Transcription

Hey everyone! Welcome back to the show. I’m excited to bring an amazing guest to you today. His name is Dr. Daniel Stickler. You’re going to listen to a medically-trained doctor who has taken it upon himself to master marketing and business development.

He’s going to share some of the lessons he’s learned after pouring over $1.5 million into marketing his business over the past several years. You’re going to learn the highs and lows and what he’s learned along the way.

Let me give you some of his background. He’s a future-focused visionary and a human potential evolutionary thought leader. He’s the co-founder and chief medical officer at The Apeiron Center for Human Potential, and The Apeiron Academy. He also serves as medical director of the Neurohacker Collective, which has many popular products for nootropics, brain health, and so forth.

He was very disheartened by our current sick care system, so he created the human potential medicine; an integrated biospherical systems approach that combines the scientific grounding and expertise of modern medicine, leading edge genetic and epigenetic science, and advanced neuro-psychophysiological modalities to synergistically expand human capacity.

Now, I know there are a lot of big words there. But basically, he’s on the cutting edge of getting down to the root, at a genetic level, of what makes people sick and how we can get them well.

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

Daniel:                 Doing great, Yuri. I’m glad to be on.

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Yuri:                      I’m happy to have you here! We are always excited to talk with amazing people in our space, whether they are medical doctors, personal trainers, or health coaches. It’s great to highlight people like you who are doing some awesome stuff.

What you’re doing is pretty cutting-edge, pretty leading-edge. What does your business model look like? If doctors or one-on-one practitioners are listening to this, can you give them a better sense of how you serve your audience using the Internet, and technology?

Daniel’s background, mission, vision, and mindset

Daniel:                 It comes down to our mission and vision. And our mission and vision is to change the whole landscape, the whole paradigm, of healthcare. We look at healthcare from a disease model, and the disease model is beyond repair. It’s at a point where we need a new model, and that’s what we’ve been doing in my medical practice.

That’s the business of medical practice. Because it’s a concierge practice, it requires marketing skills, and as a business it needs an entrepreneurial mindset. We also do training, where we train health and wellness professionals in this new model.

The Internet has been the number one resource for us in getting this message out. It’s amazing. We are training people from all over the world because of this Internet marketing aspect.

Yuri:                      That’s cool. A lot of doctors out there are not very savvy when it comes to business or marketing. Was that a challenge initially, or was that always something that was part of your wheelhouse?

Daniel:                 Being a surgeon, my ego told me that I could do anything I wanted to do. Fortunately and unfortunately for physicians, ego plays a big role. You think, “I’ve done this. I can do that. It’s just marketing. It’s just business.” We come from that world where you hang a shingle and they’ll come.

You’re never going to be unemployed as a physician, typically. But getting away from an insurance care model and moving into concierge services where people pay cash opens a whole new world. It’s eye-opening for physicians that get into this.

When I started this, I had no background in marketing or running a business. I had some major pitfalls along the way. I’ve had this entrepreneurial spirit all along with my medical practice, and it’s evolved over time. But some hard lessons would’ve been short-cutted quite a bit by some assistance, if I had been willing to ask or look for it.

Business, marketing, challenges, and getting into concierge services

Yuri:                      I bet. What were some of the initial challenges when you started your business? What was extremely foreign to you?

Daniel:                 I was doing laparoscopic gastric bypass, the weight loss surgery. A lot of people would shop around for weight loss surgeons, so I realized that I needed an Internet space for that. A lot of people pay cash, too, so it was a market where I had to get the message out. It wasn’t a competitive market, necessarily.

I needed to get in front of people that were looking for it. There were some hard lessons. I got on forums, and didn’t do Facebook. Initially, we were focused on forums, giving talks, and things like that.

It didn’t do well that way. If I had known how to do it right from the get-go, it would’ve made a big difference in the amount of time I spent on it and how busy my practice was.

But still, my practice grew.

We have this assumption that if you have something great and put it out there, people will find it. You can have the greatest program in the world, but if nobody knows about it, you’ll be in the homeless shelter. It’s hard to grasp that.

You think you’ve created an amazing thing and wonder why people aren’t coming. It’s because they don’t know.

That marketing aspect gives them the ability to see it.

Yuri:                      Yes, the field of dreams doesn’t happen online.

Daniel:                 No.

Yuri:                      If you have a physical clinic, maybe people will walk in. But not online. That doesn’t happen.

You mentioned forums as being something you did initially. Were there one or two big things that moved the needle for you guys to help get in front of more people?

Daniel:                 I think it was my transition. I started doing age management medicine as a hobby during my surgical career. I trained at the Cenegenics Institute, and they spend an entire day on marketing. I learned how to market, and to immediately respond when somebody reaches out for a contact.

I learned to have a series of email responders when they don’t respond, or after 30 days. I’d never even heard of that before. It was eye-opening for me to see marketing done for health. I hadn’t experienced it because you have no business training whatsoever in medical school.

You can get that in chiropractic because they rely a lot on marketing. But in medical school, there is nothing on that.

There’s no business training for physicians. So, you wing it. There’s a lot of trial and error and money spent on things that don’t work. Eventually, you hit something.

But learning what they taught at Cenegenics in the marketing and business development made a big difference. Even just using SEOs to name pictures on your website with keywords, which was something I never considered. My pictures on my website were just a series of numbers followed by a .jpg.

I had no idea how simple it was to build your SEO without having to invest a lot of money. People have the impression that you must invest a lot of money to search this out, but I’ve learned techniques over the years like looking at the people who like your page.

Creep on them a little bit. Find out where they shop, or what music they like. Learn the avatar of the people who follow your website. You’ll have your marketing niche right there, and free. You don’t have to spend a lot of money to have somebody identify that for you.

Determining your market and effectively getting your message in front of them

Yuri:                      True. Did you do those initial things yourself? Or did other people on the team do it for you, allowing you to just share your message?

Daniel:                 Well, it was a mixed bag. When I first launched my practice, I got all excited about business stuff and jumped full bore into it. I had money that the banks were willing to throw at me because I was a surgeon making a lot of money.

I took out big loans to hire a marketing firm and I think they spent $20,000 on just the logo and its patent. Before I knew it, I was almost $500,000 deep into developing the marketing.

I’d get the bills three months later and see that they had lunch with somebody, or went out to lunch to discuss us, and charged us for the lunch.

Yuri:                      Oh my goodness.

Daniel:                 I looked at that and thought, “Holy cow.” It was three months later, so I couldn’t stop it right then. I stopped it once I saw it, but I had already done three months of spending money on this stuff.

It left a bad taste in my mouth, so I completely moved away from asking anybody for help. I wanted to do it all myself.

I went from one extreme to another and finally started to settle into a middle zone. I said, “You know what? Be smart about this. Just shop for the people that really know what they’re doing and can help you.”

I spent all this time donating money to Facebook, as my buddy Nicholas Kusmich tells me. He is a true expert in that area and knows how to AB test. You get the money in initially to find out what ads are working and what aren’t, then you put your money towards the one that is working.

I had no idea. I just thought, “Oh, this is a cool ad,” and I’d throw it up there.

That was another hard lesson. We created websites and content that bragged about what we did and what we offered. They weren’t about the person reading it.

The lesson was to understand that you create websites and ads for the person. When they look at it, they should see how you’ll help them. You shouldn’t just say, “We’re awesome. Look at what we do.”

That changed how we went about marketing, creating websites, and creating landing pages. We realized it was about them, not us.

Your message and content should be about your client, not about you

Yuri:                      That’s a huge take away. It’s must always be about them. I’m happy you made that realization because as you mentioned before, for a lot of physicians and doctors, ego plays a big role in a lot of aspects.

The tendency might be to say, “Hey, look at me, I’m so cool. Look at all these degrees I have,” but no one cares about that. They care about their problems and how you can help them solve them.

That’s cool to hear from your perspective.

Daniel:                 Even in my free consult, I offer 30 minutes to talk to people to find if they are a client I want to take and if we have a program that matches their goals. In those conversations, I initially would spend 20 of the 30 minutes talking about what we offer.

I transitioned several years ago to just the opposite. I led them on with questions, and they spent 20 minutes talking about themselves, and I spent 10 minutes talking about my programs. My close rate went from about 20% to 80% when I did that.

That’s the thing: We get out there and tell everybody about what we do, but they just want to know what it’ll do for them. It’s hard to learn that, because all you want to do is say, “This program is so awesome. You can’t believe what we offer here.”

But if it’s not about them, it doesn’t make a difference.

Yuri:                      I can’t tell you how many things I have launched that have failed because of disobeying that law when I first started. I still see clients of ours, or just websites in general, looking at it from a third-party objective perspective, which is a lot easier than when you’re in it yourself.

It’s important to have that perspective because a lot of wasted time and money can go down that path. If you can avoid that by clarifying the message so people care, it’ll make a huge difference.

As you said, it’s the same idea with strategy or consulting calls.  It’s all about them, it’s never about your stuff.

If you were to start all over again, what would you do differently? What’s the first thing you would do out of the gates, knowing what you know now?

Building a business model, the value of lessons, and persistence

Daniel:                 That’s a great question. That’s exactly what we teach our coaches in our training academy right now.

We teach the science of genetics and epigenetics, and apply that in a systems-based program. A large part of our training is on business model.

We ask: How do you spend money wisely? How do you assess whether stuff is working or not?

Coaches learn valuable lessons from my, probably, $1.5 million in investments over the years in failed outcomes that made a big difference. Looking back, we tried to launch a franchise, from scratch, back in 2004 or 2005.

We had a great medical program and we decided to open small franchises doing nutrition, weight loss, and exercise in the facilities. We entered the world of becoming a franchisor. Just the legal work alone was $60,000.

We went into it without a working model. I look back at it now, and I wonder what I was thinking. We hadn’t even created a model that showed that it was what people wanted. We just assumed that we love it, it works well, and it was a great program.  We just assumed everybody would love it without testing it.

We opened our first facility and it floundered. We had some dedicated people, but it just never took off. We realized that, while we thought it was great, the public didn’t want it.

We tried telling them what they want, instead of listening to what they want. That was another failed business venture of mine that was a great lesson learned. It cost a lot to learn that lesson, but I carry that lesson with me all the time.

When I look at things, I think, “Is it something they want?”

Our academy is in a seed funding round because we’re going to launch it to a much bigger world audience. We have a model that works. We have 90 coaches in training right now from all over the world.

They are implementing the business practice with great success already.

I look at other genetic companies and am left with a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. There are companies that have started off with a business model and big-name investors. Two companies do something like what we do, but not to the same degree. We are a much more in-depth and scientifically and medically sound program. But they’re both funded at $30 and $40 million.

And they haven’t even created a business model that works. Because they have big investors that believe in them, they’ve got the money to do it. They are creating a program from a business model, whereas we’ve created the program and are creating the business model to move forward with it.

My opinion, based on my lessons learned, is that this is the model to move forward. You’ll have much greater success with a model that works from the get-go, rather then moving it into it with a larger-reaching high-investment model.

Yuri:                      It makes sense to help one person before you can help 1,000. Having proof of concept is important. I think there’s a lot of wisdom that comes with time, years of experience, and money spent.

There’s a direct correlation there. If you’ve invested $1.5 million in lessons learned, there’s a lot of value for people taking your course.

What do you think is one of the top traits or skills entrepreneurs must possess for lasting success?

Daniel:                 Persistence.

There are dark days for every entrepreneur. It’s never just success after success after you decide to become an entrepreneur. Failure should be expected. Entrepreneurs are a crazy sort of people.

I forget what the numbers are, but I think 2% of new startups go big time and become a successful company. Yet, every single entrepreneur in the space thinks that they are that 2%. It’s true insanity, but that’s the passion that drives the entrepreneur.

When you look at it, that’s not a very good success rate. But the entrepreneurs who are successful persist. They create one thing, and if it doesn’t work, they create something else.

Eventually, that 2% added up over time will hit on something. It’s just a matter of pushing through it. I’ve had times where I struggled to pay rent to just keep moving forward with the business. You’ve got to be able to accept that as an entrepreneur.

Unless you have a family fund that keeps you moving, you’re going to have some financial struggles as an entrepreneur in the early going.

Yuri:                      Totally. I think I remember Elon Musk saying that when he sold his shares of PayPal, he also asked a friend for rent. He reinvested all his money into SpaceX, or whatever else he was working on.

It’s true. I call it delusional optimism. You must have this belief to keep persisting. And I completely agree with you, that persistence is massive.

Do you feel that there’s a difference between persistence and patience?

Daniel:                 I don’t think any entrepreneur is patient. I don’t believe patience is a trait that makes a successful entrepreneur. I think it’s just the belief that it’s going to work, and the work ethic to make it happen.

The vision to shift a paradigm; the mindset of illness vs. the mindset of health

Yuri:                      Nice. What’s most exciting for you from the business perspective, and what’s your vision for what you’re looking to achieve?

Daniel:                 It’s exciting to have a greater goal than to just make money.

It’s not about making money. Most entrepreneurs in the space are there for the money and they don’t have the passion to drive a business and be persistent with it.

We are shifting a paradigm that has existed for a century; the disease model paradigm. Our passion is to show people that there’s an alternative. Healthy people, and even people with disease, are not relegated to that life.

Science shows that we can change outcomes through epigenetic expressions, nutrition, and fitness. Yet, it’s not taught that way in the health and wellness community.

Even in the alternative health community, they say they are not about disease model, but they are. They still promote things like, “Is your thyroid diseased? Do you need detoxification?” They say you’re sick and need help.

I like clients that say, “You’re pretty awesome to begin with, but there are ways to be better.” Our coaches are enjoying those clients, but it’s a new paradigm of health. People don’t realize that this is out there, and we are creating businesses around it. Our own health coaches have independent practices that are building around this model, which is exciting for us.

Yuri:                      That’s awesome. You mentioned that there still a degree of sick care to the alternative space. For the most part, humans are retroactive. They wait for crap to hit the fan before they act. A lot of people are motivated by fears.

Then there’s the other side of the spectrum, which are the optimizers, who see the value in optimizing where they are. Do you think we’ll ever shift to the optimization side of things, or do you think there will always be that spectrum that includes people who need something to happen to be motivated to act?

Daniel:                 There’s a split in the road there. That’s why I’m saying it’s a new paradigm, rather than trying to fix the old. They don’t go together. You either have the mindset of illness, or you have the mindset of health.

If you have diabetes, the sick care model says you have diabetes and need intervention. We say you have insulin resistance relating to a lifestyle pattern that isn’t conducive to your genetic expressions. We determine what we can do to optimize the outcome. You can sleep better, reduce stress, and eat less simple carbohydrates. Those kinds of things will resolve the insulin resistance that’s throwing the body out of homeostasis.

It’s a different perspective on it. I enjoy working with clients that have the perspective of optimization rather than the ones that say, “I’m sick, I need to be fixed.” It’s a whole different model, and it’s much more rewarding from my perspective.

Yuri:                      I completely agree. I’m sure you’ve found that the people who are optimizers take responsibility for their health versus those who are on the other side that believe someone else is going to fix them.

They play the victim. And that’s not a lot of fun to work with.

Daniel:                 No.

The Rapid Five

Yuri:                      Daniel, this has been awesome. Thank you so much for sharing. Are you ready for the rapid-fire, the Rapid Five?

Daniel:                 I’m ready.

Yuri:                      You have no idea what these questions are. Whatever comes to mind, top of mind, is probably the best answer.

Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

Daniel:                 Procrastination, for sure.

Yuri:                      Nice. I’m with you on that one.

Number two, what is your biggest strength?

Daniel:                 My belief system. When I believe in something, it is all-occupying in my thought processes and I make it happen.

Yuri:                      Nice.

What’s one skill you’ve become dangerously good at to grow your business?

Daniel:                 Managing money, and understanding investment versus ROI.

Yuri:                      Nice.

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

Daniel:                 I typically meditate or work out.

Yuri:                      Do you do guided meditation, or on your own in quiet?

Daniel:                 I use the Muse headband.

I don’t have enough alpha activity, and it helps me get into that state. I like the neuro-feedback aspect of the Muse. I’m a strong ADD type, and my brain tends to wander. I sit in meditation, find myself down a road minutes later, and don’t realize that I’ve left. Muse quickly alerts me when my brain drifts.

Yuri:                      I love Muse, too. I use it every morning. I find that I’m the calmest after a workout. I didn’t work out the other day before I did a meditation. I was 74% calm during the 20-minute meditation, which for me, I’m usually 50 to 60%. So, I don’t know if you experience that yourself.

Daniel:                 It varies. I never know what the day holds, and it usually has a lot to do with my quality of sleep. I generally get good quality sleep. But, I’ll tell you, I hit 94% one day and had 283 birds.

Yuri:                                    Nice.

Daniel:                 I took a screenshot of that one. I don’t think I’ve ever achieved that in any of the meditations before.

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

Daniel:                 When the new paradigm becomes a common paradigm of health for optimization rather than disease care.

Yuri:                      Awesome. I love it.

Dr. Daniel Stickler, thank you so much for joining us. Where’s the best place our listeners can check out what you’re working on and stay up to date with you online?

Daniel:                 Check out apeironcenter.com. Apeiron means limitless. And our training Academy is apeiron.academy. That’s the best place to find me.

Yuri:                      Awesome. Daniel, once again, thank you so much for sharing your journey. I know this’ll be inspiring for many listeners.

Daniel:                 Thanks, Yuri.

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Yuri’s take

I love how Daniel pulled back the curtain and said, “Here are the highs and lows. Here’s what went down. And here’s what we’ve learned in the process.”

One of the reasons I love having these conversations is because each of these individuals is coming from a place of service and wants to solve a big problem. In this case, it’s getting to the root of disease and not having people rely on the sick care system that does nothing for most people.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this interview and found it inspiring.

While we are talking about cool stuff, have you checked out the Seven-Figure Health Business Blueprint training? It’s our newest training that’ll show you the new way to attract your ideal clients that are willing and ready to pay top dollar for your help to transform their life.

If that’s something of interest to you and you want to build a more profitable online coaching business that serves your clients at a deeper level and helps you make a lot more money and enjoy more freedom in the process, then I think you’ll enjoy that training.

Check that out over at healthpreneurgroup.com/training. Again, thank you for your attention and joining me on this podcast. If you haven’t subscribed, please do so today. We’ve got lots of great stuff coming your way over the next couple days, weeks, and months. I’ll see you on Friday with a great interview with Mr. Pat Rigsby.

Until then, be great, do great. I’ll see you on the next episode.

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Follow Dr. Dan SticklerAt:

https://www.apeironcenter.com/

https://www.apeiron.academy/

Facebook

Twitter

YouTube

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Free Healthpreneur Health Profit Secrets Book

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Transcription:

When I use the term marketer, I use it in the best way possible. Some people have negative connotations to words like selling and marketing, but I see marketing as simply just building a relationship with people. That’s all it is.

Whether that’s done through a podcast like this one, content, a webinar, or in a single message on a Facebook ad, marketing is simply a medium for bridging a gap. The gap is closed when people knowing who you are and are motivated to do business with you to help them solve a problem.

The importance of empathy in marketing

The one thing you have to master in order to see the desired results in your business is something called empathy. Empathy is the ability to get inside someone else’s shoes and understand what they’re going through.

One of the exercises that we do in our workshops is called the “Emotion Inventory.”  We provide a great worksheet and thinking tool that helps you get into the shoes of your prospects to understand their fears, frustrations, and desires.

That’s an important place to start. We talk about our perfect client pipeline; a very simple model we use for our business. The simple model we teach and help implement into our client’s businesses is this; a simple Facebook ad invitation to a webinar, then inviting people from the webinar to a strategy call, with an application before the call.

It seems simple, right? But why is it that some people crush it while other take a bit longer? Why is it that some people work well with a product launch formula while others don’t? Why is it that some people do extremely well with paid traffic, joint venture promotions, selling an e-Book, or selling high-tech items while others struggle? it doesn’t really matter what you’re offering. The key is empathy.

Let me illustrate this with something that might resonate with you. I lost my hair when I was 17 years old to an autoimmune condition called alopecia. When I was in my early 20’s, I was taking the subway to work to train some clients. A guy came up to me on the platform, looked at me, and said, “Hey, do you have alopecia too?”

Immediately he found his tribe. He found his peeps because he knew that I had gone through something that he was going through. I could tell in our conversation that he was having a tough time going through the experience of having lost his hair. It was interesting to see my perspective versus his. He was really depressed about it.

I said, “You know what? It’s only hair. It’s no big deal. There are worse things that can happen.” I tried to lift him up a little bit, and we had an instant bond because we knew what the other person was going through. There’s nothing more powerful in this world than the ability to do that.

There’s a belief that if you can explain someone’s problems in language better than they can explain to themselves, they’ll inherently think you have the solution to that problem. Going back to the story, the young man who was my age at the time wanted my contact information to stay in touch and see if we could support each other.

The key is it all comes down to this bond. It’s not about pushing your stuff onto people, it’s about understanding where they are and communicating that in your messaging, Facebook ads, webinars, podcasts, content, emails, and everything you do. That undertone that permeates everything is understanding the fears, frustrations, and desires of your perfect client.

Examples of a missed connection with the audience

Even if you’re the best copywriter and have all the techniques dialed in, if you don’t understand your marketplace, it’s not going to work. I’ll give you another example.

One of our partners that we do a lot of business with and have promoted on the health side are good friends of mine. They’ve a couple of products that we don’t offer, which means that we’re happy to support them. It’s something that I use every single day so it’s a great fit.

They reached out and asked if they could run ads on my behalf on my fan page. They would pay for the ads and give me commissions. They just need access to my fans.

I agreed and asked them to send over the ad creative before moving forward. They sent over the ad creative which was five or six different ads. To give you some context before I describe the ads, my audience for the health business on Facebook and my email list tends to be female and older.

They sent over the ad copy, I looked through it and thought, “Are you guys on drugs? What kind of messaging is this?” The ads were saying things like, “Do you ever struggle building muscle? Do you go to the gym, hit it hard, then wonder how to recover properly?”

I told them, “Guys, you know my audience. There’s no way I can run this on my page. This is so far-off. This is not even in the same universe as the people that I help.” I said, “Redo the copy, here’s our audience.” They did, and it was better.

The same company had also set-up a specific landing page for us. I looked at the page and, although it looked nice, the first images were of a guy, a bodybuilder, in his Speedo on stage. The page talked about muscle, protein absorption, and things like that.

Again, this could not resonate with my audience because it was so far disconnected from who they are. The importance of understanding cannot be underestimated. As health professionals, if we pay attention to this and spend any amount of time dealing one-on-one with people, we’ll have all the intel we ever need.

Examples of knowing your audience and understanding their pain point

You don’t need to do online surveys. Spend years, months, hours, whatever it is, with people one-on-one. Know what they’re going through, and know what keeps them up. Know what their challenges are. Document that stuff and keep that front and center at all times.

If you live in their world, watch what happens to your marketing and your business.

It can be something as simple as one sentence. For instance, one of our best-performing ads to health entrepreneurs in the coaching space is, “Are you tired of one-on-one coaching?” Or, “Is one-on-one coaching wearing you down?” Just that single sentence immediately gets the prospect thinking of what they’re going through right now.

I was in that position when I was a trainer for seven years. I was exhausted. I understand because I’ve been there and I’ve served a lot of people in that space who are also there. If I can get into that situation and bring up what that emotion feels like, what that experience looks like, it becomes really powerful.

It’s not just a matter of, “Is one-on-one coaching wearing you down?” That’s a statement similar to saying, “Do you feel tired?” The power is when we relate that to their day-to-day situation. Let’s look at fatigue and tiredness because that’s an area of expertise in my health business.

Instead of saying, “Are you tired,” expand on that. You might say, “Do you ever get home after a long day’s work and all you want to do is lay on the couch? Meanwhile, your kids tug at you because they want you to play with them, but you’re just too tired and drained to really be the best possible parent you can be?”

I took that frustration, due to lack of energy, and I’ve superimposed it into a daily occurrence; a situation that this person is experiencing on a daily basis. When you can do that, the prospect will think, “Wow, this person understands what I’m going through.”

When we feel understood by someone else, we’ll open our eyes and ears to pay attention to what they’re saying. But if you don’t understand their situation, if you don’t have that empathy, nothing else you do is going to make a difference.

Your mission for today is to make this your mantra. Understand who your perfect client is and live in that world. It’s not about you, it’s about them.

Head over to the blog, healthpreneurgroup.com and find the latest episode discussing empathy and the golden rule for improving your marketing.

An opportunity for training and upleveling your business

To go a little bit deeper, I invite you to a special training we have called The Seven Figure Health Business Blueprint. See how we put this in action, attract our clients, and most importantly, how you can do the same. It’s not about me and it’s not about this cool stuff we’re doing. It’s about you and your business.

If you want a predictable and consistent method that generates clients for your business, without manual prospecting or relying on the occasional referral, then I’d like to show you exactly what we’re doing. You can go through the entire training absolutely free at healthpreneurgroup.com/training. I promise it will be one of the best 75 minutes you’ve spent on your business in the last couple of months or maybe ever.

Check it out today.

It will help you understand that the old way of building your business online is no longer valid unless you want to spend the next 5 to 10 years doing that. If you want a faster path to your desired outcome of making more money, helping more people, and enjoying more freedom in your life to travel, hang out with your kids, get up whenever you want, not sit in traffic, whatever is most important to you, this business model will show you exactly how to do that.

You can do it quickly whether or not you have a following because this really levels a playing field. I’m very, very excited about this and that’s why I’m offering this as a free training for you.

That’s all for today. Thank you so much for joining me.

Transcription

Hey guys, welcome to the Healthpreneur Podcast. Yuri here with you, welcome to today’s episode.

We’re going to be speaking with Mr. Danny Lennon, who is the founder of Sigma Nutrition and the host of a great podcast. If you’re interested in nutrition, check it out—Sigma Nutrition Radio, really popular. Lots of downloads, lots of listeners. It’s very, very cool. They have actually amassed over two million downloads.

Danny is the performance nutritionist for several professional MMA fighters, boxers, and he’s presented at several conferences across Europe, including Amsterdam, Vienna, and Dublin. He’s a pretty cool dude.

We actually have a really great conversation in this episode. And specifically, what we’re going to talk about it is how to uncover your superpowers to grow a successful business. This is one of the things that Danny does so well—really focusing on what matters most and putting the blinders onto everything else.

So without any further ado, let’s bring Danny onto the show. Let’s jump right in and let’s have some fun.

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Yuri:                Danny Lennon, welcome to the Healthpreneur Podcast. How’s it going?

 Danny:            I am great. Thank you so much for having me, Yuri.

Yuri:                Yeah, I’m excited to chat and it’s always great to connect with someone who’s across the pond and doing some pretty cool things. I think I tend to forget that there’s an internet outside of North America, so it’s cool to see that people like yourself are doing some really cool things.

You’ve got a great company, Sigma Nutrition. You’ve got a really popular podcast called Sigma Nutrition Radio. Talk to us about how it all started. How did you go from this nutrition experts to building this company and getting into podcasting?

How focusing on Danny’s super power created a great podcast

Danny:            Yeah, sure. I suppose it depends on how far we want to go back, but to try and keep it to some brief CliffsNotes for people … I originally started getting interested in the whole nutrition thing, I suppose, when I first went to university.

I started studying science—I was doing biology and physics as my majors in university—and during that time, reading for my own interest in athletic performance, I started reading research that might help me in my own endeavors on the field and in the gym. So, obviously I came across nutrition and different elements of sports nutrition. I got super excited about that.

After graduating from college, I actually became a high school teacher of science for a year, but decided to go back and do nutrition afterwards.

I did my masters degree the following year in nutritional sciences, and during that time I started taking on some clients, working with some people on their nutrition and their habits. Just the same way many of us get involved in fitness—starting small and working with people locally, just trying to help them and just building up my coaching base from there.

As that expanded, and once I’d completed my masters, I decided to start putting some content out online just to kind of grow my business—knowing that I probably would prefer to work for myself. We can dive into that a bit more in a while, but I started to get the inkling that my nutrition consultancy would probably be my own, as opposed to going and looking for jobs working within an organization somewhere.

So, obviously at this time I realized the importance of putting out some content, and with so much there I thought as a lot of us probably have, “I need to be everywhere.”

I started a blog, started putting out articles. I said, “Okay. I’m going to put out an article every week. I’m going to do YouTube videos every week. I’m going to start this podcast, because I love listening to podcasts.”

I soon found very quickly that, number one, my skillset and my personal preference was best suited to one of those mediums, which is obviously audio at this point. And two, that was where I was getting the most traction, in terms of where people were resonating with my work most. At least that’s what the analytics were telling me, and that was where my business was growing the most.

I just really doubled down on that area, and pulled back on this kind of pressure to put out content all the time everywhere, and started thinking about what was the quality of the content. I decided to put more of my energy towards the podcast.

This was early 2014, when the podcast went out. Around that time podcasting was nowhere near as big as it is now and obviously the last three and a half years we’ve seen considerable growth in all podcasts, not only my own. I kind of got lucky, I suppose you could say, with the timing of starting that.

And yeah, just from there it started to grow organically, but that was really how it came about. I think a mix of, number one, luck—deciding to start at that time because I was interested in it.

But I think also two main elements were my own awareness of what my skillsets were best suited to, and what I knew I could work the hardest on because I actually like doing it. I decided just to focus on that area and kind of let some of the other stuff go by the wayside and not try to do it all.

That was really how the podcast itself took off. Then obviously there’s other elements to the business we can probably talk about. Most namely, the coaching service we run, and we do a lot of seminars and conferences

But generally the podcast itself is the main way a lot of people get to know Sigma Nutrition. That was how it really kind of came about.

Yuri:                That’s awesome. I think you did a really smart thing, which was cutting off the things that were not serving you, and that’s very tough for a lot of people who are starting off, let alone already established in business.

Because as you said, you think you have to be everywhere doing everything. Sure, if you have a team of 100 people you could do that, but if you’re a one man show or a small team, you really have to focus.

That’s really, really good advice. A lot of people as they’re transitioning from the one-on-one in-person type stuff to being online, they struggle with how people find them. How do people find you and how do you start engaging clients in an online medium with people that are not in your local vicinity, for instance?

For you, was that something you faced as a challenge? Or how did you initially get people to come onto the nutrition coaching side online? Was it mostly through the podcast, or was there a lag between starting the podcast and people engaging in your services? What did that look like?

Playing the long game

Danny:            Yeah, sure. Certainly, there was this kind of slow steady growth over time. It certainly wasn’t this, “I started a podcast and now suddenly everyone wants coaching.”

I think for me at least, there was no real master plan when I look back on it, but I think the one big thing that I had that maybe some other people lack was, number one, patience. Understanding that this is going to take a considerable amount of time.

With that, not putting too much pressure on myself to immediately start taking in a certain amount of clients. Again, I do realize there’s my own personal circumstances were dictated I didn’t have a family, or a mortgage, or kids, or any of this stuff that may be extra demands on people where they need to focus on immediate income right now.

I had a bit of wiggle room there, where I didn’t have to put that immediate pressure to grow the coaching side as rapidly as possible, at the expense of doing it correctly or the way I wanted to.

I put a lot of my focus on the main marketing strategy essentially being content, and thinking that if I could put out good enough content consistently over the next period of time, then that will be in and of itself driving more awareness of me and getting people interested in it.

And if they already get to know what I’m about, and actually like my content, then I’m in a much better position to be able to start saying, “If you want to take this a step further, I actually also offer coaching.” As opposed to trying to hook people in from the start who maybe are unaware of me, or haven’t been able to see my value. I think it was really built around that, that content marketing strategy.

Again, there’s a lot of people that are a lot smarter than me in that area, who can probably give much better advice, but certainly what worked for me was having patience and really, at least at the start, having a belief that if I do good enough quality work for a long enough period of time consistently, then it’s all going to work out.

I think that can be a scary thing to buy into because there’s obviously lots of uncertainty. But I think that’s ultimately what allowed it to grow to the point where it was organically at a pace that was manageable for me. It was focusing on making sure the content was good quality, making sure I could do it consistently, and then growing a solid reputation based on that. Then thinking about, “Okay. How can I start scaling up the coaching side of this, and get more clients in, and get more people aware of what we’re doing?”

Yuri:                Yeah, that’s awesome. And that’s a really great mindset to have, is really thinking about, as you just said, the long game. If I just do this long enough, it will pay off.

Did you ever find yourself wavering? Because a lot of people producing content, they don’t really see the results of that content for a long time, if at all. Were there ever moments where you were like, “Man, I put in so much time to this piece of content and I’m not really seeing anything?”

Or did you go through these periods of up and down, of disbelief? How did you stay on course even when there may have been tough times?

Focus on the things you actually enjoy doing

Danny:            Yeah, sure. That’s a really great question, because I think so often we hear in a lot of different areas of life to trust a process, and essentially that’s what we’re talking about here to people.

But I think that can be very difficult on a day-to-day basis when we’re in a situation where things are tough either financially, or we’ve put in this ton of effort into this business that we’re really passionate about, but we don’t seem to be getting back from it, at least right now, what we would hope to, or what we think our efforts deserve.

For me, there were certainly those times, but in order to try and keep putting in the work and to kind of keep the faith with it, I think one of the things—and again, whether this was out of a smart decision of mine, or just purely from luck—was that early decision to look at what work was best suited to my personal skillset. And look at what things I actually enjoy doing.

I think that allowed me to consistently do that. Doing the podcast and getting to talk to the types of people I was getting to talk to and look at the areas of research that I was looking at each week on the show … That was stimulating and interesting enough to keep me going even if, on the flip side, it hadn’t grown to the point where I wanted yet.

This might be a slight tangent, but when people talk about, “Do something you’re passionate about,” or “pick a passion area,” I think people don’t drill down far enough. For example, I could say, “Sure, I’m passionate about nutrition,” but there’s lots of areas of nutrition, number one, that I might not be passionate about.

Number two, that tells me nothing about the tasks each day that I’m going to complete, that I’m actually passionate about.

I’m passionate about creating a podcast and creating content like that. Whereas, there’s other areas of it that I might not be passionate about. I think it’s having an awareness of what things you actually really enjoy doing. What are those day-to-day tasks that you can see yourself doing even if there’s no immediate reward?

If you can build your business around that, I think that to some degree is going to mitigate that kind of nagging voice in the back of your head saying, “Look, you’re not getting any payoff from here. Just give in.”

Because it’s certainly not this steady linear path, as we kind of all know, and there’s certainly times when I would second guess myself and wonder, “Is this going to pay off? Is it going to get to a level it needs to be if I want to make a good living from it?” When you have that, it’s tough, but you need to trust the process.

But I think we need to have some sort of strategy to even not need that trust, right? Just do it for the sake of doing it because we like doing stuff.

Yuri:                Yeah. There’s a lot of wisdom there for sure. That’s really, really good advice. For everyone listening, rewind if you have to and listen to that again. It’s such a great question.

Actually, it’s funny, because for Healthpreneur I asked myself, “What is the one way I can produce content that I’ll actually really enjoy doing?” For me, it was a podcast.

Because I’m like, “I’m not going to set up another YouTube channel. I’m not going to start blogging again. I would rather just have great conversations with people like yourself.” This is something I’m happy to do forever, because like you realized, it’s just something you enjoy doing.

I think that’s really, really important, especially when there’s so many things you could be doing in any specific niche, like nutrition, right? That’s really, really good advice.

Don’t get caught up in what others are doing

Danny:            For sure. And if I could just add to that, I think the big thing I’m trying to get people to take from that is … finding the things that they’re going to be passionate about is the right question to ask when thinking about what tasks they enjoy doing.

Because so often people might see, “Oh, this guy’s being successful, and he’s got this podcast, how do I just kind of replicate that?” Without questioning, “Is a podcast something I actually would like to do, or be good at? Maybe my skills are better suited to something else.”

Similarly, you can look at people who have no podcast, but have built their whole business around writing amazing articles, and that’s all they do. Or similarly, people who are YouTubers, and that’s all they do. It’s finding what medium is going to suit you best and really pushing forward with that, I think.

Yuri:                Yeah, it really is a balance between doing you and putting your blinders on. It’s nice to model what works, but at the same time, in today’s day and age where there’s so much distraction and so much comparison, I like to stay in my lane as best as possible and not even compare myself to what others are doing.

Is that something you battle with?

 Danny:            Yeah. I think it’s at times easy to do. But generally I think—and maybe it’s just a natural way for me—I don’t get too caught up in what others are doing.

I enjoy seeing what other people are up to, but I think, again, it can just come down to some awareness. I just think I’m pretty aware of stuff that wouldn’t suit me, regardless of how well someone is doing at it, and how well they’re building their business based on this. I just know, “this thing might not suit me” and kind of try and stick to things that I’m going to be better at. Not only a skillset, but things I kind of enjoy and I know are going to work for me.

I mean, I’m aware of what other people are doing and I try and look at those things because I think they can be quite informative, but as you said, we can look at them to try and tease out why this person is being successful without saying, “I need to replicate this.”

We can also learn, “Okay. This person might be a really successful YouTuber, and I might not want to ever set up a YouTube channel, but what is it about them that allowed them to grow this, and scale this, and how are they being successful? How are they engaging their audience?”

When we answer these questions, now we can maybe take that and apply it to a different area that has nothing to do with YouTube videos.

I think there’s definitely a value in looking to what other people are doing, but don’t get caught up in thinking, “I need to replicate it,” or saying, “Well, this person is doing this. I wouldn’t be able to do it to that level, why should I even start this because someone else is already giving out that information and they’re super smart, they have all this great stuff out there, they’ve got this big team behind them. Why would I even bother?”

I think we can certainly do ourselves harm by comparing to what other people are doing, instead of just getting on with it, to be quite honest.

Yuri:                Yeah. No, I completely agree with you.

So Danny, what was a big challenge in your business over the last couple of years? If there’s one that really jumps out at you that was like, “Man, that was a real tough time.” How did you get through that and what was the lesson you learned from that experience?

There’s no summit to the mountain

Danny:            Yeah. I mean, this is always a tough question to ask, and I think people are different in how they perceive challenges.

To me, the biggest thing when I think about the challenge is not so much one big obstacle to come over, or one big challenge. Because I think they may pop up from time to time and they can be tough to take, but generally just with time we’ll get over that.

I think the biggest problem for a lot of people in terms of the challenge, is the ongoing feeling that it’s never going to stop being a challenge, right? There’s no point where you get to, at least I haven’t found yet, where you’re like, “Okay. My business is successful enough now. Now I can kind of relax a bit and I don’t need to keep doing more. There’s not something that’s going wrong.”

In fact, as I think things scale and grow more, there tends to be more fires to put out, more problems, more challenges, and I think the biggest risk is to let those challenges get to you too much, because they’re always going to be there.

And I think starting out, we can have this false assumption that if we just had a bigger business, if we had more capital behind us, if we had more people in our team helping us out, if we were only able to get to the amount of subscribers that this person over here has … Then everything would be okay, and it’d be fine, and I could relax, right?

In fact, that point never comes. It’s always tough.

For me, when I think of entrepreneurship and challenges, I think it’s the small little things on a day-to-day basis—the things that aren’t exciting that you just have to get done and the ability to get up each day even when you don’t have a super exciting project right now. Or maybe there are just some tasks that need to get done but you still need to put in that work today.

I think that can be a real challenge, especially when motivation is low. For me, that’s the biggest challenge of how you can consistently do it and keep working at it when there’s not this big exciting task to overcome, if that makes any sense.

Yuri:                Yeah, totally. That’s a really good way of looking at it.

It’s funny because a lot of people are looking for like, “Hey, what’s new and exciting?” It’s like, “Well, I’m working on this thing,” but a lot of times business shouldn’t be new and exciting.

As you said, if you’re just podcasting and that’s your thing, that’s your bread and butter, it’s just like, “Well, we’re doing more of the awesome stuff we’re doing,” right? I think a lot of times we tend to confuse entertainment with what actually needs to get done in our business and we distract ourselves with all sorts of stuff to raise the excitement in our business.

As you said, that can be a challenge to really kind of stay on course. Just understanding that these little things on a daily basis don’t really go away.

As you’ve grown the business, what are some of the challenges, maybe the little things you were not aware of at the beginning that have crept up over time, how has that helped you develop as a business owner, in terms of dealing with those and overcoming those?

Danny:            I think this kind of builds on what I just spoke about. At least in the early stages thinking, “Okay. Stuff is really hard now because I don’t have many people following me. I don’t have that many clients. I don’t have much capital in the bank. I don’t have this team I can fall back on.”

All these other things and just believing that, “Okay. I’ll put in the hard work now and as these things start to take shape, then things will get easier and easier over time.”

I think the thing that I realized is that that’s not the case, and if it were the case, there might be something going wrong, in fact.

Because I think, like I mentioned, if it’s growing and continuing to get big, you’re taking care of more people, your services are getting wider and more diversified—if that’s the case, then just by the laws of probability there’s going to be more stuff that’s going to go wrong. And there’s more stuff that you have to deal with—stuff that you don’t really want to deal with, because there’s just issues going on. I think that’s one element to it.

I think maybe another that has taken a while for me to realize is that there’s no kind of endpoint as such. It’s never like, “Okay. I’ve got to a certain level now. Now I’m kind of comfortable and now I can start relaxing and offloading stuff.”

You don’t end up really doing that, so I think those two points are very connected, and obviously we touched on a lot of it in the last answer, but that certainly has been the biggest challenge or change from when I initially set out to kind of realize over time.

Yeah, that’s I think how I’ve dealt with it. Just realizing it’s always going to be there.

Yuri:                Nice. There’s no summit to the mountain, it just keeps on going.

 Danny:            Right, yeah.

Yuri:                That’s awesome. Knowing what you know now, would you do anything differently if you started again?

 Danny:            Oh man, I’m sure this list could be super long and I think pretty much everything, we could probably think of a different way to do it.

Yuri:                Well, what would be one thing that you would do differently?

Nothing is ever going to be 100% perfect

Danny:            I think for sure it would be having less of a need for things to be perfect before I put them out.

I even still struggle with this to this day, but certainly for the first couple of years when I was putting out content—particularly when it was my own content, either articles, or a webinar, or presentations. I had a real high level of perfectionism, but really it was this fear of putting stuff out in case it could be criticized in any way and needing everything to be 100% perfect in my eyes before I could hit publish on something.

I remember talking to a friend of mine before and at that stage in my drafts folder on WordPress I had like 10 different articles that I’d written, and they were just still in draft. I hadn’t hit publish on them purely because in my mind they weren’t good enough yet.

And on one end, I do think there’s a certain level of wanting to have high quality work, and certainly that’s the model I’ve gone with—less frequent, but more high quality work. At the same time, letting this feeling of, “Okay. Where could someone possibly say something bad about this piece?”

Because 1) really, there’s never going to be one piece that’s 100% perfect, I don’t think. 2) There’s probably going to never be something you can put out that no one can criticize in any way, but what we have to get to is … If I’m putting this piece of work across, is it a high enough quality that I’m going to be generally happy with it? And is it going to serve and help the people that it’s intended for?

If that’s the case, then you have to put it out. Otherwise, you’re just detracting from your whole mission anyway.

That’s something I struggle with—and to be quite honest, still struggle with—is being able to be happy enough with work, even if I think it’s going to help the vast majority of people, just having that fear of putting it out. Because someone could potentially say something bad about it, or I don’t think it’s good enough, or if I put more time into it, I could make this even better.

You could end up spending three times the amount of time on that piece of content for the extra 1-2% at the end. Certainly, that’s what springs to mind for me.

Yuri:                Yeah. A lot of it is a mental game, right? It’s like, “What if this happens, and so-and-so happens?”

As you said, there’s never going to be something we put out that doesn’t polarize people. And that’s fine. If certain people disagree with it, whatever.

It’s just fun to see how certain topics get certain reactions. Like, Keto is obviously a big theme these days and I did a video on YouTube about the Ketogenic diet and it got absolutely blasted by the number of negative reviews and bad comments compared to most of my other videos. Just because it’s a topic that polarizes people, right?

They either love it or they hate it. I knew that, “Okay, whatever. I’m just going to say my thing on this and see what happens.” But yeah, I think it just comes with maturity. Initially we try to please everyone and we don’t want to be disliked, because God forbid we should get some bad comments, or thumbs down.

But I think as we grow as entrepreneurs and business owners, our skin becomes a little bit thicker to that kind of stuff. It’s cool. I appreciate you sharing that.

Danny:            Yeah, for sure. I definitely see it. I think, especially when it comes to health and fitness and nutrition, it’s even more important that we realize that your goal isn’t to go out there and please every single person. Like, “Put this out.”

It’s your job to base it on what you know and what you currently have seen within research, or talking to people, what you believe is a sensible and helpful opinion to put across to someone that’s going to help them, and is most objectively accurate.

Sure, like most things, nutrition is notorious for having people who have certain dogmas and almost cults in certain areas, so you’re going to have people that don’t like it. But if you truly believe it’s objectively what you believe to be true and most helpful, then just go with it and just accept sometimes that happens.

The Rapid Five

 Yuri:                Yeah, totally. Danny, this has been awesome. Are you ready for the rapid five?

 Danny:            Let’s go for it. I can’t promise I’ll be that good with them. I’m not so good with on the spot stuff.

 Yuri:                Don’t worry, you really can’t fail at this. I mean, it’s all good. All right. Here are the rapid five, or the five rapid fire questions one by one. Whatever comes top of mind is the right answer. Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

 Danny:            I’ll go with perfectionism, just based on what we said.

 Yuri:                Yeah, cool. Number two, what’s your biggest strength?

 Danny:            I think I don’t get overly stressed. I think I’m pretty good at managing stress and emotion, which can help when you’re running your own business—if you run it on objectivity and logic, rather than too much emotion.

 Yuri:                Yeah, no kidding. That’s good. Number three, what’s one skill you’ve become dangerously good at in order to grow your business?

 Danny:            I would say effective communication. In that, I think over time I’ve become much better at being not only concise and clear at my communication, but making sure it’s communicated in a certain way that the recipient is super clear on it and there could be nothing lost in translation.

Because that can often happen, especially when you’re dealing with subcontractors online, or whatever the case may be. I would say, communication online.

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

Danny:            First thing in the morning is usually to go down and get a cup of coffee like I think a lot of people, and kind of take stock of the day. I have no clear routine, as in everything is regimented the same every day. It tends to change across the week.

So, usually it’s have a cup of coffee, take stock of what’s up for the day, and then make a plan of when stuff is going to get done.

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

 Danny:            I think it’s I know I’m being successful when I feel fulfilled.

Obviously, that’s probably quite vague for some people, but I think that that sums it up to me. There’s just something when you know you’re being either productive or doing things right, that it gives a sense of fulfillment.

Yeah, that’s the best way I think I can describe it.

Yuri:                I can definitely relate to that. That’s good. Awesome.

Danny, this has been a lot of fun my friend. Thank you very much for joining us on the Healthpreneur Podcast. What is the best place for people to check out what you’re doing up online?

 Danny:            Awesome. First, thank you so much for having me Yuri. I’ve really, really enjoyed this conversation, some great questions-

Yuri:                Thank you.

 Danny:            Thanks for having me on.

If people are interested in finding me, they can go straight to the website, which is just SigmaNutrition.com. They can find the podcast Sigma Nutrition Radio on pretty much any podcast app, just search for that.

Then they can find me on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, all that stuff if they just type in my name. I’m pretty easy to find I think on those places as well.

 Yuri:                Perfect. Danny, once again, thank you so much for taking the time and I appreciate you sharing your journey and a lot of your wisdom too, which has been refreshing. Thank you so much for taking the time my friend.

 Danny:            My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.

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Yuri’s take

All right. Pretty awesome interview, right? Danny, just a great guy. What I love about him is that he’s just so focused. He knows what he’s great at doing, he knows what he’s not best at doing, and he just focuses on what he’s great at, right?

It’s such a simple message for any of us to really remember and then hopefully do our best to apply. Hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. Again, if you have, again, check out his podcast Sigma Nutrition Radio. Great, great stuff. Great guests, great information.

If you’re a podcast junky, like so many of our listeners are, and are interested in the nutrition side of things, then check it out.

Once again, I want to thank you for joining me on this episode and if you are interested in taking your business to the next level, then be sure to check out our free training, the Seven Figure Health Business Blueprint.

Inside, I’m going to walk you through a new way to attract your perfect clients to help you build a six or seven figure online coaching business without spending years building your platform, without doing all the crazy stuff that we don’t want to do, by actually focusing on what you love doing best—which is probably coaching, teaching, and serving your clients.

If that’s of interest to you, and you want a more predictable, more sure fire way of growing your business without all the nonsense, then check out this training over at HealthpreneurGroup.com/training.

That is all for today. I want to thank you once again for joining me. If you haven’t yet subscribed to the podcast, I would really appreciate if you did because I’ve got lots of great stuff coming your way, including next week we’ve got a solo round on Monday and I’m going to be sharing the golden rule of marketing with you. Then on Wednesday, we’re speaking with Dr. Daniel Stickler about what he’s learned after investing $1.5 million into marketing his health business … and sadly a lot of that was lost.

We’ll also be talking with Pat Riggsby about some of the secrets to really building a lasting business in the online health and fitness space. So, that’s coming your way. Subscribe today and I look forward to seeing you next week.

Continue to go out there and be great, do great, and we’ll see you then.

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Follow Danny Lennon At:

https://sigmanutrition.com/

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Transcription

What’s up, healthpreneurs? Yuri back with you and welcome to episode 67 of the Healthpreneur podcast! Man, it’s been a fun ride so far. Hope you’ve enjoyed it.

If you’ve missed anything, by all means, subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. We’ve got 66 amazing previous episodes that you may not have gotten your hands on. Go do that now if you haven’t already.

Today, I’m excited to be speaking with a friend and an amazing health coach, Lisa Lewtan. We’re going to have some fun on this one, because Lisa has a background in the tech world. She actually had a tech start-up/company for 20 some odd years.

Then, she kind of burned herself out a little bit. And like so many of us do in our space, we tend to share what we need healing with. That’s kind of how it all started. I’m not going to ruin the surprise as she’s going to share more of her journey in the interview.

Just to give you a little more background about Lisa, she is a health and lifestyle coach, the founder of Healthy, Happy, and Hip. She’s an award-winning author of the book, Busy, Stressed, and Food Obsessed, and a radio show host on Voice America.

I was actually on her show several months ago. We had a great time—we share very similar philosophies when it comes to food and all that stuff, so that was pretty cool.

As I said before, after co-founding a successful tech start-up, Lisa literally collapsed from years of stress overload. Using the skills she developed as an entrepreneur, she self-hacked her own mind and body to restore her health and go on to feel a lot better than ever.

She has since transitioned over the past couple years into her health and wellness company.

I’m excited to have her on the show. She’s spoken at Google, Canyon Ranch, Kripalu, a bunch of other amazing places. Our discussion today is going to be really, really insightful because we’re going to talk a lot about the idea of comparison. Comparing ourselves to other people on social media and all that kind of nonsense. How you can get better at staying focused on what you need to focus on—the power of the two letter word, N-O, and how you can really tap into that.

Plus just a lot of other cool nuggets of wisdom that I think you’ll really enjoy.

With that said, and without any further ado, let’s welcome Lisa onto the Healthpreneur podcast, and let’s jump into it.

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Yuri:                Lisa, welcome to the Healthpreneur podcast. How’s it going?

Lisa:                So great, Yuri. Thanks so much for having me today.

Yuri:                I am pumped because you’re doing some pretty cool stuff. We’ve connected a few times previously, and I’m just fascinated by spending half an hour with great entrepreneurs in our space like yourself. People who can share some wisdom and insights based on their journey—what’s been working, what are some of the lessons learned—and really just to inspire our listeners with your awesomeness.

Lisa:                Oh, well thank you. So much good stuff to talk about in that.

The power of saying N-O

Yuri:                Yes. Okay, let me ask you a question right off the bat. Actually, I’m not sure this is a question I’ve ever asked anyone on this podcast, but when you think of a business role model, is there someone that comes to mind for you?

Lisa:                Believe it or not, it’s my husband who pops into my mind.

Yuri:                Nice.

Lisa:                Which is kind of ironic. We worked together for many years. In my first business, we had a tech startup which we started in our early 20s. He’s probably the hardest working person I’ve ever met in my life.

The thing that he taught me so well was it’s not how many things you say ‘yes’ to, it’s how many things you say ‘no’ to—which is so hard for me to do. I continually think about that all the time now.

Yuri:                That’s a huge takeaway. I do a solo session every week, and one of them was on the magic two letter word that will transform your business, and that’s ‘no.’ How do you find yourself being able to make the decisions to say ‘no’ to stuff?

Lisa:                Well, I’m very fortunate that I’m at a point in my life where I have some flexibility. I did work so hard at that tech company, which gave me a life with some room for flexibility. I literally now listen inside and go, “Is this something that’s going to get me jazzed about it? Is this something that I’m going to get excited to do?”

If it’s really not, then I’m going to probably push it aside and focus on those things that light me up. When we’re excited about things, we work hard and we make them work.

 Transitioning out of tech; Lisa’s story

Yuri:                Mm-hmm, yup. Absolutely. That’s great advice. Talk to us about the transition from the tech company to your current company, which is more on the health and lifestyle side.

 Lisa:                Well, of course there’s a story. When I started the company, I just worked all the time. I was living on Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. I wasn’t taking care of myself in any way, shape, or form—like many people in their 20s were doing at that time.

By the time I got into my early 30s, I had gotten married, I had a couple babies,I moved into a house … and I collapsed.

It wasn’t pretty. It was a really horrible episode for me.

It rocked my world, because I was that type-A, go get everything done, never an issue woman. All of a sudden, I’m like, “What the hell?” Like, nothing’s working—my mind wasn’t working, my body wasn’t working. I was a real mess and fell into a deep, dark hole. And doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me—they just offered me meds and I didn’t want them.

I said, “Hey, I’m an entrepreneur. I’ve got to take this on as a project, and figure out how to get better,” and I did. I really started experimenting. You hear this story with a lot of us in this health and wellness field.

Yuri:                Yup.

Lisa:                We had to cure ourselves, because the answers weren’t really out there. When I started doing that, it was just fascinating.

These were things I’d never paid attention to before; not only food and exercise, but mindset and the roles of caffeine and the roles of sleep, the roles of friendship, the roles of fun, all those yummy things.

I did get better, and I actually got better and better. It seemed like a no brainer for me when I eventually decided to go back to school and study holistic nutrition and get into this world of health and wellness. It’s amazing.

Beautiful place to be.

Yuri:                Yeah. It is, and I really believe that there’s no other profession in the world that can transform people’s lives like we can—whether you’re an accountant, financial planner, whatever.

That’s cool, but if you can help someone transform their health. That’s pretty profound.

Lisa:                It is. If you can make someone smile and feel like they’re not broken, it’s been a great day.

 Yuri:                Absolutely. That’s awesome. What are some of the similarities between your tech company, or the world of tech, and this kind of entrepreneurial, bootstrapping way of building a health business? Are there any similarities, and maybe some of the differences that you can think of?

 Lisa:                Well, we started our company like 30 years ago. It wasn’t like it is now, it wasn’t cool to be in your 20s and be a tech entrepreneur. We were a bootstrap company.

I think that was great training for me on how to figure things out. It doesn’t matter what you know. It matters, “can you figure it out?”

I became really good at just figuring out how to do things, whether I knew or not. I think that was a really good similarity. I was lucky that I had dabbled in so many different areas of our company. In the early days when it was super small, I got to do like 15 different roles. That’s been really helpful.

The thing that was so bad for me is that we were in an environment that did not have any self care. We were running ourselves into the ground. I have to fight those demons all the time, still.

That’s how I was brought up in the business world. You go until you drop. That does not serve me at all anymore. I have to constantly keep that part of me in check, and say, “No, you’re getting to that point. Your warning signs are there. Haul it in, bring it down, and walk your walk. Walk your talk.”

So that’s the good and the bad of it, for me.

Yuri:                That’s really cool. I mean it’s cool to talk with entrepreneurs in our space because I find a lot of them, including yourself, are more conscious of this “black hole” that we can all end up going down.

I think—and maybe you can speak to this more than I can—outside of the health space, I don’t know if people are as aware of this. They’re just going, going, going, and then all of a sudden, they have a heart attack or they have a breakdown or they’re just exhausted.

Is that something you’ve found? Are people in our space, on the entrepreneurship side, a little more in tune with that? I’ve had a lot of conversations with people who are versus more of the pure tech/business world.

Lisa:                Well, I think that first of all, so many of us in the health and wellness space got here because we had some medical or health issue. We learned that we have to take care of ourselves.

That’s number one. We can’t help anyone if we’re not okay.

In our space, absolutely; there is an awareness of it. I think some of the more enlightened companies, maybe the Googles, are putting these wellness practices into place. Perhaps. Maybe not.

I did give a talk at Google. I talked about how I collapsed and burned, and it kind of ruined my life. Their response at the end when I got some feedback was, ‘Well you know, your business made it okay, so what’s the big deal?’

I was like, “Whoa! That is not the message at all.” You know, the message is that we have to take care of ourselves, or we’re all going to end up in either injured, sick, or something’s going to happen if we don’t take care of ourselves.

I really like helping people start to understand what those warning signs are for them so they don’t get to that place.

Yuri:                It’s so weird. I don’t know the culture of workplaces like Google, necessarily, because I really haven’t spent a lot of time in them. I have this perception that you have all these young millennials or 30 something year olds who are just like, “I’m invincible. It’s all good, as long as I make money and the company works, then it’s all good.”

I think maybe it’s human nature as well, where we don’t really do something until crap hits the fan.

 Lisa:                Well, I think that we get that little tap, the tap, the tap, and it’s not until the hammer hits us on the head that we go, “Wow, something’s not working here!”

 Yuri:                Yeah.

 Lisa:                That’s what happened for me. I probably had a million warning signs, but I was brought up in a world where you’re like “Oh, it’s only stress. No big deal,” right?

“It’s just stress, I can handle that.”

Yuri:                Yeah.

Lisa:                The dangers of stress are so profound and I see so many people who are totally burnt out, exhausted from living real life. Especially a lot of the women that I work with—they might be working full time, they’re coming home, they’ve got kids.

Even if they have people helping them, it doesn’t matter. They’re still just going, going, going, all day long. They’re just tired. They’re really tired.

We need to start teaching people what self care look like, because I don’t think people even know what that term means.

Yuri:                Yeah. I think it’s nice that you do what you do, because it’s well needed. But it’s very tough because we’re fighting an uphill battle a lot of times—for anybody who’s doing stuff in our space. Because no one is taught about nutrition, health, mindfulness, self care, at all … until they hit a point where they’re like, “Hey, maybe I should look into this.”

We’re not taught this stuff in school. Most of our parents don’t teach us about this stuff. It would be a lot easier if kids were taught this stuff at a young age, which would be part of their fabric. Yeah, hopefully we’ll just continue spreading the good word, and more and more people will be served.

Lisa:                Well I can’t agree with you more. We learn like the dates of war, but we don’t learn how to cook a meal!

And I think anxiety among young kids, teens, people in their 20s, is at an all time crazy high. We’re not teaching anyone tools. We should be teaching meditation and breathing and everything in schools from birth. I think they do in certain other countries.

We have a little bit of re-prioritization. I think that needs to happen.

 Yuri:                Yeah, totally. I recently found out that the highest rate of suicide in the US is girls between the ages of 10 to 14. That’s shocking.

This is a little bit of a tangent, but when I go to Starbucks and it’s after school, I see all these girls who are in that age group. They’re there drinking their venti frappuccinos with their friends, and they’re sitting at a table with each other; but they’re not even talking. They’re looking at their phones.

There’s bigger problems. There’s this disconnection, people are not even socializing properly anymore. When you compound that with a lack of proper self awareness of what health is, what good food is—it’s going to be an interesting couple decades ahead.

Hopefully we can make a good impact on that.

How technology is a blessing and a curse

Lisa:                I know, it’s so scary because I have three kids. I remember when my girls were that age.

That’s a very, very insecure time in life. You’re so worried about what people think about you, and am I wearing the right thing, do I look the same way? Now with social media, it’s not just the kids in your class. It’s the world. The pressures on these kids to look at a certain way, and have enough ‘likes’ per second, or whatever the thing is now on their Instagram, it’s just so high pressure.

You’re right, it’s going to get worse and worse. Technology is such a mixed blessing and a curse for us. I love technology. I’ve worked in technology, I love using technology, but I know I’m an addict now, too. I have a real hard time putting down the phone. It’s something I’m working on personally.

And if I’m that way, think about all these kids growing up with that. That’s just a scary thought.

The social media comparisons and why you need to stop scrolling

Yuri:                It’s not just the kids, too. I mean there’s so many entrepreneurs who are comparing themselves to other businesses and other entrepreneurs; like, “Oh my god, this person has this many likes, this many followers,” whatever.

How do you deal with that person? And we all do this. How do you deal with that comparison?

Lisa:                It’s so hard, oh my god. That is so hard!!

Well, I’ll tell you that I’m guilty, just as guilty as everybody else. I started unsubscribing to certain newsletters that made me feel bad. Again, it’s really tapping into, is this something helpful and useful for me? Or, is this something that’s going to make me feel bad about myself?

If it’s a newsletter that is just telling me that I’m not doing good enough, it’s out.

The same thing on Facebook on my feed. I am so sick and tired of these people saying, “I made a million dollars this month.” Bye. I don’t care. I grew up in a world of humility—that just doesn’t feel right for me, so I’m going to nix you, too.

And I keep coming back to, why am I doing this work? How can I best serve people? When I get back to that really grounded place, that’s when I do my best work and that’s when I feel best about what I’m doing.

Yuri:                That’s awesome. Yeah, it’s a tough balance. You want to look at what’s working, you want to model to some degree, but you also have to just stay in your lane and put your blinders on, because otherwise it’s a downward spiral of self loathing.

Lisa:                Totally. I like that “stay in your lane.” I’m going to use that.

Yuri:                Yeah, I mean I live in Toronto where there’s a lot of bad drivers, so I think for us, it’s a good analogy here.

Lisa:                I’m in Boston! We’ve got tons of bad drivers!

Yuri:                Yeah, I know. It’s funny. For you, in your journey with the health business, what’s been one of the biggest challenges you’ve had to deal with, and how have you overcome that? What’s the lesson you’ve learned in that process?

Focusing on the stuff you like and detaching from the outcome

 Lisa:                I think that a really big challenge for me was the glory.

I was super lucky. I came out with my book, I got a lot of attention, I got a lot of offers and a lot of big dreams and big visions of all these great things that I could do. And I had opportunities. I started going down that path, and I was like, “Oh my god, I am so tired, and I don’t have time. I can’t even see my friends.”

I realized it wasn’t really working for me.

I had to start saying ‘no’ to a lot of things. I really had to consolidate even my own offerings, and figure out what are the things I really love and how can I help people the most? I cut out a lot, and really focused on a key program, on some other things that I’m doing. I think that I have better clarity and focus now, and I think I’ll do a better job for everyone because my mind isn’t into 50 different projects, if that makes sense.

Yuri:                Yeah. No, totally. That’s why I love entrepreneurship is because you learn so much about yourself in the process. You’re always evolving. You’re like, “Okay, that didn’t work. Maybe this doesn’t work for me. Maybe this is more of my thing.”

It’s something that I don’t think a lot of employees have to go through. As an entrepreneur, you’re just forced to grow because your business becomes a reflection of your growth.

 Lisa:                You know, I’ve never really been an employee. I started my first company at 22. I think I had one year of work experience.

I don’t even know. I can’t really relate.

My husband’s an entrepreneur, and we talk to our kids like they’re entrepreneurs—we raise entrepreneurs! I think it’s just a way of thinking. It’s not failure, it’s just another route.

Like, “Okay, that didn’t work. Let’s try something different. Let’s see what will work.” And there has to be a lot of patience in this, because there is so much trial and error. I’ve learned so much in this journey. It’s incredible.

Yuri:                What’s one of the biggest learnings that still kind of sticks, like first and foremost for you?

Lisa:                Well, one thing I learned about myself is that every single time I offer a course or a retreat, anything, I am convinced no one’s going to show up.

I am absolutely 100% convinced every single time, nobody is coming. I have finally learned that that happens. I say, “Oh, there’s that thing.” It comes.

Instead of freaking out about it, I welcome it. I go, “Yup, I know you’re here, and this has not been true in the past. I hear you, but I’m probably going to be okay because other times, it’s worked out totally fine.”

These are the lessons that I remind myself of. I teach my clients that just because you think it, doesn’t mean it’s true.

Yuri:                Yup, that’s good advice. I mean I know for myself, I don’t regret anything in life. But there’s one thing I would have regretted had I passed away like yesterday, or a couple months ago.

Lisa:                What?

Yuri:                That would have been not putting on my own big live event. The only reason that I’ve postponed doing it is the fear of … Are people going to show up?

Lisa:                It’s a big one!

Yuri:                Yeah. I mean it crippled me for so long, because you’re like, “I’m going to look like an idiot,” and whatever.

But when we did Healthpreneur Live and we had like 100 plus people, it was phenomenal. And as you said—once you’ve done it once or twice, now you have all these reference points. It’s like, “You know what? It worked out before. We can make it happen again.” I think that’s why experience is such a great asset as you build your life and your business.

Lisa:                And also, un-attaching from the outcome. It’s a Buddhist principle, it’s hard to really implement into your life, but you kind of have to.

You do your best work, and who’s meant to show up is going to show up. That doesn’t mean that you don’t work your butt off to get the word out, but it always works out. It’s always, always a learning experience no matter what happens.

I really do genuinely take that attitude with everything I do.

Yuri:                Yeah, that’s awesome. That detaching from the outcome is huge. I had an epiphany about this several years ago.

I would check my stats all the time, like all the time. I was asking myself, “Why am I doing this?” I think at the bottom of it all, it was like I didn’t have faith that things were working out for me. I had to feel like I had to control everything, every second by looking at the numbers.

I challenged myself. I’m like, “What if I just believe and have faith that everything’s working out, and I just kind of distance myself from tracking and looking at the stuff every second of the day?”

It’s extremely freeing, so I totally get what you’re saying with that.

Lisa:                It’s so liberating. It really is.

And that goes to what you were saying before, even on social media. Forget the ‘likes,’ forget this, forget that. Just keep putting out your best work to the world from a genuine place—the right people will find you.

 Spreading your message with awesome content

Yuri:                So, speaking of people finding you, what has been a really effective strategy for you to help people find you and help spread your message?

 Lisa:                You know, I think that I just really come from a place of generosity. I really do share a lot through Facebook Live. I have a radio show which comes to an iTunes podcast, it’s called ‘Healthy View Radio.’ We just changed the name this year, which is super exciting.

I write quite a bit. I wrote a book, and I write for different online magazines. I’m getting out there in a lot of different ways and just sharing my own struggles.

I think that I’m really honest about my own issues and struggles, and people can relate to that. I don’t think that we relate when everything’s perfect and so great; but if they see that you understand what they’re going through, then they’re more likely to start a communication with you.

 And that’s what I really look for. I’m not looking for the, “I’m going to trick you into buying my course.” I want long term relationships with my clients and the people in my tribe. I think I am surrounded by the most amazing people, and I appreciate them every day.

Yuri:                That’s awesome. That’s great. I’m sure they feel that way as well. If you’re starting all over again, knowing what you know now, would you do anything differently?

 Lisa:                Oh, I’d do it all differently. … But that’s the beauty of it!

I think that I went fast forward for five steps in doing all these great things, and then I had to go back and say, “Wait a minute, I didn’t have a sustainable business model behind that.” Maybe I would have done that a little bit differently, but I think it all worked out all okay. It’s continuing to evolve. It’s all good.

I think, again, as long as I keep checking in with myself and make sure I’m taking care of myself and that I’m doing work that feeds my soul, that’s the key. That’s the key for me, is to keep doing that. Yeah, so no regrets.

Staying resilient and patting yourself on the back

Yuri:                That’s good. That’s awesome. Now what do you think is the number one skill entrepreneurs most possess for lasting success?

 Lisa:                Resilience!

 Yuri:                That’s a good one, that’s for sure.

 Lisa:                Got to take a punch all the time. We get punched every single day and we just get back right up into the ring.

 Yuri:                Yeah, I couldn’t agree more.

One of my favorite quotes of all time, and I literally should print a poster of this, is from Winston Churchill where he says, “Success is going from failure to failure with unbending enthusiasm.”

Lisa:                I love that, it’s so true!

Yuri:                It’s so good.

Because I don’t know about you, but  don’t know if I’ve ever reached a goal that I’ve set. Like I’ve come close, but sometimes I’ve been way off. It’s very demoralizing if you don’t have your head on right.

Lisa:                Totally, and the problem is that people like us that are drawn to these entrepreneurial careers, we set the bar really high. And we keep raising the bar again, and again, and again. We’re constantly putting ourselves in this thing of like, “Okay, I’ve got to get there, I’ve got to get there.”

And that’s really hard, especially when you’re trying to help other people not do that.

Again, it’s checking in and saying, “Okay, let me just remind myself, what is success for me? What does that look like? How am I going to know when I’m in a good place, and have achieved some of my goals?” And they’re not always obvious ones.

Yuri:                Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah. That’s very true. I was at an event a couple weeks ago, and Daymond John was speaking. Someone in the crowd asked him about goal setting and stuff.

He said, “Every six months, I set six new goals, and I never hit them.” He’s just like, “I go to bed at night, I review my goals. I review them in the morning, but I never, ever hit those six goals, and then I just redo them every six months.”

It’s interesting, because one person could say, “Oh my god, I didn’t do this. I didn’t hit it again.” Or, you could maybe just look back, instead of looking into the gap, right?

Lisa:                Right. And give ourselves a pat on the back on all the stuff we do, do. I think that’s something everybody needs to do is, like—hey, maybe you didn’t do that, but look at the ten things you did do. And take a second to just celebrate that.

Yuri:                Yeah, absolutely. Do you have a regular practice for journaling, or acknowledging those elements of gratitude or success?

Lisa:                Oh my god. Well, I have a morning practice that saves me. I’m really into affirmations, and I’ve had gratitude journals for years. I meditate, and I use that time to really ground in.

Lately, I’ve been experimenting with tapping, too, a little bit in the morning. That’s kind of new for me, and I’m actually enjoying that quite a bit.

So, I have the routine in place and I can bring in and out different things to try, but you need to really have that place in your day. Once that’s there, it’s really fun to play around in there and see what works for you. I’m really big into all that stuff.

Yuri:                That’s cool. Well, that was one of the rapid fire questions, is what do you do first thing in the morning? Do you mind elaborating on what that morning routine looks like?

Lisa:                Oh sure. Usually I do some quick affirmations when I’m having breakfast. I like to eat right away.

And rather than affirmations, they’re actually reminders to me—that I choose to be healthy and happy, and I’m grateful for my food, and my family. I go through these series, and then I always end with, what wonderful thing is going to happen today? I think about my day and I think about all the great things.

I go, “Yeah, that’s going to be awesome.” It puts me in a really good state.

Yuri:                That’s a such a good question to ask. Like, “What wonderful thing is going to happen today?” That’s a great question.

 Lisa:                Yeah! Because I really do believe that if we say, “Oh my god, things are going to go wrong, they’re going to go wrong.” But if you go, “What’s going to go right?” They kind of do, a lot of times.

And then I might work for a little while, and then I’ll go do my “stuff.” I write in my gratitude journal. I might read a little passage from a book, I do my tapping, I do my meditating. I love it.

And even if I only have ten minutes, I’m not saying this is an hour practice. Sometimes it’s eight minutes of meditation, sometimes it’s 15. It’s really what I’m feeling that day.

But it leaves me feeling so connected, grounded, and in touch with what is going on emotionally, physically, spiritually, in my body. And I really do believe it will help me prevent illness. It will help prevent injury, because I’m so in tune with my body.

Yuri:                Yeah, that’s awesome. It’s pretty interesting. For everyone listening, if you’ve listened to all these episodes, meditation is actually one of the most common practices from everyone we’ve spoken to; which is pretty cool. Thank you for sharing that.

 Lisa:                My pleasure.

The Rapid Five

Yuri:                Lisa, are you ready for the rapid five?

Lisa:                Yes, hit me.

Yuri:                All right, so you’ve already answered one of them so I’m going to swap that out with another one; so it’ll be a surprise in slot number four. So again, you have no idea what these questions are. Whatever, just whatever comes to mind. Just blurt it out.

Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

Lisa:                I’m a planner, I’m an excessive planner. I’m trying to be more in the moment.

Yuri:                Cool. I mean there’s a benefit to that, to some degree, for sure.

 Lisa:                Our greatest strength is our greatest weakness.

Yuri:                Yes, that’s the second question is what’s your biggest strength?

Lisa:                I think my greatest strength is that I’m a creative problem solver.

Yuri:                Nice.

Lisa:                I don’t give up easily.

Yuri:                That’s good. I just want to talk about that for two seconds, because I’ve worked with a lot of people. I’ve hired a lot of people. One of the biggest things I look for in anyone is resourcefulness, and the ability to solve problems.

I don’t care what they’ve done in the past. I don’t care what their resume looks like. What you just said is such an invaluable skill because you’ll find a way. That’s it.

Lisa:                Absolutely, exactly. You don’t have to be book smart, you have to be just smart in creativity, and go, “Okay, that didn’t work. There’s got to be another way around this.” It’s hard to really recognize in people sometimes. It’s hard to really haul that out and figure out if people have that.

 Yuri:                Yeah, I’ll share a quick little story with you. For our Healthpreneur Live events, we had two amazing event planners work with us. Christie and Alison, I mean I continue to give them praise because they’re unbelievable.

One of the things that I loved about what they did is they went behind my back and did things above and beyond what I would have asked for. They had an idea of what the vision was.

So as an example, we wanted to create these yearbooks for everyone that we would mail out to all the attendees after the event. Lo and behold, Sunday comes. It’s the last day of the event. And they’re like, “Yuri, we just want to make sure it’s okay that we actually give out the yearbooks today.”

I’m like, “What? You got the yearbooks done during the event with pictures from the event?”

Lisa:                So cool.

Yuri:                I don’t even know what printing places are open on a Saturday night to do this stuff, or a Sunday morning. They made it happen. That kind of stuff for me is like—they get it, right?

They’re just going to find a way. It’s so, so valuable. If you’re that type of person already—like you are, which is tremendous—or if anyone listening has the ability to work with someone like that … Man, it is a game changer.

 Lisa:                The best. Yeah.

Yuri:                Yeah, it was awesome. All right, so number three: what is one skill you’ve become dangerously good at in order to grow your business?

 Lisa:                Listening.

Yuri:                So number four was the morning routine, but I’m going to swap that out for something else. What is something very few people know about you?

 Lisa:                I have a black belt in TaeKwonDo.

Yuri:                Are you serious?

Lisa:                I’m serious.

Yuri:                That’s awesome. Do you still practice?

Lisa:                No. I was very goal oriented, I got the belt. The truth of the matter is I got hurt and I kept re-injuring it afterwards. I stopped, and I did eventually heal the injury, but I knew if I continued that I wouldn’t heal; and so I did stop.

It was one of the hardest things I ever did, for me, because I had to fight. This was serious TaeKwonDo.

Yuri:                If you were jump back in the ring now, would you be able to kind of find your way, or would it be like … Nope.

 Lisa:                No, I don’t think I could; but I mean I went to a very traditional TaeKwonDo school where you had to go and fight every Friday night for like six months before you could take your black belt test.

I’m not like this huge person. I had all this gear, and I’d have these people like two feet bigger than me attacking me, punching my head, and kicking me. You couldn’t get me back in that ring if you paid me.

Yuri:                That’s cool, very cool. Final one here is complete this sentence: ‘I know I’m being successful when.’

Lisa:                I know I’m being successful when I smile with my eyes closed. I just sometimes will sit there and just be smiling and peaceful at the same time.

Yuri:                That’s awesome. That’s a very visual image there. I can picture that. That’s great. Lisa Lewtan, thank you so much for joining us on the Healthpreneur podcast. This has been a lot of fun.

Lisa:                So fun!

Yuri:                What’s the best place for people to stay in touch with you and follow your work online?

 Lisa:                So, my website is HealthyHappyAndHip.com. When you visit there, there’s a place to join my free Facebook community. That’s pretty active. We’ve got a great community going on in there.

So I welcome you to visit the website, click the little button to get access to the Facebook group; and I will see you there.

Yuri:                Perfect. Lisa, once again, thank you so much for taking the time and for sharing your journey, your wisdom, your insights. This has been a lot of fun.

Lisa:                Thanks so much for having me, Yuri. Always a blast.

Yuri:                Thank you.

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Yuri’s take

Hey guys, so I hope you’ve enjoyed that interview. That was a lot of fun, as it always is for me.

I really enjoy doing this podcast, because all I get to do is just have cool conversations with people like Lisa and everyone else we’ve interviewed on the show. That’s my selfish reason, honestly, for having this podcast is because A) it’s a great source of inspiration and content for you, but also because I get to connect with these awesome people.

Many of them I know already, many of them I don’t. It’s just a beautiful way for me personally to do what I love to do.

Yuri’s phone challenge

I want to leave you with a question, as I have started to do at the end of every episode. Today is actually a little more of a challenge. This is something I issued to myself several months ago, and it’s really been great; because it’s something that I knew I needed to do, but I needed to figure out a way to just confirm to myself that it was okay to do it.

And that is this: … Lisa and I talked about this addiction to social media, and how we can tame that beast a little bit. One of the things that I’ve found extremely helpful for me is I’ve actually deleted the Facebook app and the mail app from my iPhone.

I’ve spoken with my wife about this several times. I’m like, “You know what? I wish I just had my flip phone, my Nokia flip phone from like ten years ago.” That’s kind of what I want. It was nimble. It was small. I could just flip it open and look … It was badass. I really enjoyed that phone.

But to be very honest with you, the camera capabilities of the iPhone, the navigation, the maps, the very fact that right now, what I’m speaking into, at this very moment, is my iPhone … There are definitely some important uses that I have for my phone.

Well, what I recognize is that if I’m not creating, I’m consuming. I want to challenge you to spend more time in creation than consumption.

If you find yourself going on to Facebook, Instagram or your mail, and you’re just scrolling (i.e.: consuming) that is a waste of time.

My challenge to you is two fold, okay? Step one is, before you log on to social or your email, I want you to ask yourself, “Am I going here to create, or am I going here to consume or react?”

If you’re opening up your email, your app on your phone, you should be writing an email to someone. It’s not about going through and refreshing, “Did someone send me an email, did someone send me an email, did someone send me an email?” That’s a waste of time, okay? That’s what you want to avoid.

If you’re going to Facebook, “Am I going there to create and leave something of value to people, or am I just going to scroll on my newsfeed?”

If you want to take that approach, that’s cool. If you find yourself, like me, wasting too much time scrolling the newsfeed, I’m just going to suggest that you remove it off your phone. How do you share stuff on Facebook otherwise? Well, you can do it on your desktop or on your laptop.

If you’re doing Facebook Live video, use a really cool software called “eCam Live.” It’s 30 bucks, a one-time purchase, and you have it on your desktop or your computer. You can stream Facebook Live directly from your computer.

If you don’t want to hold your phone all the time, that’s what I do. I use eCam Live from my computer. And worst case scenario, for instance, if we do live events and I want to get some actual footage for my phone, I will re-install Facebook for that event and then I’ll just delete it afterwards.

I’m telling you, environments will always trump willpower. Don’t rely on discipline and willpower, because it’s fleeting. You only have so much of it. Set your environment up to win, which basically means set up your iPhone to support you.

I would much rather be on my phone in Google docs creating something than scrolling my newsfeed on Facebook. I have Google docs on my iPhone, and I go in there to create stuff. That’s a much better use of my time with my phone.

So those are my two kind of challenges that I’m posing out to you. If you want to take them, go for it. That’s awesome.

That’s all for today. Hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. A couple reminders, subscribe on iTunes. That’s first and foremost. If you’re not subscribing, you’re missing out big time; because we’ve got some amazing interviews we’ve done, many more to come.

If you want to take your business, your health and fitness, wellness business to the next level, this is the podcast. This is the podcast that’s going to show you how. You’re going to learn the real life journeys from some of the most successful people in our space. You can learn from them and save yourself a lot of time and frustration in the learning curve.

Second is, if you haven’t yet picked up your copy of Health Profits Secrets, I would suggest you do so right now. Go to HealthpreneuerBook.com, and I’ve already covered the cost of the book for you. In fact, all I’m asking you to do is cover a couple dollars in shipping. I will send it off to your front door in the next couple days.

Inside the book, you’re going to discover the four underlying secrets that all successful health businesses have in common. If you already have the book, terrific. If you don’t, grab it today. It’s a really, really good one. It’s basically a compilation of my 12 years in this space, and seeing what does and does not work. There are also three big mistakes I also highlight in that book that you’ll want to avoid in your business journey.

That’s about it. I want to thank you once again for taking your time, for your attention, for being with me once again. Continue to go out there, spread your message, be great, do great, and I look forward to seeing you in our next episode.

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Follow Lisa Lewtan At:

https://www.healthyhappyandhip.com/

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Free Healthpreneur Health Profit Secrets Book

 

 

Transcription:

Welcome back to the show. I’m excited because I’ve got a great message to share with you. It’ll help you share your content in a way where people will want to go further with you and buy from you, instead of just giving away your best stuff for free with no return.

If you can resonate with that, don’t worry. I’ve been there, too. I think almost everyone who does any kind of content marketing has been there or is currently there.

Before we get into that, let me share a story with you.

Examples of why some web content doesn’t make money

A couple of years ago, I went to a website and bought an eBook on food photography. I was buying it for my wife because she was interested in food photography at the time. It was about $27.00 for the download.

After I purchased it, it took me to a white page with “Thanks.” at the top in tiny letters. That was it. I checked my email, got the download, it was all good, and that was the end of the story.

I went back to that website afterwards because they show their monthly income reports. This is a site in the health/food space and they show how much money they make on a monthly basis doing this.

The income reports show where they’re generating income and what their expenses are. I looked at the last 12 months, this was back in 2015, and their monthly income hovered between $18,000 and $25,000. At the time, they were getting 600,000 unique visitors to their site per month.

That’s a lot of traffic. In comparison, we get about 700,000 to my blog, which is pretty awesome.

Out of curiosity, about two years later, I went back to the website. I was doing some SEO research for our own website. I came across this website again, and now, two years later, they had 2.2 million unique visitors. That’s about three and a half times more traffic.

I looked at their income reports for the most recent twelve months. Their income was almost the same, hovering in the low to mid-$20,000s per month. I’m not saying that’s an insignificant amount of money, but I wondered why they have three and half times more traffic, but their income is still the same.

At an event about 2 years ago, I was sitting beside a friend who has one of the most popular wellness blogs on the internet. She was candid about the type of traffic she got, and I had a sense of some of her challenges. She said she got close to 6,000,000 unique visitors a month, but I knew her income did not reflect that.

Another buddy of mine was in a similar situation. At the time, he had one of the most popular blogs on the internet, but was struggling to monetize that content. In the last two years, things have changed for them.

These conversations and this discovery of my own led me to really understand that the way people are sharing content is not driving revenue for their business. That’s a very big problem.

What’s the point of creating content if it’s not generating ROI for you?

I don’t want to talk specifically about how to write a blog post (we have an entire course on that ) or do a YouTube video properly, because there is a distinction. if someone is searching on Google after searching on YouTube, they’re typically going to be searching for a solution to a problem, i.e. “How to X.”

What I’m about to share with you may not always apply to that type of content, and I’ll tell you why in just a moment.

How to create content that drives revenue: Teach to Sell and build desire

What I’d like to teach you is how to share your content in a sales environment. When I say “a sales environment,” I’m talking about any environment. Every environment is your opportunity to really make a stand, take a stance, and invite someone to move to the next level with you so you can better serve and support them.

Let’s use the example of a webinar or Facebook Live video. These are two synonymous mediums that you can use to share your content. On a webinar, a lot of people don’t share anything. I call this “No Teach.” There’s no teaching at all; it’s just a sales pitch the whole time.

On the flip side, we have what I call “Teach to Teach.” This is when you share all of your content. Everything. You verbal diarrhea everything all over everyone.

Then, in the middle, we have a sweet spot. This is where we want to spend most of our time. It’s a methodology I call “Teach to Sell.”

Let me give you the difference between Teach to Sell and Teach to Teach. Teach to Teach doesn’t yield any monetary results. Maybe not any, but less than they’d like to see. Teach to Teach shares the “How.” Teach to Sell shares the “What” and the “Why.” That’s a very big distinction.

A year and half ago, we had a health coach come to one of our workshops. She had a webinar that was selling a sugar detox. The sugar detox was not selling the way she wanted it to, which was basically not at all. I said, “Okay, let’s have a look at your keynote slides.”

I opened up the keynote and looked, slide by slide, at everything she was doing. Then, I found the answer. I was like, “Right there. See what you just did with the content? That’s the reason why people are not buying from you.”

She was using Teach to Teach. She was giving away the “How to Sugar Detox.” When that happens, you resolve the tension for the prospect. You scratch all of their itches and that kills any desire for the next step.

In that keynote, she had given away everything a person would need to do on their own to achieve success. That’s why her sales conversions were struggling. We made a couple tweaks and repositioned how she presented the content. It improved the quality and conversions of that webinar.

The Teach to Teach method would say, “If you want a detox from sugar, here’s step one: Get rid of sugar. Here’s exactly how to do that.” You provide valuable information, but your goal is not to teach people. Your goal is to help, support, and move them to a better future.

You can’t do that if they do things on their own. Wouldn’t you agree? Otherwise, the whole coaching and consulting industry would not exist. We know that people need our support and it’s our duty to present quality content to them in a way that moves them toward potentially working with us.

Teach to Sell focuses on the “What” and the “Why,” not so much the “How.”

Share the “what” and “why,” but not the “how” for higher conversions

Teach to Sell also builds desire. It doesn’t kill desire. If you were looking to lose belly fat and I told you one secret was to do full body movements that burn total body fat, I’ve told you the “How to”. Now, you know how to do it. Desire goes down for the potential of buying your solution.

Alternatively, from a Teach to Sell perspective, what we would say instead is, “Stop doing isolated movements.”

Notice that when you say, “Stop doing,” or “Avoid,” you’re telling them what to do, but then the next question in their mind is, “What do I do instead?” Even if you were to answer that, depending on the nature of your offer and how you’re structuring your content, they might then ask, “How do I do that?”

If you reveal that, then you’ve just shot yourself in the foot. It’s a very small distinction, a small little nuance that makes a big difference.

In the teaching component of a webinar or a Facebook Live we want to focus on the “What” and the “Why. ” We should share what to do, what to avoid, and why that’s important instead of exactly how to do it. If you take that one tip and build your content around it, it’ll make a difference in your conversions.

Let me go back to the blog and YouTube stuff for a second. I mentioned that this method is not what you want to do all the time with blogging or YouTube. When people search online, they searching “How to lose weight,” or “How to make a healthy meal.”

If that’s what they’re searching for, you have to provide the solution. Otherwise, your content will get crushed. People won’t share it and it’ll drop in the search engines.

There’s a balance when you put up free content on a blog or on YouTube. You can give that stuff away, but it’s up to you to decide if that’s the type of business you want to run. Do you want to give away all of your trade secrets and “How tos” for everything, or do you want to focus on one powerful message, or pillar piece of content?

If the latter, you should drive people to a webinar. Give them an amazing experience without revealing the ‘How to.’ Give them enough to where they say, ‘Wow, this is absolutely mind blowing and I need to know more.”

If that’s what you want to do and you want to see conversions from that, you must adopt the Teach to Sell method, even with your blog. Even if you’re producing “How to” stuff, there are ways to segue your free content into a call to action, which will lead to higher conversions.

That’s beyond the scope of this show today, but I did want to plant that seed and share the difference between Teach to Sell and Teach to Teach. Do not verbal diahrea all of your stuff all over everyone.

Keep it clean. Keep it concise. Focus on the “What” and “Why,” and not so much the “How.” That’s what people will pay you for.

If you want to see this in action and, more specifically, if you want to see how you can build a high six or seven figure health coaching business, I invite you to a great training called, “The Seven Figure Health Business Blueprint.” I’ll show you five secrets to building a hassle-free million dollar business. This is the blueprint to get there.

There are many different ways to build a successful business. I’ve done a lot of them. We’ve built a very successful presence online in the last 12 years. What I’m going to show you in this training is the simplest and fastest way to get to the end result while helping your clients at a deeper level.

You’ll also free up your time in a massive way and won’t waste your time fiddling around with nonsense like building funnels, optimizing pages, and other stuff most of us hate doing anyways.

If you’d like to join me for that training, go to healthpreneurgroup.com/training and register absolutely free. I promise you it will be one of the best 75 minutes you’ve spent working on your business, other than listening to this awesome podcast.

By the way, thank you for joining me and welcome if you’re brand new. I would greatly appreciate it if you subscribed to the show today so you don’t miss any of the episodes we’ve got coming your way.

We do a solo round every Monday and interviews with great experts in our space on Wednesdays and Fridays. We highlight what they’ve done to grow their business and how they’ve overcome some of the challenges along the way. Thank you so much for joining me. Go out there, be great and do great. We’ll see you on Wednesday.

Transcription

Welcome to episode 65 of the Healthprenuer Podcast. Thank you for being a loyal subscriber if you’ve been with me since day one. If you’re just jumping on the boat now, it’s all good. Better late than never, right?

We have lots of great interviews to inspire you to keep you going no matter what life throws your way. You have an amazing message when it comes to health, fitness, or nutrition that can transform people’s lives. I believe that people need to know better, so I’m here to help you take your business and message to the next level so that you can impact those people and live the life you deserve.

Does that sound good? Does that sound like something you’d like or are currently living? If so, that’s great. You’re in the right place. This is the place for us Healthpreneurs to hang out.

Today, we’ve got a really cool guest, Juma Iraki, and he is joining us all the way from Norway. That’s a first! We’ve never had anyone on the show nor do I know anyone from Norway, so I’m excited.

Juma is a certified personal trainer, holds a Bachelor degree in Nutritional Sciences, has completed his IOC diploma in Sports Nutrition through the International Olympic Committee, and is currently pursuing his Master’s degree in Sports Nutrition at the University of Sterling in Norway. He’s the CEO of Iraki Nutrition AS and Head of Nutrition at AFPT where he lectures in Sports Nutrition. He also works as a business consultant for one of the largest supplement companies in Norway, and is the head Sports Nutritionist for the National Judo Federation in Norway.

Juma’s going to share an amazing story about how he built his company, how it hit rock bottom, and what happened after that. I’m not going to spoil the surprise. Without any further ado, let’s welcome Juma onto the show.

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

Juma:             Hi Yuri. Thank you so much for having me. It’s going great. What about you?

Yuri:                It’s going very well, thank you. I’m excited to have you on because you’re doing cool things in the nutrition space with your business and everything you’re sharing, but you’re also joining us from Norway, which is a first for the podcast.

What’s something that people don’t know about you that you’re happy to share?

Juma:             Well, most of the information about me is available on my website, but if I were to mention something that some people don’t know about me, it’s that I’m a huge soccer fan.

Yuri:                Nice.

Juma:             An extreme soccer fan. I follow a team called Newcastle United in the north of England, and I’ve been following them for 24 or 25 years.

My dad was at a conference in Dublin and came home with a Newcastle shirt for me, and from that day on I’ve been watching and following them. It’s been an interesting journey with ups and downs, and lately it’s been more downs than ups, but hopefully that will change in the future.

Yuri:                I remember the good old Alan Shearer days.

Juma:             Yeah, those were the good days. We really need an iconic number nine, a striker, in our club, but we’ll see.

There’s some talk now about golf money being invested into the club, so we might be up for sale. There might be a takeover by the end of the year. Hopefully that will happen and we’ll see how that goes.

Yuri:                Yeah, it’s amazing. I played pro soccer for a number of years and love soccer fanatically. To see the English partnership and how it’s grown in 10 years from where it was when I was in my teens is crazy. It’s been pretty cool to see the changes with all the Asian money that’s come in and all those new owners.

It’s always cool to connect with people who love the sport. Your dad brought you home a jersey and that’s how you connected to the club. That’s a very nostalgic connection.

So, IIraki Nutrition is the company. What’s the journey been like? How and why did you get into doing what you do?

Juma’s background and tough beginnings

Juma:             I got my Bachelor’s degree in Nutrition Science in 2012, and a couple of months before I graduated, I started to think about what I was going to do when I finished my degree. I decided to start my own company, set up an office, and do nutrition consulting and see how that went.

I started a month after I graduated, and to be honest, it didn’t go as planned. There were basically no clients and it was really difficult to get clients. I was working 16-18 hours a day and struggled to make money.

A year after that, my son was born. I had been struggling with some intense stomach pain on and off for six or seven years. My wife told me, “You know what? You’ve been complaining so long about this. Maybe you should go see another doctor and find out if there’s something you can do about it.”

I went to another doctor, and I found out that I had Crohn’s disease and it hadn’t been treated for the past six or seven years.

Unfortunately, that caused a lot of scar tissue in my GI system, so I had to have surgery and it didn’t go well. I had complications two or three days after. I spent the next year away from work because I needed an additional nine more surgeries to fix the complication that occurred. In total I did 10 surgeries that year.

Here in Norway, if you’re employed you get money if you’re ill or sick. If you’re self-employed, you don’t really get that much. You get about a 65% average of what you earned the last three years, and since I hadn’t been running my company for that long, I basically had no income.

Luckily we had savings. If it weren’t for the savings, we would have ended up on the street, losing everything. That was a rough experience, especially since I’m really competitive and determined. To be placed in a situation where I felt so vulnerable and unable to support my family was tough.

Company-wise, my company hit rock bottom. Everything I did the last year was completely wasted. I had nothing to come back to. I wondered if I should give it another push, or find another job to support my family.

I was encouraged by my family to give it another go, and I set up a goal that if I were to make the same income that I was making in the next year, then I would continue. I really don’t know what happened.

Prior to starting the company I had been writing a lot of articles for different websites here in Norway regarding training, nutrition, and supplementation. Three months after I did my second push with the company, I signed three major contracts with big companies here in Norway.

One of them was Proteinfabrikken, the biggest supplement company here in Norway. Another one was with the Academy for Personal Training in Norway. Recently, I landed a contract with the Norwegian Judo Federation.

I basically do three things in my company here in Norway: Guest speaking and lecturing on sports nutrition for Academy for Personal Training, business consulting for the supplement company, and training and nutrition counseling for national Judo athletes.

It’s amazing how I was at rock bottom and within the next three months everything just flipped the other way. I think the effort I put into it prior to that that accumulated during that time.

In 2015, since things were going well, I converted my self-employed company into a stock-based company where I could employ myself and have the same benefits as everyone else in Norway. I haven’t looked back after that. The main reason was because I never want to go through what I went through ever, ever again.

It’s one thing to have the disease and struggle with your health, but a whole other to also experience the stress that you’re about to lose everything and not be able to support your family. That was major stress factor for me.

Yuri:                I can only imagine. Thank you for sharing that. No one would want to go through a similar situation just from a health perspective, let alone all the financial stress. Amazingly, you pulled through all that. On a day-to-day basis, there must have been periods of self-doubt, but was there a voice in your head that said, “I can do this. We can make this happen.” What was that mindset that helped you get through that tough time?

The mindset and drive necessary to bounce back from obstacles

Juma:             I think it’s how I was raised by my parents and how I grew up. I was a really stubborn kid. If I wanted something or I set a goal, I didn’t stop until I achieved that goal. I played soccer for 10 years and I wanted to be the captain of my football team. So I just kept at it for several years and finally I was the captain of my team.

I always set a goal to be the boss at every company I ever worked with. But what I really struggled with when working for other people was that as soon as I was the boss of the company, I really didn’t feel I could go anywhere else. That’s also why I started my own company, because then there are no limits.

My driver was that I had to make it work to support my wife and kid. There was no option to fail. That has kept me on my toes and helped me structure my day. That experience alone has helped me be more efficient with how I work.

I spend more time being productive because in the back of my head, I always look forward to spending a lot of time with my kid and my wife. As soon as I catch myself doing something that I shouldn’t do work-wise, I remind myself that the more time I do that, the less time I have with my family. Because I travel a lot and have a hectic schedule during some parts of the year, that’s what I always look forward to.

I think my determined mindset has always been there. My life motto is even tattooed on my body. It’s a Latin phrase that says, “Aut viam inveniam aut faciam,” which basically means “I shall either find a way or make one.”

It’s an old quote from Hannibal. He came to a lake with his soldiers and elephants and they told him that there was no way to cross it. He told them that they’ll find a way, or make their own. That’s really stuck with me. I don’t like to look at obstacles; I always try to find a solution.

Yuri:                That’s awesome. I love entrepreneurship because you’re forced to be in positions where you put that mindset to use, which is tremendous.

During this journey, besides the story that you shared with us earlier, what has been one of the obstacles that you’ve dealt with in the business as it’s continued to grow? How did you overcome those obstacles and what lessons did you learn?

Overcoming obstacles, finding opportunities, and discovering automation

Juma:             When I first started, I noticed that I was spending a lot of time doing things that could be automated, which took up a lot of my time. One of the things was accounting. I put that away several years ago now, so I have an accountant that does everything for me. I don’t have to think about that.

All my online client systems have now been automated. When I look back, I wish that I had spent more time at the start figuring out how I could do these things. Then I would have been much more productive early on.

One of the main things here in Norway about being a sports nutritionist is that you really have to have the right connections. You have to be stubborn and try every option that you have. If you look in the UK, there’s much more work for sports nutritionists because a lot of the professional teams have sports nutritionists on their staff.

In Norway, on the other hand, not a lot of clubs are willing to spend money on a sports nutritionist. I figured out early on that only nutritional consulting wouldn’t work.

It’s not like a physical therapist where people need to see you regularly. They’ll see you once, have a followup two weeks after, and then maybe meet you once a month after that. The amount of clients that you have to have needs to be big.

I started to look at other options besides nutritional consulting. I learned I could also work in guest speaking, holding lectures, and writing articles. I could work in the supplement industry.

One of the reasons why I think things worked out so well for me compared to others, is that I tried to see opportunities in bigger areas than a lot of other people did. They only focused on just doing the nutritional consulting thing, and like I said, you really need to have a huge amount of clients to have that as your full-time job.

Yuri:                That makes sense. You looked at the opportunities as opposed to the obstacles and thought creatively about how to solve those potential issues, which is awesome.

Juma:             I’d like to mention one strategy that I use. If I set a goal to work with a company, for example, I will tell them something that they need to improve on. I’ll then follow that up with how the problem can be solved.

When you do that, you’re making work for yourself. With the supplement company, I got the opportunity to go to their warehouse and speak to a lot of the people there. I set a goal to locate the CEO, chat with him, and be completely honest with what I see from the outside and how I potentially could help them.

That’s how the relationship with the supplement company started. I was completely honest with them about what I thought they were doing right and what they were doing wrong. I also told them how I would do it differently and, since it was my area of expertise, I could help them with it.

10 minutes later, they invited me to lunch and the rest is history. We’ve had a great relationship for the last four years now.

One of the things I also tell a lot of people is that you need to make your own opportunities as well. There’s no shame in asking. Many people are afraid to ask for collaboration with a company because they’re afraid to get rejected.

But that’s how it is. Sometimes you get a no and sometimes you get a yes, but you’ll never figure that out if you don’t ask.

Yuri:                There’s a really good lesson there too, for everyone listening. You went to the company and said, “Here’s an issue and here’s how you can solve it.” You were demonstrating that you could help them by helping them and giving them some type of result before even asking for anything.

This is the premise of building any successful relationship. Giving, giving, giving. Demonstrate what you’re able to do before you ask for anything. As you mentioned, within 10 minutes they wanted to have lunch with you. That was a good example of that whole thing playing out.

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

Skills for lasting success

Juma:             A skill that is really important is being structured and organized. But you also must have respect for yourself and your time. Find systems to organize and set your priorities.

It’s not about the amount of hours you’re working. It’s about how much quality is in the work that you do. For me, I came to a point in my business where I thought, “Is more money going to make me happier, or am I satisfied with what I have now?”

I feel I’ve come to a point where I value my free time much more. Being a business owner and entrepreneur, I love the freedom to do what I want, when I want. There isn’t a set hour where I need to be someplace.

Even though I have freedom, I still structure my day. I split up when I work. I’ll wake up in the morning at 6:00, work from 7:00-12:00, go to the gym from 12:00-2:00. Then I’ll eat dinner with my wife and kids, spend some time with them, then I usually have some small things to do like emails, replies, or something like that. Then I’m done for the day.

A couple of years ago I found that I was much more productive when I split up my day that way. I do the heavy tasks in the morning, have a break to go to the gym and spend time with my family, then I do the autopilot work, as I call it, which doesn’t require as much brain power.

Yuri:                It’s a discovery process. You learned how you best work and found that you do your best work in the morning. I love how you said earlier that you look at your day and recognize, “If I start goofing off, I’m not going to have as much time to be with my family.”

Having that perspective and awareness is really important.

I tell everyone, “If you want to be more productive, just have kids.” It forces you to really prioritize things. I’ve got three boys and they’re in school from 9:00 until 3:00, so that’s my work time. When 3:00 comes, everything shuts down. Otherwise, what’s the point of doing what we do?

This has been a lot of fun. Are you ready for the rapid five?

Juma:             Yes.

The Rapid 5

Yuri:                Here we go. The five rapid fire questions. You have no idea what they are. Whatever comes to mind first is probably the right answer. Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

Juma:             That I’m stubborn.

Yuri:                What’s your biggest strength?

Juma:             My biggest strength is when I say I’m going to do something, I do it 100%. I focus on delivering quality services to my clients. That’s why my company has been really successful.

Yuri:                What’s one skill you’ve become dangerously good at in order to grow your business?

Juma:             As we discussed, how I manage my time and how efficient I have become over the years of running my company has been my biggest strength. I notice that I’m able to handle a lot more work now in a fraction of the time compared to before because I’m now working with systems and automations.

Yuri:                That’s great. What one or two productivity tips you could give less structured or disorganized people so they could better utilize their time?

Juma:             A lot of people do all the small things first and then they’ll save the big projects for last. Every day, I have one big task and some smaller tasks on my to-do list. I always start with the worst things first, because then I know that if those get done, they’re off my shoulders.

The small things can always be done the next day or later, but if I get one big thing done for the day, I’m satisfied. That’s one tip that I would give.

Yuri:                That’s awesome. Don’t overlook how simple that tip is. If you did nothing else in your business but that one thing, it would make such a huge impact a month or year from now. That’s great insight. Thanks for sharing that, Juma.

Juma:             My pleasure.

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

Juma:             Usually I take my kid to kindergarten. If my wife does that, I usually go for a short walk to start the day with fresh air and a clear head. I usually start working at 7:00. I wake up at 6:00, start work at 7:00.

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

Juma:             When I’m able to have balance in my life and dedicate time for work, time for training, and time for my family.

Yuri:                There you have it. Juma Iraki in the house. Juma, where’s the best place for people to stay in touch or see what you’re up to online?

Juma:             My website, IrakiNutrition.com. You can also follow my Facebook page. I’m not really active on social media, not lately at least.

Yuri:                That’s because you value your time.

Juma:             Yes, because I value my time. I know social media is really important for your business, but not if you’re spending most of your time on social media and not on what’s actually bringing money to the company.

Yuri:                Yeah, for sure. Juma, thank you so much for being with us, sharing your story, and sharing your insights. This has been extremely valuable for me, and I know our listeners will feel the same. Thank you so much, my friend.

Juma:             Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure, Yuri.

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Yuri’s take

Juma went through an emotional roller coaster. If Crohn’s and all those surgeries weren’t bad enough, he had to deal with being the sole breadwinner and his company not being able to generate revenue because he was going through surgeries and was sick. To see him bounce back from that and build an amazingly successful, flourishing company is truly remarkable.

I hope this inspires you to sit back and reflect. Maybe this is something you’ve experienced in your life. Maybe not to the same degree as 10 surgeries or Crohn’s disease, but maybe there was a setback in your life or a pivotal moment. How do you see the light at the end of the tunnel?

Hopefully Juma’s story can connect with you and give you some hope, wherever you are. If you’ve been there in the past, then you’re on the flip side of that. This is meant to inspire you to keep going every single day, because what you do matters. It really does matter.

It matters to the people you’re serving, but it also matters to your family, if you’re providing for them. It also matters to you, because I believe that what you’re doing should nourish your soul.

Entrepreneurship is the ultimate creative playground.

It’s our ability to express our creativity and ourselves, and when you do good work, you feel good about that. It’s important to continue doing that so you feel fulfilled, your family is taken care of, and you’re serving your audience.

Today’s little question to ponder is a really simple one: Why did you decide to start your own business? Why did you decide to go out on your own, as opposed to working for somebody else?

Maybe, like myself and a lot of other people, you started out working for someone else and realized that you were unemployable. I am completely unemployable, and I’m happy with that. That’s just the way that we are wired.

Connect with your answer, because I want you to be able to share that story in your messaging and marketing. Part of your power in attracting and impacting more people is being able to share your origins.

For me, I lost my hair when I was 17 to an autoimmune condition because I completely ignored my health for a long time. Not that I was old enough to really know what was going on, but all of that stuff led to losing my hair, and that was the beginning of my health journey. If that hadn’t happened, I don’t know if I’d be doing this right now.

Through that journey I got into health, fitness, and nutrition and eventually moved online. We’ve had a lot of success, a lot of failures, and have helped a lot of people.

Everything happens for us. It’s not happening to us. If we can share these experiences and weave them into your story, you’ll be able to connect with your audience at a much deeper level. When people feel connected to you, like they know they can trust you, you’ll reduce their resistance to doing business with you.

I hope this message has found you well.

With that said, I have a cool book that I want to hook you up with. It’s called Health Profit Secrets. If you haven’t grabbed your copy already, you can go over to Healthpreneurbook.com. I’ve covered the cost of the book and just ask that you cover a couple dollar’s worth of shipping. I’ll send it over to you within the next 10 days or so. Probably sooner than that.

Inside the book you’re going to discover the four pillars that all successful health businesses have in common. Then you’re going to get a scorecard that will help you score yourself on those four areas, and I’ll show you how to fill the gap.

Anyways, that’s all for today. Remember to subscribe to the podcast if you haven’t already, Healthpreneur Podcast on iTunes. Continue to go out there, be great, do great, and I’ll see you in our next episode.

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Follow Juma Iraki At:

https://www.irakinutrition.com/

Facebook

Twitter

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YouTube

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Transcription

Healhpreneurs, how is it going? Yuri here. Welcome back to the Healthpreneur podcast.

Today we have a very special treat for you because we’re going to be speaking to one of the industry leaders, one of the godfathers in the nutrition certifying space for fitness professionals.

It’s none other than Mr. John Berardi.

Dr. John Berardi, to be specific, because he’s got a PhD. John is one of the most knowledgeable dudes you’ll ever have a chance to speak with, plus he’s just one of the nicest guys around.

He lives about an hour-and-a-half away from me in Toronto. We see each other maybe once or twice a year, but nonetheless, we have been connected for a long time. John is the co-founder of Precision Nutrition, and the stuff that they’ve been able to do is truly remarkable. So I’m really excited to bring John onto this podcast. We’re going to have a great interview.

We actually started talking before I hit the record button. I’m like, dude, we’ve got to start recording this because it’s so good.

We’re going to talk about the growing pains. We’re going to talk about the journey of building a behemoth type of business, and a lot of the lessons and learnings that happen on that journey. If you’re just starting out and you’re thinking, “How does this apply to me?” … Well, it applies to you because there’s a lot of things that John has recognized in the growing of his business that have allowed him to come back to his roots.

So, the things that you’re doing now, ironically enough, might also be the things that you love doing as your company grows. And the further you move away from them, the more disheartened you might feel. So, there’s some really interesting insights that we’ll go over in this interview.

So let me give you a more formal introduction for John Berardi. As I said, he’s the co-founder of Precision Nutrition, which is the world’s largest online nutrition coaching and certification company.

He is an adviser to Apple, Equinox, Nike and Titleist. He was recently selected as one of the 20 smartest coaches and 100 most influential fitness professionals in the world. In the last 10 years, he and his team have helped nearly 150,000 people get in the best shape of their lives through their renowned Precision coaching program.

They’ve also helped nearly 50,000 students become and Elite health and fitness coach through their Precision Nutrition certification program. They’ve grown their company to more than 100 employees and they’re doing about 40 million in revenue. Just incredible stuff that they’ve been able to do with this company.

I’m really excited to have this conversation with John. I know you’re going to get a lot of great value out of this, so don’t go anywhere. Grab a pen and pape—assuming you’re sitting down—and if you’re walking, come back to this afterwards.

If you want to learn more about what they’re up to, you can go to precisionnutrition.com. With that said, let’s welcome John Berardi onto the show.

 

Yuri:                Mr. John Berardi, how’s it going, my friend? Welcome to the Healthpreneur podcast.

John:              Great. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. Any chance that we get to connect, either in person or on a podcast like this is always exciting for me. Where we can talk about our shared passions, from health and fitness, the work we do there to the business side of things, which also has become something very exciting to me over the last few years.

 Yuri:                Absolutely. You guys have built a small company called Precision Nutrition, which I’m sure no one’s heard about … No, in all honesty, I think everyone listening to this knows who you are. I think they know who Precision Nutrition is.

But I don’t think they know all of it. Some of the things we’ll talk about here, I think will be really insightful and illuminating. And I love having conversations with you because A) you’re just a great person. B) you’re Canadian, which is always good. And C) you’ve been at this for a long time and there’s a lot of wisdom that you’ve accumulated over that time with respect to your professional development, your personal development, and how you’ve built PN. I think our listeners will get a lot of value out of some of the stuff we’ll talk about here.

So, I know that before I hit the record button we had some really cool nuggets, and I just didn’t want to miss any more of that.

 So, we were talking about this evolution—at least for our business—where we climbed one mountain, realized that we didn’t want to be up there, made some changes, went back to our roots a little bit.

Precision Nutrition, for people who might not know, just give people some context of where the company is now and then we’ll work backwards from there.

The start of PN and their new business model

John:              Sure. PN started with Phil Caravaggio and myself. You know Phil.

Phil was going to University of Toronto at the time, and I was at University of Western Ontario. I was renting a house, and he would come out to my house and we set up the basement as a makeshift office.

He would come out Fridays and Saturdays. So that’s where we started it, in the basement of this house, Fridays and Saturdays, two days a week. We were both full time students.

And today, we have about 100 full time, full benefits people working with the team, plus a whole host of really awesome contractors we work with. Our products and services go into 100 different countries.

To date, through our coaching program, we’ve coached upwards of 50,000 people online. Through our certification and education program, that’s another 50,000 professionals. With our recent ProCoach offering, which we launched last year—which is a chance for the people who go through our education programs to use our software and curriculum to coach their clients—we’ve coached another 100,000 people in the last year through that program alone.

So, it’s been really, really exciting to start out coaching 20 or 25 people, and now having the kind of impact where we’ve touched 150,000 people, plus the 50,000 professionals who are out amplifying that all over the world in their spaces. So that’s what we’re doing nowadays.

Yuri:                That’s awesome. And I remember when Phil was initially talking about the development of ProCoach, I went “Dude! This is a game changer.”

 John:              Yeah, it is, and on all the right levels for us.

Number one, obviously it’s a way to really amplify the reach we can have in the world. We started this thing to do good, to help people live better, to take care of themselves better.

So it’s good for the people who get reached. It’s also good for all these professionals who maybe don’t have a system in place, or are looking for system to be able to coach reliably, consistently and effectively.

And then, it’s great for our business because it’s our first ever continuity model, where the coaches who work with us to use ProCoach pay a monthly fee. And we’ve had ProCoach around now for close to a year-and-a-half, and the drop off rate is almost nothing.

We’ve retained something like 85% of the pro coaches who signed up last June, so that’s almost a year-and-a-half.

It’s the first time ever, from a business perspective, where we didn’t have to replace clients every six months. And it’s because we have this launch model.

So, we take new certification students every spring and fall, new coaching clients every January and July. And so, whenever a program ends, you have to replace all those clients. They stop paying. This is the first opportunity we’ve had to actually be in a situation where people don’t stop paying—which actually is a great prospect for our business, and it’s allowed it to really scale exponentially.

Yuri:                And it’s such a smart offering too, because there’s a pain of disconnect with the person. It’s not like a newsletter. It’s like, “I’m not going to cancel my e-mail service provider because then I can’t send e-mails anymore.”

John:              That’s right, yes.

Yuri:                It’s the same type of platform you guys have built where there’s massive value to the fitness professional who’s using it. Why would they want to cancel? Which is very smart.

John:              And on two levels, right? Because if they cancel, then they actually have to stop the program of their client as well.

Yuri:                Yep.

John:              So now their client’s pissed at them too.

Some people call it, in business circles, vendor lock-in. We hate using that language at PN. The last thing we want to do is make someone feel like they’re held prisoner or captive of our business.

But again, it’s a model that works on a whole bunch of different levels. And we like to think of it more as, it provides so much value for the client and the coach that leaving would be a pain because of the value they’d lose.

Yuri:                Absolutely. It really is a no brainer. It’s a smart technology for sure.

You guys have grown to a fairly large size—100 employees plus contractors and all that great stuff. What are some of the growing pains that you’ve had to deal with and learn from as you guys have grown over the last couple of years?

Growing pains and the holacracy system 

John:              I’d say the first one, and the biggest one also, has been one of our biggest successes. And it was born out of a problem—which was that when we got to between 20 and 25 team members, Phil and I really started to dislike our work.

It wasn’t the core mechanics of the stuff we did, like creating products and teaching and education. It was actually what I often call “playing business.” And it’s not that charitable of a thing, but now we have people on our team who love to do that work. They don’t call it playing business. I think I minimized my use of that phrase because it might be patronizing to people who love that aspect—they love planning and forecasting and modeling, they love coming up with systems and structures for how we are together as a team inside the company.

But for Phil and I, we were always really passionate about what goes over the wall; not necessarily how the people inside the wall are playing together, but the quality of the work that goes over the wall.

And you can basically become two companies within one. And you have to, at a certain size. It’s where one group of people just worries about in the wall—how we are together, how we work together, can we get things done effectively and efficiently in a way we all enjoy? Can we grow together as a team?

But then the other group inside the company has to worry about what’s happening outside of this little group. Are we doing great work? What do those people out there think of what we’re doing? Because they don’t see inside. They don’t even care about the inside.

Oh, does person A from HR and person B from client care and person C from marketing get along? Or, is there effective communication between them?

No, they don’t care. They only care if that effective communication produces better products that bring value into the world.

So, it started to get really tricky because Phil and I were responsible for most things in the beginning, and everyone turned to us for advice. We essentially hired a bunch of really nice, cool people to help us. They were all working for Phil and I.

And then it just gets to the point where you can’t communicate effectively with 25 people. All of a sudden, I had no time to produce anything. I just had to be meeting with people all the time, and it became a major stressor—even to the point where Phil and I sat down and were like, “Do we want to keep doing this?”

PN was continuing to grow like crazy, but we were both sad. Me more so than him, in all fairness.

That’s when we started getting some advice from people who have been down this road before. And I know you’ve done a lot of personal and professional development coaching, so you know the value in this.

And we’re really smart guys. Phil studied engineering at the top engineering school in the country—like the MIT of Canada—and I have a PhD and graduate training and a bunch of undergrads.

Objectively, we’re pretty smart people, so we could try and figure this out. But there’s a whole bunch of people–—even within our circle—who’ve already figured this out. Can we just tap their knowledge?

And so, what we found was a different way of organizing our company. It’s called holacracy, and it got a lot of attention in the media because Zappos has been applying it to their company over the last couple of years. And they’re obviously much bigger than we are. We were one of the first adopters of it, and they even hired us to come down and consult on that project.

Yuri:                That’s awesome.

John:              But, the idea was that it was a different way of organizing. It gave us a structure and framework for organizing a company, but it was also a different form or organization than the top down, militaristic hierarchies.

It’s probably something more suited to knowledge workers, remotely distributed knowledge workers like we are. Everyone works remotely. We don’t have a central office.

When we want to work together, let’s say, for example, we’re building a new piece of software, and we need to be in each other’s presence for a short period of time, we’ll just take two weeks and meet up in Costa Rica instead of everyone having to live in Toronto or wherever.

Yuri:                That’s awesome.

John:              So that was our first major learning. You get to certain point—and this is written about in the business literature, so it’s not ground breaking—but there’s these multiples. You get from zero to 30 employees, things have to change, 30 to 100, things have to change. 100 to 300 (or whatever it is), things have to change.

And in our experience, that’s been true. When we hit 30, and as we’re getting to around 100, different systems have to come in place. The old systems just become obsolete, and if you keep trying to work them, everyone just gets sad.

So that was pretty much it, and that was an organizational learning thing I guess. This need for a different system, and maybe even two different groups within PN—one looking after how we are together, and the other looking after what we put out into the world.

But that also was a really personally gratifying experience, going through that, for Phil and I. I often say that in the beginning my unofficial job title was “Director of worry about everything.” It was just like, “Who’s doing what? What are they doing? I’ve got to worry about that. Okay, now the launch is coming. Okay, now this product’s going out.”

I had to be involved with everything, or at least I felt like I had to.

And when we reorganized, all the roles became clear. So there was actually someone who was accountable for looking after these things that we had to make very explicit. And then, I only had to worry about my own accountabilities. Other people—competent, talented people hired for that specific thing—had to worry about those accountabilities.

And it was really freeing. I could take a vacation without worrying about stuff. All I had to do was make sure the accountabilities I’m supposed to look after—someone was looking after those in my absence.

So it became really freeing. Phil said for him, it was the first time he’s ever allowed himself a real vacation since we started the company because he just knew, “I’m going to hand my accountabilities off to this person for two or three weeks. I’m going to go away and then not worry about it.”

Yuri:                Amazing. It’s funny because at our Healthpreneur live event I was talking about this growth curve which basically mirrors what you just said.

Which is, we all start off in the business as a technician. We’re a great trainer, nutritionist, expert. And we eventually get to the point where we’re like, “Okay, we need to build this a little bit.”

We become operators. We start doing everything. And then we put on the hat of the CEO, and then we hit this existential crisis, which is like what you just said. You guys were really unhappy with what you were doing, and it was like, how do we get back to doing what we love to do? Which is creating great products and putting it out to the marketplace.

So it’s really cool to see how you guys have gone through that, and how you’ve restructured to really build a business that you love, which is tremendous.

Your unique ability and how to find your perfect role as a founder

John:              Yeah, and the result of all this learning is that you need to be really clear about what your unique abilities and values are, and you need to hire the things that aren’t that.

Yuri:                Yeah.

John:              I would be a terrible CEO. Most of the things that CEOs value and are good at, I don’t.

I certainly don’t have the skill—although I could probably learn it. But I would never be as good as someone who actually values the very things that make for good CEO-ing. I don’t value those in my own life. So I could learn the skills by memorization and practice, but I never really energize that work very well.

So if the advice then becomes, get really clear on who you are and what you do and then hire out the other things, most people wouldn’t take it.

But there’s a reason for that. It’s because I’m in the position now where I’m past it. And quite frankly, our revenue is high enough that we can hire out for those things. But there are certain points where you just simply don’t have the money to hire a CEO. And that’s why I think some people fall into that role where they’re like, “I’m a technician who’s now a manager of managers? I hate that.”

But you don’t have the money yet to do anything else.

And our current CEO—whose name is Tim Jones—often says, “You hire when it hurts, and not before.”

I think that really speaks to what I just brought up. The idea that, it’s probably going to have to hurt you or the organization for a while, because you need talent or you need new roles filled but you can’t afford it. And it hurts for a bit.

But then as you either grow or change your organization to accommodate it, that’s when you start doing the hiring.

And that, to me, is the key lesson. You can’t ever make it not hurt. You’re actually looking for the hurt in some respects. People say growth comes along with pain, and I think it’s become such a cliché we don’t actually understand it.

But this is what we talk about at PN all the time. Let’s say, for example, our customer base is growing and we don’t have enough client care to support it yet. Well, you don’t hire when there’s one more customer than your ability to handle customers.

You have to hire well beyond that point, because you need infrastructure and management and all that stuff.

So, instead of being like, “Oh, it hurts a little bit. We gotta fix it right away, make the pain go away!” We actually look for that kind of discomfort now. We appreciate it as part of a growing business, and then we now know not to try and make it stop.

It’s just like in counseling or in most aspects of life. When things hurt, most people’s response is to make it go away. Most coaches think it’s their job to make the hurt go away for their clients.

But it’s actually not. It’s to actually appreciate that life does hurt sometimes, and that’s okay, and what strategies do we have for dealing with that?

Hiring A+ players vs. “mold-able” players

Yuri:                Yeah, and that’s such good wisdom. And we talked a little bit about A+ players versus B players before we started recording.

This is always an interesting conversation I have with different entrepreneurs. What’s your view on hiring people who are seasoned? They’re going to come in, they know exactly what to do. They know more than you in that specific role. Versus hiring someone who you mold and grow into that role?

John:              Yeah, I don’t know if we’ve ever figured it out yet. We have some best practices at PN, but for me to sit here and pretend, “Oh yeah, we’ve got this nailed down,” would be just a bit of a stretch of the truth if not an outright lie.

This is one of the things we were talking about before. I feel like this is a life practice. It’s not like a handbook you get and now you’re done. Just follow the rules and then you’re going to be able to hire A+ players all the time and you’re never going to have any problems in hiring.

No, it’s just like you need to brush your teeth or meditate. You need to do these things over and over again because every day your teeth get dirty again. Every day your thoughts get unfocused again.

And every day, you either think about hiring or make hiring decisions wrong again. You know what I mean?

Yuri:                Sure.

John:              But with that said, we’ve done some things that I think are really positive. One of the great inflection points for us was when we actually brought on an HR team. We’re like “Hey, let’s actually have people who are responsible for recruiting, screening recruits, and then doing continuing development with people on the team.”

So there’s a whole group of people who think about that all day, every day at work, and work towards that. But when it comes to hiring, Phil and I have gone back and forth over the years, as we have with our CEO and leadership team and HR team.

I don’t think there’s a good hard and fast rule here.

We work in a business where generally people have to understand the business and be passionate about it. And you’ve seen this I’m sure, many, many times.

One of the famous failed experiments in the nutritional supplement business, for example, was when a nutritional supplement company gets big enough that they can actually start hiring from outside the supplement world. And they bring in the former CEO of Pepsi or something, you know what I mean?

Yuri:                Totally.

John:              They’re like “Hey, we just brought in someones legit, not just some upstart from this little niche, but this person was the leader of one of the largest organizations in the world.”

And the company fails inside of like 18 months. You know what I mean?

Yuri:                Yeah.

John:              I’ve just seen this over and over again. And the reason is because you have someone who’s really, really talented, vetted and proven … in a non niche industry.

And we work in a niche, where the people in that niche have their own tribe, code and values and morals—and someone from outside of it doesn’t understand any of that. Then they make decisions based on that.

And all of a sudden, the audience dissipates. They’re like “Oh, this isn’t our tribe anymore, obviously.”

So when hiring, you have to do this fine dance between the two. You don’t have five years to train someone who’s really passionate about your business, but has no skills in doing that work.

And you don’t want to bring someone in who has all the experience, but is going to ruin the business because they don’t understand the tribe.

So it become this real tension. What takes longer? To learn the culture, or to learn the work skills?

So what we found—and this is probably the only useful piece of advice that’s not loosely philosophical here—if you hire someone with all the skills and experience without the industry experience or understanding, you need to pair them up with someone who does. And they need to make decisions together.
And if you hire someone without the skills who knows the tribe really well, then they need a consultant who’s working with them side by side—either outside the company or inside—who can fast track them on the skills.

But this is something Phil and I learned early on. If you pair people up based on unique abilities, skills and knowledge, you end up getting more than one plus one.

Yuri:                Yeah, totally. That’s awesome. That’s funny. I was actually walking my kids to school this morning, and there was this older kid, maybe grade six, who came flying by in a scooter. And my son Luke is like, “Hey, that’s my reading buddy!”

And I was like, “That’s so cool.” So I was asking him, “does everybody in kindergarten and first grade have a reading buddy?” And they do.

That is such a great parallel to what you’re talking about here. The kids learn how to read, and then they give back by mentoring younger kids on how to read. And then as our kids grow up, they’ll be the mentors to other kids.

That’s actually never something I’ve considered implementing in our business. But it makes total sense.

Keeping culture in a remote workplace

 John:              Yeah. And Phil and I lucked into this. Our whole business started with a pairing—him plus me. We were co-founders, we started this thing together.

His technician background is in systems design, interfaces and stuff like that, so he built websites. And I understood nutrition and science and physiology. So that was our pairing early on.

We didn’t have the same skill set, and we had different ways of seeing the world. But we had a shared passion.

And then when we started hiring, we just naturally started doing that—who could pair with who?

We don’t hire necessarily in pairs, but we look for how people can work together. And aside from the skill sharing and blind spot checking, there’s also just the communal aspect. We work virtually, so everyone essentially works alone sitting in their home office, or whether they go to a shared work space or whatever it is.

But you’re working at your computer alone. Even if you worked in an office building somewhere in cubicles, you still do most of your work alone if you’re a knowledge worker sitting at your computer.

So that can be isolating and boring and crappy and times, because you hold the accountability for doing a particular piece of work. It’s up to you, and if it goes badly, you are held accountable to that.

But one of the problems with holding a sole accountability is sometimes you forget that the best way to make a decision is to have resources to go to that can help increase your confidence in making a decision.

If you give people—I often call it at arm’s length—if you give people someone who’s at arm’s length, so really close, it’s not hard to get access to that feedback that they need. The chance that they’ll use it is way better than if it’s far away. Like if it’s a consultant outside the company, or if it’s someone who works in another department who they don’t work with regularly.

The chance that they’ll actually reach out and get that feedback that they need is low.

So for us, it’s like how can we put complementary skills at arm’s length from each other so that they will use each other as a resource regularly?

Yuri:                Yeah. That’s awesome. So, do you guys have the Toronto office anymore, or that’s no longer?

John:              It’s pretty much a slow erosion. As you know, we used to have the fifth floor of a shared work space in Toronto and we had a whole bunch of people who worked there every day—maybe eight or ten people.

And then slowly, people just started migrating back to their home offices as their lives changed.

Maybe they had kids or they decided to move out of the city. So we have like one lone person hanging on, still going to the office—Robert, who’s our CFO. And it’s because he lives nearby and he likes riding his bike to work. So he’s basically the lonely remaining person who goes to the office.

And we’re a few millimeters from just closing it down, and then everyone works from home.

Yuri:                Yeah. But how do you maintain culture when everyone’s virtually remote around the world, around the country? What are some of the best practices that have worked for you guys?

John:              Yeah, it’s funny because whenever I get this question, it always blindsides me. I’m like, “Oh, I didn’t even think it was a thing that people would suspect this would be difficult,” because we’ve always worked this way from essentially day one.

You just need to be in contact, and it needs to be easy to be in contact.

One of the great things about holacracy is that it already has an out-of-the-box set of meeting structures. So we don’t have to invent how we communicate, how we work together, how we collaborate. It already has a way of doing that built into the system.

Now, we’ve improved on it over the years for our own way of working. But yeah, for example, if there’s a top priority project… And for everything at PN, whenever we have our annual strategy meetings, we determine what our three priorities are for the year. My belief is that if you’ve got a list of 10 priorities, anything after three might as well not even be on the list.

Yuri:                Can I just stop you there for a second?

John:              Yeah.

Yuri:                I just want to make sure the listeners get that, because this is something you’re not going to find from novice entrepreneurs. And this is maybe from trial and error, but this is something I’ve recognized too.

Four priorities for me, over the year, is even too many. We’ve realized, even with a team far smaller than yours, there’s no way you can accomplish four or five big rocks in a quarter.

So that’s just really, really important. I just want our listeners to really make a note of that.

John:              Yeah, it might be the most important thing I’ve ever learned. And no one loves this realization. This is like that brushing your teeth thing.

Everyone at the organization can level set on an understanding that we can only do three big things a year. And then every single day, teeth get dirty again, and you’ve got to brush them again and remind yourself that we only do three things.

Because four is a zero, five is a zero, and if you’re even thinking about it, it distracts you from one, two and three. I think the way that we’ve been able to get comfortable with it is realizing that we plan on doing this for a long time.

We plan on having this business for a long time. We have big, ambitious goals, but we realize it’s going to take time to achieve them. So if we only do three things a year, that’s fine.

And now, after practicing this discipline for multiple years, people get it. They’re like oh, wow! I know you’re familiar with the Strategic Coach stuff where you actually do the retrospectives…

Yuri:                Phil and I were in the same group.

John:              Yeah, that’s what I thought.

And where you actually look back every 30, 60 or 90 days, whatever you choose, and say, what are we proud of having accomplished? What are we excited about today, and what are we looking forward to for the future?

When you do that exercise, it makes three priorities okay. And it makes it okay, because when you check back in 90 days, you’re like, “Whoa! We actually did a lot of stuff we’re proud of,” even though the list said three priorities.

So I get how having a short list still allows you to grow, and thrive, and be great and achieve your goals.

Anyway, this one’s super important one to me and it’s something I try and exercise in my personal and professional life.

Yuri:                That’s awesome.

John:              But with that said, getting back to the original point, working virtually.

We have our strategy meeting each year. We decide on our three priorities. We write down all the things we’re not going to do. Even through they’re great ideas and people are passionate about them, but we’re not doing it.

And when we’re working very diligently in the creation phase of some of these things, we have a daily standing meeting. So everyone shows up for a 15 minutes meeting. It’s virtual, so we use Zoom or something like that, and everyone says what they did since the last meeting and what they’re planning on doing until the next meeting. It just takes like 15 minutes if the group’s not too big.

So “Hey, since yesterday I worked on this.” Now everyone knows, cover any clarifying questions or whatever, and then, “for tomorrow, I’m going to work on this.”

And then you get back to your work.

Sometimes that work involves you alone, sometimes that work involves you pairing, so you may go on another Zoom and do screen shares. And we have Slack, which is a collaboration tool. Basically you can have all these multiple channels where you can live chat with your team, and we’re on Slack every single day.

Slack is 50% work, 50% jokes generally at PN, and funny GIFs and stuff like that. So that’s how we keep in touch.

And then, when we really have to work on something that requires intensive concentration and collaboration, we all just go somewhere. Our annual strategy meetings are in person. If the programming team is building something, usually the last few weeks we’ll do in person. And again, it could be in California or Costa Rica. If it’s the winter in Canada, you better be sure we’re going somewhere warm.

And then the team just rents a house together. We all stay in the same house and work together collaboratively together that way.

Or if our content team is going to create the content calendar for the next six months or one year, we’ll get together for that. So it’s this combination of in person when in person is required, regular check ins, and keep the meetings short. No one loves going to long meetings unless they like hiding from their work. And then regular communication on Slack.

And it doesn’t take people very long. If you are the right personality type for virtual or remote work, then it doesn’t take you very long to acclimate to this. The people it takes the longest are people who are the wrong personality type.

There’s a certain kind of introversion/extroversion. Gregariousness. There’s a bunch of traits we screen for, and some people just don’t do well with remote work if they’re this certain combination of extroversion and gregariousness.

They just don’t feel good sitting at their computer all day, so they can’t do this. It’s in everyone’s best interests that they don’t.

Using personality quizzes and test projects for hiring

Yuri:                No kidding. That’s very cool. Are you guys using Kolbe, Myers-Briggs, a bunch of, a combination of things?

John:              Yeah. We do. Depending on the roles, we’ll use different things. For example, the Caliper profile is one we’ve long used that we really love. That one, we actually picked up when doing some work with some elite sports teams.

I was fascinated—and so was Phil—with learning about how they were using these trait identification tools, which were originally validated in executive formats with drafting NBA players or major league baseball players to figure out how they stacked up. At that level, they’re all talented. All round one picks are super talented.

The idea then, is how will they fit into our team dynamic? And will they help or hurt in this context?

So we started using Caliper early on, and then we’ll use a combination of Kolbes and Myers-Briggs and other tools based on the role to figure out how someone might fit in. And interviews.

And then usually what we do beyond that is we give people trial work to do. Almost no one has ever been hired at PN without doing a project with us. Just to see if they like working this way, if we like working with them, etc.

We pay them more than the project was worth, as a reward for actually doing this in the first place. Most of them are talented and have other jobs, to start with. So we’ll over pay them for the work, but it’ll give us a real great sense, in combination with these other tools, as to whether this is the right thing for them.

Yuri:                Yeah, that’s huge. People can talk all they want and put whatever they want in their resume, but when they actually have to do the work and you can see if they’re getting stuff done in a time efficient manner at the performance levels you want, that’s all the proof you need.

So I think that’s a cool strategy.

John:              Yeah, and then embracing the truth and the reality of how people are is also helpful there. Because the truth is, if someone wants to work at your company and you give them a trial project, they know that’s a trial project, they’ll over perform compared to regular performance.

So you just have to factor that in. It’s like Chris Rock used to say, “When you go on a first date, you’re not meeting the person, you’re meeting their representative.”

So that’s the same. We’re like “Oh, this is cool. All right, this person, we just met their representative. They did great work, we liked working with them, but this is the best we’re ever going to see. So let’s factor that in too.”

The number one skill entrepreneurs must possess for lasting success

Yuri:                That’s great. I’ve got one more question for you before we jump into the rapid five. What do think is the number one skill entrepreneurs must possess for lasting success?

John:              Oh, wow. This might as well be part of the rapid five. I don’t know. You’ve met so many entrepreneurs, and they all share different talents and skills and stuff like that.

Some people may say passion or whatever. I feel like that’s too nebulous to be useful. I feel like there’s a certain amount of patience that’s required. But if you were to look at my Caliper test for example, I’m in the 99.9% percentile of urgency—which means I’m not patient.

So I would say, if we’re talking about true entrepreneurship, probably high on the list is a certain adaptability, a flexibility. Can you deal with constantly changing conditions? Micro changes and macro changes to your work structure, to your day, to your personal life?

When I started this business, I was not married and had no children. Now, I’m married and have four children. So, can you adapt? You might not even have to like it. But can you do it? Continually adapt, continually re-invent?

So I don’t know. There’s probably a set of traits that makes for great entrepreneurship. But I would say this one would be part of the core matrix of what would be required.

Yuri:                I agree. I thinks there’s definitely a Darwinian thing there, which makes a lot of sense. I think it’s important, especially nowadays, where stuff is changing so rapidly compared to when we started almost two decades ago. So that adaptability is huge.

John:              I even wonder if that’s true, though. I’ve asked myself that same question, because it does feel like things are changing, but I remember our first website was built with Phil teaching me how to code HTML.

And then very shortly after, it wasn’t like that at all, and everyone could have a website. So I’m like, “Has  the change even been that rapid in our business terms?” I think it’s always been changing fast.

Yuri:                Yeah, well it’s true. I think our generation, we’ve seen everything. We’ve seen the cassette tapes to the CDs etc.

I think our parents’ generation would be like, “Okay, this is happening a little bit too quick,” but for us, we’ve grown up with that, so I think that’s to our advantage.

John:              Yeah.

The Rapid-Five Questions

Yuri:                All right John, you ready for the rapid five?

John:              Yeah, let’s do it.

Yuri:                All right, buddy, so you’ve got no knowledge of these questions. I’m just going to fire them at you. Whatever comes top of mind is the right answer. All right, here we go. Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

 John:              Patience.

 Yuri:                And number two, what is your biggest strength?

 John:              Communication.

 Yuri:                That is probably the most common answer that we’ve seen on this podcast—this emotional intelligence, communication, that’s a big one. So everyone listening, make a note of that.

Number three, one skill you’ve become dangerously good at in order to grow your business.

 John:              One skill I’ve become dangerously good at… Understanding our customers.

 Yuri:                So it wouldn’t be HTML coding?

 John:              (Laughter) There’s some danger in my HTML coding. You wouldn’t describe it as dangerously good.

Yuri:                Oh, that’s funny. Cool. That’s a big one, though. Understanding the customers is huge.

Just a tangential question, as the company grows, do you feel it’s more important to stay more connected to your customers? Because I think a lot of people at the top of their organizations end up being so disconnected from their customers they almost lose a sense of what they’re doing.

 John:              Yeah, absolutely, totally. And there has to actually be someone with an explicit role to do that. Without that, everyone will just be busy playing office politics or doing their role.

And this is the thing I’ve moved to after I had my short tenure of pretending I was going to be the CEO.  After I became liberated from that, I was like, “Here’s what I’m good at, going out and giving talks.” Being on Facebook or forums or wherever people are congregating online to talk about stuff—just being there, answering questions, helping out, listening. And then surveying and doing interviews of our clients and customers. Things like that.

So that really became my primary focus after my CEO days. Now, I actually have a role in a bunch of circles—which are work groups at PN—to be the voice of the customer. That’s actually what I’m representing.

And I think it’s really critical. Not just like “Oh, isn’t that cute that they do that?” I really like that PN does that. It’s essential.

In our product development team, there is a bunch of really smart, talented amazing coders and product people. But they don’t know much about the customer.

Now, they have interview processes and surveys that they do. But those are at best, a triangulation of the truth. There always needs to be a role in every work group that does this. So that is something that’s really my primary job at PN, is to spend most of my time outside the wall, figuring out what of that needs to come inside so that we can continue to do great work.

Yuri:                Yeah, I think that’s really good advice. Because I think nowadays, especially in the online space, there’s so much talk about “automate this and systemize that, remove yourself from everything.”

And the real magic is connecting with people, especially our customers. So that’s really good advice.

John:              It also makes me look like a rock star because often I’ll post on Facebook, and people are like “Oh, my God, that’s so amazing! The founder and leader of the company is answering my questions.”

And that’s like my dirty little secret. I don’t have to do anything else but this.

 Yuri:                Yeah. Awesome. All right. So number four, what do you do first thing in the morning.

John:              First thing in the morning. I have a little bit of a routine. I can tell you about it real quickly.

So I wake up and do my skin care and go to the bathroom and all that stuff, and then I go out and I cook breakfast for the family. I usually just beat them by a few minutes into the kitchen. And so I cook breakfast for them, send them off to school.

As they’re leaving, I cook breakfast for myself. Once it’s all ready, I boil a pot of water for tea—which maybe you’ve been hearing me sip as we talk here—and I sit on the counter while the water’s boiling. I just sit quietly, breathe and clear my head for the five minutes it takes to boil a kettle.

And then I bring my food and my drink to my office, and I start work.

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

John:              Early on, when we started considering having a family, I realized that there are three things—and it’s consistent with that theme for work too—that were really super important to me.

One was having quality relationships with my partner and our children. Two was doing great work that makes me proud, and that other people are happy to be a part of at PN. And three is taking care of my own self, my physical wellbeing.

And so I know I’m being successful when I have, over a given period of time, devoted equal resource to all three of them.

 Yuri:                That’s awesome. Really nice answer. That’s actually an answer we haven’t heard, so that’s a really nice perspective.

John Berardi, thank you so much, buddy. It’s always great connecting with you, and thanks for sharing the behind-the-curtain stuff at PN, and what you’re up to.

What’s the best place for people to stay in touch with you, PN, follow your work?

John:              Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for the opportunity to share that. People can find me on Facebook, I post every day there. So Dr. John Berardi is my Facebook page.

And then our website is at precisionnutrition.com. We have a blog with 1200, 1300 articles now, so lots of free stuff. And we even write about our business from time to time. So everything from coaching and change to nutrition and fitness to business and entrepreneurship.

So yeah, if people want to follow the business, check out precisionnutrition.com, and if you want to hear my random thoughts on family, work, like, eating better, living better, check me out at Dr. John Berardi on Facebook.

Yuri:                Awesome. There you go, guys. Check it out. We’ll also link up to all that stuff in the show notes on the blog, so you can check that out afterwards.

John, once again man, I want to thank you so much for your friendship, for everything you’ve done for our industry, for raising the bar for really being the guy to elevate a lot of amazing fitness professionals to higher levels to serve more and more people.

And just want to commend what you and Phil and your entire team have done for so many years now, to just continue transforming people’s lives and also being a great beacon for what an awesome business looks like.

So thank you so much for all that.

John:              Oh, thank you, Yuri. And also, I’d just like say it’s really awesome and inspiring seeing your growth as well.

We’ve known of each other and then known each other for a lot of years now, a scary number in fact. And so it’s really cool seeing your own evolution of your business, transformation of yourself—and from very much the same situation. Single dudes and married, children, multiple businesses, very successful, making a difference in the world.

So kudos to you as well, and thanks for having me, and thanks everyone who’s listening. We’ve spent more than our 30 minutes we originally intended to spend and so I appreciate your time listening, and hopefully some of what we said today was of value to you.

Yuri:    I bet it will be. Thanks so much, John.

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Yuri’s take

So talk about a really inspiring interview, right? John is such a great guy, if you haven’t been able to tell that from our conversation.

Really caring, really present, and just such a great human who’s doing great things in this world. Such a pleasure to connect with him.

If you ever have the chance to meet him I person, you’ll experience the same person as you just heard on this interview. He’s really, really a special person. So I’m excited that we were able to have this conversation and bring these insights to you.

The other reason I love speaking with entrepreneurs who have been in the space for so long is because of all the wisdom that is acquired on this journey. There’s things that you don’t even know you don’t know until you’ve been in business for 10, 15, 20 years. And that’s something that is very tough to learn in a book.

And yes, you can have mentors that can help you speed up the process and help you avoid mistakes, which is totally recommended. But you also have to understand that you have to put in the time.

There’s power in longevity. There is power in being at this for a long period of time. And that’s why it’s really important to always come back to your why.

What is your big reason for doing what you do?

And that’s the little exercise, the little thought provoking exercise I want to leave you with today. Figuring out your why. Why is it so important that you do what you do? Because if you can really get to the core of why it is this business, this product, this service you’re offering is a must—it’s going to really help you move beyond a lot of the obstacles and the potholes that are going to happen.

I’m telling you, they’re going to happen. Crap is going to hit the fan, there’ll be times when you want to give up, there’ll be times when you’re thinking to yourself, “why am I even doing this?”

But you always have to go back to the bigger reason why. And that reason should not be logical. It should not be in the brain. It should be something you experience viscerally in your heart, in your soul. Like, “I know that I’m doing this for the right reason.”

With Healthpreneur, I feel so passionate about what we do here that this is something that I don’t ever see myself leaving in the foreseeable future, because I really believe that if I can help you—the health, fitness or wellness entrepreneur—take your message and share that with more people … those people that you touch are all going to be transformed in some way, shape or form.

And the sad part about our industry is that we’re amazing technicians for the most part. We’re great trainers, doctors, functional medicine, all that stuff. But how do we build a business? How do we market?

And I use market in a way that hopefully you’re not feeling it as slimy and yucky. It’s how do you get your message out to more people? How do you get people to know about what it is you have to offer?

Because if you can get in front of them, that’s how you can transform their lives. And if you don’t know how to get in front of them, you’re not serving anybody.

And that’s why I do what I do. Because I’ve had to figure the stuff out for myself, and I’ve had a lot of success, had a lot of failures. Probably 10 times more failure than successes.

And as Michael Jordan said, that’s why I’m successful—because I’ve continued to fail, and continued to do so every single week, learning from those mistakes, bringing back from the trenches what I’ve learned, how it can help you, so that if you can move your business forward to help even one more person, or 100 or 1000 or a million more people … then I know that this is good. This is the work I want to do.

And that’s my why. That’s my why with Healthpreneur.

So for you, what is your why? Why is it so important? I want to end suffering. I want to end suffering for the average consumer, and I want to end suffering for the business owner who doesn’t quite have the clarity, confidence and capabilities to move to the next level to impact more people.

So for you, I want to challenge you and encourage you to figure out your reason why if you haven’t already. Okay?

So, that’s all for today. And just a couple of housekeeping things before we finish off. Remember, number one is to subscribe to the Healthpreneur Podcast if you haven’t already done so on iTunes. Just click the little subscribe button and you’ll be all set.

That way you don’t miss any upcoming episodes or any of the previous ones, and we’ve had lot of amazing interviews and many more to come with inspiring, remarkable entrepreneurs in the health and wellness and fitness space.

Number two is I would greatly appreciate if you left a rating or review on iTunes, because it helps us get more visibility and more people can find out about this and obviously we can serve more people.

And number three is, I’ve got a free gift for you if you haven’t grabbed it already.

It’s called Health profit Secrets. It’s a physical book that I would love to ship to you, and I’m actually covering the cost of the book. I’m just asking you to meet me about halfway and cover the cost of shipping, which is only a couple of bucks.

In that book, you’ll discover the four underlying secrets of all successful health companies and how you can really harness those into your business. And there’s also a score card at the end of the book that will help you score yourself on those four different parameters. And then obviously what you can do next to fill those gaps.

So that’s over at healthpreneurbook.com. You can grab your copy today.

And with that said, I want to thank you once again, and as John had mentioned before both of us really appreciate you taking the time out of your day, out of your lives to be with us, to listen to this podcast. And hopefully it inspires you to take things to the next level.

So continue to get out there, be great, do great, and I look forward to seeing you in our next episode.

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Follow John Berardi At:

https://www.precisionnutrition.com/

Dr. John Berardi Facebook Page

Precision Nutrition Facebook Page

Twitter

Instagram

Pinterest

Transcription:

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Healthpreneur Podcast. Yuri, here, and on today’s episode we are going to be speaking about polygamist entrepreneurship.

Yes, that’s right. You’re probably asking yourself, “What the heck does that even mean?” Well, sit tight, because I’m going to share with you exactly what that is and why it’s important for you to understand—whether you are a monogamist entrepreneur or a polygamist entrepreneur.

And I’m not trying to infer anything with the rest of your life and your preferences and stuff. That’s none of my business. But what I’m talking about, as it pertains to your business, can really help you or it can sidetrack you.

The story of my son, Oscar

One of the biggest challenges that a lot of us entrepreneurs face is chasing shiny objects. I want to share a little story with you about my son, Oscar. So Oscar, as of this recording, is seven years old and we recently had a parent-teacher interview with his grade one teacher.

His grade one teacher was somewhat concerned because he was not able to sit still and focus in class. And like with all great establishments, they’re thinking there’s something wrong with him.

I’m just sitting through this nonsense and thinking to myself, “I do not give a shit.” Because, you know what? The very fact that you want him to fit into a box and sit still and not focus is crushing his soul. It’s not who he is at his core.

He’s a creative person, he’s very artistic, he needs to be moving around and for the school system to say, “Your son or daughter, no matter who they are as individuals, must fit into this mold,” is just another ridiculous example of why the school system is nonsense.

Anyway, we have tendencies as creatives, right? Because I think most entrepreneurs are creatives. We like to start stuff, we like to get stuff going, we like to create, and the flip-side of that is this challenge that we have to see things through and really focus on one thing at a time.

If you can resonate with this, you’re not alone. There’s nothing wrong with you. You don’t have to have Ritalin or anything like that. The reality is that’s just the way our brain is wired.

So, with that said, does that mean that we should be going out and becoming polygamist entrepreneurs? Should we be going out and chasing all sorts of different shiny objects, instead of focusing on the one track that we’ve committed to?

You see how I brought those two together there? You like that?

You need a roadmap, and you need to stick to it

Here are my thoughts on this. I think a lot of times we get into polygamist issues within our business—chasing a lot of different things—because we don’t have a proven or a certain roadmap that we’re following.

We’re not clear on the direction in which we’re moving. We don’t have a simple plan of action, therefore we feel overwhelmed and because we feel overwhelmed, we have no certainty. And when we have no certainty, then we’re looking for all sorts of different things.

We feel good, initially, when we buy that latest course or we jump onto this latest telesummit or whatever it is, and then afterwards we look back at ourselves, we’re like, “Wow, that really got me off track. That really sucked away some of my time that I could have been using to focus on my initial course,” in terms of the track that you were on, “and now, I don’t even know what I’m doing anymore.”

My desire for you is to not squash your creative genius and not squash the ability to start things, but my challenge and my encouragement for you is to really figure out what your business model looks like.

Okay? What does it look like?

Everything that we do in business is a reflection of our philosophy about our business, very much like everything we do with our health is a philosophy of how we see ourselves in this world living healthy or not.

I’ve been online since 2006 and I’ve done everything you can think of. From affiliate marketing to big product launches to paid traffic to content marketing. You name it, we’ve done it all.

How I used this knowledge when starting Healthpreneur

A lot of the stuff we’ve done has come as a result of not having clear focus on what the most important thing was to get done. With Healthpreneur, I started this business two years ago now, and I said, “Knowing what I know now, what would I do differently? Knowing the mistakes I’ve made, knowing the successes that we’ve had, how would I want to start a business knowing all this stuff?”

And that’s exactly what we did.

Actually, to be very honest with you, I still fell into some of that old mindset like building lead magnets, ascension funnels, and we actually built a couple courses, too. Then I started thinking to myself, “No, it’s too complex. There’s too much stuff going on. We’re gonna simplify it even more.”

So we came back to the drawing board, trimmed away the fat, and just went bare bones. We said, “Listen, here is the business model.” And our business model, there’s no secret to it. There are the little nuances that make it work, but at a surface level it’s simple.

We drive traffic from Facebook—we pay for traffic—to a webinar. From the webinar, we provide some amazing content and then we invite the right people to jump on the phone with us to see if they’re a good fit to work together. At the very minimum, we offer them some great insight into how they can take their business to the next level. That’s all we do. That’s it, okay?

The only other thing I do in my business outside of that is this. This podcast. That’s the only thing we do.

Why I don’t have Instagram or Facebook on my phone

There’s no blogging, there’s no YouTube for Healthpreneur, there’s no Instagram stories. We have an Instagram feed, right? It’s populated with the newest episodes from the podcast and so forth, but I don’t do any of that stuff.

I actually don’t even have Instagram on my phone anymore, nor do I have Facebook on my phone—and the reason for that is because I know that if I start seeing what other people are doing, I’m going to start to gravitate towards thinking like I should be doing some of that stuff.

So, I really recommend spending more time in introspection than comparison. If you are spending a lot of your time on social or if you listen to a thousand different podcasts, what’s gonna happen is that things are going to start seeping into your brain that will make you think you need to start doing this or that or X, Y, and Z.

That’s all good, right? I mean, there’s a lot of different ways to scale the mountain.

But what you need to be extremely clear on is what is your business model. What is the track that your train is on?

If you’re a train on a track, you can’t jump off that track to another train track. You need to stay on the track and when you don’t, the train crashes.

That’s how that happens.

The key word is predictable

So you need to be very clear, if you’re not already, about what your business model looks like. And, specifically, there are three systems that we help our clients get extremely clear on; attract, convert, and deliver.

Those are the only three systems in a business. Okay?

How are you attracting leads? How are you converting those leads into paying clients? And how are you delivering an amazing result for those clients?

Now, within those three parameters, there are a lot of different things you could be doing.

How do we attract leads? Well, we publish a daily piece of content on our blog and, hopefully, some of the people opt in. Or we put out a daily podcast, or we buy Facebook ads, or whatever it is. Right?

But the key thing that I’ve realized, having spoken with a lot of health coaches and practitioners and trainers and business owners in our space, is that they don’t have a predictable way of generating leads. They don’t.

So, they’re doing all sorts of manual prospecting—they’re part of 20 Facebook groups, and they’re popping in here and there adding some authority and maybe building a couple relationships through private messenger.

And that’s fine, a lot of that stuff works and I would recommend it. But it cannot be the primary focus of your lead generation.

If you don’t have a predictable way—and the keyword is predictable—of generating leads, your business will always suffer. And when that happens, when you don’t have that structured system and predictability, that’s when we start having affairs within our business.

We’re sort of thinking, “Hey, you know what? That new thing over there looks pretty hot. I’m gonna give that a shot,” and all of a sudden you’re having a one-night stand with this latest product launch video.

You go down that rabbit hole and you’re like, “Oh, my God. Shit. I’ve gone a little bit too far here. I’ve completely lost my data,” or, “I’ve completely lost focus off what I was actually doing.”

You need to stay focused on your track, and in order for you to do that you have to be clear about what that track is. And in order for you to know what that track is, you have to be clear about what your vision is and what you really enjoy doing.

I love working closely with people—ideally in person—and I love teaching and coaching and helping people implement strategies and systems in their business that are gonna free them to do what they love doing most, which is teaching, coaching, and serving their clients. Not setting up funnels and writing sales copy and optimizing all that nonsense.

I’ve built our entire business around that. Everything we do leads to that, nothing else.

We’ve taken out all of our lead magnets, all of our courses, because that stuff moves us further away from the real deal which is really serving people at a deep level. That’s why I have no need or desire to even learn about what anyone else is doing with their business.

Sure, there are a couple of nuances with how we can improve a few of the moving pieces in our current business model, but I have no intention of doing product launches ever again. I don’t care about doing joint venture or affiliate stuff.

I don’t need to do any of that stuff. I don’t take part in summits, necessarily. There’s a lot of stuff I don’t do and I say no to very easily because I know exactly, “All I need to do is more of this,” and the results speak for themselves.

I hope and I pray that you have the level of clarity and certainty in your business that allows you to put the blinders on and stay in your lane.

One of the things I’ve found that happens—and I’m guilty of asking this question sometimes, I’ll ask someone, “Hey, what’s new and exciting in your business?”

That’s actually a very bad question to answer and ask because normally what people will answer is, “Oh, I’ve got this new thing we’re working on or this thingamajig,” and that’s a challenging answer.

Because, again, we want to create new stuff. Right? That’s part of who we are.

But at the same time, I’m gonna ask you this, “Are you creating new stuff and chasing all this stuff because it’s entertaining? Because your business is too boring for you? Or is it actually producing results for you in your business?”

If it’s not producing results for you in your business—and when I say results I mean is it impacting your clients in a big way, is it making you a lot more money, is it freeing up your time and, obviously, do you enjoy doing it?

If the answer to any of those questions is no, then you probably shouldn’t be doing it.

But, again, you might enjoy spending time in Canva creating banners, but is that impacting your clients? Is it making you more money? Is it freeing up your time?

No. It’s probably not in your unique genius, so you can just give that off to someone else.

Businesses become boring

Business inherently becomes boring. It inherently becomes boring as you grow it and I think that’s part of the reason why so many people are willing to jump ship and jump into bed with other sorts of shiny objects that seem more attractive at the time.

But just like with your marriage, if you’re committed to this and you know this is the right person for you—you commit to it! You go deep, you focus on this one person, you focus on this one business model, and no matter what, I guarantee you, if you stick to whatever it is you’re doing, you will succeed.

Now, you might succeed a lot faster by following what we teach—because it’s really the fastest method I’ve ever seen to grow a business—but it might take you ten years and you still might succeed doing something else.

Like, “Hey, I’m gonna make my blog an authority website.” Terrific. I wish you all the best and I’ll talk to you in five years when you’re finally getting some traction. Nothing wrong with that, but you have to be realistic about what’s in it, and are you in it to win it?

If you’re going to do the blogging thing, if you’re going to do the content marketing, go full into content marketing. If you want to sit behind your computer, you don’t like interacting with people, then that’s cool. But if you love coaching, teaching, and serving clients and you want to get in front of them in a way that’s leveraged and can impact their lives, make you a lot more money, free up your time, then that business model is not going to work.

If you want to become a millionaire and you’re selling e-books for $10, well, good luck. I mean, I did that and it sucks. You need a massive amount of traffic and with tiny margins like that, you’ve got to be maniacal about your data.

And that’s not a lot of fun because now you’ve become an info marketer, where all of your time is spent setting up ten funnels to split test, all sorts of different stuff—instead of actually spending more of your time doing what you love.

So spend time in your unique genius, delegate the rest. Don’t even touch the rest. That’s my advice.

So we’ll wrap it up there. Okay? A little food for thought for you today, a little word of encouragement, a little kick in the butt to enjoy your business—but don’t be distracted by what is entertaining versus what is actually fulfilling and productive.

So, with that said, if you’d like to discover how you can implement the business model that I’ve been referring to, what we call the “perfect client pipeline,” I’d love to walk you through that in our awesome training called the Seven Figure Health Business Blueprint.

You can register for the training absolutely free over at healthpreneurgroup.com/training, and once you’re over there just choose whatever time is best for you and you can join me for that training.

I’ll walk you through, in about 75 minutes, the exact game plan. At the very minimum, you’ll have so much more clarity on what to do. I’m telling you, it’ll save you so much frustration just knowing this and knowing that there’s a simpler, better solution out there to grow your business and really transform people’s lives at a much deeper level than trying to have them buy your $10 e-book.

Not that I’m saying that’s a bad thing, but it’s a lot more rewarding.

Anyway, if you’d like to join me for that, you got the URL and that is all for me today. So, I want to thank you so much for joining me once again on the show. We have some great interviews coming your way this week, so don’t go anywhere.

If you haven’t yet, subscribe today to the Healthpreneur Podcast on iTunes and continue to go out there, be great, and do great and I’ll see you on Wednesday.

Transcription

Welcome to episode 62 with Jen. While you’re listening to this, I’m also conducting the second day of our Luminaries Mastermind; the highest-level group that I work with of awesome visionary health and fitness entrepreneurs. We have our first meeting of 2018 right now, in Scottsdale, for two days.

We are creating amazing breakthroughs in business, and if you’re ever interested in working more closely with me and a group of incredible entrepreneurs to collaborate with, generate ideas, and learn from, that’s what we do. If you’re interested, send us an email at [email protected] to see if you’d be a good fit for the group.

As I was speaking with Jen, I felt like I was speaking to myself because we are almost on the same wavelength. Anytime we connect with people like us, we feel more connected.

Jen has a very similar background to me; she played collegiate basketball and I played collegiate soccer. She did that for four or five years and worked as a trainer at her university, and I did too. It’s interesting to see how her path evolved and her perspective on fitness and business.

Jen is a core transformation coach and founder of The Love FitMama Way, and you can learn more about her by visiting  LoveFitMama.com.

She primarily works in safe core fitness, self-care, and mindfulness. She helps new moms embrace, nurture, and enjoy their motherhood journey, and is most passionate about is supporting women in loving their bodies and lives, which is critical in today’s world. There are still so many dogmatic beliefs, and the quantitative side of dieting and weight loss puts you in a box.

What Jen does is very unique; she offers a deeper, more mindful and heart-centered approach to appreciating yourself and living your life in a way that is truly awesome. She has two young daughters, ages two and four, and she travelled with them around the world about a year and a half ago while she was running her nearly-virtual business.

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Yuri:                Jen, welcome to the Healthpreneur Podcast.

Jen:                 Thank you. I’m so grateful to be here, Yuri.

Yuri:                I’m excited to have you on. Your website is The FitMama Way, and it’s a fit pregnancy blog. That’s a great niche, by the way. I’ve talked about the power of niching down. You’ve done a great job with that.

Jen:                 Thank you.

Yuri:                Talk to me about how you started. You were doing one-on-ones like a lot of our listeners.

How did you make the transition to the online side? Was there a pivotal moment where you saw an opportunity or needed a change?  What did that look like?

Pivotal moments, challenges, and bridging the gap

Jen:                 There definitely was a pivotal moment.

I started Love FitMama, and my website LoveFitMama.com, after I had my own two babies. I realized that all the fitness, general abdominal exercises, and generic stuff that was taught at Mama Baby Bootcamps wasn’t really safe. I’d been working 16 hours a day in gyms as a trainer, but that also didn’t fit into the lifestyle of having kids.

These two things put me in a place where I thought, “Okay, how can I make this work?” I have an extreme passion to help people, and I know that new moms need information about core and safe exercise postpartum. But I didn’t want to be stuck in a gym working long hours while my kids were at home.

So I started with exercise videos in March of 2014. I created little at-home exercise videos, sharing them in my Facebook group and with friends. About six months into the exercise videos and starting the site, I gave myself a very serious back injury.

It landed me in the hospital twice in one week, and I fainted twice with pain and couldn’t get up. I was breastfeeding my little one at the time who was one and a half, and I had a three-year-old at home. My husband traveled incessantly for work, so it was a very intense and pivotal time.

I thought, “Now what?”

That was the pivot point in the The Love FitMama Way.

Before, I was hard on myself. I would push myself to the limit. Even though I had babies at home, I would push myself to a point where I would never push any of my clients.

I felt that, since I was the trainer, I had to be more hard-core. I came from an athletic background, I played five years of basketball at Queens University and was captain of the team.

I was the trainer for all the players for years. Even in my first year, I started training programs with the older players. I just loved it, but it didn’t fit with the new mom paradigm.

Even though I created The Love FitMama Way and always said, “Being a fit mama all starts with love,” what that really meant didn’t come to life until I hurt myself and became physically unable to do anything.

Yuri:                That’s awesome. Your journey is very similar to mine. I think it’s relatable to a lot of people in our space.

Jen:                 The lowest of the low always brings a new dawn, right?

Yuri:                Totally. You have to go through that because you don’t know the contrast otherwise, right?

Jen:                 Exactly.

Yuri:                During that time, what was one of the biggest challenges that you initially faced?

Jen:                 The biggest challenge I initially faced, and sometimes still face, is shifting people out of that physical-based paradigm that is fitness, nutrition, and the whole fitness industry, and shifting them into a mindful and emotion-based perspective, if that makes sense.

When we are young, our bodies work in ways that we don’t have a lot of control over. We throw ourselves onto the basketball court, dive in, heal, fix – it’s all good – until there comes a time where there needs to be more of an internal shift. Either we have an awakening moment where a coach or trainer gets us to dive deeper inwards, or we hit a rock bottom moment and have to crawl back out.

One of my main goals with Love FitMama is to not let other moms hit this rock bottom moment.

I’m sure you know, as a parent, that there can be a lot of aftermath with giving birth for the mom. Physically, there are a lot of injuries postpartum; pelvic floor injuries, back injuries such as the one I gave myself, and other weaknesses.

Our society tells women to push, push, push, and there isn’t acceptance and reverence for the beauty of slowing down and letting yourself heal. Even in the the fitness world, we push and want to rip our muscles apart. We want to get stronger, but we don’t realize that strength comes from rest and the repair.

Mindfulness and taking clients on the transformational journey

Yuri:                That’s great insight. Business is almost the same. We’re so focused, and the paradigm of hustle and grind keeps us going, going, going, 27 hours a day. We will burn out just like with exercise. Many people eventually evolve in their own journey, but must understand that to get better outer results they must go inwards.

Do you find that many of the women you serve are already there, or do you have to take them on the journey? I ask because many people in our space want to help people understand mindfulness, but oftentimes the people they’re serving just want to lose weight, right?

Jen:                 Absolutely.

Yuri:                So how do you bridge that gap? Are you attracting people who already get it, or are you bridging that gap for them?

Jen:                 That’s great insight, and I agree. For me, it’s about meeting people where they are.

I love the postpartum time period where someone has just had a baby, realize things are not quite the same down there, and don’t know what to do. They want to get back to their old ways; working with a trainer, doing CrossFit, running marathons, whatever was their mindfulness practice, and now they don’t have it and it becomes an internal struggle. They end up placing the focus on their weight.

I focus on that with them because that’s where they are.

I loved a video I saw of yours recently. You said, “Steve Jobs wasn’t asking people, ‘Hey, do you want an iPod?’” People had no clue. It was like, “Sure. Whatever.” So if I’m telling people, “Hey, do you want to repair your pelvic floor and rehabilitate from the inside?” They think, “Well, that sounds good, but what does that mean? That all just sounds weird to me,” right?

Yuri:                Sure.

Jen:                 I don’t focus on weight as a primary thing, but people end up coming to me through a weight journey. My real philosophy is around breathing back your body. So many people say, “I want my body back,” and they think it has to be this, that, or the other.

They think they must run harder, lift heavier, restrict food, or whatever, so I teach a new way, The Love FitMama Way. It’s a shift in perspective where they can move towards their goals with ease and flow. It just feels good.

It doesn’t have to be forced, and for a lot of my clients, it’s a unique thing. But they do require a bit of a journey to get there, mostly due to socialization and cultural norms.

I was high-pressure; I did five years of university to play basketball for five years, and got two degrees. I did a thesis. I did my personal training certification, and traveled all over for basketball.

The same thing goes for the entrepreneurial space, as you know. It’s that hustle you talked about. We think more equals better, and when it comes to fitness, when it comes to being a fit mama, and when it comes to being an entrepreneur, it doesn’t work.

Yuri:                This is the stuff our listeners need to hear. There is a time to put in work, but eventually, the less you do, the better off you’re going to be.

Jen:                 Absolutely.

Yuri:                Whether it’s business, sports, or the human body, you can’t go in fifth gear all day long.

Jen:                 I thought I could. I made it 33 years then crashed and burned.

Yuri:                You have two daughters that are pretty young. What has being a parent taught you about entrepreneurship, business, and marketing?

Lessons in balancing work and life

Jen:                 I don’t recommend starting a business when you have babies at home. A little momentum before I had kids would’ve been good, but I’ve found a perfect and beautiful harmony. Kids are the essence of presence, are in the mode of play, and watch life unfold curiously.

When it comes to our businesses, we try and control so much. When it comes to our bodies, we think we need to control more. Just like growing a baby inside your body, the beautiful, amazing miracle that happens is actually when you take your hands off and just let it be.

They bring that to me every day, and allow me to check out of the business, out of the focus on what else I have to do. I have a long to-do list, and there’s only a limited number of hours in the day. It allows me to stop and be, put everything aside, and just focus on what is really important.

What’s important is their emotional health and well-being and having a present parent. Because regardless of all the fit mamas I help, they want me to be there for them. I love my role as a mom and I feel very grateful.

Yuri:                 Everything you’re saying is what I believe and experience. We have the same core values and belief systems, which is what it’s all about. I was listening to a great podcast on parenting by Dr. Meg Meekers, and she was talking about how kids’ self-worth is determined by their perceived sense of how much time their parents want to spend with them. I’ve never considered that.

Kids just want your presence. They don’t need all the presents and gifts.

Jen:                 That’s a quote in my book: “They don’t need your presents. They need your presence.” It’s actually a quote I have, so it’s so funny you said that.

Yuri:                You work from home. How do you balance that with the kids?

Jen:                 My little one just started junior kindergarten, so they’re both in school five days a week. We’ve actually not had a full week of school yet because we always have trips on Fridays. When I started my business, my kids were in daycare two days a week.

We had them in a Montessori and they enjoyed it and were fine separating from me. I was the one bawling at home for a long while thinking, “Why am I doing this?” I truly wanted to be with them.

But I realized that I was more productive and present for them because I felt filled up. I felt truly fueled. I felt passion in the work that I was doing – affecting change, helping people, on my mission – and it allowed me to be fully present at home.

I have great babysitters because we have no family within 350 kilometers of us, so when I travel for a week or two, my husband is able to step in as dad of the year. He’s great. We have no real issues that way, and my kids just love doing stuff.

We are always doing active things, so whether it’s with me or on their own, they always feel protected, safe, and engaged. I know they’re not sitting there looking out the window pining for me, which helps me be more productive as well.

Yuri:                It’s always cool to see how people juggle family and business.

Jen:                 The freedoms for me outweigh the negative side of it, which is working late at night when I could be watching Netflix. I don’t even know how to work our Netflix because I just don’t take the time for that. I’d rather take the time for other things, prioritize, and find a good flow.

Marketing and getting your mission heard

Yuri:                How do people find you? How do people engage with you as a client or a customer?

Jen:                 I have a Facebook group and I like to foster community with Love FitMama. FitMama is really about, like I said, connecting within and giving ourselves permission to breathe, slow down, feel what our bodies are feeling, and listen to our intuition instead of others who told us we should be doing this or that, or we’re not doing good enough.

I am present in the Facebook group community daily. We do a lot of challenges.

Beyond that, we have break-out Facebook groups for different programs that I’ve created. I privately coach, where I work one-on-one intensively with my clients over the phone, through Skype, and based on their schedule.

My clients are generally very busy moms who run big businesses or corporations, are VPs, or run their own medical clinics. We don’t have time to engage much.

I help them utilize the tools that I’ve created so they can drop inside really quick, trust their intuition, set boundaries, ask for help, and let the guilt go aside.

We shift that whole paradigm because, as moms, in the history of time we’ve had to not only run our household, worry about food, kids, and school, but also run businesses and be really engaged in our work and have a dual-income household. But those are the times now, and there is no rule book.

Just like raising kids, there’s no real understanding of how to do it until you’re thrown into the fire. The women I work with are paving their own way. They’re figuring it out while they’re in the fire, and the beautiful thing is that they don’t need hours and hours of conversation.

What they need is short hits of inspiration, of trusting, of following their intuition and their heart. There’s a lot of evidence out there through HeartMath Institute to support living in a more heart coherent space. When we live from a place of love instead of our head, we feel our gut and core, which is why I talk so much about the core transformation that moms go through during this time.

Yuri:                That’s awesome.

Jen:                 It’s about community and giving women a safe space to realize they don’t have to push harder. They can actually ease up on the gas and end up further down the road at the end of the day.

Yuri:                That makes sense. Since you started your business online, what’s been the most effective marketing strategy for you to get  in front of new people and turning them into clients and customers?

Online marketing techniques and how Jen reaches clients

Jen:                 Facebook Live. I love hanging out on Facebook because a lot of the mamas hang out there, too. You can get in front of them in a way where they’re discovering you through referrals. People share your videos in an authentic way and video, as you know, is just a great way to connect and allow people to get to know and trust you.

You can only be so prim and proper on video for so long, so people really get to know you on a deeper level. I share my story, my vulnerability, and my crises, and how I’ve come out of that has been one of the biggest connecting points to my clients and prospective clients.

As entrepreneurs, especially online entrepreneurs, we often talk about freebies, free opt-ins, and different things like that. But before that, it’s about offering good content that hits home for people and gives them a wake-up call.

I like sharing polarizing content, like, “No pain, all gain,” instead of “No pain, no gain,” and shifting the conversation. I point out things to people that they take as the norm, as gospel, and when they hear something different they’ll begin to shift the way they see things. My main thing is giving good content and having people share it, because the content speaks for itself.

Yuri:                Awesome. I wanted to touch on something that is important for our listeners to hear: your story. That is the biggest differentiator you have, and that’s how we connect with people. You’ve done a great job at that.

Second, you talked about sharing your beliefs; “Here’s the status quo. Here’s what I believe instead.” That’s a huge thing that I think everyone needs to do. Don’t just share what you know, but what you believe. That’s how you build your tribe.

Being a role model for your message through your story

Jen:                 Yuri, I couldn’t agree more. Personally, what I am most passionate about is supporting women to love their bodies and love their lives, and in our society right now, there’s too much of a scarcity mindset around our bodies. There’s a lot of shaming.

There’s a separation between people, and I want to bring back that sisterhood of women supporting women. We need to let go of that judgment, which really is judgment of ourselves, and say, “Hey, I’m not a bad person if I eat a donut. I’m not ‘cheating’ because I’ve decided to eat pizza instead of my boiled chicken breast or something.” The word “cheating” is so negative.

People are ripe and ready for the opportunity to let all that negativity go, they just need more role models. They need more people standing in it. As entrepreneurs, especially Healthpreneurs, we want to project the perfect salad or the perfect soup, a beautiful, ideal mix of macronutrients on our plate.

Yes, vegetables and vibrant colors do make for better pictures, but what’s the reality and what perception are we giving of what this really needs to look like?

Raising daughters, my perspective has shifted. It pains me to  imagine my girls, who are just full beams of light, somehow turning darkness onto themselves.

I can’t accept them feeling shame around their bodies for eating this or that or not doing this or that. I can’t accept that for my own kids. I can’t accept that for myself, my friends, my loved ones, and any women out there. They don’t deserve that.

Yuri:                So good. As you said, we need people, role models like yourself to stand in that voice because there will always be people gravitating towards the restrictive, dogmatic rules. The work you’re doing is amazing. It really, really is, and I just wanted to commend you for that.

There are a lot of parallels with business, too. People feel bad because they’re not doing all the stuff they feel they should be doing. Just do you. Find your path. Do you, and that’s it.

One of the biggest things that people got out of Healthpreneur Live was the relief in feeling that they could just do their thing. They hear about people and business owners doing things differently.

It’s the same with health. You’re giving people permission to be themselves.

Jen:                 Exactly. Nobody has your story so you can’t compare yourself to others out there. That is absolutely detrimental.

We can’t fit ourselves into a box, because when it comes to online, and spreading our messages virally across the globe, there is no box and right or wrong way of doing things. If you check in with yourself, your stomach ache, stabbing anxiety, or pinch in your neck, pain can indicate that you aren’t on the right route.

Keep trusting your inner guidance system, it will take you where you need to go. Let go of the ego’s sense of comparison lack. All that is irrelevant when you begin to stand in the power of your personal message. We each have a unique advantage when we look inward at what that really is because that’s what we’re here to share.

The Rapid 5

Yuri:                That’s good advice. Thank you for sharing what you’ve shared. Are you ready for the rapid five?

Jen:                 I think so.

Yuri:                All right. Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

Jen:                 My biggest weakness is my mindset around fun. Sometimes the things that I consider fun are detrimental and end up taking me away from my goals. I sometimes procrastinate, want to have fun, and not focus because it feels like work.

The issue is the definitions that I’ve given to fun and work. I’m always playing along the boundaries of that because I feel like I don’t have a job. I feel like I can do whatever I want, whenever I want.

To make it fit, I ask if it was the best use of my time and fun. If not, it’s an old, antiquated way of thinking about work and fun. I’m playing with the definitions.

Yuri:                Nice, I haven’t heard that one before. What is your biggest strength?

Jen:                 My big heart. That plays into a weakness, too. I just have so much love to give, which it’s a beautiful thing. It lets so much love and light in for others, but sometimes it does push back and allow me to feel like I’m pushing through my own boundaries, so the strength and weakness seems to come back to boundaries, but my strength has always just been my heart, unconditional love, reverence, and a connection for others.

I never felt different from anyone else in a way where I would be condescending or judgmental of others. I truly feel one with others. They have something to teach me and are here to gift me their knowledge and wisdom. I just want to embrace everyone and give them a hug.

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

Jen:                 Great question. The thing that comes to mind first is talking. I fancy myself a fabulous listener, but I’ve become dangerously good at talking about what I love and what I’m passionate about. I’ve had many instances in the last year where I’ve lost my voice, and that’s the sign to slow down and listen more.

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

Jen:                 I go into my hot room, and turn on the heater. I’m incessantly cold, so heat is the one thing that will get me out of bed with a smile on my face. So I have a little room, a glorified closet that I’ve emptied out, and I have a heater in there with a little salt rock lamp and a diffuser that changes color.

I go in every morning. I would consistently go in at 5:00 am, but now I’ve been traveling a lot over the last two months. If I can snuggle an extra few minutes with my little one if she comes in at 5:00 am, I do.

I’ll walk into my hot room, turn on the lights, turn on the heater, and just sit and breathe. That’s the beginning of every day, and it just connects me.

Yuri:                That’s great. It’s like a makeshift sauna. Finally, complete this sentence. I know I’m being successful when…

Jen:                 When I feel good and slow down enough throughout the day to feel. I know myself and my body so well that I can feel when my heart’s racing, and it’s very similar to the feeling I had when I had new babies and they would nap. I would think, “Okay, do I know if they’re going to nap for five minutes or half an hour? How much time do I have?”

I would run around the house like a crazy person fitting in everything that I needed to do, there was an anxious race against the clock, and I know I’m being successful when I don’t have that feeling and I feel peace and calm. I breathe. I check in throughout the day, and move into my heart and gut area.

Yuri:                That’s really good. Some people say, “I know I’m successful when I get testimonials from other people.” Then there’s people like you who said, “I just kind of introspect. I’m like, this is how I feel. I feel like I’m in the zone or I’m doing my thing.”

It’s cool to see the different perspectives. Great stuff, Jen. This has been a lot of fun. Thank you so much for being open and sharing what you shared. It’s been extremely valuable for me, and I bet our listeners are going to get a lot of good stuff out of this as well. What’s the best place for everyone to follow your work online?

Jen:                 Thank you, Yuri. You can find me at LoveFitMama.com. That is my website and I’m always updating things there. I’d love to hear from you, so just drop me a line there, or find me on social media @love_fitmama on Instagram. I love Instagram Stories and am always sharing them.

Yuri:                Very nice. There you go, guys.Thank you so much, Jen, I appreciate you for all the amazing work that you’re doing, and the wisdom and growth that you’ve gone through to come to this point. It’s a beacon for a lot of women and men who can relate to your stories and your journey.

Jen:                 Thank you. It’s been a pleasure, and I appreciate all that you do, too.

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Yuri’s take

I hope you’ve enjoyed this show as much as I have. As I mentioned before, it’s just funny to see the parallels between Jen’s journey and my own, and it’s always great to connect with amazing people in our space. This podcast is all about highlighting other amazing entrepreneurs doing great stuff in the health and fitness world and just sharing their journey, their ups and downs, their highs and lows, what you can learn from them, and how you can be inspired from them.

My hope is that over repeated lessons and episodes you get the idea that building a successful business takes time. It doesn’t happen overnight. There are faster ways and slower ways, but I want you to understand that the journey of being an entrepreneur is extremely rewarding and challenging, but it’s rewarding because it is challenging.

You grow so much. You learn so much about yourself. You become a better person because you are responsible for your success or failure. We have to take 100% responsibility for our lives, for our results, or lack thereof.

I think one of the greatest marks of leadership is the ability to recognize that we are responsible for everything, good or bad. We must be okay with that and take ownership.

Everyone we’ve interviewed are at different places in their journey. Some people are building huge companies. Other people are working on solo-type businesses.

That gives you a different perspectives and one might really resonate with you, and that’s what it’s all about. It’s about finding your path and doing what you do. It’s nice to model success and what other people are doing so that you can avoid a lot of mistakes and potholes. At the same time, be very careful not to copy or compare.

I’m going to challenge you to spend more time introspecting than comparing. By going within, you’ll discover where the breakthroughs can happen in your business, the type of business model you want to have, and the type of lifestyle you wanted to create. These are all things that only you can answer, and we can only answer that by creating separation from all the noise.

 

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Follow Jen Oliver At:

LoveFitMama.com

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Free Healthpreneur Health Profit Secrets Book

Transcription

Healthpreneurs! Welcome to the Healthpreneur podcast. Yuri Elkaim here, and this is episode 61 with Dr. Spencer Nadolsky. Hope you guys are having a great day, it’s about to get a little bit better.

That’s my goal, every single time we connect—is to make your day a little bit brighter, little bit more inspired and to give you a couple nuggets of wisdom for how to help you take your business to the next level. Because we’re here to help you to grow your business.

You’ve got a health, fitness or wellness business and people need to know about it. You’ve got a message, you have a gift that people need to have. You can transform their life. You know that. They might not even know you. Let’s connect the dots. Let’s make magic happen.

I really believe that marketing is the lifeblood of any business. Marketing is essentially what I’m doing right here! This podcast is a form of marketing! Marketing is simply, how can you get in front of people who don’t already know you, and get to the point where they know, like and trust you enough to do business with you. So, a podcast is a great medium to market what it is you do to make that happen.

Today we’re going to talk with Dr. Spencer Nadolsky, who’s a young physician. He’s a young guy—fresh out of medical school, couple years out and he’s going to talk about what he’s discovered about the importance of marketing.

There are a lot of doctors who want to do their own thing but then they quickly realize … How do I get patients? How do I get clients? How do I get my message out to more people?

Spencer is one of the guys who’s figured this out. He’s got 65,000 followers on Instagram. He’ll share how he got that. He’s got a very, very loyal tribe on Facebook and he’ll talk about how he’s built that up.

Whether you’re a doctor, a personal trainer, a health coach, it doesn’t really matter, Spencer’s got some really cool insights to share with you in this episode.

So let me tell you a little bit more about him. Spencer Nadolsky is a board certified family medicine physician and a diplomat of the American Board of Obesity Medicine. His love for lifestyle-as-medicine—which is his whole thing, instead of pharmaceuticals—began in athletics where he worked hard using exercise and nutrition science to propel himself into football and wrestling.

After wrestling at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill—as the Tarheel heavyweight—and earning a degree in exercise science, he headed off to medical school. After medical school he attended a residency to start his practice and he is now practicing online via SteadyMD, where he’s pioneering a new delivery of medicine. We’ll talk about what that is in this episode.

If you’d like to know more about him, you can check out his website at drspencer.com. Talk about a pretty good url, right? Might as well just be spencer.com.

So, that’s Spencer. Let’s bring him into the show and let’s have some fun.

 

Yuri:                Dr. Spencer Nadolsky, how are you my friend? Welcome to the Healthpreneur podcast.

 Spencer:        Very good. Thanks for having me on buddy.

Yuri:                Yeah, I’m excited to connect with yet another amazing person in our space who’s doing some really cool things. We’ve talked with a lot of people on, for instance, the one-on-one fitness and coaching side who’ve come online. Yours is a little bit unique but similar because you are a physician and you said, “You know what? I’m done with the medical practice, I’m going to come online.” Which is pretty cool.

So talk to me about that transition and how it all started.

The medical school grind

Spencer:        You go to medical school, it’s four years long. The first two years are in the classroom. The second two years are the clinical rotations.

Then you go to something called residency and depending on what specialty you choose, it could be anywhere from three to even eight years if you’re doing neurosurgery. And then if you specialize further it gets even longer and longer.

All of that stuff is in a brick and mortar clinic. Everybody knows a doctor that you go to—you have to go, wait in the waiting room and you sit there for a while and then you go see the doctor and they give you five minutes of their time and you’re out the door with some sort of prescription.

I’m going through training and I’m just sitting there going, this doesn’t seem right. This isn’t efficient. It just seems like there must be a better way.

Are you familiar with John Berardi and Precision Nutrition?

Yuri:                Yep. He’s a good buddy, we just actually interviewed him last week for the podcast.

Spencer:        Oh, very cool. He’s been a mentor of mine and I’ve been a big, big fan of his for a long time. While I was in medical school watching the program they had—it was called Lean Eating before, now they just call it Nutrition Coaching or whatever. I’m sitting there going “Wow, you’re affecting a lot of people using online technology, you have a system in place and it’s really spreading your net far.”

I was sitting there going, “Okay, there’s gotta be a way to do this with medicine.” It seems archaic to have people sit in a waiting room forever and then just churn out patients and patients, not being able to actually give good lifestyle advice, etc. The problem is there’s a lot of “yellow” tape, I guess, with the laws and regulations for doing medicine online.

Technology is growing so fast that they have to come up with legislation to keep up with it. Now there are telemedicine laws coming up but at the time, around 2011 when I was in residency, the laws were just not enough.

You just couldn’t tell. There was so much yellow tape that I just gave up on this idea and said, forget about it.

The unfortunate realities of working at a hospital

Well, fast forward—I graduate residency and get a job in the clinic and, as I already knew, it was miserable. The hospital administrators are like, “You’ve gotta see 20 to 30 people a day to make up for all this overhead that we don’t actually need.”

So, imagine somebody comes in and they want to talk about their blood sugars. Do you need a big expensive office and a bunch of other staff to really help somebody eat, improve their diet, improve their sleep, improve their exercise and then maybe adjust their medicines?

You really don’t need an expensive place to do that. But in order to make up for the overhead that they’re paying for, you have to see 20 or 30 people to just pay for your salary and to pay for all their costs and everything.

So I’m sitting there going, “This is miserable. I can’t even give the good lifestyle teachings that people need.”

I did develop an online presence in social media and I started developing these online programs to direct my patients because I didn’t have enough time in the clinic to give them what they actually needed. I wrote a book and basically used it as a patient handout that they loved, called The Fat Loss Prescription.

And that stuff was all fine and dandy but still it was burning me out very quickly. And I’m fresh out of training. Most doctors burn out in their late 40s, 50s, etc. And I’m just out of training for a couple years and I’m burning out quickly!

Spencer’s beginnings at SteadyMD

So this company, SteadyMD, comes to me and they say, “Hey, you have a big online following for an online doctor.” A lot of doctors aren’t on social media, it’s mainly a lot of fitness professionals doing really well on social media. There’s not a ton of doctors, and if they are doctors they’re on Twitter talking to other doctors, not generating a huge general population following.

So this company said, “Hey, we’re trying to do this thing with telemedicine right now for acute care.” Meaning if you have a sore throat or a cough, you call the doctor, a random doctor online and they talk to you and may or may not give you antibiotics—which, as we all know, is probably not good practice just to give out antibiotics like candy.

So they said, “Well instead of that, we want to do more chronic care. Lifestyle medicine online where you actually develop a relationship with somebody. And instead of these quick appointments where you have to wait for a week to get in and you’re only there for five minutes and you end up with a script because you can’t talk about lifestyle … You actually get way more time with people. The overhead’s very low and then you can communicate informally with text messages as needed.”

And I said, “This is interesting…”

So basically, after I posted on Facebook on a random Friday afternoon—which we all know is where your Facebook messages go down to purgatory because the algorithm. Friday afternoon is never a good time. I posted, “Hey you can be my patient now, wherever you live in the United States.”

And over 150 people signed up right then and there to be my patient. It was the right offer.

Yuri:                That’s awesome.

 Spencer:        And SteadyMD goes, “Well geez, maybe we should just hire you full-time.” It was supposed to be just a pilot to see if it would work. So they actually offered me a full-time gig with them, to help them grow it.

And I quit my job in the clinic. It was a lot of angst because I had this good job but now I could work from home. I have a new baby. She’s 10 months now but at the time she was just born and I was like, “Well, this is going to be exciting.”

It was scary, very scary—but now that I’m doing it, working online, I get a patient or two per day, maybe three, and then I keep retaining them and slowly build up. But to get to actually talk with my patients and give them the lifestyle advice needed online, as opposed to just a quick five minutes in person, I have not looked back. I will never go back to that old system.

 Yuri:                That’s awesome. Good for you, man. That’s a real cool story. You talked about the yellow tape with respect to telemedicine. What are some things that our listeners who might in a similar position, medically, need to consider if they’re going to do the virtual lifestyle consulting stuff?

 The confusing world of “telemedicine”

Spencer:        This is where it gets confusing, because there are a lot of non-physicians and non-licensed healthcare practitioners giving lifestyle coaching, right?

But in my mind, lifestyle coaching is medicine. And people don’t think of it like that. I could give someone a lifestyle prescription and get them off their insulin and make their blood sugars normal.

To me, that’s medicine. I think we’d all agree, probably listening to this podcast.

Some people don’t consider that medical advice, but if a physician—a licensed practitioner—is giving that advice, does that count as medical advice or not? I don’t know. I couldn’t find where that line is.

The thing with being a physician is, if you’re going across state lines, I’d say medical advice is probably telling somebody to start or stop their medicines.

I used to give lifestyle advice and help people with diet and exercise across state lines. When I didn’t have a license in the state that the person was in, I was very clear clear. I made them sign things that basically say, “You’re not a patient of mine, this does not establish a doctor-patient relationship, I’m going to be giving you lifestyle guidance that doesn’t treat any particular disease.” Even though it does, obviously it does.

I tried to play it from that angle but now as I’m doing both at the same time with SteadyMD, with their lawyers I basically get licensed in every single state that I’m practicing in. It’s really tough because there’s a bottleneck there.

I shouldn’t have to get a license in every single state. I should be able to take my national boards—which I did—and I should be able to practice anywhere I want in the United States. But unfortunately, now you have to go and pay 500 to $1,000 per state to have your license for a year or up to three years. It totally depends on the state. Just to be able to practice there.

So with this company, they’re a startup and they’re trying to do that for everybody that signs up. We’re trying to find out ways around this. There are some things called reciprocity where a state might honor a license in another state.

We’re trying to cover our butts and basically get a license in every single state where I’m practicing. But it’s crazy like that. And who knows, would you actually get in trouble if you didn’t have one? I don’t know, I’m not sure. But we’re just covering our butts really.

Yuri:                It’s true. It’s so backwards that the system wouldn’t support this. It’s like everything we, as entrepreneurs, try to do to make things a little bit better, it’s like jumping through hoops that are covered in fire.

It’s never as easy you think it would be because we’re trying to make things a little bit better for the system. But eventually it will be better. And based on the work you guys are doing, it’s trailblazing to some degree.

The other thing too is that I don’t actually like going to the doctor (because I don’t like going to the doctor) but also just because of the inconvenience of the travel. I don’t want to get in my car, take half my day, go to the doctor, park. With this, it’s like let’s just jump on Skype or Zoom or similar platforms and bam, that’s all you need.

Spencer:        And I noticed that for myself as well. It’s a pain in the butt having to take a half day off work and then travel to wherever.

The other thing, and the reason why I’m doing well on the platform, is because the people that sign up want to use me as lifestyle or fitness-as-medicine. My nickname is “The Doc who lifts.” I use lifting weights as medicine, that type of thing.

So you’re confined, wherever you live, to a doctor right in your area or vicinity. Otherwise you have to drive, maybe to find somebody that fits with your lifestyle a little bit better and follows your interests. So that the other reason—yeah, it’s nice to be able to hop on a call, especially for my traveling patients. They’re not in one place at one time and they’re busy entrepreneurs and everybody has some sort of job where it’s just hard to take off a day of work or half day of work.

So it’s easy to jump on and have a doctor you mesh with well. So yeah, that’s why it works, I’d say.

Building a proper social media following

Yuri:                That’s awesome. Let’s go back a little bit. You talked about how you have this great following on Facebook. You just announced, “Hey, I’m doing this thing online. I’m now seeking patients,” and you had this huge response.

How did you build such a big following on social? And what are some of the things that others who are listening might be able to deploy themselves?

Spencer:        I think about this a lot. I started this five years ago maybe.

I started in residency during training and basically used it as a platform to tell my patients—go follow me there, I’m going to be taking pictures of the foods that I eat, I’m just going to give out quick tidbits, maybe case studies of how other people were able to solve their issues with their disease.

Because what I also noticed when I share patient stories—it inspires other people as well. I think I’m a pretty smart guy, I went to medical school, did all this stuff, did well, but what I’m finding out is that when patients actually go through it, they find more tips than what I could even think of. Because they’re just going through it.

And they share these tips with me and then I share them with other people and then as that happens these followers start building up.

At this time, I have around 25,000 followers on Facebook. Now that’s not a ton, however I will say that these are very strong, loyal followers. And so you hear about the width versus the depth of followings, and it’s very important to really interact and have your followers get to know you and understand your personality.

Because those are the people that will want to work with you forever. Whoever came up with whole “a thousand loyal followers, true fans,” that’s the whole idea. I know people that have a few hundred thousand followers and none of them would jump at an offer like that.

I do Facebook Live’s now, now that I have that. I answer questions and just interact and they get to know me, personally. They understand the jokes that I make and things like that, which is important because sometimes people will see jokes out of context and they’ll be like, “Who is this guy?” But my followers jump in and let them know, “Oh no, he’s just kidding,” type of thing.

So yeah, it’s giving good content, not worrying about other people that have bigger, larger followings, and developing your own voice. Not being too vanilla. You don’t want to be too vanilla, which basically is the, “Oh, everything is okay. It depends on this and this.”

Develop a strong opinion on certain things. You don’t want to be completely out of the realm but you should have strong opinions and stick with them, develop your voice—I think, anyway.

Of course with science things will be dependent on specific circumstances, not everything’s black and white—but you should give a strong opinion on certain things that you truly believe in.

That’s basically how I did it and it’s been great ever since.

Yuri:                That’s great. It’s totally true.

You talk about taking a stance, having a position in the marketplace—because otherwise you’re just like every other doctor or everyone else who’s sharing health and fitness advice. That’s really important.

You also talked about … Oh my goodness, that just totally slipped my mind. That is really frustrating. I will come back to that once that comes back to me.

Spencer:        It’s all right.

Yuri:                Yeah, that probably happens at some point in your life—you’re like, “What was I just about to say?” And it just totally vanished.

Spencer:        I do that a lot. I was just doing a Facebook Live about five tips to curb hunger and I got into a story about pot roast, and my mom using chuck roast while I used an eye round and then I started talking about something else, and then I totally forgot what I was talking about.

Yuri:                It’s funny. I need some more fish oil up there. Get the brain cells going. Anyways…

As you’ve built this online presence and you’re starting to get more of these lifestyle clients, what are some of the challenges? Other than the yellow tape, in terms of the legalities of stuff. What’s been an obstacle you’ve had to overcome as you’ve built this online presence?

The challenges of dealing with already-healthy people

Spencer:        I will say that one of the biggest obstacles is that I actually like working with those who want to use lifestyle to improve their chronic disease. What I don’t do well with are people that are super healthy—and we call them “worried well” in medicine.

In those cases it’s like, “You’re super healthy, you’ve basically got to take a step back and maybe do some more meditation type practice.” It’s hard to deal with hypochondria. A lot of those types of people, I don’t do as well with them because it’s frustrating. I see these other people that just have a clear pathology with diabetes and blood pressure stuff—and then someone else who’s perfectly healthy, their blood sugar is 95 and they want it to be below 90.

It’s like, “Well, no that’s a blip. Don’t worry about it.” You know what I mean? Stuff like that.

It’s like “Hey, that’s not a big deal. We can we’ll just retest it and make sure that’s fine, but it’s likely a blip.” Those types of patients that message me a lot—I don’t do as well with those.

That’s one of the obstacles. People see you as a guru type of thing online and it’s like, “Yeah, I do well and I help people out but I do best with the people that really want to use that lifestyle to improve their current health situation.”

 Yuri:                Very cool. It is funny, the internet has a weird way of creating celebrity. It really is weird. I was dropping off one of my sons at school this morning and his teacher’s like, “You’re a celebrity aren’t you?”

I’m like, “What are you talking about? Not really, maybe in my own little niche.” 

But she’s like, “Yeah I was doing a search on how to open up tight hip flexors and I saw one of your YouTube videos.”

Spencer:        That is so funny. 

Yuri:                I’m like, “That’s crazy.” Because I’m on YouTube apparently I’m a celebrity.

Spencer:        Yeah, well I live near Washington DC and I’ll be walking around with my wife and someone will come up like, “Hey you’re the doc who lifts!” And I just start laughing because it’s like, in your little world you think you’re so cool and whatever but people are searching for things and they find you.

If you have a cool voice and something to offer, anybody can turn into a pseudo celebrity.

Yuri:                From a positioning standpoint that’s great. If we can use that to affect more change and help more people, then that’s great. But it’s so interesting just to see those kind of comments, it’s always funny.

What do you think is a really important success trait for entrepreneurs to possess, to really enjoy lasting success with their business?

 Spencer:        A trait? Is that what you said?

 Yuri:                Yeah.

Enjoying the process and going deeper, not wider

Spencer:        I hate to be so cliché, but really enjoying the journey and process. It’s so hard because we all see other very successful people, entrepreneurs. We see maybe the cars they’re driving, the houses they live in but the most important part is really enjoying it. It’s like a game, the way I see it.

I feel like for most people there’s never going to be enough. We’re always going to want to strive for more, so really just enjoying that process of seeing it build. For me anyway, I have to focus on that because I get really caught up in the end game. But really there is no end game.

Yuri:                It’s called death.

Spencer:        Yeah, exactly. And that’s not what anybody looks forward to. Really just going, “Hey, this is really fun building this,” as opposed to, “I just want that materialistic object.”

That’s what I would say.

Yuri:                That’s cool. That’s really good advice.

I’m coming back to what I was going to say earlier. You had mentioned that you had a really good bond with your audience even though they’re not a million people—as opposed to having an audience that might be 10 times the size but doesn’t really respond to anything.

I firmly, firmly agree with that because our whole thing with Healthpreneur is that you scale by going deeper not wider. And you bring up a good point which is, how do you balance the wanting or desire to grow while still staying connected at a deeper level with your audience and enjoying that journey? Does that make sense?

 Spencer:        Yeah. It’s really tough. I’m on Instagram as well and I just grew my Instagram from 3,000 followers in March to now 65,000 using these infographics. The thing is, even though I have 65,000 followers there relatively quickly, they’re not nearly as loyal and as strong as my Facebook following.

I posted about becoming my patient on Instagram and maybe 20 people signed up, and two of them canceled within a day. It’s a little bit different. You can find these hacks and whatever to increase your following quickly but this slow, very strong following on Facebook and really getting them to understand your personality is important. Not using weird hacks.

If you can go viral and get a huge following yeah, sure—I suppose. But just understanding it’s going to be a slow process and really enjoying that process is important.

 Yuri:                That’s good. And I bet our listeners are wondering right now, “How on earth did he do that?” (The Instagram infographic thing.) And if you’re listening to this, I’m going to tell you right now we’re not going to share that with you.

And it’s not because I don’t want you to know it, but just what you said there—it’s not about this massive influx of followers because maybe they’re not the right people to be following you in the first place. Or maybe they latched onto the wrong bait or whatever. And I think your advice of the slow steady growth is super, super important.

 Spencer:        Yeah, no, exactly.

 Yuri:                Knowing what you know now, would you do anything differently if you started all over again?

Learning about marketing, copywriting, and selling

 Spencer:        I know you had Pat Flynn on your podcast not too long ago. He’s now my business partner, and we’re working on our fat loss prescription brand together.

I wish I would have learned copywriting and selling earlier because doctors, physicians—we’re very uncomfortable trying to sell. We’d rather give everything away for free. But I’ve realized that if I would’ve learned marketing, copywriting, direct response and all this stuff I’d be in a different position. And it’s okay because I’m learning it now, it’s not too late.

But one of the things I notice is that patients would continue to do something like P90X, despite me giving them a more reasonable plan—and it’s because it drew them in. It drew them in.

So now I’m learning that, and getting patients excited about the standard good lifestyle stuff that I’ve always been trying to give. But I’m finding ways to hook them, and it’s not only from a monetary standpoint which, of course we all are growing businesses, we want to put food on our table etc. But it doesn’t matter how good your program is if people aren’t following it.

I wish I would’ve learned copywriting and sales back in college, really. I wish I would’ve understood that instead of just shunning it away. That’s important.

Yuri:                That’s huge. I completely agree with that one. And it would be awesome if they actually had a subject in school called influence or direct response because it’s not so much both the writing of the words, it’s understanding the mechanics of it.

 Spencer:        Right, exactly.

 Yuri:                I can’t tell you how many doctors and physicians I’ve spoken to who don’t like seling. Exactly what you just said, they don’t like selling. They have to be cautious because of their MD stuff.

It’s not about that. It’s just about understanding how to share a story and connect with people and take them from where they are to where they want to be.

 Spencer:        Exactly.

The Rapid-Five Questions

 Yuri:                That’s really good advice. Dude, this has been really, really good. Very insightful so thank you for sharing. Are you ready for the rapid five?

 Spencer:        Yeah, this should be good.

 Yuri:                All right here you go. So you’ve got no idea what these questions are, whatever comes to mind first is probably the right answer. Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

 Spencer:        My biggest weakness, physically … Probably my calves. And actually knowing when to say no. I’m working on that one for business-wise. I’m sure that’s a lot of people’s.

 Yuri:                Yes. I’ve just actually recorded an episode on this. The power of saying no. The more successful you become, the more inaccessible you have to be.

 Spencer:        Yep, exactly.

 Yuri:                Inaccessible not to your family or to people you actually want to spend time with, but to opportunities that are just taking you off path.

 Spencer:        Yep that’s something John Berardi has tried to tell me multiple times. I’m working on it. I am working, I’m getting better actually. I’m getting better.

 Yuri:                That’s awesome. It’s good to see ’cause everyone will get to that point at some point so that’s cool. Number two, what is your biggest strength.

 Spencer:        Biggest strength is my drive. That was something in high school. If I have my eye set on something, I will find ways to make it happen regardless, whether that means pivoting or whatever. That’s probably my biggest strength.

 Yuri:                That’s awesome. And so for you right now, what is that? What does that vision look like for you? What is that thing that’s driving you forward?

Spencer:        I finally found my go-to guy, Pat Flynn, he’s big time copywriter, understands how to sell. We have a clear vision and now it’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when this is going to explode.

Yuri:                Awesome. Yeah, Pat’s a good dude. He’s awesome. That’s exciting. Okay, so number three, what’s one skill you’ve become dangerously good at in order to grow your business?

Spencer:        Understanding my authority holds a lot of power. And using it for good as opposed to evil. But understanding I hold a lot of power and have a lot of responsibility. Understanding that and using it to my advantage.

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

Spencer:        First thing in morning—I actually have Hashimoto’s thyroiditis so I take my medicine and drink a huge glass of water with it. The next thing is pick up my baby with my wife and snuggle them for a little bit. And then go for some coffee.

Yuri:                Nice. Excellent. And finally, complete this sentence. I know I’m being successful when _____.

Spencer:        I know I’m being successful when I notice my energy increasing and I notice I’m just in a more positive mood. If that makes sense.

Yuri:                Yep totally. That’s what it’s all about. Feeling good, right?

Spencer:        Yep.

Yuri:                Excellent. Well Spencer this has been a lot of fun, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to join us and sharing your journey, your wisdom. I know our listeners will get a lot of value out of this episode so thank you so much.

Spencer:        Thanks for having me on. I’ve been looking forward to this and sorry I had to cancel couple times.

Yuri:                It’s all good. It’s all good. Third time’s a charm.

 Spencer:        Third time, that’s correct. 

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Yuri’s Take

And that’s a wrap with Dr. Spencer Nadolsky. That was a pretty cool interview.

Young guy! I mean, he’s not this old curmudgeon doctor who has had it with the medical system, he’s a young, young dude. And if you check out his website he’s actually got a really nice website at drspencer.com. Talk about a good URL, right?

So for today my thought provoking question is going to revolve around this idea of asking yourself, “Why do I need to have a bigger following? Why do I need to continue scaling my business?”

I talked about this in one of our solo rounds couple months ago—it’s this whole idea about the power of staying lean. And I’m not saying lean like small. I’m a huge believer in thinking big and growing, don’t get me wrong there.

But I want to ask you this; why do you want a million followers on Facebook? Instead of 100,000 who might be more deeply connected to you?

Why do you want to make $100 million instead of a million dollars that will provide you with the ultimate lifestyle that you want?

I’m not saying that making $100 million is bad, I just want you to think about this stuff and really bring you back to understanding, or just being aware of what is really important for you in your life.

Because understand that with growth comes opportunity costs and there’s going to be sacrifices. Are you willing to make those sacrifices to continue growing your business, making more money, doing all that kind of stuff? Or are you happy at a more nimble, leaner level that provides the lifestyle that you want—you’re able to hang out with your kids, etc.

Again, there’s no right or wrong answer here, just something to think about. So that’s what I’m going to leave you with today.

While you’re here, if you haven’t done so already, open up iTunes on your phone right now. Just do that real quick, I’ve got a surprise for you. Go to the Healthpreneur podcast and if you haven’t already, there’s a little purple button at the top that says subscribe. Click it now. Do it.

You can just take your thumb, click on it, watch what happens. Have you done it? Cool.

So you see what happens? Now you’ve subscribed to the podcast and you’re going to get to hear my voice every week. Monday, Wednesday, Friday all sorts of great episodes, amazing interviews.

As Spencer eluded to, I spoke with John Berardi recently. He’s a good friend of mine, we’ll actually have him up on the podcast exactly one week from now. That’s an episode that you’re not going to want to miss, because there are some amazing insights from the $40 million man, as I call him.

So yeah, just tons of amazing people we’re bringing your way to help you stay on track, to keep you inspired, to help you continue growing and building an amazing impactful business. Whatever that looks like for you.

Whether that’s to help 10 people, a million people, it doesn’t really matter to me. Whatever is most important to you, that’s what I want to help you do better.

I really believe that you have to become a smarter entrepreneur. You have to become a smarter business owner. You have to understand marketing. You have to understand the nuances, the journey that comes with being an entrepreneur, because it’s not all peaches and roses.

There are definitely some highs and lows, and often there are a lot of lows. It’s just understanding that this too shall pass, and I want to bring these amazing guests to you to help you understand that.

So that’s the deal. Thank you for subscribing and if you enjoyed this podcast, if you’ve been listening for a while I would greatly appreciate a rating or review over on our iTunes page as well.

And then finally, I’ve got a great book for you if you don’t know about it, it’s called Health Profit Secrets. I actually cover the cost of the book. I’m going to send it to you, I’m just asking that you cover the cost of shipping, which is a couple bucks. Inside this book you’ll uncover four underlying secrets that all successful health businesses have in common.

You’ll also get a scorecard to score yourself on those four different areas and really get a good idea of where you’re at and how you can fill in the gap to strengthen your business so that it’s not like driving on a flat tire. These four areas are like four wheels on a car. If one or more of those tires is flat, well the car’s not going to run very well. Very same idea with the business.

So that’s all for today. You can grab the book over at healthpreneurbook.com.

Thank you so much for being with me. It’s a pleasure to bring these amazing guests to you, to inspire you, to help you take things to the next level and I look forward to seeing you in our next episode.

Go out there, continue to be great, do great and rock on.

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Follow Dr. Spencer Nadolsky At:

https://drspencer.com/

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Free Healthpreneur Health Profit Secrets Book