate. That’s where most people online are when they sell $10 ebooks and try to upsell you to increase their average cart value from like $19 to $21 just so they can take those two dollars of profit and hopefully build something out of that. That’s fine. That’s where I lived for way too long.

The better option, I believe, is to just focus on the flip side, which is going high and going premium. Charge more, offer a better service, produce a better result for your clients, and do not compare yourself to what other people are doing. That’ll limit your creativity. It’ll limit what you think is possible.

Introspection, self-confidence, and believing in yourself

When it comes to pricing or anything new, the biggest objection we have is, “Well, I don’t know if this will work for me, because I want to see it before I believe it.” That is the wrong approach to take with anything in life. If you’re asking yourself, “Well, I need to see the proof before I believe this can work,” guess what? That’s never going to happen. You’re not going to see anything you want to see.

As entrepreneurs, what we do is take things that don’t exist and bring them into physical form. We take an idea and create something out of it like a product, service, or program. That is the genius that we have as entrepreneurs.

You must believe that you have magic. We’re turning that magic into something tangible. But if we’re always looking for the proof before believing it, then naturally we’re going to compare ourselves to what other people are doing.

The same thing happened with Roger Bannister, the first person to break the four-minute mile. Before that, no one thought it was possible because it hadn’t been done. Roger Bannister believed he could do it, and he did. Within the next 12 months, I believe 13 other people broke the 4-minute mile.

It’s up to you whether you want to be the innovator and the believer, or if you want to wait until someone else does it, so you can follow their footsteps and become a follower instead of a leader. Think about it.

There are two reasons why we doubt anything in life.

One, we doubt ourselves or don’t have faith in the process, whether it’s business model or a specific process. We don’t believe it will work.

Two, we don’t believe we can make it work. You must go to work on yourself and build that belief. Build that delusional optimism, as I call it. Take calculated risk. The risk comes from believing in yourself. Do you think that Elon Musk believes in himself? Maybe a little bit.

If it weren’t for people like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and thousands of other amazing entrepreneurs and business owners around the world, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation. I probably would not be able to talk into this microphone because someone didn’t think it was possible.

I want to challenge you to go within, introspect, instead of compare.

Know, deep inside, that what you’re doing, or going to do, is right for you. It doesn’t matter if other people have succeeded or not with it. All that matters is that you know that you can make this happen.

Comparison is a waste of time

Let me give you a perfect example:

We’ve got an amazing workshop called the Health Business Accelerator. The only way we invite people to join us is by application or by going through our Perfect Client Pipeline, at which point, we jump on the phone with them.

One of the bigger objections is, “What’s the success rate of this? How do I know this is going to work for me?” That’s the wrong question to be asking. What that says is that you don’t believe in yourself.

We’ve laid out the game plan that works, we’ve stated the case and shown the proof. If you don’t feel that it’s going to work, that’s on you, not us. We’ve seen this work in our business, we’ve helped countless clients with the same process and it works.

Understand that self-doubt kills business. Self-doubt comes from not believing how good your product is and how amazing you are to transform someone’s life, and it also comes from comparison. Theodore Roosevelt said, “Comparison is the thief of joy.”

Here’s another great quote. Jon Acuff said, “Don’t compare your beginning to someone else’s middle.” You have no clue what someone else’s business looks like. When you’re comparing yourself to people on Instagram who have 400,000 subscribers, you might think that’s what you need to do to build your business.

That is an absolute waste of time. It’s not that some of them aren’t doing very well, but I can guarantee you this: The people you think are “crushing it” with their online business, aren’t.

I know a lot of these people very closely. They do eight figures in business revenue, but their profit is like 1%. That’s not very alluring. That’s not the type of business I want to run.

I don’t know if you want run that, but that doesn’t sound like a lot of fun to me, so be very careful when comparing yourself to other people and other business. You don’t know the true picture.

Don’t compare yourself to my business. Well, maybe compare yourself to The Healthpreneur, because it’s done properly. But in my health and fitness business, I’ve had so many people say, “Oh my god, dude. I love your stuff.” I say, “Hold on. You love my stuff? What does that mean? You love the type of business I built, why?”

I’ve put out some good content and some YouTube videos. I appreciate the kind words, but I don’t wish that type of business on you, because it’s so complex. There are so many moving parts, so many expenses beyond what even makes sense, and it’s not the type of business that I would ever want to run again.

That’s why, with Healthpreneur, we set things up properly from day one.

Please spend more time introspecting than comparing yourself to other people.

Beloved Crystals and Yuri’s wife; realizing her product is worth more

Going back to my wife’s bracelet business, a couple of days after we had the conversation she said, “Hey, guess what? I’ve just increased my prices.”

I challenged her to double her prices, and I was giving her countless examples of other similar bracelets that were charging two or three times as much. They’re mass production and they don’t put the love and care that she puts into her bracelets.

I told her one thing that stood out for her. She said, “You know, the one thing that really made sense to me was that you said I’ve got 7,000 sales and over 1,700 five-star reviews.” I responded, “Yeah. I think that’s enough proof that you need to increase your prices.”

You must believe in yourself. As Old Spice would say, “Believe in your smelf.” Please don’t compare yourself to other businesses. Don’t compare yourself to other people, because you are unique. You are the only you.

If you start comparing your prices and your stuff to what other people are doing, then guess what? You’ve just increased the level of competition in your market, and that’s not good. That’s not going to help you win, to climb to the top of the mountain.

Do the work, separate yourself, go premium, and be the best. Be the pinnacle of service that the clients who are looking for a solution will seek out.

No one wants mediocre results. No one wants to say, “It’s okay. That’s why it’s only 10 bucks.” People who are suffering with pain or problems want the solution. The faster and more certain, the better. That’s only going to come by looking within and creating something magical for your clients.

That is all for today’s episode. If you want help creating your magic or turning your magic into an amazing program that will serve clients at a deep level and give you the financial and time freedom you want, start off by joining our free training over at healthpreneurgroup.com/training.

I’ll walk you through The Seven-Figure Health Business Blueprint. It’s a terrific 75 minutes. I promise you it’ll be the best 75 minutes you’ve spent on your business in a while. Remember to subscribe to the podcast, if you have not done so already. Hit “Subscribe” so you don’t miss any upcoming episodes or solo sessions. I’ve got more great stuff coming your way.

Once again, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. I’m signing off. Continue to go out there, be great, do great, and I’ll see you on our next episode on Wednesday.

Transcription

Welcome to the Healthpreneur podcast. This is episode 77. Today we are talking with Scott McCulloch from Glasgow, Scotland. He is the co-founder and director of Vegan Kind, the U.K.’s largest vegan subscription box.

Scott is going to describe how he and his wife got the idea, devised the proof of concept, and how they’ve grown rapidly over the past two years. Interesting stuff. What they’re doing with vegan foods and products is similar to the box-of-the-month type of thing, where there are surprises in a box every month.

They’re doing extremely well. You’ll get a lot out of this conversation, even if you don’t have this kind of business.

So, that’s who we’ve got on the show today. If you want to learn more about what the Vegan Kind is up to, you can go check out their website at thevegankind.com. At this current time, they only deliver within the U.K. If you’re in North America, you can’t benefit from their service, but they’re still a cool business to look at in terms of how they’re doing what they’re doing.

Scott’s going to share with us how they’ve grown using things like Facebook and Instagram. They encourage sharing in a very organic way and it’s catching on. He’ll also share how he has connected with other influencers in the space. That will be extremely valuable to you as well.

Without further ado, let’s bring Scott onto the show and have some fun.

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Mr. Scott McCulloch, welcome to the Healthpreneur podcast. How’s it going?

Scott:                    Thank you, Yuri. I’m very well. Thank you very much for having me on.

Yuri:                      You’re welcome. It’s great to connect. You’ve got a cool business. You run the U.K.’s largest vegan subscription box. I don’t know a lot of people that run a box-of-the-month company. Can you tell our listeners how you got into that?

Scott’s background and the beginnings of Vegan Kind

Scott:                    We’ve been in business for about four years now, so we’re out of the early startup stages and realizing our full growth potential.

Before it all came about, I was a meat-eater. My wife Karris, the company’s co-founder and co-director, has been vegetarian pretty much her whole life. As a couple, we happily coexisted with me being a meat eater.

I used to buy my monthly meat intake from an online farm shop. I would have it sent to the house, separate each individual chicken breast or whatever into sandwich bags, and freeze them for later consumption. I was a gym-going protein-conscious person.

Karris was vegetarian and always had been. She was going down the path where her beliefs around becoming vegetarian, such as the mistreatment of animals and the like, were leading her to investigate veganism.

Because we lived together, I think we were married or engaged, when she made that transition I found myself also eating more vegetarian and vegan food. At the end of the day, a delicious meal is still a delicious meal regardless of what’s in it.

I consumed more and more vegetarian and vegan food, and realized that I could still eat cheeseburgers, ice cream, and drink milk with my cereal. I felt I was consuming the same type of diet and types of foods, but I was doing it on a plant-based diet. I didn’t feel like I was missing out on anything.

Karris made the transition to full veganism, and she was a beauty blogger at that time. She was receiving subscription boxes and free products to review on her YouTube channel.

She thought the transition to veganism perhaps didn’t need to be as difficult. Maybe you don’t need to spend so much time looking at all the products down the aisles and there’s a way we could make it easier. She was already exposed to the beauty subscription box market.

I said, “What about if we did a vegan subscription box?”

That very night, we jumped online. We couldn’t find anything at all in the U.K. and thought that was a good starting point. No one else was doing it here. Then, I came across a company in America that was doing it. That was an instant catalyst to plow forward with the idea and get it off the ground immediately.

Vegan Kind was quickly created and started blooming.

Yuri:                     That’s awesome. How do you start that type of business? You’re sourcing a lot of different products. What did those first couple of weeks look like?

Scott:                    One of the fundamentals of getting any business off the ground is a little bit boring. I used to be in business banking. I was a business banking manager for about ten years. So, I already had very good grasp on how to set up a limited company and what it takes to do that. I knew how to register shares and all that boring stuff to get the fundamentals laid out.

At that point in time, I was working in sales for a company called Worldpay. They’re more prominent in the U.K. and have just been bought over by Vantiv Bank in America. They are one of the world’s leading payment processors.

I already understood a bit of the business banking side of it, and was very much living in a payments world. I understood card processing payments. The entire business at that point was 100% card processing transactions on recurring billing. This went along with Karris’ understanding of how bloggers react to receiving free goods that we could then showcase on their channel.

My background and understanding of how to get the fundamentals set up and my experience in working for a very high pressured sales environment made me very conscious of how important sales are for every and any business no matter what you do.

You need to focus on your sales.

Brand awareness, marketing, and positioning

We organically, through our backgrounds, got the business off the ground extremely quickly. We identified that, as much as it was a business for us, what we could present to brands was also a marketing opportunity for them.

I started reaching out to brands that we liked or felt weren’t as well known. We pitched them to see how are they were currently getting their brand awareness. We asked which avenues they’ve explored regarding their marketing budget. We asked what return they were getting for it. We asked if they had considered giving us some of their product for marketing purposes. We would do X, Y and Z with it, which has a follow-through effect.

We positioned ourselves from a marketing angle as well as a sales angle. That’s what worked.

Yuri:                      That’s awesome. Some listeners might be doing a lot of manual or cold outreach.

What tips could you give in regards to effectively reaching out to companies or individuals you may not know personally so they positively respond to your offer?

Scott:                    That’s something I’m living and breathing right now. The business is currently seeking investment. We’ve got a pitched business plan, a financial operating model for the next five years, and the potential of launching a crowdfunding campaign.

Before we reach out to the crowdfunding network, we’re behind closed doors reaching out to high net worth individuals and people within the plant-based sector who could contribute to a cornerstone investment. Then we’ll take on a crowdfunding platform.

A lot of people know it’s a bit of a failure, or can be, to go into a crowdfunding scenario having not already secured a portion of the funding.

At the moment, I am very much living what you’ve just asked me to discuss. I’m identifying people that I would love to invest in and convey our vision to, and make sure they see our financials. In terms of tips, I would say to investigate all avenues to get a warm introduction. Make sure that you have double-checked your common connections on LinkedIn.

Check if they have a profile on Facebook as a business individual, or a private family one. Quite a lot of people will do that. Then, if they do have an individualized Facebook page, it might not have a huge number of followers. Bear in mind that, sometimes with Facebook, you can contact people and they might never see it.

Similarly, with LinkedIn, you might find that you go to connect with an individual, and you’ll get a pop-up saying, “How do you know me? If you don’t know me, then I’m not willing to connect with you.”

Another angle is Instagram. I’ve had great success this past week contacting somebody who’s very high-profile but isn’t living that Instagram lifestyle. They’ve got one, but they’re not posting memes every day and don’t have a lot of followers.

They have a modest following, which I was delighted to see, so I confidently knew that when I reached out that they would see my notification on their phone. They did, and responded to me within five minutes. I nearly fell off my seat.

Yuri:                      That’s awesome.

Scott:                    So first and foremost, if you can find a warm introduction, that’s absolutely the road to go down. But think outside the box in terms of how you can contact them.

I’ve identified who I want to speak to and am confident that they will buy our pitch. Once they see it and live my story with me, why wouldn’t they want to invest?

I’ve struggled with my voice being heard. Even I get a routine 50 messages day. God knows how many these people get. Make sure you’ve investigated all avenues and choose the one that you believe is most likely to be seen.

The evolution of The Vegan Kind; the business models, marketing, and facets

Yuri:                      That’s great advice. For listeners who may not be familiar with the Vegan Kind, what does the business and pricing model look like on a month-to-month basis for the consumer?

Scott:                    We currently have a multi-revenue business now. When we set up with just a subscription box, people subscribed throughout the month.

If you subscribed on the 18th of October, you’d be subscribing for our November box. You wouldn’t know what was going to be in our November box, but you’d know that everything in it was suitable for vegans and it wouldn’t contain any animal products.

You would know that there would be between five and eight products in it. You’d know that the retail value of the box would have a higher RRP than if you’d bought the products individually.

In the U.K., customers are paying ten pounds a month for the box, plus three pounds 50 in postage and packaging.

On the first of every month, we would debit their money and ship their box within three working days. A few days later, a box will land across the U.K. for several thousand customers. They will then receive them broadly at the same time, jump on Instagram, review the products, and tag the brands.

Generally, you get quite excited about the box. When new subscribers are subscribing at the end of month, they are usually subscribing for the next month’s box. But we always overstock the prior month’s box.

A customer will subscribe on the 19th of October and get an email saying, “Your first box will be November.” Then, they’ll get a follow-up email saying, “Wait a minute. We just double-checked. We’ve got some spare October boxes. Would you like to get started? Click yes, please.” We’ll upsell, and they’ll get the October box.

We don’t always manage to do that if we sell out the prior month’s box. But the aim is to always make sure we’ve got enough overstock to give the customer what they want and give them a surprise when they think they must wait or have missed out.

That’s one angle with the monthly lifestyle box.

We also have a quarterly beauty box. It works with the same concept, but just four times a year.

In December of 2016, we made the strategic decision to grow the business and do more with money spent on Facebook ads, PPC, or other avenues. The amount we were spending stacked up successfully for the subscription boxes we were selling. It was fine in that respect.

We thought that for that same advertising budget, we could be selling a hell of a lot more throughout the whole month.

We were not using the innocuous shop tab on our website. That tab was purely to get rid of a bit of overstock. It had a few items, some branded mugs, tote bags, and odd things we had done for festivals. We made the strategic decision to change that shop tab to its own supermarket. We changed the word “shop” to “supermarket,” and grew an inventory there.

Now, we’re known for two separate things. Our subscription box company has loads of loyal customers and is brilliant for people that are going vegan but going through that initial struggle where they’re unsure about what they’re meant to buy and eat.

Once people realize that it’s a very easy lifestyle, we’ve got a full-fledged supermarket with a massive chilled section and next-day delivery that ships across the U.K. We currently have an inventory of two and a half thousand items, and we forecast that will be seven or 8,000 by the end of 2018.

We have those two distinct strands to the business now. Before, we only had the recurring revenue from the subscription boxes. Now we have considerable cash flow from the supermarket. It’s working well.

Yuri:                      Do you find that there’s a good spillover from the people who buy the one-off stuff in the supermarket to the subscription boxes?

Scott:                    Yes, it’s worked quite harmoniously. When we first started the supermarket, we had a bit of a challenge making sure we were getting our marketing message right.

We couldn’t quite decide on what the correct message was to convey, “We’ve got this, and we’ve got this.” It’s quite difficult to get that across succinctly in one message. Now, where we advertise as a subscription box, we don’t even mention that we do a supermarket.

A lot of people probably come to the website, see we’re a subscription box, and don’t click anywhere else. They love it, buy it, that’s it, and they check out. That’s fine.

Similarly, a lot of people will see the U.K.’s biggest online vegan supermarket, and they’ll click. They’ll go straight through to thevegankind.com/supermarket, which is a Shopify store. At that point, they won’t know we have a subscription box, and that’s the way we like it. Then we have our three distinct sets of customers.

Once they know about us, are a customer, and go on our mailing list, we get the opportunity to tell them about the other side. For example, every single supermarket order comes with a flyer that says, “Did you know that we do subscription boxes? It contains new-to-market, hard-to-find, exciting products. It’s like a birthday every month. If you like that idea, here’s five pounds off your subscription box.”

Rapid growth, tackling problems, outsourcing, and leveraging social media

Yuri:                      That’s so smart. You’re getting a little bit of everything and both of those play nicely into each other.

What type of team do you need to run this whole operation? How many people do you have working? Do you have a facility? Or is everyone virtual and remote?

Scott:                   When the business started, and it was Karris and I in our flat with a newborn baby, a Chihuahua named Tyson, and a cat named Honey. We posted pictures the other day on Instagram.

The business reached a pivotal point and we had to move because we were taking deliveries of our flat pack cardboard to make up our boxes. We got them in smaller bundles for the initial two boxes, and we received them at our flat in a normal DHL-style order.

One day, I was in Oban, which is a three-hour drive from Glasgow. Karris was in a meeting at her work. A delivery driver called me and said, “I’m at the Gala gate,” which is the street we lived on at the time.

He said, “I’m at the Gala gate in an 8.5 attic truck with a palette for you. Have you got a palette truck?” Not only did I not have a palette truck, they needed to go up two flights of stairs. And I was in Oban.

We quickly realized that we outgrew our living room, which was stocked floor to ceiling, across all the hall, and into the baby’s bedroom. We moved into a 1,000 square-foot unit. Karris, maybe six months or so after that, was the first to leave her job.

It was a strategic exit. We made sure that we were financially stable when we peeled away from work. For four years, we burned the candle at both ends and in the middle. We made sure that we could keep up our lifestyle.

The family home grew, and in December of last year, when we decided that we wanted to implement a supermarket, we realized that it could only happen if I burned the ships as well and left my job.

At that point, we moved from the 1,000 square-foot unit to a 3,000 square-foot unit to take on the subscription boxes and grow the supermarket. Within three months of being in the 3,000 square-foot unit, we completely outgrew it.

There’s photos of it. It was literally filled wall-to-wall, left to right, front to back with Royal Mail yorks, these cages to collect the boxes. Because they’re square, you could tell there was literally no space in that unit.

I was fully away from employment at that point, so we made the strategic decision to either move out of that 3,000 square-foot unit that we’d literally just moved into or outsource the subscription box. To circle back to your question, at that point in time we had three full-timers; Karris, Jenna, and I.

And at that point we had one of the biggest problems with the business. Every month, when it came to pack, we needed five to ten people to pack during packing week. It wasn’t full-time work. We were at the mercy of students and people that needed a bit of ad hoc work. It was difficult to manage getting the right people in at the right time and putting people on payroll. It was a logistical headache.

We made the decision to move the subscription box to a fulfillment company. Now we don’t touch the subscription boxes. The suppliers send the stock to another warehouse. They get packaged and sent from there.

We receive the overstock, sell it on our website, and use it for end-of-the-month upsells. This leaves us in the 3,000 square-foot unit, but we now we’ve got five full-time staff and two part-timers.

However, even though we’ve outsourced the subscription box to another company, the 3,000 square-foot unit is getting extremely tight. Yesterday we viewed a 5,000 square-foot unit because in a few months’ time, we won’t last there.

Leveraging social media for marketing and connecting with clients

Yuri:                      It’s great to see how different companies grow. I love entrepreneurship, because you get to see growth that happens quickly. Going from one space to another is something I find very common with people who ship stuff. Initially they do all the shipping themselves, then get to the point where it doesn’t make sense. Then you find someone else to take care of it.

It’s cool that you went through that process as well. Listeners, even if they’re not in the subscription or box-of-the-month type of business, might have similar issues in terms of fulfilling orders.

Scott, you mentioned Instagram. When people get their boxes, you encourage them to share stuff on Instagram. Is that a conscious branding/marketing decision to get the word out for The Vegan Kind?

Scott:                    It’s strategic and conscious, but has more to do with making sure the brands are getting the exposure that we want them to get from working with us.

We make sure that there are several high-profile, large follower-base customers that get our boxes. We can’t guarantee they’ll post about it, but most of them know about us. They’ve followed our journey over the years and show support for us by doing an “unboxing” video, Instagram story, or feature us on their feed.

In general, social is huge for us. We have a large social following across all platforms. I think it’s a few 100,000 in total. It’s one of the largest social followings within U.K. veganism, or certainly within U.K. vegan businesses. I don’t know of any that have more than us, to be honest.

It’s a personality thing as well. Karris, my wife, is the soul of the business. Everything the Vegan Kind embodies is her, really. It was her path from vegetarianism to veganism that carried on to become a business. I was somebody who realized a change in my mentality overnight.

I didn’t want to take part in an industry that I felt was completely unnecessary. I was still getting my full protein intake and could still eat whatever I want. I was eating the same things. I was just eating things that didn’t contain dead animals or didn’t contain product that came from an animal. It just made perfect sense to me.

Social is where we get to convey a bit of our personality; as a couple and as a family as well.

For instance, when a customer signs up for an order, we send a separate thank you email. We thank them for showing support and love, and we’ll put our Instagram handles there so they know that we’re real people. They can follow us and see that, on the weekends, we take our kids out and do things as a family. We go to restaurants and live a normal life. Social is an extremely important platform for us.

Yuri:                      That’s awesome. And when someone receives a box of cool stuff, they’re more likely to share it on Instagram, because it makes them look cool as well. That’s a nice, synergistic bubble that you’ve created.

Skills necessary for lasting success; a drive to succeed and an early morning start

Out of everything you’ve gone through in your journey so far, what do you think is one of the most important skills entrepreneurs must have for lasting success?

Scott:                    Specifically for myself, a burning desire to grow and succeed.

We’re in an industry that is experiencing a stepped change across the world. More and more people are going vegan. There has been a deep increase in recent years with Bill Gates investing in plant-based companies, Lewis Hamilton in the U.K. going vegan, and celebrities and athletes going vegan.

It can be easy to set up a business that’s a vegan and feel that that the vegan movement will carry the business along with it. That’s not true. If you take that passion for changing the way people view animals or change the diets of the world, that passion will get you a long way.

But if you channel your passion for change into sales and marketing as well, investigate what your options are, and have an absolute desire to succeed, that’s what will get you far.

I run out of time during the day regularly. I’ll feel like there’s so much I didn’t do. I know exactly where that time is. It’s between five and seven o’clock in the morning.

Get up at 4:45, have your clothes laid out, and preset your mind to the fact that you’re getting up at five. Make a list of all the things that are bothering you that you haven’t done that you know you must do.

You won’t just wake up because of the alarm. You’ll waking up because you know you’re going to crack on with these things.

Wake up with your clothes ready, put some headphones on, listen to ten minutes of a podcast while walking the dog, and put the kettle on before you go out. Then, come back home and be sitting at your desk with laptop open and coffee in hand at a quarter past five. You’ll find yourself in a time zone you didn’t know existed.

Nobody bothers you. No emails are coming in. There’s no desire to check your Instagram feed or Facebook to see what mundane stuff has happened in the last 15 minutes. You just crack on with the work at hand and get a phenomenal amount done.

That mantra I heard from somebody years ago. It was key during a strategic growth spurt within the business. I lived that life for about two or three months. We got into the zone with it.

I was compelled to get up at that time every day. All I did was recalibrate my working hours. It doesn’t mean sleeping less or burning the candle at both ends. I was getting up at five and be asleep by ten, have a cracking sleep, and get a full seven hours. That would be my working week.

Come Friday night, I’d stay up a good bit later, maybe have a beer because I’d earned it, and maybe get up at eight on Saturday. It didn’t feel like a long lie, but I’d be ready to crack back on with it on a Monday.

A desire to succeed and an understanding that your passion will only get you so far is key. To succeed, take your passion and channel it to understand sales and marketing as well.

Yuri:                      Awesome. I love it. I completely agree, the magic time in the morning is the best time. If you’re listening to this and you’re not waking up earlier than you currently are, make a point of it, because it is a game changer.

The Rapid Five

Scott, are you ready for the rapid five?

Scott:                    Yes.

Yuri:                      All right, here we go. Five rapid-fire questions. You have no idea what they are.

Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

Scott:                    I’m less keen to delegate tasks to others. I hold onto tasks too much.

Yuri:                      Cool.

Number two, what is your biggest strength?

Scott:                   Optimism and determination.

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

Scott:                   Facebook marketing.

Yuri:                     Ads or the whole platform in general?

Scott:                   Our ads. Anytime I’ve had Facebook involved, take a screen share, results, or whatever, they’ve been blown away at what our cost per conversion is. They say they rarely see conversions as low as ours.

Yuri:                      That’s awesome.

Number four, what has having kids taught you about business and marketing?

Scott:                   I don’t know in relation to business and marketing, but having kids has certainly taught me to relax a bit. When I was in high-pressure sales, I would come home and still be thinking, frantic, and not as present as I am now.

Now that I’m in full control and have autonomy of my own life, I understand the importance of when I’m with them. I realized that I should be with them and that it’s precious time.

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

Scott:                   When we complete this round of investment that we’re going through. Once I know we’ve secured the full value of what we’re looking for, I’ll feel like we’ve done it.

Yuri:                     That’s awesome. I have no doubt that’ll happen because what you guys are doing is awesome. For listeners who don’t know about The Vegan Kind, can you share the website and the best place for people to follow you online and on social?

Scott:                   Of course. It’s thevegankind.com. You’ll see our main website and the supermarket tab at the top. Follow us on social, which is The Vegan Kind on Facebook and Instagram. I’m Scott_thevegankind and my wife is Karris_thevegankind on Instagram.

Yuri:                     Awesome. Scott, this has been a lot of fun, man. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to join us and share your journey and the awesome stuff you’re doing with your business. It’s unique.

It had added a lot for the people in the U.K. Thank you for taking the time and doing all the awesome stuff you guys are doing.

Scott:                   Thank you, I appreciate you speaking with me.

Yuri:                     For sure.

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Yuri’s take

Cool stuff, right? A box of the month business hooking you up with awesome vegan stuff every single month, and complimenting that with a full-on supermarket through their website. What I loved about this business model is how they’re fusing both together.

I believe that, in any business, you don’t have a business unless you have stable, predictable, recurring revenue. This is something that we’ve built into our own health and fitness business in a big way. We realized that if you don’t have recurring revenue, you become a promotion machine; constantly promoting one-off products every week or month.

It becomes very unpredictable and erratic. You get to a point where you don’t enjoy your business.

I liked that The Vegan Kind has a recurring subscription model, but also one-off purchases for their supermarket. They both lend nicely to each other; they support one another.

I’m going to leave you with a little challenge. Whether you do it is up to you. Here it is. Ask yourself: Do I have recurring revenue in my business?

If you’re training clients, seeing patients on a plan, or if they’re coming in several times a month, is there a fixed cost every month? That would be an example of recurring revenue.

In my Luminaries Mastermind, our clients pay every single month over 12 months. That is recurring revenue. In our Super Nutrition Academy, my health business, people pay $47 a month, month after month. That is recurring revenue.

So, in your business, do you have some type of recurring revenue? If you don’t, I challenge you to consider how to create something that is going to give people what they want in a more seamless way.

All recurring revenue is either some type of coaching, product, or membership site where you simply give people access to knowledge and wisdom that’ll help them go from where they are to where they want to be in a clearer, more succinct fashion.

Here’s the reality: There’s no shortage of information on the Internet. You can find everything you want, and that’s a good and a bad thing. What we offer our clients should be clarity and convenience. We can say, “Listen, you can scour the Internet and do all this stuff on your own, or you could pay me $X a month and get everything curated so you can go from here to there quickly, succinctly, and without all the messing around.”

That’s what we’re offering people. It doesn’t have to be 1,000 different things every single week in terms of new content or programs. Clarity and convenience is a big added value for any type of recurring model. And if you’re offering supplements, have an auto-ship program.

Think about that. Think about how you can make an existing offer or a new offer some type of recurring revenue model. If you want support with this, we are happy to help however way we can. If you meet my criteria, I’d be happy to work with you inside of our Luminaries Mastermind group if you’re interested.

You can email me directly at [email protected]. If you’re interested in more information about our Luminaries Mastermind, I’ll send you more information about it.

That’s all for today, and I hope you’ve enjoyed the episode. It’s always fun to connect with great people doing great things in their business. If you haven’t subscribed yet, be sure to subscribe on iTunes today. Go to the Heathpreneur podcast, click on the little button that says subscribe, and you’ll get all our episodes right to your phone every single Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

We’ve got a cool free gift, if you haven’t grabbed it already: The book Health Profit Secrets. If you want to discover the four underlying secrets that all successful health businesses have in common, this is the book for you.

If you want to know where you score on these four areas, you’ll also get the Healthpreneur success scorecard, which is inside the book. It’ll show you how to go from where you are to where you want to be. I’ve also included an advanced 90-minute training to go more in-depth with that specific stuff. You get all that for free, just cover a few bucks in shipping. Find it over at healthpreneurbook.com.

With that said, I bid you farewell. Thanks for tuning in, for your attention, and for being awesome. Continue getting out there and spreading your message. Be great. Do great. And I’ll see you in our next episode.

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Transcription

Welcome back to the show. Today, we have a great interview with Tess Challis. Tess is an author, vegan chef, and what she calls “One Degree Coach.” If you have no idea what that is, don’t worry. She will explain it in this interview. She’s written five books including “Radiant Health,” “Inner Wealth,” “The Two-Week Wellness Solution,” “Radiance 4 Life,” “100 Vegan Entrees,” and “Food Love.” Her greatest passion is helping others achieve both radiant health and inner wellbeing – all while enjoying delicious food.

Who wouldn’t want that, right?

We’re going to talk about several things, but one of the big themes is how to package your coaching to better serve your clients and give you more income. Most coaches say, “I charge $75 an hour. Let’s have a chat,” and that’s it. We’re going to talk about a more effective way to do that and what’s working for Tess, her business, and her coaching clients. You’ll find a lot of value in this.

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Tess, welcome to the Healthpreneur Podcast. How is it going?

Tess:                      It’s going great, Yuri. Thank you so much for having me.

Yuri:                      You are very welcome. Thank you for being here. What is new and exciting in your world right now?

Tess’s excitement to learn and connect with successful people doing great things

Tess:                      I just got back from LA. I went to a conference where I met a lot of millionaires, billionaires, and entrepreneurs. They were all doing very heart-centered things and sharing from a space of love, wanting to give, and contribution. They’re serving big and it comes back to them in their businesses, so I’m just super inspired because of that.

Yuri:                      That’s awesome.

Tess:                      It inspired me more in my own business. I’m excited about creating new things.

Yuri:                      What conference was it?

Tess:                      It’s called “Zone.” I’m going to another thing in Colorado Springs, which we were just talking about, next month. I didn’t realize that all the same speakers are going to be there, too, so I’m going to get a double dose. It’s going to be fun.

Yuri:                      Cool. It’s so good to be at those events because they’re like battery rechargers. As an entrepreneur, you go through these peaks and troughs – sometimes a lot of troughs – and going to these events, meeting people, and getting inspired charges your batteries for a good amount of time afterwards.

Tess:                      It’s so true, Yuri! When they hear that I’m going to a conference, people ask me what I’m going to teach, but I just go to sit and learn. I’m so jazzed right now because I haven’t done that for years. I haven’t gone somewhere and just learned. I need to keep doing it on a regular basis because it’s awesome!

Yuri:                      That’s great.

Tess:                      I think it was Tony Robbins. I watched his documentary and it hit me. He said, “The best leaders, the best coaches, they are always learning something new. Always, always. Every day.” I do that in my own way, but not enough with other people or in-person.

I’m a believer now. I got to keep doing stuff like this. It’s awesome.

Yuri:                      That’s great. I had a realization a long time ago. I built my business online for three years and struggled for all three years. I decided I was going to figure stuff out on my own. I thought I didn’t need to learn from anyone and that I was smart enough. That didn’t work out too well.

I decided to start going to events, meeting people, learning from others, and finding a mentor. When I did that the following year, everything took off for me.

At our Healthpreneur live event, I showed people the journey of every single event I went to, and how they created another opportunity that created another opportunity. I mapped out the whole thing. When you put yourself in a room with the right people and the right information, you can’t even forecast what’s going to happen. It’s just all good stuff.

Tess:                      It’s validating for you to even say that because that’s how I feel about it. I was learning my own way; I’m someone that’s always wanting to make myself better every day. But I wasn’t around other people in those spaces, and it’s very different. I’m grateful that I could go. A friend said, “You need to do this. I’m giving you a ticket. Get your ass out here.”

I needed a little kick. Now I know that this is something I’m going to keep doing. I liked Bill Baren, and there were different people that I liked and connected to. They have so much to teach. Like you said, you always get something, and it leads you forward. I could see myself leveling up my game and serving in such a bigger way than I thought was possible. It’s inspiring.

Yuri:                      It’s like the Roger Bannister four-minute mile thing. No one ran a four-minute mile until he did, then I think 13 people did in the following 12 months. It just shattered limiting beliefs.

I was at a smaller event, and a buddy of mine was sitting beside another friend of ours and me. He was in between us, leaning back in his chair, and happened to catch a glimpse of our friend’s screen as he was looking at his stats. He saw the revenue-per-day number that he was making. It was about $20,000.

It was an e-book. That changed everything for him.

Tess:                      Wow.

Yuri:                      He didn’t know that was possible. It lit a fire under his you-know-what. It made a huge difference in his mindset and belief system. Now, he sells one of the most popular programs on ClickBank for digital stuff. That just doesn’t happen if you’re not in those types of environments.

Tess:                      I agree. That’s exactly what happened to me. I was looking around going, “Wait, you’re making $30,000 a month, and that’s no big deal and normal?”

My main thing is coaching. What I did, I don’t do anymore. I was having people buy packages, and they were buying four sessions for X amount of money. Everybody at the conference said, “No, you need to be working with people for a year charging at least $10,000.”

Then, from there, you start to scale. Not only is that going to provide more money for me, which is great, but then I can serve my clients so much more than the people who flaked out. They’re being held accountable because they’re invested. It was eye-opening because I didn’t realize people were making such good money and serving bigger.

For people like us, it’s all about both. It’s about the win-win. We must have a great business for ourselves, but we do that by being of service to others and giving. If I can do more of both, that’s awesome!

The people at the conference are not doing anything that’s compromising any ethics. It’s all about the love.

Yuri:                      It’s just a slightly different business model and offer, right?

Tess:                      Exactly.

Yuri:                      The more money you charge, the more the person who’s investing pays attention, because now they’re fully in. And it also forces you to provide even better service, right?

 Tess:                      Yes.

Yuri:                      If you’ve been with someone for a year, you can have a lot of impact in that person’s life, assuming they did the work. Also, you can see so much more change than you could in a couple sessions. Everyone wins, but again, we’ve got mindset stuff that gets in our way sometimes.

I’m happy you came to those realizations and had that exposure. I have no doubt that you’ll create some awesome change in your business as a result.

Tess:                      Thank you so much. Yeah. Someone said that when you give someone something, they don’t make change. That’s so true, because I’ve gifted people. Those people disappear because they don’t value it.

I have a lady who’s signing on today for a year. I know that if this was two months ago and I had just signed her up for four sessions, she would flake out. But she is so committed now because of what she’s investing in herself.

Yuri:                       Awesome. For everyone listening, go to events to surround yourself with people who are playing at a higher level and have already paved the path that you want to go down. It makes a huge difference.

Tess:                      It’s a game-changer. I’m immersed in gratitude for that experience.

Tess’s evolved offering to make more money and serve bigger

Yuri:                      Talk to us about your journey. Give everyone a quick overview of your business model. How do people engage your services, and how do you get in front of them so they know you in the first place?

Tess:                      I’m going through a transition right now. I’ve rebranded myself as a one degree coach, and I get in front of people through social media and events. I’m going to an event next month to learn how to be a speaker on bigger stages because I just discovered that I want to be a motivational speaker.

I’ve always wanted that and have always limited myself with my own beliefs. I’m going to do that, but right now, I’m still speaking on small stages. A couple hundred people at the most.

I had a four-session package, then I had a program online that people could enroll in for about $50 a month, but people told me that I needed to put another zero on that.

My heart is so in something. I’m sure everybody listening can relate. When you’re charging more, you can give more and that’s exciting. When I sat down and figured out what I can give as a one-degree coach, it was so much more.

You start feeling like you’ll truly impact a person’s life. I’m focusing on that right now. I’m focusing on filling up. I’m going to keep my slots very limited because I want to be able to offer plenty to the people that are doing it.

When I fill up the rest of the slots, I’ll start to scale my business and create some programs that people can go into as a group. I’ll charge enough so I can give a lot and they can get a lot, in comparison to my $50 a month thing.

I have a good friend who’s a celebrity vegan chef. He and I have accountability calls every Sunday. This is a good thing for entrepreneurs who want to up their game. He’s brilliant, inspiring, and values my input. We do these calls and bounce ideas off each other.

We had a conversation about cookbooks. We thought, “Does the world need more recipes right now? Is that what the world needs?” We’re getting away from just creating recipes and doing food stuff because, although I love that, I’ve done it for decades.

If someone want to come on as a client, I can work with them one-on-one and show them how to transition into eating better. I can teach them how to shop and set up their kitchen for success. That’s still fun for me, and I feel like I have a lot to offer. But I don’t want to do just that anymore because I did it for so long. I feel like the market is saturated with recipes right now.

Yuri:                      You’d think cookbooks would hit their ceiling, but apparently, people can’t get enough of them. They buy a cookbook, make one recipe, it sits in their cupboard, then they think they should buy another one.

Tess:                      I’ve written five, thought about writing a sixth, but have decided not to. People think, “Oh, you write cookbooks. You must make so much money on the cookbooks.” It’s actually the thing that makes me the least amount of money.

I love hearing people say that they love my recipes. What I love about being an entrepreneur is that, if you have an open-mind, attitude of openness, and want to serve, what you do just keeps expanding and more possibilities open.

Transitioning to a new brand, offering, and business model

Yuri:                      Totally. You’re transitioning from a previous “label” of yourself to this new path of the one-degree coach.

I think a lot of people, myself included, have struggled or are currently struggling with that. Here’s why I initially was: I was a trainer. I was a health coach. I was this…whatever. Now, I’ve evolved into something more than that. How do I be that to the fullest?

Is that something you struggled with at all in terms of being consistent with your audience, or letting them know about your transition and evolution? Has that come up at all for you?

Tess:                      That’s a good question. I’m just doing it. Yesterday I did an Instagram live video on a motivational topic, and then people popped in and said, “I saw you speak in Golden, Colorado. What kind of vegan cheese can I buy?”

The conversation totally went to transitioning to being vegan, and I still help people with that. But it was just funny because it hit me that people still associate me with that. Of course, they do because I’ve been doing it for decades.

I have a little identity crisis in a way, but I’m fine with it. I think the more you grow, the more you have your own business, and the more you evolve as a person, you know you don’t have to have everything figured out.

I think we stop ourselves because we think we must have everything figured out. I’m realizing that I don’t. I don’t have to have any of it figured out. I’ll keep figuring it out as I go. If in a year I want to relabel myself with something other than a One Degree Coach, I can do it.

I think it’s about the energy. It’s more about the energy of what we are and what we’ve become.

I had a gal I was coaching. She came to me for sports nutrition, and I almost didn’t accept her as a client because I didn’t feel competent in sports nutrition. That’s not my thing.  But she was insistent on working with me.

We talked about sports nutrition for 10 minutes, then discussed emotional eating, which was the issue. We talked about emotional eating for months. At that point, I was her life coach. We talked about ending abusive relationships, creating healthy boundaries, etc. Then I transitioned into being a life coach. From there, I knew it needed to be something more specific. So now it’s One Degree Coach.

We feel like we must have everything figured out, but we should just keep going forward and creating. What I love about being an entrepreneur is that our money flows are related to our growth as a human being. When we better ourselves, raise our vibe, learn, and elevate our offering, it creates a magnetic force.

Yuri:                      It’s just universal law, right? If you’re vibrating at a higher frequency, you’re going to attract different things to you than if you’re depressed. It’s funny to hear people call it woo-woo, because it’s not. It’s just the way things are. It’s just like gravity. It’s the law of attraction.

If you own your space and you’re connected, you’re going to attract better things into your life.

“One Degree Coaching,” the importance of energy-alignment, and authenticity

Tess:                      I decided I wanted to do One Degree Coaching. I didn’t totally know how, but I just started working on it. I did a Facebook Live. I was in the zone, and I had someone message me.

She wanted to work with me and I was just being. It was so validating. Like you said, when you’re vibrating at a higher level, better things start to become attracted to you.

It’s such a win-win because it was someone I wanted to work with. That’s what’s so cool: You can have clients that you enjoy. I laugh with my clients. I have fun with them. I challenge them. I learn from them. It’s so cool how that works.

When you go to events like this and you see these multi-millionaires, multi-billionaires, and they say they’re not perfect, it reminds you that you have permission to not be perfect.

Yuri:                      Exactly. Even if you’re selling a cookbook or a product, people need to resonate with you, your brand, and your energy. Especially if you’re doing intimate coaching. It is you as a person.

Energetically, below the surface, you get a vibe to say yes or no without seeing anything else. It makes a big difference too, and that’s why it’s so important to just be yourself. If you’re not yourself, you’re going to attract the wrong people into your business in the first place.

Tess:                      So true. We do that out of insecurity. That’s part of knowing you don’t have to be perfect. Just fully ground yourself into the authentic you.

People respond to that. So many people are trying to be something, and I always pick up on when somebody is authentic. That’s always a refreshing thing.

Yuri:                      It is. It is refreshing for sure. What’s been one of the biggest challenges that you faced in your business? How did you overcome that and learn from that experience?

Perseverance through tough times and realizing the entrepreneur’s freedom

Tess:                      The challenges is always to have total faith. Sometimes, before a breakthrough, you think, “Can I buy groceries?” Before I got one of my biggest clients recently, I was literally walking around the store with a calculator counting how many kombuchas I could I buy.

Yuri:                      That’s so fun.

Tess:                      Right? Oh, so fun! But I’ve been in that position and I don’t quit. You hear the cliché like, “Don’t quit. Keep going. Blah, blah, blah,” but it’s real, unless you’re a trust-funder, but I don’t have relatives with money. I don’t have people that I can ask for money.

It’s been a journey of totally believing in what I’m doing, to the point where I keep going when other people tell me it’s stupid. I keep at it because my heart is so fully in it, and I know that I can give bigger and get bigger if I stick with it.

Anybody that’s an entrepreneur, whatever field you’re in, it’s all a battle with ourselves. It’s a battle with your mind to overcome self-limiting beliefs. We all struggle with self-doubt. Look at anybody.

I don’t care who they are, and if they’re on a stage in front of thousands of people. They have doubt. They do not always believe in themselves. They struggle.

The journey of an entrepreneur is about self-growth. It forces you to grow. It’s a challenge, but it’s part of what I love about it. It forces you to be your best, overcome all the limiting stuff, and it’s not always easy. It’s spiritual, right?

Yuri:                      Yes. Being an entrepreneur is the ultimate spiritual journey. As you said, you’re forced to grow a hundred times more than if you’re an employee, because 100% of the responsibility is on your shoulders for whatever happens.

Tess:                      It is. Absolutely.

Yuri:                      Going back to the grocery store, if someone came up to you and said, “I’m going to offer you a steady paycheck, 9:00 to 5:00. Just come work here.” Would you do that, or would you rather still be in that entrepreneurial environment where there’s less certainty, but at least you have more control over your outcome?

Tess:                      Well, I’ve had that. I know I can go get any job.

Not to sound cocky, but I’ve done enough stuff. I’ve managed enough stuff. I could get a job if it got that bad, and that’s been the fallback in the back of my mind. If the worst is out there, life is out to get you, and none of the positive things you believe are true, you can always go get a job.

But just take this: Ride this out until the very last moment and just keep going. Just keep going. When you feel like giving up, just keep going. For me, that wasn’t the last moment. It’s not like I was starving. It’s not like I was sleeping on the street. I still had a bed to sleep in. I still had groceries in the fridge. I walked around with a calculator, but I would have said no. I would have said, “No, thank you.”

Just that day, I did see a great job offer. Somebody that I know who runs an amazing magazine wanted somebody to work with her. I was tempted, but knew I couldn’t. I had to believe in what I was doing and keep at it. It’s such a challenge, but so much more spiritually rewarding and growth-creating.

Part of that is believing in ourselves and not buying into the doubt.

Yuri:                      I totally agree. I don’t fully understand people who are not entrepreneurial. I’d rather have uncertainty.

I’ve been through periods of not knowing how to pay rent back in the day, but I would much rather have that knowing that there’s a limitless upside. Back in the day, I had friends who had a job where they were making $3,000 a month, and that was their ceiling. I thought, “That sucks.”

I don’t want to be in the position to have to plan for a trip two years from now because we have to save up all this money.

Tess:                      When I talked about going around the grocery store, I did a little game with myself. I told myself that I had to change my mindset. I couldn’t feel bad.

I looked around and thought in a nonjudgmental way, “Yeah, maybe I’m having to walk around with a calculator but look at this, look at the employees. This is their ceiling. Maybe I’m walking around with a calculator, but I have so much opportunity just through my mindset alone and what I know is possible.”

I have resources, connections, a website, and a great business. I have so much that I can’t feel sorry for myself. Maybe that is the difference, not to sound harsh. When you’re an entrepreneur, you cannot see yourself as a victim. I think most of society falls into thinking, “I’m a victim. Life happens to me. It doesn’t happen for me. Life sucks.”

Yuri:                      Totally.

Tess:                      We must be willing to take total responsibility for our lives, and that’s hard to do. Most people aren’t able or willing to do that.

Yuri:                      That’s why we’re cut from a different cloth. We are a special breed. I fully believe that.

Not to say that everyone else is not good, but I just enjoy spending time with entrepreneurs. Most entrepreneurs have a couple similar core values. They’re usually growth, contribution, freedom, and then family is usually in there as well. That’s just cool.

It’s great to connect with people who get that, right?

Tess:                      I agree with that completely. I love how you put that. Absolutely.

Perseverance as a necessary trait of entrepreneurs

Yuri:                      Awesome. What do you think is a skill or trait that entrepreneurs must have for lasting success?

Tess:                      Perseverance.

Perseverance and openness. Be willing to keep going. Any successful, great person who has accomplished things will tell you that there were plenty of times where they felt like giving up.

Oprah was told, “You’re no good on TV.” The Beatles were told, “No one will give you a record contract.” Be willing to push past those things that happen to all of us.

Yuri:                      It’s true. One of my favorite quotes is from Winston Churchill. He says, “Success is going from failure to failure with unbending enthusiasm.”

Tess:                      That’s one of my favorites too. I love that one.

Yuri:                      The reality is, as an entrepreneur, we fail. Personally, I think we fail way more than we succeed, and we must be okay with that.

Tess:                      Hell yeah. When people call you lucky, you think, “Do you know how many times I failed and thought about how much I suck?”

We fail all the time. I’ll create an event and nothing. I’ll create another event, and get plenty of signups. You should know it’s just how it is and to keep trying.

The Rapid Five

Yuri:                      Totally, Tess. This has been a lot of fun. Are you ready for the Rapid Five?

Tess:                      I don’t know, but we’ll find out.

Yuri:                      All right. Well, you’ve got no choice because here they come. Whatever comes top of mind is probably the right answer. Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

Tess:                      Time management.

Yuri:                      Number two, what is your biggest strength?

Tess:                      The ability to inspire maybe?

Yuri:                      Is that a question or a statement?

Tess:                      I don’t know. It wasn’t very inspiring, was it? Positive attitude.

Yuri:                      Cool.

Tess:                      I’ll stand by that.

Yuri:                      I asked, “Is that a question or a …” because the last time l asked my oldest son, Oscar, “How was your day at school?” He said, “Good?” It sounded like a question. It was funny.

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

Tess:                      Perseverance. It’s a skill.

Yuri:                      It is. You’ve got to build that callus, that thick skin.

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

Tess:                      Meditate.

Yuri:                      Guided or on your own?

Tess:                      On my own. I’ve been doing it for a couple of decades. Our mind is like a tape that repeats, and most people’s tape is not super-positive and inspiring, so we need to replace that tape.

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

Tess:                      When I feel that amazing energy that lifts me up, and I know that I’m serving others as well.

Yuri:                      Beautiful. Tess, thank you so much for taking the time and sharing this great conversation with us. Where is the best place for people to find you online?

Tess:                      It was so fun. Thank you, Yuri. You can find me at tesschallis.com.

My social media links will be there, so you can connect with me and Facebook friend request me. All the things. I’d love to connect with you!

Yuri:                      Tess, once again, thank you for being so candid and open, and sharing this awesome space with us today. It’s been a lot of fun.

Tess:                      Thank you.

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Yuri’s take

Inspiring stuff, right? Hopefully you got the wheels turning. If you’re doing any kind of coaching, in-person, online, whatever, hopefully the message from this episode has resonated with you.

One of the things I want to bring back to the center is when talked about how when people enroll with you for free, there is no commitment on their part. It’s important that you qualify people properly. If you’re going to get on the phone with them, make them jump through hoops. If you’re going to work with people at a high level, they must pay a premium.

Do not offer one-off sessions. It doesn’t help you and it doesn’t help them. Think about packaging your coaching in a much more effective way.

If you’d like help doing this and you want to move from one-on-one to group-based programs where you can leverage time, serve more people, and give an amazing experience that still feels personalized, I invite you to join our Seven-Figure Health Business Blueprint Training. It’s a free online training that will walk you through the new way to build a successful online coaching business in the health space.

I say “the new way” because the old way of doing things is dying, and if it’s not dying, it’s dead. It’s very tough to continue doing one-on-one coaching. It’s tough to sell info products, do affiliate marketing, and all that stuff. It’s tougher than it used to be, but it’s not impossible. If you want to do that stuff, you should understand the pros and cons. In this training, I’ll show you that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to continue doing that stuff, especially if you love teaching, coaching, and serving clients.

Join us for that training at healthpreneurgroup.com/training. Again, it’s totally free, 75 minutes, and will inspire you to think bigger with what you’re doing. Thank you for taking the time to join me and remember to subscribe to the podcast if you haven’t already. There’s lots of great stuff coming your way. In the meantime, continue to go out there and be great, do great, and we’ll see you in the next episode.

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Follow Tess Challis At:

https://tesschallis.com/
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Free Healthpreneur Health Profit Secrets Book

Transcription

Welcome to another great week on the Healthpreneur podcast. We’ve had an amazing week.

Today we’re talking about why winning the lottery is for suckers. Yes, you heard me right. I’ll tell you more about that in a second, after a quick recap on my previous week.

Recap on Yuri’s week and last week’s episode

I’ve had a lot of fun these last seven days. Last week I was in Morocco and we came back on Tuesday, I think. I had a day at home, hopped on a plane to Orlando, and spent three days at the USTA National Tennis Center in Orlando doing a three-day training camp. I felt like a kid again. It was amazing.

I got back yesterday, and I’m all tennis’ed out. Actually, I could play tennis until the end of time, even if my arm fell off, and I’d still be happy. I played a lot when I was in Morocco. It was on clay, so that was interesting. I’m not a clay court player. I was back on the hard courts in Orlando at the USTA National Tennis Center.

So here’s the thing: When you build a business that you love and provides you with the financial and time freedom to do the things you love, life gets much more exciting. If you can relate, I’m so happy for you. If you can’t do the things you love yet, I share this stuff with you to show you what’s possible when you dream again and don’t allow yourself to be limited by, “Is this realistic?”

Last week we talked about charging premium prices. If you missed that episode, it’s important. Go back and listen to it. It’s episode 72.

If you’re selling anything under $100, you’re going to need a massive amount of volume to live the life you want to live. However, if you’re charging several thousand dollars to work with people closely and impact their lives, the possibilities are a lot more exciting. You get to impact peoples’ lives at a greater level, feel more fulfilled in the process, and save time by not needing to build funnels and all that nonsense online. You’re helping people.

I’m very grateful and blessed for the business that I’ve built and the lifestyle it’s allowed my family and I to enjoy.

Why winning the lottery is for suckers

With that said, let’s talk about the lottery for a second. I think a lot of people in life lose their ambition. They lose the sense of possibility and wonder that we had as kids, and they end up growing up believing that their only escape is if they win the lottery.

I think that’s absolute freaking bullshit.

Pardon my harshness, but it is. When you don’t believe in yourself enough and believe more in a lottery system that may never end up working for you, that’s problematic. It’s ridiculous to say, “I’m going to put my dreams on hold unless I win the lottery. Then I can live the life I want to live.”

As entrepreneurs, as Healthpreneurs, we’re able to take control. We are in the driver’s seat of our life. If we want to make something happen, we make it happen.

So I say winning the lottery is for suckers.

Winning the lottery doesn’t make you a better version of yourself. It’s not about the destination. It’s about the journey.

Who you become in the process is the key

If one day you’re moseying along and making a certain income, a decent living but nothing crazy, and suddenly you win $20 million, you aren’t suddenly a better person. That’s a long bridge to cross if you were to do it normally. You’d have to add value to the world, solve problems for people, and build a business that helps you do that.

For most people that are employees, that’ll never be a reality. They often live paycheck to paycheck and they have a cap on what they can make.

So, the problem I have with winning the lottery, freebies, and handouts is that they don’t develop you as a person. Something I teach my kids all the time is that your goal in life should be to become a multimillionaire – not because of the money – but because of who you’ll have to become in the process.

That is the secret.

When I played professional soccer in my early 20s, the best result was the person I became in the process.

This is not a public service announcement to go have kids, but why is it awesome to have kids? Because you become a better version of yourself to be the best possible parent and role model. You look in the mirror and call out your own nonsense because you know your impact on these little humans.

Whenever I look at a destination we want to hit, it’s never really about the destination. It’s always about who we become in the process.

We live in a sad reality where 90% plus of people would rather rely on handouts, play the victim, and maybe someday win the lottery so they can live the life they want. Instead they could ask, “How can I be of value to this world? How can I contribute to the people around me, and because of that, get compensated fairly?”

You have a choice; make the choice to live the life you want

I don’t sympathize with people who complain about their jobs. No one put a gun to their head. No one forced them to bag groceries at the grocery store. If you want to make more money, build your skill set, and become an asset to the people that you serve or the market in general.

As an entrepreneur, it’s the same thing. You get paid what you are worth. Not as a human, but how the market values you in terms of the value you provide to them.

If you want to make a million dollars, how do you become more valuable to the marketplace? You figure out a solution that people want, and you offer it to them.

The more people you get in front of, the more money you’re going to make. Figure out a solution and charge a higher fee for that solution. Work more closely with people with less headache, which is the approach that I like, and help them solve that problem.

This may not apply to you. I’m talking about people in the rest of the world.

Again, it just bothers me. We all have so much potential. I see so many people complaining and yet they always have the choice to do what they want to do. I understand commitments. I understand that you might have a family, a mortgage, and bills to pay. There are things that confine us sometimes. But if you don’t, there’s no excuse.

This is turning into a little bit of a rant, but when I was on the plane from Toronto to Morocco, I went to the bathroom and heard the flight attendants gossiping and talking shit about the union. They were complaining about getting shifts and all kinds of stuff.

I thought, “Guys, I’m going to open this door and throw you out of the plane soon because look at the opportunity you have! You get to fly around the world for free. You get to fly to any destination you want for free, even when you’re not working. Stop complaining. If you don’t like what you’re doing, go make lattes at Starbucks or do something else that you would rather do.”

I apologize for the harshness, but obviously, this charges me up. It’s not about the money. It’s not about the destination. It’s about enjoying the process and being a better version of yourself and living life on your terms.

Live a fulfilled life by putting in the work

As Healthpreneurs, we’re in the position to do that because we’re the ones who are paving the way for ourselves. We might be following a proven plan but we’re building our dream, not someone else’s. If you’re building someone else’s dream and you don’t like it, don’t complain about it. Do something about it. Please.

If you want to win the lottery, terrific. But don’t bank your future on that possibility. Not winning the lottery and instead putting in the work, building yourself and your business, and making as much money as if you did win the lottery is a much more fulfilling prospect.

Wouldn’t you agree? If you do, great. If you don’t, that’s fine as well. We can agree to disagree. It’s all good. That’s why we have freedom of speech.

What’s ahead and training opportunity

That’s it for today’s episode. That was a little rant, but hopefully there was a part of it that stuck with you. If you’ve enjoyed this and want to go a little bit deeper with me, check out our awesome Seven-Figure Health Business Blueprint training at HealthpreneurGroup.com/training.

I’ll walk you through the new way to build a high six or seven-figure online coaching business by turning your expertise into amazing outcomes and results for the people you want to serve. If that’s of interest to you, check out the training. It’ll be the best 75 minutes you’ve spent on your business in a long time.

I appreciate you joining in. We’ve got some great interviews coming up this week. We’ve got Tess Challis, a great health coach, on Wednesday. I’ll also be talking to Scott McCullough on Friday. He’s got a cool, vegan, done-for-you meal delivery service.

If you haven’t subscribed yet to the Healthpreneur Podcast, what are you waiting for?

Go to iTunes and hit that little purple button that says “Subscribe” so you don’t miss any of my future rants and amazing interviews. We offer great insights and conversations to help inspire and take your business to the next level so you can live the life you want and impact the people you want to serve in the process.

Continue to go out there, be great, and do great. I’ll see you on Wednesday.

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Transcription

Welcome to today’s show. Today we are speaking with Aaron Hinde, the President and Co-founder of LIFEAID beverage company. I met Aaron five or six years ago at a Genius Network event and we hit it off.

At the time, he was ramping up his healthy sports drink business. It’s was cool to hear about what he was doing back in the day. Fast forward five or six years, and it’s amazing to see the progress, success, and scale they’ve achieved.

I’m excited to have him on the show today because he’s got a different business than a lot of us. He has a physical beverage that has propelled into a very competitive marketplace. LIFEAID has become one of the official if not the official drinks of the CrossFit Games. They’ve also sponsored a lot of other cool events in the health and fitness space.

LIFEAID has been on the Inc 500 fastest growing companies list for the past two years in a row. They now have 55 full-time and 50 part-time members on their team.

Aaron’s driving to the airport as we’re having this talk. He’ll share some cool lessons from his experience running a physical product business where there’s often inventory and cash flow issues. Then he’ll discuss entering a very competitive marketplace. Whether you’re in that same space, which most of us aren’t, there are insights and lessons that you can apply into your business.

Without any further ado, let’s welcome Aaron onto the show and let’s get into it.

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Aaron Hinde, welcome to the Healthpreneur podcast. How’s it going, buddy?

Aaron:                  It’s going great, Yuri. Good to be here.

Yuri:                      You are joining me live from the car as you are driving to the airport, about to miss your flight, so I appreciate you taking the time and prioritizing this over your plane ride.

Aaron:                  Ha! Great to be on.

Yuri:                      Awesome, man. You said you just had a meeting with Walmart! For our listeners who don’t know what you do, can you tell us about your company and how you serve your peeps?

Aaron, his company, and his beginnings

Aaron:                  Our company is LIFEAID beverage company. I am the President and Co-founder. We make very clean, nutritional products for active lifestyles. A lot of people know us by our FitAID beverage, which is a clean recovery drink that is big in CrossFit and functional fitness.

We’re the official recovery drink in the CrossFit Games, the official recovery drink of the Spartan Race, and sold in about 10,000 accounts. We are sold in a lot of gyms nationwide and internationally as well.

Yuri:                      How did you become the official beverage of the CrossFit Games and Spartan Race?

Aaron:                  It started at the beginning of the journey. My business partner Ryan and I met in a CrossFit gym in Santa Cruz. I was a sports chiropractor, so I used to work on people from CrossFit headquarters and athletes that came into town. I was always more involved as a trainer and worked out in the traditional Globo Gym environment.

They got me to come over and give CrossFit a try. That’s where we met and started this LIFEAID journey. Fast forward six years, and we’re now the official sponsor of the CrossFit Games.

Yuri:                      Wicked. What was your mindset during the development of the brand and the different products? Were you thinking how you would separate yourselves from Gatorade or Powerade? What did that process look like?

The mindset during product development: Cool, sexy, hip, functional, and clean

Aaron:                  Back in 2010, part of the “A-HA!” moment was when I went down the grocery aisle with my young son, they had an open-air beverage cooler, and his little hands reached for one of the popular energy drinks. My profession was to try and get people off those, so I was offended by that.

But I realized that energy drinks had done two very effective things. One, they’re very cool, sexy, and hip, so they’ve done a great job on the lifestyle branding. Number two, they’re functional. They do work. What they’re missing is they’re not healthy. If you poll 100 energy drink drinkers, nobody is going to tell you they’re drinking it for health reasons, right?

We knew there had to be a better way. We’re here in Santa Cruz, California, which is kind of the hippie capital of the world. The clean health drinks, like kombucha and chia drinks and so forth, are more of an acquired taste. They’re not cool, sexy, and hip like the energy drinks.

We wanted to create something that had cool factor, functionality behind it, but also something we could give a “wink wink” to the moms out there because it’s clean and doesn’t have a bunch of added caffeine, sodium, artificial ingredients, and so on.

Yuri:                      That’s awesome. Going into business online and becoming an expert or creating books and information is one thing, creating a supplement/beverage company is a very different thing. Was that a daunting task? What were some of the obstacles when you guys started?

Cash flow, mentorship, and looking to information marketers to sell online

Aaron:                  There have been many, many obstacles the entire way. Even just trying to put this thing together. How do you make a beverage? How do you make it taste good?

The first obstacle was when we pulled some money together, added some initial concepts, and put together some initial supplement blends that we wanted in the drinks. We went down to the flavor house and handed over the Word document to the flavor scientists. We said, “Here are the supplements and doses we want to put in the drink.”

She immediately looked at it and said, “This looks like a great formula, but there’s no way you’re going to put this in a drink and make it taste good. We’re going to have to cut all the supplements in half. I recommend using sucralose, which is an artificial sweetener.”

We immediately said, “Thanks but no thanks. We’re obviously not in the right place.” We turned around to leave and she said, “Wait, wait, wait. We’ll make a go at it.” We worked at it and worked at it until we were finally able to create great tasting products without sacrificing the efficacy of the blends or the flavor profile.

Yuri:                       Awesome. What are some of the other challenges? In our business, for instance, we have information plus consumables and supplements. The inventory and cash flow issues on the supplements side is a very different animal from the digitally-based side of things. Is that something you had to learn to manage, or are there other challenges that people don’t think about as they’re getting into physical goods?

Aaron:                  Yes, managing cash flow. Cash is king. That’s always a big one.

I can’t tell you how many times, especially in those early days, when we had payroll of $5,000 or $6,000 due and we only had $3,000 in the bank. A deal would come through or a check would cash and we would be able to make payroll. Managing cash flow is always a big challenge.

Accurate thinking is always a big challenge as well. My previous businesses and entrepreneurial endeavors taught me to think accurately and not take certain things as fact. I’ve had to learn to look at what type of turn to expect, the velocity at which the product is moving off the shelf, to not chase all the shiny objects from the big retailers that are out there because you could potentially grow your way out of business.

Yuri:                      You started off as a sports chiropractor and got into a beverage company. There’s got to be a gap that was bridged there. Did you hire consultants or mentors that had gone down this path? Or did you figure it out on your own?

Aaron:                  We had some mentors that were traditional in the space, but the best. What got us to the initial traction was looking at the information marketers that we knew and figuring out how to apply those principles to physical products. We did that quite well.

Beverage experts told us that we would never be able to sell drinks online. We proved that wrong. We grew a massive social media following. We sold drinks online. We did continuity programs online for beverages.

We did a lot of things outside of the box without going to the traditional brick and mortar approach too early on, which allowed us to bootstrap, gain momentum, and gain better positioning when the time was right to approach traditional retailers.

Success through a B2B offer, seeing the customer’s perspective, and teamwork

Yuri:                      That’s awesome. What’s one big win in marketing strategy that’s been your bread and butter? What has made a big difference in getting your brand out to more people and acquiring more customers?

Aaron:                  We had two products, GolfAID and FitAID, and we used the same model for both. We created an irresistible offer, without any field marketing or sales reps, from our home base HQ. We sent samples of the product then put them in a follow-up sequence offering them a free refrigerator with a minimum purchase. That’s how we started.

That’s how we went from floundering to having our first month where we opened 30 new gyms, then 50 new gyms, then 100 new gyms, then 200 new gyms. We saw things start to fall into place after we figured that model out.

Yuri:                      Just so our listeners understand, you sell fridges to CrossFit gyms, not to the end consumer necessarily.

Aaron:                  Correct. This was a B2B play that we figured out. Initially, they would purchase ten cases of product and we’d give them a free fridge, banner, posters, POS material, etc.

Now we know all our numbers, lifetime value, and retention rates, so if you’re a qualified gym, we’ll give you two or three cases and the free fridge without even requiring a credit card. We know that if they stock it and market it to their members, we’ll get the turn, reorders, and the retention is just as good. The close rate went from about 15% with the first week of the sequence and offer to basically 100% because everybody gets one.

Yuri:                      Great. What has been the key to your success? Is there one thing more than anything else?

Aaron:                  I don’t know if there’s one thing. I think from a marketing perspective, we always looked at things from a customer’s perspective. We have 10 poles in the water at any given time because what works today may not work tomorrow. We make sure we’re pressing and being innovative.

We’ve built a great team around us. We’ve got an incredible team now, 55 full-time employees, and all are A-tier players making big things happen.

From a product standpoint, you must have incredible products that are clean and healthful, with review site and social media presence. The companies that have traditionally cut corners, used artificial ingredients, gratuitous amounts of sugar, or played the two servings per container game are being put out in the open now.

Consumers are savvy to that. Fortunately, from the very first day that we were in that flavor house we had the right approach by not compromising on functionality, supplements, and flavor.

If you had to sum the way we do things, I think it would be always playing the long game. Everyone on our team has ownership in the company, 401Ks, living wages, and healthcare. Even the product and marketing is with the long game in mind.

Growth changing Aaron’s role, their hiring process, and patience

Yuri:                      As you’ve grown, how has managing a team of 50-plus employees changed the way you operate the business in terms of your role and developments?

 Aaron:                  Huge. Every aspect of the business changes; from fundraising and accounting, marketing and sales, taking out the trash, everything!  As you start to grow the team, you need to delegate tasks and roles, which is one of the most difficult things to do as an entrepreneur.

We feel like our input is essential in every aspect of the business. But to grow and scale, you must have faith in the people that you’re bringing on. You must start removing yourself more and more.

We had some difficult decisions and conversations early on to separate out jobs. We decided who was going to be in charge and the ultimate authority in one aspect of the business, and who would handle other aspects. We divvyed up responsibilities. Relinquishing some responsibility was a big challenge, but also a key to scaling.

Yuri:                      Did you have an HR team or firm to hire, or was the hiring done internally? What have you learned about hiring?

Aaron:                  Good question. As you’re growing and scaling and doing so many things yourself, either you’re going to burn out or somebody else is going to burn out unless you bring somebody else on. All entrepreneurs find themselves in that situation. When you hire out of desperation, that first resume that comes across your desk will look somewhat qualified and you’ll bring on the team.

That is not the way to do things anymore, because doing that has created some major disasters and significant lessons for us. Now, we have a big emphasis on a list, so our list continues to grow every month. We’ll put out open positions through social media, to our list, on Craigslist, and so forth, so it’s not atypical that we’ll get 500 to 1,000 applicants for one position.

We have our core values posted, a detailed description of the type of person we’re looking for, and typically, we’re looking for the right cultural fit, not just the right skill set. Culture is as important, if not even more important than skill set. We must make sure they’re fitting into the way we see the world and treat our customers.

We run all those people through Top Grader, which will weed out a big percentage of them. It takes a while to fill out the Top Grader, and it has a big emphasis on how you rate your past employers and the longevity that you’ve been with your previous employers. Red flags become apparent with Top Grader and the people that are just lazy get weeded out.

From Top Grader, we’ll pick our top ten candidates, do phone interviews, then fly three to five people for in-person panel interviews. We’ve been very fortunate that the cream always rises to the top there.

Yuri:                      Through that process, have you consistently found that these people were the right fit?

Aaron:                  There’s always wild cards, variables, that cut through the system, but I would say 90-95% of the time we’re getting the person that should be there.

Focusing on cash flow, taking on investors, and holding off on “going big”

Yuri:                      Awesome. Knowing what you know now, if you were to start over, would you do anything differently? If so, what?

Aaron:                  Yeah, I think we would.

We have a strong e-commerce and B2B business that generates a lot of cash flow. I think the temptation as an entrepreneur is to push bigger and go bigger. Especially in the traditional brick and mortar setting, this can be very expensive and patience is key. I think waiting a little bit longer and putting more cash in your pocket before looking for outside investment is a smart way to go.

We’re good friends with Peter Meehan, the Co-founder of Newman’s Own Organics, and he started that brand 20 years ago and was able to cash flow it and put millions of dollars a year into his pocket as a result of building a solid business.

There’s different ways to look at it. Going big, being the billion-dollar brand, and getting outside investment from the investment community is the shiny, flashy way to do things. There are other ways to do things where you focus on cash flow for the stakeholders and do it that way.

In retrospect, we probably would have held off another year or two before going more mainstream. But, we’re down that path. We learned a lot along the way, learned what works and what doesn’t, and have no regrets, just lessons learned for the next rodeo.

Losing focus on ROI-based decisions: Nightclub party fail

Yuri:                      Totally. What’s a big mistake you’ve made in business, and what did it cost you?

Aaron:                  Bringing on team members and hiring is number one. If you hire the wrong person and they become toxic, it has a negative effect on other people and morale, and it can be very costly to part ways with them.

Especially for startups where cash flow is always a big concern, you must focus on ROI-driven decisions.

Early on, we tried doing events at big nightclubs. It was costly to take over the nightclub, have product there, and staff it. We spent $6,000 or $7,000 one night for a nightclub party. It was just a bunch of 20-somethings that were so hammered, they didn’t even remember what they were drinking.

When you have $20,000 in the bank and you just spent a third of it on a club party, you start thinking, “Maybe that wasn’t the best spend from a ROI perspective.” Be ROI-focused early on. Every dollar out needs to bring a dollar or more back into the business.

The Rapid Five

Yuri:                      That’s smart. Aaron, this has been good so far. Are you ready for The Rapid Five?

Aaron:                  Let’s do it.

Yuri:                      Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

Aaron:                  I always say, “Go for it! Go for it!” I’m always pushing forward at 110 miles an hour. Sometimes I need to take a little breath and taking a step back. My business partner helps balance me out a little bit and makes sure that we make good, informed decisions before pushing the chips all in.

Yuri:                      Nice. What is your biggest strength?

Aaron:                  The same thing.

My ability to just push forward. If you don’t move forward, you stagnate and things wither up and die. If you’re that type of personality, you need balance on your team. Your business partner, spouse, whatever, can help keep you in check and do gut checks occasionally. It’s my biggest strength and weakness.

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

Aaron:                  Closing deals. I love it.

Yuri:                      Is that something you’re naturally good at, or is that something you trained and developed over time?

Aaron:                  I think every single one of us is naturally good at it from when we’re kids. Anyone that has kids out there knows how persistent and persuasive a kid can be. For whatever reason, as we get older, we get beat down and lose that.

I think we all have that innate ability to sell and be persuasive and it gets beaten out of us. It’s something that has been honed over the years.

Fortunately, in my previous profession as a sports chiropractor, I had a great referral-based business. There wasn’t a lot of selling, but I was a solopreneur. I had to go out, meet people, and get patients in the door. It’s not like you just open the door and people start showing up.

That was a stepping stone to where we are today.

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

Aaron:                  I have a morning routine that I’ve followed for several years now. It has been essential for me. I wake up, drink a glass of water, and fill out my five-minute journal, which is a gratitude and intention-setting journal.

I hop in the shower, and when I’m finished showering, I do one round of Wim Hof breathing. I slam the hot water off and do a little cold plunge, which wakes me up. I have my bulletproof coffee with MTC oil.

I do my morning prayers on my way to work with my son. I have him do three intention-setting statements and a self-affirmation, then I stop at the beach next to the office. I do two more rounds of Wim Hof breathing, get out of the car, enjoy the ocean for five minutes, and then head into the office and tackle my day.

Yuri:                      That’s great. Are you much of a surfer?

Aaron:                  I’m not a surfer, no. I’ll surf in warm water like Hawaii, but Santa Cruz is not warm at all.

Yuri:                      I know. It’s amazing. People in California who surf all the time are brave. It’s not the warmest water, but it’s cool that it’s still part of the culture there.

Aaron:                  And the great whites were out heavy this summer. Heavy. I’ve never seen them so heavy. Yeah, they were everywhere. It was crazy.

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

Aaron:                  When I look around and everyone around me has a smile on their face.

Yuri:                      Awesome. Does that happen quite often for you?

Aaron:                  It does. I’m becoming more attuned to it.

Yuri:                      That’s great. Awesome, Aaron. This has been extremely valuable. I know our listeners got a lot of great insight from this conversation. Thank you for taking the time on your drive and thank you for being with us, man.

Aaron:                  I appreciate you having me on.

Yuri:                      Amazing.

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Yuri’s take

This is a very different business than many of us are in, but if you’re selling any kind of physical supplements or products, much of this stuff applies to you. My big takeaway from this interview is the attention to the quality of the product.

They didn’t want to compromise the integrity of their brand or the quality of their ingredients. Everything they’ve done was and is held to the highest standard. That’s important.

It doesn’t matter what you’re offering people. Whether it’s a coaching program, physical product, information product, or course, we’re in a day and age where the best products will win when combined with the best marketing.

That’s all for today’s show. Hope you’ve enjoyed it!

If you have, remember to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. Click the little subscribe button on your phone and you’ll get awesome episodes coming your way in the coming days and weeks.

On Monday, I’ll share why winning the lottery is for suckers. If you want to see what that’s all about (you might think I’m crazy), stay tuned to Monday’s episode.

Want to take your business to the next level? If you want to go to six or seven figures in the next 12 months with less frustration, more simplicity, and more clarity, I invite you to check out our Seven-Figure Health Business Blueprint online training.

It’s completely free to attend. I guarantee it’ll be the best 75 minutes you’ve spent on your business in the last couple months, if not ever. I know that’s a big promise, but you’ll see what I mean. Head on over to HealthpreneurGroup.com/training and I will see you there.

In the meantime, have an amazing day! Thanks for tuning in. Continue to go out there, be great, do great, and we’ll see you on Monday.

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Free Healthpreneur Health Profit Secrets Book

 

Transcription

I’m pumped for today’s interview because I get to reconnect with my old buddy Mike Whitfield, aka Mikey “Pancakes” Whitfield. What’s that all about? You’ll find out in just a few moments when we bring him on the show.

I’ve known Mike for seven or eight years now and I remember the first time we met. He’s such a great guy, and not just because we’re both shaved-head, good-looking dudes, but because he’s such a giving and genuine person.

The first time I met him in person, I said, “Dude, you’re going to be a great addition to this online fitness biz. You’re a great person. You’re going to be very successful.” He came into a very competitive marketplace and figured out a way to support everybody else instead of competing with them. He’s going to share what he did in today’s interview.

Here’s a little background: Mike Whitfield is the author of “Rise and Hustle: Transform Your Life Physically, Personally, and Spiritually in Just 90 Seconds a Day.” He lost 115 pounds and has kept it off for over a decade, which propelled him into the fitness industry. He started an online business from scratch and did it full-time. His wife could quit her job and be a stay at home mom in just eight months.

You’ll see why Mike is such a special guy. Without any further ado, let’s bring Mike Whitfield on and get into it. Mikey “Pancakes” Whitfield, welcome to the Healthpreneur Podcast!

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Introduction and where the “Pancakes” came from

Mike:               Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Yuri:                Right away, people ask, “Why do you call him Pancakes?” Let’s break the ice. Tell the listeners why Pancakes is attached to your name.

Mike:               Absolutely. It’s Craig Ballantyne’s fault. Years ago, he put out a broadcast to his fitness readers and on his blog. He talked about how I like pancakes after a regular conversation that we had had at a Mastermind.

He talked about how he likes pancakes more than I do. I literally took offense to that because I’m the pancake extraordinaire. Nobody loves pancakes on this earth more than I do. So, I reached out to him and told him that was blasphemy.

From that point on, he introduced me to his list, which was way bigger than mine since I was just starting out, and fitness readers as Mikey “Pancakes” Whitfield. He even apologized for saying that he liked pancakes more than me. It turned into a joke and he grandfathered the name, Mikey “Pancakes” Whitfield. That’s how it came about.

And I do have a stack of pancakes every Sunday. It’s my weekly thing.

Yuri:                That’s awesome. Maybe Craig can contribute the Canadian maple syrup but that’s about it, right?

Mike:               Absolutely.

Workout finishers and complementing other people’s existing products

Yuri:                I want to piggyback on what you just mentioned about how when you were just starting out, he had a bigger audience, but he started to introduce you to his audience. One of the things that I remember from when you were starting is that you came out with “workout finishers,” correct?

Mike:               Yes.

Yuri:                Talk to us about that. It was a smart way to introduce yourself into the market as opposed to coming out with a competitive product that everyone else has.

Was that intentional or just something you wanted to do? How did you come online and find that niche and how did that help you get started?

Mike:               Craig had an opportunity for all the certified Turbulence trainers to do a guest blog on his blog. I took the opportunity to talk about finishers. At the time, because it was just for his audience, I talked about how you can simply tag a finisher onto the end of a Turbulence training workout. You didn’t have to change your entire workout; you could continue what you were doing and simply add in the finisher. It replaces cardio or intervals.

Most people are wired to go to the gym, do their work out, then go to the treadmill or elliptical for 30-45 minutes. I wanted to give people an alternative to save time. They could do this little 10-minute mini-burst at the end of very intense exercise to replace that.

I started out doing a two or three-part series on his blog. His readers responded so well that I drew a line in the sand and thought, that’s it! I’m going to create a product based on this. So, I put a compilation of 40 finishers together, and that’s how I got it out there. He was my first affiliate so I hit a grand slam with my first product. The timing was perfect, too.

I didn’t see it as another workout program because people are already on a workout program and there are already so many out there. I wanted to escalate the results that they were going to get from their existing program by simply adding in these finishers. I went in with the mindset of not wanting to compete but complement other people’s programs.

Yuri:                Super-smart. Everyone becomes a potential partner.

Mike:               Absolutely.

Yuri:                Great. When you first started, what were some of the biggest challenges you had to overcome? How did you overcome them?

Overcoming the challenges of sales copy

Mike:               I wasn’t intimidated by technology, but I had no experience in sales copy. There was a lot of room for me to do that. There was a lot of sales copy writing, rewriting, then rewriting again. Craig was cool about walking me through that process because he took me on as an affiliate and partner.

My biggest challenge was writing copy that resonated with people. The biggest thing that I remember from that one-day Mastermind that I went to way back in 2011, was Pedro saying that when you write out your bullets, do a benefit then add in the words “so that” to give them the end in mind.

In other words, let’s say you have finishers “so that” you lose weight even faster and look slimmer at your reunion. Something like that. That was one of the biggest key points I got from that Mastermind. But it was the sales copy.

Yuri:                Sales copy is one of those things that matters. For you, was it just a matter of repetition and practice, or were there other resources that you turned to as you started to hone your skills?

Mike:               At the time, it was just repetition and practice. One or two years later, I found a book by Michael Masterson titled “Great Leads: The Six Easiest Ways to Start Any Sales Message.”

Yuri:                That’s a great book.

Mike:               Yeah, that opened my eyes to different avenues of leading in with your sales copy. That strengthened my ability to write copy.

Yuri:                Awesome. If you were to have a conversation with someone starting a business online today, whether an info product or coaching, what advice or steps would you give them to get some momentum going?

Figuring out “the hook,” the value of feedback

Mike:               Without a doubt, you must figure out your hook. What makes your program standout from everything else that’s out there?

A trick I like to use is going to Amazon, finding a product like mine, then reading the one star reviews. There’s pure gold in there. People say what they didn’t like about that product so you can find out what’s missing.

What can you present with your product that’s not in the products that are already out there?

That’s a big one for me. There’s prewritten copy for you in those one star reviews.

Yuri:                So figure out the hook and use Amazon one star reviews as fuel to feed that fire.

How do you know when you have a hook or a big idea that’s a winner?

Mike:               One of the things I’ve done in the past is a two or three-day email series, so I’m not wasting time on sales copy. I write good articles about the product I want to release and see what kind feedback I get. Even if there’s just 30 people on your list, there will be a couple of people who will give their feedback.

And as a matter of fact, that’s one of the things I did when I came out with Workout Finishers 3.0 earlier this year, which I rebranded as Cardio Afterburn. I did a four-day series of articles on what they’re looking for, what’s missing from their existing finisher programs, and things like that. Come to find out, beginner options and joint-friendly exercises were missing.

I came out with 3.0 to give those options. I had come up with two different versions of workout finishers but none of them had beginner options. Jump squats, for example, are a great exercise. But not everybody needs to be doing jump squats. If somebody has knee issues or are 60 to 70 pounds’ overweight, they shouldn’t be doing a lot of jump squats.

I offered joint-friendly substitutions such as total-body extensions and kettlebell swings. The only reason I honed in and figured that out is because I did these articles and asked for feedback.

Yuri:                Smart, and simple, too. It’s not like going to the moon.

I remember doing one of your finishers years ago. I was like, f-bomb this guy for putting me through this after I’m already toast from a workout! But no, it was great stuff. I just wanted to mention that to you.

If listeners want some cool follow-along workout finishers, go to workoutfinishers.com, and the 3.0 version is with beginner and joint-friendly options as well is cardioafterburn.com.

As you’ve built the business and it’s grown over the past couple years, what are some challenges that have surfaced that you didn’t foresee when you were first getting started?

Mike:               Branching out. There’s a video sales letter for a product I put out in 2013 or 2014 that got over 1,000 clicks and one sale.

Yuri:                That’s terrific. Welcome to the club of yet another failed VSL or offer.

Unforeseen challenges: Discovering the obstacle and the solution

Mike:               Yeah, exactly. I didn’t have affiliates mail out for that, but it opened my eyes.

There’s different opinions on surveys. For me, I find them very powerful. I simply ask, what is the number one obstacle that is keeping you from losing weight? I get so many great answers from that not only for article ideas, but also broadcast, blog ideas, product ideas, and things like that. Bonuses.

The biggest thing was not going to my audience first. I just tried to throw something on the wall and see what sticks.

I just asked them what their obstacle was. Not, “What do you want to buy?” Not, “If I were to come up with a product, what would you invest in?” Instead, ask what their number one obstacle is and give them the solution to that obstacle.

Yuri:                Awesome. There’s always a fine balance between knowing your audience’s pain points and your own innovative creativity to bring it all together. When we ignore our audience, it doesn’t end well.

Mike:               Absolutely.

Yuri:                Was that product shelved after that initial conversion data?

Mike:               Yeah. I may bring it up again but right now it’s in the vault.

Yuri:                What do you say to people who have a product idea, release it, and it doesn’t work out? When they lose hope, and feel discouraged, how would you encourage that person?

Mike:               To not give up. A good example would be when I first launched. I branched out from my exercise thing and went with a product called Diet Free Weekends. It did above average.

One thing that you could do is you get feedback from those that bought the product, even if it’s not a lot of people. Get feedback to find out what’s missing and how you can make it better.

Come to find out, people didn’t like the fasting that was in the program. So, I tweaked the program, came out with a 2.0 version, and gave my existing customers a free copy. That version gave them fasting as an option. That way, they weren’t forced to fast.

It’s powerful to see what’s missing from the program, get feedback, and see how it sometimes relates to the hook as well.

A lot of people are on the cusp of something great, but it’s all in the hook. I’ve seen people rebrand. As a matter of fact, I was about to go into how I rebranded Diet Free Weekends into The Achievable Body to show how you can take the same product and give it a different hook.

I tried cold traffic to Diet Free Weekends and I had it on sale for, I think, $10. I sold two or three on three or four different emails. Granted, this list had only about 1,500 people.

I rebranded it into The Achievable Body. It was the same product with a different hook, video sales letter, and price boosted to $37. Just like that, I had four people buy it from cold traffic. It wasn’t even a completely different hook; it was just tweaked a little bit.

Many people are so close to breaking through with a product, but end up completely forgetting about it and going in a different direction. A small tweak can be a complete game-changer. Just looked at your hook or headline and asked yourself, “Does this solve a problem? Does this overcome people’s obstacle?”

Yuri:                It’s true. It’s just the packaging, right?

It’s asking how to change the packaging, because it’s the same meaty good stuff inside. It’s easy to jump onto the next thing and say it didn’t work. But maybe there is something valuable in the product and you should just change the hook, the positioning, so it resonates in a different way.

And, obviously, never give up.

What do you think is one skill or trait entrepreneurs must possess for lasting success?

Tenacity, establishing relationships, and consistency to build longevity

Mike:               Good question. The first word that comes to my mind is “tenacity.”

I don’t believe in the hustle mindset where sleep is overrated and you must work 20 hours a day. I don’t believe in that. But I do believe in doing something for your business every day, even when you’re having a bad day. You must have that tenacity to follow through.

Let’s not sugarcoat it. It’s hard. Having an online business is hard. But once you get it established and have momentum, the freedom that you have is incredible. And it’s totally worth that tenacity.

Yuri:                Good. That’s something a lot of people don’t understand. In the offline, real world, if you built a studio, people can walk by or drive by and see it. Online, if you build up a website, no one will ever find it unless you develop your marketing chops and get in front of people. Having tenacity to get in front of more people is huge.

What have been the big movers for you in terms of getting your products and message in front of more people?

Mike:               For me, affiliates. And that’s from establishing those relationships years ago. And always lending a helping hand, and that’s not just a cliché. It works.

Look at what your strengths are and see how you can help a potential affiliate. For instance, if you know an affiliate that’s willing to put together a squeeze page and you know Optimize Press or Click Funnels extremely well, say, “I can invest 30 minutes to an hour to put together that squeeze page for you. I’ve got some ideas for you, as well.” Or maybe you have an assistant that’s looking for extra work and they’re looking for an assistant. Little things like that.

There are several ways to establish these relationships. Fortunately, because of the connections I’ve had years ago, these are the same people. The people who mailed out my workout finishers way back in 2011 and 2012, are mailing out The Achievable Body, not only because of the product, but because of the relationship we have.

It’s friends helping friends. It’s priceless to have those relationships.

Figure out how you can add value to someone’s life, or a future affiliate’s life. Don’t look like, “If I help this guy out then hopefully he’ll mail for me for a couple months when I have my product done.” Don’t even think about that. Just go in and say, “How can I help this person?”

Just because, for one thing, it’s fun. It’s fun to help somebody out. Like this podcast. I can mention this to my readers and say, “Yuri’s got this fantastic podcast for entrepreneurs in the health industry. You should check it out.” I’ll send the link to iTunes because you have something valuable that I think could be extremely valuable to other entrepreneurs and I want to share that.

My list will appreciate that. So just go in with a helping hand, transparency, and don’t worry about the outcome. Go in and see how you can add value.

There are many things you can do to establish those relationships. You can shout out their product on Facebook. You can do some tech stuff for them. You can have your assistant help with customer service. You can create a graphic for them. You can offer a headline change.

Yuri:                That’s awesome, man. That’s why you’re such a cool dude, right? You’re always thinking like that.

A lot of people in business, especially online, are looking for overnight success more than ever before. I don’t know if it’s because we see images of “success” on social. But they don’t even look at building relationships, they look at who will promote them.

Your perspective is better. I think it’s the way most people should approach business; don’t even ask anyone for anything until you’ve given them something first.

What’s been your biggest key to success? Outside of tenacity, let’s say.

Mike:               Consistency.

Even when I have bad days, I continue to work on my business. I’m doing what I was born to do. Building a business is like losing weight. You’re going to have bad days and choose the wrong foods. That doesn’t mean your diet’s shattered and you should just forget it for the rest of the year.

Instead, think, “That was a bad day but tomorrow is going to be better because I’m going to make better decisions.”

Work on your business no matter what; even when things are not going well. I’ve been doing this since 2011 and I’ll still send out an offer from time to time, think it’s going to be a home run, and there’s only crickets. I could give up and say I’m going back to training clients like I used to so I know who’s coming in and know what kind of business I can build from that.

Instead, I get to spend time at home with my two young boys. I get to work out in the middle of the day with my wife. You can’t put a value to that. And so, because of that, I want to stay consistent.

Yuri:                Awesome. What does that consistent action or set of actions look like in your business? What are those one or two things that you do consistently?

Mike:               Writing emails. I email my list every day and try to give them actionable content. I used to be guilty of saying, “Check this out,” and it would be a link to a sales page.

I’ve gotten away from that because I’d rather give content. It’s certainly building my longevity. People have reached out to me and said, “Hey, I’ve been on your list since your workout finishers days back in 2011.” And it’s been cool. I’m about to bring on a coaching client that has been following me since I put those guest posts on Craig’s site back in the spring of 2011.

The biggest thing with consistency is building that longevity. I do that with emails and postings within the Facebook group. Even if they don’t buy something from the email, they can get something to put into their life to help them get healthier. And that’s my mindset. I can sleep at night doing it that way.

Yuri:                It’s a good frame of mind to have. At every touchpoint, you add value to someone’s life.

I can give you some quantitative data on this. We have a couple ads on Facebook that we’re running for a webinar. The ad itself had two and a half more shares than links which is very unusual. It’s usually the other way around.

The reason is because the ad, in and of itself, is valuable even if they didn’t click on the link. Because of that, people are more likely to share it. What you’re doing with the emails is a great example of that. Even if people aren’t buying or clicking on a link, that time they spent reading your stuff is extremely valuable, and they’re going to stay on your lists.

They’re going to want to engage with you. These things are tough to measure but they’re important. I’m glad you mentioned it.

Mike:               Definitely.

The Rapid Five

Yuri:                So Mikey, are you ready for the Rapid Five?

Mike:               Absolutely. This should be fun.

Yuri:                We’re not going to sugarcoat these with maple syrup. We’re going to get right down to it. Five questions. Whatever comes top of mind. Nothing incriminating so it’s all good.

Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

Mike:               Sugar.

Yuri:                Hence the pancakes, right?

Mike:               Yeah, absolutely. If you put something sweet in front of me, I’m going to eat it.

Yuri:                Number two, what is your biggest strength?

Mike:               I would say the act of encouragement. I’m good at encouraging people.

Yuri:                That’s awesome. That goes a long way in people’s lives for sure.

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

Mike:               Writing emails.

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

Mike:               A specific quiet time routine. I pray, look at my devotion, then write in my gratitude journal. It’s automatic every day.

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

Mike:               I’m spending time with my family in the middle of the day.

Yuri:                Nice. I love that. There we go guys, Mike Whitfield.

Mikey, thank you so much for taking the time to share your wisdom and knowledge. It’s been a lot of fun to reconnect. Where is the best place for people to follow your stuff online and check out some of your programs?

Mike:               They can go to riseandhustle.com and check me out on Facebook at Facebook.com/mikeywhitfield.

Yuri:                Mikey, thank you for sharing your awesomeness with our audience.

Mike:               You’re very welcome. This was fun.

Yuri:                Awesome, buddy. Thank you.

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Yuri’s Take

Great interview, right? I want to recap on what he mentioned about friends doing business with friends. If your business is about selling products or having people promote you, your stuff, or your services, then it is very important to develop and nurture these relationships. At the end of the day, as the saying goes, your net worth is directly related to your network.

Never discount the importance of relationships.

Sometimes we let them fall through the cracks because we’re busy, don’t think it’s that important, and think we’ll get to it later. We might see someone at an event, rekindle that flame, and that’s great. But take little steps in between events and stay in touch with people. Send an email. Send thank you cards. Let them know that you’re thinking of them. It goes a long way.

Remember, we do business with people we like, whether that’s a client doing business with you, or you promoting someone else’s business. The stronger the relationship, the more likely it is to get that type of support. That’s what I want to leave you with today. I hope you’ve enjoyed this one.

Subscribe to the Healthpreneur Podcast on iTunes if you haven’t already. We’ve got a lot of great stuff coming your way.

We’re talking with Aaron Hinde on Friday about how he’s built FitAID LifeAID, an awesome beverage company that is now the official sponsor of the CrossFit Games, among other things. We’ll learn how they’ve built this terrific empire. We’ve got amazing guests coming on the show and inspiring solo rounds to give you insight and mindset shifts to think about your business in a more productive and profitable way.

One final thing before we finish: If you haven’t attended the Seven Figure Health Business Blueprint, check it out today. It’s an amazing free training. I guarantee it’s the best 75 minutes you will have spent on your business. I’ll walk you through the new way to build a six or seven figure online health coaching business without spending years doing so.

You don’t have to worry about building out funnels and all the other crazy stuff that most of us don’t like doing. I’m going to show you the newer, smarter way to build a profitable business that you love, impacts your clients at a deep level, and brings you a lot more profit in the process.

Does that sound good? If so, head on over to healthpreneurgroup.com/training.

With that said, I hope you have an amazing day. I look forward to seeing you on Friday. Continue to get out there, be great, do great, and keep up the great work.

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Follow Mike Whitfield At:

https://riseandhustle.com/

workoutfinishers.com

cardioafterburn.com

Facebook

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Free Healthpreneur Health Profit Secrets Book

Transcription:

What’s up Healthpreneurs? Welcome back. I’m excited to be with you once again.

Today is a special episode, because as you’re listening, I’m in Morocco. I’ve been here with the family for the past two weeks and we’ve spent most of March here. It’s awesome. My dad’s Moroccan, born in Marrakesh, so we decided to bring the kids and my mom to make a family trip out of it. It’s been a lot of fun.

As you’re listening to this, I might be playing tennis. I love playing tennis when I’m traveling with the kids and I love bringing these episodes to you.

In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about how to charge premium prices even if you’re not a guru.

I’m not talking about charging premium prices for a book or a course, because the information is toast. Selling information nowadays is a lot more challenging. What I’m going to talk about is applicable if you’re selling any kind of coaching, specifically group coaching, or if you’re selling any kind of physical product, like a supplement.

Examples of price incongruences

Let me share a story to help you make sense of this. A little while ago somebody messaged me on Facebook and asked me some questions about our workshops. We were going back and forth, and they said, “Well, do you know this person? Do you do something similar to this person?”

I didn’t know the person was, so I checked out their site. He was a body transformation coach. A big, buff bodybuilder guy. He helps men and women get in great shape. I didn’t think he did anything close to what I do, at least with Healthpreneur.

Anyways, when I looked at his website I thought, “Wow. This guy has 5,000 or more transformation stories and amazing social proof.” He had come highly recommended from this other person, was a leader in the space, and I didn’t even know who he was.

I went to one of his website tabs, titled “Work with Me.” He had one or two different programs that were 16 weeks each. There was a program to burn body fat, and another to build muscle. I looked at the price almost fell off my chair. He was charging $167 for this online training program.

Have you ever felt like someone presented something so powerful to you, then they revealed the price and it was such a disconnect from what they were offering?

I met one of our recent workshop attendees while speaking at another event. I did a round table discussion after my talk, where we talked about webinars, why certain webinars don’t convert, and how to make a webinar convert more effectively.

She told me that she has an amazing program that helps people go through cancer naturally and detox from chemo and so forth. I thought it was amazing. She spoke about incredible success stories, the people she’s transformed, then I asked her, “What’s the challenge here?”

She said not a lot of people were buying, acting, or enrolling in this. I asked the price point and she said $97. I said, “Are you crazy? That’s the problem. You’re showing people how to heal from cancer for $97.”

I know that sounds like it would be great, but it’s not. In our mind, there’s a big incongruency that happens when we make the promise of something alluring, but the price is too low. It’s not reassuring for the customer or client.

Why it’s important to charge premium prices

I want to talk about why it’s important to charge premium prices before I show you how.

First and foremost, this is not about simply inflating prices to make more money. That has nothing to do with what we’re talking about. Here’s the thing: Charging more is a very good service for your clients.

Here’s why: Number one, when you charge more you attract better clients. I didn’t say better humans. I mean clients that are more committed to doing the work. Which means they’ll get better results.

This is why someone who buys a $10 book on Amazon is unlikely to see the transformation that you could provide working closely with them at $5,000 over eight weeks. If $5,000 scares you, then you’re going to have a little reality check in a moment, and in a couple episodes we’ll talk about mindset. For now, that’s the first thing.

Number two, premium prices force you to show up in the best way possible for your clients. If somebody buys a $10 book that you created and provided on Amazon or your website, you don’t care. If it doesn’t work, you can refund it. No big deal.

Obviously, we don’t want that to happen. We’re all in the business of trying to impact people’s lives, but it’s not the end of the world if they do or don’t act with that material. I say this because I’ve written a lot of books, blog posts, and other things that skim the surface for most people. It’s a surface impact.

If you want to truly transform someone’s life and impact them at a deep level, it’s not going to happen through a book.

Surface impact may give people one idea that they can kind of pursue and move from. But to get someone investing a couple thousand dollars for a program you’re going to walk them through, that’s where you’re going to impact people the most.  You’ll show up and think, “What do I have to provide to these clients to make it impossible for them not to succeed?”

That’s tough to do when you’re charging $20 or $100. When you’re charging three, four, $5,000 or even higher for your program, they are working directly with you so you can hold them and help them walk them through the jungle, the valley of death, up the mountain, however you want to think about it.

You will lead them through a world of confusion. The information age that we’re now in is beckoning for the transformation age.

People are overwhelmed with information. They’re going on Google. They’re searching for whatever it is they’re searching for. And guess what? The whole first page is full of garbage results so you’ll just end up searching forever and getting lost.

You might get an idea, then find a conflicting point of view somewhere else. That doesn’t serve anyone. Having built a very large content platform, I now believe that spraying content endlessly is a disservice, unless it’s opinionated polarizing content to draw the right people into your world.

Putting out how-to stuff like how to lose 10 pounds or 55 uses of coconut oil, is garbage. Let’s just be honest with each other. It’s not helping anyone. No one’s life is transformed because of that.

Charge premium prices.

You show up and help your clients at a deeper level and they get the results they want. That’s the key.

Third, you get paid what you’re worth. I say that loosely because if you don’t believe you’re worth $3,000 to transform someone’s health, then you’re not. I’m being very blunt with you.

If you think that you’re going to offer a program for someone that’s $100 and it’s going to transform their health, and it does, do you think that transformation is more valuable that $100? I certainly hope so.

Here’s something to remember. It doesn’t matter if you went to school for X number of years or if you’ve been doing this for so long. None of that matters.

All that matters is that you can help your client go from suffering to success.

That’s it. They want to solve their problem and if you can help them do that, that’s the only criteria that matters.

Naturally, people will want to see social proof. They’ll want to see that this has worked for other people. But at the end of the day, they must do the work. They must show up.

If you have a recipe for success to help reduce back pain, lose weight, overcome autoimmunity, whatever it is, that’s all that matters. If you have expertise that can help solve a problem for someone, the right people will pay you for it.

If you don’t believe that you are worth several thousand dollars for the life transformation you can create for someone, then I’m sad to say that you’re probably not worth it and you have to do some work on yourself. Do some work on your program so you believe in the core of your being, in every single cell of your body, down to your DNA, that what you are offering someone is going to change their life.

If they don’t act with you, they’re going to continue to suffer. When you come from a place of wanting to serve, and knowing that if they don’t do this they’re going to continue to suffer, watch what happens.

Watch what happens to the way you speak with people. Watch what happens to the level of certainty and confidence you bring to your conversations. Watch what happens to the people who will now be lined up to work with you.

People pay for certainty.

We provide certainty. If you’re offering something for $100, that’s not very certain. If you say, “Listen, if you invest $5,000, I guarantee you will transform,” and back it up with results, you’ll see a massive difference in the conversions and how people enroll.

If you’re wavering and thinking, “I think I might be able to help you.” You need to go back to the drawing board, look at yourself in the mirror, and do the work. Do the work on yourself.

Build your belief. Build your program, make it even better so the likelihood of their success is inevitable.

How to charge premium prices (even if you’re not a guru)

Now, how do you charge premium prices even if you’re not a guru?

Something that frustrates me is that so many amazing experts, health coaches, trainers, practitioners, you name it, have an expertise, have gone to school, have experience, know how to solve someone’s pain, but still feel like they’re not good enough.They feel that they must have a platform, influence, and social proof before people will even do business with them.

That’s nonsense. In real life, if you had a gym or a clinic none of that stuff would even come into the picture. Someone would come into your office, you’d have a consult, and if you felt they’d be a good fit and you could help them, it’d be a done deal. For some reason, online, we think that we must have a huge influence, have been on TV, and have New York Times bestselling books.

None of that matters. I’ve done all that stuff and I’m grateful that I did, not because of how it’s impacted people’s lives, but because of the wisdom I’ve gained from it. On episode 60, we looked at the Perfect Client Pipeline, the four-step process to building a business that is predictable and profitable. It’s an amazing episode, if you haven’t listened to it already.

That’s how our whole business was built and that’s exactly what we teach our clients to do in their own businesses. When you do that, you’re able to charge premium prices.

Here’s how: You create the desired outcome for your client. That’s it. When you obsessively focus on how to make the best possible experience for someone so that they get the result that they want, that is how you can command premium prices.

If you ask, “What are other people charging?” or put out some stuff here and there, you’re not going to get that.

It is a choice. In any market, there will always be people who are willing to pay top dollar. There will always be people who are flying first class and there will always be people who stay at the Four Seasons Hotel instead of Motel 8.

Getting to the top

The decision about what type of business you want to run is 100% up to you. If you don’t feel you can command higher prices, too bad. That’s something you must work on and get through. If you don’t feel like people are going to pay you for that, then they’re not.

If you believe in yourself, and what you can do for other people, then you will with certainty put yourself into the market and provide a solution to the right people. That is the place you want to be.

One more thing. There’s very little competition at the top. If you’re selling a course or a challenge for $100 and you’re looking at what everyone else is charging and they’re charging $77, don’t drop your price. Otherwise, we’re going to do what happened to information over the past couple years, which is a race to the bottom.

Guess where there’s not a lot of competition? At the top.

It’s your choice. It is your choice, but your choice must be based around producing a result for your clients. Now, I with 1,000% certainty with every fiber in my being know that if someone works with me in our workshop or in our Luminaries Mastermind, and they’re the perfect client, I will transform their business.

There’s not even a shred of doubt. I say that with absolute certainty, vigor, and confidence. I have no problem telling people, “Hey listen, if you’re serious about this and this is what you want to do, I can help you. If you’re not, I can’t help you.” That’s it. It’s very simple.

You must take that position. You must know that your stuff is the stuff. That your solution is the solution to that person’s problem. If you’re not there yet, you got to go back to the drawing board and make it better. Be better. It all must come down to serving and impacting your clients.

When you focus on service, the money follows. Don’t worry about, “How am I going to make the money?” Instead, focus and worry about, “How do I make this program amazing and make the results almost impossible not to achieve for these clients?”

Charging premium prices is all about better serving your clients. Thus, you’ll make a lot more money. You’ll get to live a greater life. You won’t have to worry about selling $10 eBooks and having thousands upon thousands of customers to worry about.

Work with fewer customers at a much higher price point. They’re a joy to work with. You’ll love connecting, coaching, teaching, and serving them instead of building out funnels and all the other nonsense that internet marketers tell us to do.

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That’s my little rant/education for today. We’ve got some great episodes coming your way this week. Mike Whitfield, one of my longstanding buddies from the info-marketing space, is going to be talking about how to create a no-brainer product that other influencers are happy to promote. For the past seven or eight years he’s been selling follow along workouts.

He has carved himself into a very competitive market so that other people like myself can promote his stuff to our audience.

On Friday, we’re talking with Aaron Hinde from LifeAid/FitAid, an awesome beverage company. They sponsor the CrossFit Games and other cool things. He’ll talk about how he’s built up that company.

If you have not yet joined us on our Seven Figure Health Business Blueprint Training, head on over to HealthpreneurGroup.com/training.

If you’re vibing with this premium price stuff, want to serve people at a deeper level, want to build a business that doesn’t suck the life out of you and gives you more predictability (through consistent lead generation), and want more fulfillment and profit, then it all starts with this training.

I’ll see you there. Thank you once again for joining me on the episode today. If you haven’t subscribed to the podcast, be sure to do so today.

Transcription

Healthpreneurs, welcome back to the show. Today you are going to meet one of the original gangsters, and I say gangster in the nicest way possible. Our guest today is Pat Rigbsy.

I’ve known Pat loosely since I started online back in 2006. He was one of the first people I was aware of building a fitness business, specifically online, so he’s been around for a long time. His wife Holly and I know each other. Holly also does some great stuff with her online fitness business.

I’m excited to feature Pat in today’s episode.

Pat is a business coach who helps health and fitness entrepreneurs build their ideal business. He’s built over 25 businesses himself in the fitness industry, including two Entrepreneur Franchise 500 award-winning franchises and a three-time Inc 5,000 company, and he’s also authored or co-authored 11 different bestselling books.

Not too bad, right? One of the cool things he’ll mention in this episode is that he has written a daily newsletter for fitness entrepreneurs for over 11 years without missing a single day. Talk about consistency. That’s incredible.

He’ll share some of the most important and fundamental lessons that he’s discovered over this amazing journey. They are fundamental traits and attributes necessary for building a successful business and life.

It’s going to be another great episode. With that said, let’s welcome Pat Rigbsy on to the show.

Welcome to the Healthpreneur Podcast, Pat. How’s it going?

Pat:                        It’s going great. I’m excited to be here.

Yuri:                      I’m excited to have you because you are one of the original gangsters. You’ve been in this game for a long, long time. Many people in this space fizzle out, and I’ve realized over time that longevity is a huge asset.

I want to commend you and your wife, Holly, for all the amazing work you’ve done since I’ve known you. You two have been at this for a long time, which means that you’re doing something that’s making a difference in people’s lives.

“The Consistency Factor”

Pat:                        I appreciate that a great deal, and I know Holly does as well. I think one of the hallmarks of the people I see doing well is that they have an element of consistency to them. They keep showing up and trying to do good work consistently, and over time it pays off. That’s not one of the hacks or tricks anybody tends to talk about, but if I look at the people that I admire and have made a real difference, they’ve all shown up and done meaningful things consistently.

Yuri:                      Yes. It reminds me of the Babe Ruth analogy. You could strike out 1,000 times and hit one home run – maybe that’s that one product or service that catches wildfire – or you could do things consistently, like singles or doubles, so every time you’re up for bat you make a difference over time.

In your experience, is consistency a learned skill or something that is inherent in a lot of people?

Pat:                        It’s a little bit of both. I don’t want that to be a cop out answer, but I think that, along the way, we all learn that showing up and doing things over and over tends to pay off. We all understand the concept of habits.

I was a college baseball coach before I got into the entrepreneurial stuff, and I think anybody who was involved in sports during their upbringing understands that you must show up and do the work every day if you want to perform on the field. If you’re going to be a great student you must show up, do good work in class, and pay attention to get a positive outcome when it comes to a test or report card.

It would be hard for me to say that we’re born with that, but I think that it’s something that we’re exposed to very early on in life. We get into trouble when we deviate from these fundamentals and look for a shortcut without seeing that a shortcut might just augment fundamentals, not replace them.

You, Holly or I, or any of the other great entrepreneurs that you’ve had the opportunity to spend time with on this podcast are always looking for ways to be more effective, efficient, and accelerate the process. But we do that in conjunction with great work and consistency, and we make sure we’re doing all the fundamentals to have an impact and run a successful business.

Yuri:                      I notice that if someone is a trainer, nutritionist, doctor, or technician, and they’re good at what they do, they start running a business and need to take on a whole new skill set. In some cases, they’ll have a product or an idea, set up a sales page, it won’t work, and they’ll become disheartened and discouraged. This leads down a road of inconsistency with the things that make them successful.

How do you get someone through the little failures time and time again so they stay consistent enough to succeed?

Setting expectations and celebrating small successes

Pat:                        I default to a couple things. First, I set realistic expectations and an understanding that nobody’s great the first time they try something. You must be willing to be bad at something before you’ll ever be great at it.

Set realistic expectations early on about what success looks like and what a win would look like. Getting a page up or getting a product out could be a success because you finally broke through and finished something when many people just leave it in the idea stage. If you’ve finished something, maybe that is a victory. Setting realistic expectations and building on them in a small, cumulative way is the first thing I look at.

Second, I connect anything that I ask somebody to do, anybody I’m coaching, to a new task, project, or activity I have experience in so I’ve got a frame of reference. That way, I’ve got a realistic way to view and understand it. If you’re a great technician, be it as a personal trainer, chiropractor, or whatever else, you didn’t start day one of your certification or school and say, “I’m ready to be world-class at my chosen profession.”

You had to accept that there was a process to go through, and you didn’t get to circumvent the process to get to where you wanted to go.

I ask if they are willing to go through a process. Yes, we can expedite it because they don’t have to figure it all out on their own. I help with that. But I ask if they are willing to go through the process to get to where they’re trying to go, or if they’re just trying to jump to the outcome. If they’re trying to jump to the outcome, they’re setting themselves up for disappointment.

Yuri:                      Great advice. Patience and persistence are so valuable for success and fulfillment in a business.

Pat:                        Let me add one other thing. So many people that come to me are trying to go online. I always phrase it as their “virtual second location.”

My logic is that I always want them to understand that they must treat it with the same focus, allocation of time, resources and care that they did their first location. If they’re not willing to make that commitment, the odds of it being tremendously successful are almost non-existent. By saying it that way, it resonates well.

Yuri:                      That makes sense. When people think of an online business, they don’t think of it with the same degree of seriousness. They think, “Hey, I’m just going to whip up a website and start making money.” It’s probably more challenging to make money online than it is offline. That’s a nice perspective shift.

From your experience working with a lot of coaching clients, what do you think are some mistakes or common trends people tend to fall into?

Common mistakes people make when moving to an online business model

Pat:                        People often don’t understand the benefits they have offline, so they default to those same bad habits online. For example, a personal trainer offline has the luxury, in many cases, of having recurring revenue. Somebody walks in, signs up for an annual or monthly program, and they suddenly have recurring revenue. They don’t have to be great at marketing.

They don’t have to be great at client acquisition. They can run a solid sustainable business with sporadic marketing, and some mediocre referrals because they don’t have to have that many people to have a healthy small business.

Compare that to a business that needs thousands of customers every month to survive, like a traditional retail business, and there are some advantages to this training-based business.

Another thing people often ignore is the fact that physical businesses have a very specific local target market. To gain traction online, they must do the same thing. Locally , they can cast a broader net for who their ideal client is by demographic, goal, pain point, or whatever, because they have a built-in niche. Even just the convenience of getting there makes a difference.

No matter how good someone in Arizona is, I’m not going to train with them three days a week from Louisville, Kentucky. They have that built in, but I don’t think they recognize that. They’ll say, “I want to sell a fat loss product online because that’s what I do locally. I’m really great with fat loss clients.” I’ll ask, “How can we distill that down to a more targeted person? You’re really great with fat loss clients in Middletown, Kentucky but since we don’t have the luxury of just having Middletown, how can we narrow that even further?”

You must consistently get out there to grow an audience, market, and build a following, and narrow the focus on who you’re going to serve. Not doing those two things is something I see almost every time I get somebody who wants coaching or has come through a course and want to get their first product up online. They almost always fall into one, if not both, of those two traps.

Yuri:                      I’ve fallen into that trap myself. When I started online, I loved working with soccer players and athletes. That was my bread and butter offline. Online I thought I’d just serve everyone. That was an uphill battle. I wouldn’t recommend it. Stay niche.

Specifically, for online entrepreneurs, what are one or two skillsets necessary to succeed in this competitive space?

Skillsets necessary to succeed online: The Consistency Factor and narrowing

Pat:                        We already talked about The Consistency Factor. When anybody talks to me about doing Facebook Live, podcasting, or any other marketing approach, the people who do best are the ones that constantly do it every day.

We can look back to the beginning of the fitness online entrepreneur landscape at guys like Mike Geary. They weren’t just running Google AdWords two days a week. They weren’t running them for a week and shutting them off for three.

They showed up consistently, kept fine-tuning things, and improved upon their approach. They put out articles to improve their traction, be it from an SEO standpoint or to provide great content for affiliates over and over.

I spoke with Lewis Howes last week. I interviewed him on my podcast, and was in his office when he said, “When I started my podcast, I committed to doing one year, regardless of how it went. I committed to doing one year.” I see that so often with people.

The people who do well pin their ears back and use that consistency to their advantage. They know they’re getting so many more repetitions than everybody else, so they’re bound to improve.

I think that is paramount. When somebody asks if they should use Facebook Live, I remind them that the successful people on Facebook Live aren’t showing up once a week. They’re showing up four, five, six day, even multiple times a day, every week. They’re gaining that snowball effect, that critical mass, and they’re also learning and improving. They’re getting feedback.

The second thing to understand is that you must start narrow. You must start narrow because you can go broader locally because you’re just narrowed by geography. It’s just there.

Think about this podcast. This information will be valuable to any entrepreneur who’s moving online, no doubt, but you’ve narrowed it to health and fitness-focused entrepreneurs so you can speak specifically to them.

That’s so much of what I’ve done in the business coaching landscape. The stuff that I do would be valuable to a financial planner, restaurant owner, or whoever else, but I can’t speak specifically to them and gain enough attraction.

If I water down my message, it’s not meaningful enough to gain or maintain somebody’s attention.

Narrowing is a big deal. People fear missing out if they narrow.

My wife, Holly, launched Fit Yummy Mummy, an info product-based business in 2007. She just focused on busy moms who wanted to work out at home. That’s it. If she would have said, “I need to be able to reach every woman,” she would have instantly watered down the message, it wouldn’t have had nearly as much meaning, and she wouldn’t have gotten as much traction.

You already touched on it how tough it is online. The competitive landscape is so different. Typically, as a personal trainer, you don’t have competitors in your market spending $20,000-40,000 a day on advertising, right?

Yuri:                      Totally.

Pat:                        So if you’re going to win, win by being the best solution for a very specific audience.

Yuri:                      Great advice. Narrowing down and being consistent. I’m happy you said that. Many people want to hear the latest tactic. None of that stuff matters if you’re not consistent with it or if you’re not narrow enough in your message and audience to speak to someone in a meaningful way.

In your own entrepreneurial journey, looking back at when you started and where you are today, what is one big challenge or series of challenges that you had to overcome? What did you learn from that?

The struggle to say “no,” establishing guardrails, and relationship-building

Pat:                        The biggest obstacle that I’ve encountered, is one I created for myself. The entrepreneurial gene I have made it a battle to say no.

It was a battle to say no to things I thought had potential, speaking engagements where I might’ve been able to get in front of the right people, or business opportunities with a better track record that I had. The more success I had, the more opportunities presented themselves that would’ve been over the moon years ago. Saying yes to too many things made it so that I wasn’t giving my best effort, or the needed focus to any one thing. At that point, you can’t do it at the level that you should or could.

Looking back, I’ve owned over 30 businesses in the fitness, health, and sports industries. In some instances, I’d not only be an owner but the functional CEO in about a dozen of them at once. At the time, I’m sure I was thinking, “I’m doing fine. I’m working hard. I’m moving things forward,” but in hindsight, I was never able to give my full professional attention to any one of them. I think I could have been two or three times better had they had that, and it’s a battle I still face today.

I’ve established guardrails that help me. It’s like a decision-filter for what I’m willing to do, what I’m not willing to do, and what’s a fit. I think that’s a challenge because saying yes to okay things is the enemy of doing great work.

Yuri:                      Totally. It’s a challenge especially for us in the health space because a lot of us are people-pleasers. We want to serve and help others and have a tough time saying no. I can relate to that and I’m sure a lot of listeners can, too. You’re not alone, my friend.

What do you think has been the number one factor for your success?

Pat:                        Relationship-based marketing and business.

I’ve written a daily newsletter for 11 years and haven’t missed a day. I see it as sending a note to my friends to make their business, life, and day a little bit better. I just show up and try to treat people well, add value to them professionally and, because we are small business owners, there’s carryover to personal value as well.

If there’s anything that stands out, it’s the relationships. I have people that have been customers and clients of mine since 2006 that are still around. I’ve got relationships with colleagues and friends from as early as late 2004, and some of them have turned into successful, lucrative, and fun opportunities to grow our businesses in tandem.

I understand that when I talk about things like consistency and relationships, it’s not the shiny object or the tactical stuff. But I think that makes all the shiny object and tactical stuff infinitely more valuable.

Yuri:                      I completely agree. That’s one of the biggest things that I’ve realized. The inflection point of my business was when I said, “I’m going to get away from the computer and actually meet people in person.” You can’t take that away.

No matter what happens in your business, you always have those relationships, assuming you treat them well.

I want to talk about the newsletter that you’ve written daily for 11 years. People must be thinking, “Oh my God. I don’t even want to write once a week.”

How do you come up with ideas and content to write an email for your audience every single day?

The writing process, gathering content, and finding inspiration everywhere

Pat:                        I think it’s easier to write daily than once a week. If we write once a week, we feel like it must be perfect. You think, “This is going to be my connection to my audience. I’ve got to make this great.” For me, doing it daily takes some of the pressure off. If it’s not the best thing I ever wrote, well, I get another shot tomorrow.

Any of us that are in a service-based world have enough experiences to know that, if we’re observant, there are always things to write about. I always leverage the time I spend with a client, Mastermind group, or Facebook group for one of my coaching programs, to see what people are asking there. I’ll try to answer those questions or provide some insight.

But I also know that they’re not alone in asking that, so I’ll try to share it with a broader audience. If I’m reading things, I’m making observations about things that happen outside of the fitness industry and how they transfer into the industry so I can share that. I approach the newsletter knowing that my goal is to share just one idea, one thought, that makes somebody’s day a little bit better and helps them move one step closer to their goal.

There’s no pressure to write the best article that ever existed about customer service. It might just be one idea to improve a client experience, or a story that may drive a point home. If you’re observant, it’s everywhere. Everywhere around you is the potential for something to share with your audience, be it a newsletter or a Facebook Live video.

You must be observant, and you must document. I carry a little notepad with me everywhere and if I don’t have it I’ll jot it down in the notes on my phone. The biggest challenge I have is not writing three a day because I’ve got more than enough topics to write about. But how much does somebody want to see me in their inbox?

Yuri:                      That’s awesome. That could also be leveraged if someone wanted to do Facebook Live. They could take those same topics and do a video if they wanted to. I love how you talked about extracting life. There are so many things that happen to us daily that can apply to someone else. Good stuff, Pat.

You ready for the rapid five?

The Rapid Five

Pat:                        I’m ready. I’m a little anxious since I don’t know what I’m getting into here, but we’ll work through it.

Yuri:                      Oh yeah. It’s murky water here. Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

Pat:                        The ever-constant inner tug-of-war about saying no to opportunities.

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

Pat:                        Connection.

Yuri:                      That’s probably the most popular answer out of all the people we’ve interviewed. It’s like 85-90%. That emotional intelligence, that connection, it’s huge for us entrepreneurs.

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

Pat:                        Writing. I was an awful writer. In fact, if I told any of my English teachers that I’ve written a dozen books and write a daily newsletter, they would be mortified.

Yuri:                      Repetitions. That’s where it’s at.

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

Pat:                        I do some sort of physical activity. I get a quick drink then do something to get moving. It might be pulling a sled or walking on the treadmill.

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

Pat:                        I’m happy.

Yuri:                      There you have it. Awesome, Pat. Thank you so much. This has been a lot of fun. I know the listeners will get a lot of value out of your wisdom. What is the best place for our listeners to follow you online?

Pat:                        PatRigbsy.com is where it all starts if somebody wants to check out that daily newsletter, or connect with me through any of the social media channels that I hang out on.

Yuri:                      Perfect. Pat, once again, thank you so much for taking the time to join us. It’s always great to connect with someone who’s done such great work for our industry, and I know our audience will appreciate this.

Pat:                        Thank you for having me. It’s been my pleasure.

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Yuri’s take

 What an amazing guy, right? I want to go back to that 11 years of writing a daily newsletter. That is impressive. Consistency in what you do is so important.

Bruce Lee said something like, “I’m not afraid of the man who can do a thousand kicks one time. I’m afraid of the man who does one kick a thousand times.” It’s that repetition, that consistency, that forms grooves in our nervous system.

When we’re repetitively do specific movements as athletes, it ingrains into our brain and nervous system. The same thing happens in business and daily life.

It’s those daily actions – getting up early, writing one page a day, shooting one Facebook Live video a day, creating a message that’ll attract your ideal client or support your clients – that build up and make a big, big difference.

I’ll share one of the most powerful habits that I’ve built into my life that has made all the difference for me. It’s committing to getting up early. You see, I’ve gone through peaks and valleys of getting up early and then sometimes sleeping in. The struggle has always been that I love getting up early, but hate getting out of bed.

If you can relate, you know what it’s all about. But here’s the thing: I wrote all three of my published books in the span of five months. The way I did that was by waking up at 5:00 and writing from 5:00 until 7:00 every single day for a combined total of five months.

Other people might have to leave their businesses, find a cabin in the woods, and lock themselves in there for months to write a book. For me, that never made sense because I had a business to run at the same time. Having those extra two hours in the morning just for writing was huge.

I kept that up for about two years, fell off the bandwagon, and about eight months ago I recommitted to it. I needed a bigger reason why, and I recognized that I was simply a better human being when I got up early.

Now, I wake up at 5:45-6:00. A new Starbucks just opened close to where I live, and it’s a perfect Starbucks for work. It’s built for people who want to work outside the house. It’s great. I get there first thing in the morning at 6:00 when they open, and do my most important work from 6:00 until 8:00 in the morning, seven days a week.

That’s 60 extra hours I’ve created for myself in my month. That’s more than 720 hours per year. Just imagine how much amazing magic you can create in that time. What I do in the mornings might vary. I might be writing ad copy, emails, or working on strategy, but the most important things that I need to work on happen first thing in the morning. Even if the rest of the day was a write-off, that first two hours were magic time.

That’s the big thing for me in terms of consistency that’s made all the difference. So, what’s your thing? What’s your consistent habit that you’re building, or want to build? I want to challenge you and I want to encourage you to stick to that because it does make a difference over time.

Speaking of habits and building success, we’ve got a great training. If you haven’t attended yet, I strongly recommend you do so if you want to grow a business that predictably attracts your best, most perfect, high-paying clients that are happy to work with you, and you want to work with them closely without doing one-on-one coaching, to impact them at a deep level while building a very profitable and enjoyable business.

I’ll walk you through the whole four-step business model called the Perfect Client Pipeline inside this training. Learn all about it over at HealthpreneurGroup.com/training. It’s completely free to attend, and you’ll find it very useful.

Pat and I had a lot of fun bringing this to you. Go out there and continue to be great, do great, and I’ll see you next week.

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https://patrigsby.com/

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