Transcription:

Hello! Yuri here, welcome to the Healthpreneur podcast. Hope you’re doing awesome.

So, today we’re going to be talking about the perfect client pipeline, and what this is going to do is help you attract your best prospects and clients into your business every single day, even while you’re sleeping—it’s like you’re on autopilot.

Sound good?

So, the biggest challenge that I continue to see with entrepreneurs—especially in the help space—is, “How do I generate more leads into my business?” And I should specifically talk about coaching here. A lot of people are doing manual prospecting, so they’re spending a lot of time in Facebook groups building their authority and then having some one-off conversations with people in Messenger. And that’s all good, but it’s not predictable.

“My product is so good that I don’t have to advertise!” …Not quite.

Some people are getting word of mouth referrals and generating business on the back end, but the challenge is that they don’t have any way of predictably generating leads on the front end. And I think there are some people who have put this badge of honor on the fact that they don’t have to advertise—their product is so good that they get word of mouth.

But here’s the way I look at it. If that is the case, then you have the ability to advertise because your system is so good. Does that make sense?

Some people might look at this as, “Your thing is so good you don’t need to advertise!” but I look at it as, “Your thing is so good, which allows you to advertise.” Because now you can get in front of your ideal prospects, wherever they are in the world, and move them through a pipeline that is going to have them engage with you.

So, in this episode specifically, I’m going to talk about coaching and coaching clients, okay? If you’re selling products, this is not really going to apply as much to you, but I want to really lay this down.

So, the nice thing about this pipeline is that you don’t have to do anything else from a marketing perspective other than what I’m about to give you. What that means is that you get to spend the vast majority of your time in your business—teaching, coaching, and serving your clients—instead of setting up new funnels, optimizing funnels, writing sales copy, writing long sales pages.

You don’t have to do any of that stuff. There’s no product launches, no summits, none of that stuff that we think we need to be doing but that actually sucks up our time and makes us miserable in the process.

If you’ve got a pen, you may want to write this down—and if you don’t, if you’re driving for instance, then just take a mental note of what I’m about to share with you.

First and foremost, there are three components to any successful business—and those are attracting qualified leads, converting those leads into clients who are paying you money, and delivering an amazing result to them. We call those attract, convert, and deliver.

Step 1 — the ad

The pipeline allows us to really deal with the first two—the delivery of an amazing program and your coaching program we’ll kind of save for another episode. But for now, all we’re going to do in terms of attracting qualified leads is set up a Facebook ad campaign.

Now, I would recommend at least one Facebook ad, but you want to try a couple different ones with different angles, hooks and so forth to speak to different people in your audience.

But for now, let’s just keep it simple and talk about one Facebook ad. That Facebook ad is going to get in front of your ideal prospects and invite them to a webinar. Now, we’ve been doing webinars for 10 plus years and we’ve sent paid traffic, joint venture traffic, internal traffic, traffic from content to all sorts of places—whether they’re lead magnets to opt in for something, content first, a sales page, etc.

Step 2 — the webinar

Time and time again, webinars are the highest converting tool you can use online.

The only thing that’s better than a webinar is one-on-one interaction. So a webinar allows us to do more of what we love to do—which is just share our awesomeness. All we’re gonna do is record a webinar—which is about 60 to 90 minutes—that is going to teach a specific topic. But  it needs to be done in a very specific way to move people to the next level.

Again, there’s a very big difference between a webinar and a webinar that converts.  There’s a huge difference between having a Facebook ad and having a Facebook ad that converts.

I’m not going to go into the nuances here—this is exactly what we teach you in our health business accelerator workshop, we actually help you build all this stuff out. But for now, I want to give you the framework of how to think about this.

So, you’ve got a Facebook ad, goes to a webinar. At the very minimum, if no one engages with you beyond the webinar, at least they leave that with a great experience. They’ve learned something valuable. They’ve had their perspective shifted a bit. They can see a new possibility.

But the right people will move to the next level with you.

Step 3 — the call

Now, if you’re selling coaching—which if you’re listening to this, you probably are—at a higher price level, maybe three to five thousand dollar coaching packages where you’re working with a group of people, not one on one… In order for you to enroll these people, you can’t send them to a sales page.

Number one, they’re gonna take forever to make a decision, so you’re going to go back and forth trying to chase them down, which is a waste of time. What we want to do is invite them to a call, and on that call basically figure out if we can help them. If we can, we’ll do some of that on the phone and then we’ll just invite them to work with us in our coaching program.

Now, before the call there’s an application. So, from the webinar, we’re selling the call—we’re not selling the coaching program, okay? You want to plant the seed for the program. You want to let them know of where things may go if they want to choose that, but the webinar is built to get them on a call.

Now, getting people to register for a webinar is a big commitment. They’re going to spend an hour of their time or so fixated on a webinar. That’s very tough to do in today’s day and age. That’s why people think webinars don’t work.

I’m telling you, we do this all the time. It’s working. It’s much more effective than sending people to a lead magnet where there’s no commitment.

Second, we’re asking people to fill out an application after the webinar and before the call. So, now they’re going to book a time to chat with you and they’re going to fill out an application—which is another level of commitment.

Then and only then will you get on the phone with them to have a 15 or 30 minute conversation about where they are, where they want to go, where they’re stuck and how you can help them move to the next level.

Generating leads on autopilot

This is the perfect client pipeline. Facebook ad webinar, webinar to application, and then you basically have a call after that. You don’t need to complicate things any more than that.

You really don’t have to do anything else in your business other than running the system and the beautiful thing about this is that of those four components, three of them are automated. You don’t touch the application after it’s built. It’s done. You don’t really have to touch the webinar unless it tanks and doesn’t work, in which case you’ll want to rework it a little bit. But it’s a one time recorded evergreen webinar. We’re not talking about doing this live everyday.

And then third step is the Facebook ads. You create them once and then you simply manage them on a weekly basis with maybe an hour of your time. So it’s not like you have to do this day in and day out. You have the Facebook ads and webinar doing all of the digital prospecting and selling on your behalf. And then your time is spent talking to people on the phone and seeing if you can help them—and that becomes really exciting.

I really enjoy these calls—what we call result accelerator calls. They’re a lot of fun for me because I love speaking with people. I love getting to the root of their problems and helping them solve those, and then really getting more intel on our marketplace.

So it’s a great way, in my case, to understand what people are experiencing on a day to day basis in their businesses. And in your case, maybe what they’re experiencing in their lives that you can then bring back to your marketing and your messaging to better speak their language.

It’s immensely, immensely powerful.

The other thing is that if you’re enrolling someone into a three or five thousand dollar program, getting on the phone with them is the best use of your time. There’s nothing else you could do in your business that is going to give you the type of return that you will get with being on the phone with someone.

And if you do things properly, you should be enrolling one out of two of those prospects, if not more.

So I spend about three to four hours of my day—almost every day—taking these types of calls because I enjoy them and I enroll a lot of people, which is terrific. So it’s great for everyone. I’m able to provide great value, I’m able to hit our financial goals, and I’m also able to do something I really enjoy doing.

I spend anywhere from 10 to 12 hours a week on these calls and then, in terms of delivering a program, we do this in the form of a two day workshop called the Health Business Accelerator. We also now offer a six week online version of that as well.

But most of my time delivering the program is very minimal, it’s literally a couple hours of my time every week. So, if you’re someone who is coaching clients, instead of doing one on one you bring them into a group and that deliverable is going to take you two to four hours a week, in the way that we teach.

In addition to that you have your enrollment calls, which might be five to ten hours or more per week, whatever you want. So now you have a business that is really focusing on the most important things that are gonna move the needle for you, that are gonna help you impact your clients at a deeper level—and everything else goes by the wayside.

You don’t need to write blog posts. You don’t need to have a YouTube channel. You don’t need to do a podcast if you don’t want to. You don’t have to be on Instagram, you don’t have to do Facebook.

I mean, it’s nice to be on those platforms, let’s just be honest. It’s probably a good idea to have a Facebook group, a Facebook presence. But you don’t have to spend all of your time manually prospecting people. You don’t have to be doing 30 Instagram stories a day and just being like, “Why can’t I be present with my kids and my life?”

When you have a predictable machine that is working on your behalf, on autopilot 24/7, it frees you up to do more of what you love to do—which is teaching, coaching, and serving your clients.

How I can personally help you build your Perfect Client Pipeline

So, that is the perfect client pipeline. Now, if you’d like me to personally help you build your perfect client pipeline in your business, help you craft out your Facebook ads, help you build your webinar, help you get the framework and understanding of how to do these enrollment calls and how to build out what we call the Dream Come True system … Then I’d be delighted to help you, if you qualify.

So, we do this in our Health Business Accelerator workshop, and if you’d like to learn more about it just go over to HealthpreneurGroup.com/workshops. When you’re there, you can read the page and find out what it’s all about, and then simply apply to attend our live workshop or our online version, whichever one is best for you.

We’ll receive your application and get back to you within 24 hours. Is that good?

So, that is really the most in-depth way I can help you build this side of your business so that you have a lot more clarity, a lot less confusion, and a system to attract better clients and make a lot more profit. If you’d like that, HealthpreneurGroup.com/workshops is the place to get started.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode, and if you have, remember to subscribe to the Healthpreneur podcast because we’ve got some really cool stuff coming up for you this week.

Dr. Spencer Nadolsky is going to be showing you how he built a virtual medical practice. Yeah, it’s pretty interesting. And then we’ve got Jen Oliver on Friday who’s also an online health coach. Lots of great stuff that kind of flows from this conversation, coming your way this week. You don’t want to miss any of those episodes, so be sure to subscribe. And until Wednesday, I hope you have an amazing day.

Go out there, continue to be great, do great, and I will talk with you then.

Transcription

I’m excited today because I’m speaking with a good buddy of mine who I’ve known since the inception of the internet. We started our online businesses at the same time and we both have a background in fitness, personal training, and have a passion for creating videos. He did things a little bit differently with his wife, Annmarie.

He’s going to share the story about how he packed up and went on a roadshow for two years; you’ll see how that played out and why they did it. Nowadays, he is the head visionary, co-founder, and CEO of Annmarie Skin Care.

Annmarie is the name of his wife, and they’ve developed this amazing, honest, wild, and all-natural skin care line that has been hugely successful for the past seven or eight years now. Kevin is going to talk about his entrepreneurial journey; he started out in the information business with a great website called RenegadeHealth.com, which still exists to this day. It’s under new ownership now, but he’ll discuss how he moved from that into physical products.

Kevin will discuss the differences in those two types of businesses, the pros and cons of each, and what he’s had to learn along the journey to make Annmarie one of the Inc. 500 fastest-growing companies, and one of Inc. 500’s best workplaces.

Kevin and our mutual friend, Nick Ortner, who runs The Tapping Solution, are the co-founders of the popular online summit model. They did the first one back in 2007, before summits were what they are today. He was at the forefront of developing and bringing summits to the limelight.

Kevin has written a great book with Hay House called “Kale and Coffee” that I highly recommend. The book contains lots of great thoughts and insights about health, life, and business.

 

Yuri:                Kevin Gianni, what’s up buddy? Welcome to the Healthpreneur podcast.

Kevin:             Hey, man. It’s good to be here. I’m excited.

Yuri:                I know. It’s been too long since we’ve spoken. We’ve known each other for about a decade now. It’s crazy how time has flown.

Kevin:             Yeah, close to that, right?

Yuri:                Yeah, it’s nuts. Back in the days where you guys had the …

What was the name of the RV you guys had?

Kevin:             The Kale Whale.

Backstory and the beginnings of Annmarie Skin Care

Yuri:                The Kale Whale. Back in the day you guys were crushing YouTube videos with all your travels and now with Annmarie Gianni Skin Care and doing some great things there. Let’s go back in the day.

Talk to us about that journey, about how you guys were in the Kale Whale for two years, traveling around the states.

Kevin:             That’s correct. Two-and-a-half years.

Yuri:                What did that look like? What was the intention? What were some of the highs and lows that you experienced during that time?

Kevin:             Well, it was ridiculous. It made no sense. We were doing our YouTube videos mostly from our condo in Danbury, Connecticut, and I got to the point where I was just bored. At that point we had about 200 videos or so, and it had gotten to the point where it just seemed like the same thing every day.

Annmarie and I were lying in bed talking about this, and she said, “You know what we should do? We should get an RV, travel around the country, and do a roadshow.” I asked, “Did you just suggest that?” Do you really want to do that?” She said, “I do.” So I said, “Then let’s do it.”

It took less than two months to be in an RV after that night.

Yuri:                That’s awesome.

Kevin:             We just said, “Let’s do it.” It was an incredible experience. At the time, it didn’t necessarily make business sense because we were not centralized, we were traveling. In terms of WiFi, I needed to have a little MiFi thing to tether WiFi.

We produced videos every day, so sometimes I would have to go into a strip mall parking lot and pick up on some of the WiFi signals. A trick we learned was that if you type in the phone number of the business, 30% of the time you can actually get into their WiFi.

Yuri:                Kevin the hacker. Here we go.

Kevin:             We were just hacking it, but it laid the foundation for a lot of our friendships, made the show more exciting, and laid the groundwork for the skin care business because it came from when we were traveling and interviewing people.

Yuri:                That’s awesome. You’re very well-connected to a lot of people in our space and obviously, as you just mentioned, you had to get out of the apartment. You had to get out of the office, meet people, and shake hands. You guys did all sorts of cool investigatory-type videos and interviews and killed several birds with one stone.

Managing expectations, building business plans, and setting goals

Kevin:             Yeah, and we didn’t know. What I love about it most is that we didn’t know what was going to happen, and what happened just came from it.

If you go to business school they say, “Write your business plan.” I’ve never opened a document and typed a business plan. Maybe that’s still advised, but for us we just follow whatever the heck we want to do.

Yuri:                Sure.

Kevin:             Then the rest came from it.

Yuri:                I’ve recognized that stuff changes so rapidly. If you set a goal 90 days ago, you see that you went off on a different tangent because the initial thing wasn’t what you thought it would be.

I’m the same way. I don’t think I’ve ever written a business plan. I have a vision, but in terms of how we’re going to get there, I don’t know. Just start with the next 90 days.

Kevin:             I find myself being disappointed almost every year by some arbitrary goal that I’ve set. When you think about expectations, how you feel about your business, your relationships, anything, if you simply make up a goal that doesn’t make sense and you don’t hit it, there’s no reason to be disappointed.

You tried to hit it, but maybe it just wasn’t in the cards. Maybe that goal wasn’t supposed to happen that year, and maybe other things that were supposed to happen did.

Yuri:                With the perspective and wisdom that you’ve acquired over the years, how do you approach goal-setting? How do you approach, “Here’s what we want to do”?

Kevin:             I still set goals. I have a list on my whiteboard of goals that we’re gunning for the fourth quarter. We have long-term goals set up. We just started working with a company called Rhythm Systems, which is pretty amazing.

They work with your management to do goal-setting and quarterly, monthly, and yearly planning. It’s really cool software.

Yuri:                Awesome.

Kevin:             We’re really excited about it. This year I expected to grow 35%. We didn’t. If you don’t hit your goal, there are two things you can do: You can cry, whine, and feel bad about yourself because you didn’t hit it, or you can say, “Alright, we didn’t do it.”

Manage that expectation. Every year I work through a mantra or a phrase and last year it was, “No expectations.” It was a great year, man. Everything was so cool. Everything was chill. If something bad happens, it’s fine. I just don’t have any expectations about people, goals, or things like that.

You work like hell though. You don’t just sit back and surf all day or something. That sounds pretty good, but…

Yuri:                California lifestyle.

Kevin:             You work like heck to try and achieve it, but if you don’t, you don’t have that distance, that gap between where you are and the expectation that you set.

Yuri:                Detaching from the outcome.

Kevin:             Yeah.

Yuri:                Is that pretty easy for you to do?

Kevin:             No. It’s hard as heck.

Yuri:                I can definitely relate to that even with kids. You have kids as well. It’s like detaching from the expectation that they should do certain things that we want them to do. They’re in their own little world. They’re doing their thing, and you have to honor that. It’s a good lesson, for me at least.

Kevin:             It’s crazy, right?

The entrepreneur’s tendency to create excitement and drama

Yuri:    It’s nuts. I want to go back to when you said that you guys were bored after shooting 200 plus videos from your place in Connecticut. I find a lot of people, a lot of business owners, end up creating excitement in their business because they’re bored.

Do you think that becomes a distraction or do you think it’s a creative spark to something greater?

Kevin:             This is so relevant right now. We just hired a marketing manager, we have a COO, and I’m feeling it now again in this business. I talked to my business coach about two weeks ago, and she said, “Don’t do anything right now. Just sit with it. Relax, read some books, but don’t start anything,”

It’s so unusual for me not to do anything because, you’re right, I want that drama. It’s not drama like backstabbing or anything like that. It’s just feeling like I need to do something.

I’m really uncomfortable with the silence because I went from managing all of the marketing to delegating everything, so it’s just a strange space. Right now I’m just getting comfortable with the strangeness of it.

Yuri:                You’ve done your Kolbe on some level at some point?

Kevin:             Yeah. Four, three, nine, three.

Yuri:                So you’re a high quickstart. I’m high quickstart. Most people listening who are entrepreneurial are high quickstarts, so we’re always looking to create new stuff and start new things. It’s challenging to balance that because you still want to honor your creative genius.

At the same time you want to just chill for a bit. That’s the fun part about being an entrepreneur; the learning and evolution that we go through to figure out how we best operate and take the next steps.

Kevin:             In the beginning, I had to be careful not to pass all my new ideas to my team. Now that they know me, they understand that if I tell them something it doesn’t necessarily need to be done right away. As long as it’s on a document somewhere that we will review sometime, I’m okay with it. You know what I mean?

Yuri:                Yep.

Kevin:             That’s just the way I am. For me, that means I was heard.

Yuri:                Sure. So you guys started Renegade Health a long time ago, then you brought on a partner to help you do some of that stuff. Then, you basically sold him the business.

Kevin:             That’s correct.

Yuri:                He currently runs it and is a great guy. Then you started Annmarie Gianni Skin Care.

How big is the team that you have built over the past couple years?

Kevin:             We have 17 full-time people in an office in Berkeley.

The differences between an information and product-based business

Yuri:                How have you enjoyed the transition from an information virtual product business to an office and a physical product business?

Kevin:             There’s pluses and minuses to both of these businesses. I look at the info business as a business where you’re essentially selling pixels. The cool thing is that they don’t cost that much, so your margins are fantastic. There’s a lot of cash in an information business, and if that’s what you’re looking for then it’s a good business to be in.

The challenge with the information business is that you have to continually create new content to sell to your existing people. You can have one lead-gen or one upfront offer and get new customers, but on the back-end you have to come up with new content because people aren’t going to buy your e-book 10 times.

That doesn’t happen. They don’t even buy it for a friend because they’ll just pass it along.

Yuri:                Yes. Forward the email.

Kevin:             Yeah. Exactly. Which is fine. Some people get all up-in-arms about that; I’ve always encouraged people to forward our e-books around when we had them.

On the other side, the product business is great because you create a product once and you don’t have to recreate it ever again. It’s just something that sells year after year and people re-buy it.

The challenge with the product business is cash flow. There could be times when you have $20,000 in the bank, you have $100,000 in bills, and you have $500,000 tied up in inventory. You think you have to do a sale, but you don’t want to devalue your products.

It becomes a learning experience that we knew nothing about. We brought on a contract CFO to help us this year, and that’s after eight years of doing a product business. Now we’re learning, but it took eight years to realize that there was such thing as a contract CFO.

Yuri:                It’s good though. It’s like having kids. You have no idea what to expect, and then you think, “Okay, what do we do with this thing now?” You learn on the fly.

Kevin:             I like being a little bit dumb about it all. It’s gotten me in trouble, but at the same time I think part of our success is that we didn’t plan for it. We didn’t know it was going to happen, so we were forced to deal with it when it came.

Yuri:                With the skin care business specifically, what has been one of the biggest challenges you guys have had to face, and what have you learned from that experience?

Challenges, mistakes, and advice for product-based business owners

Kevin:             Our slogan is, “Honest, wild, beautiful,” and that means a lot of things to us. Anything that we do in the business we run across, “Is it honest? Is it wild? Is it beautiful?”

One of the bigger challenges is that, in the skin care industry, a lot of things can fly under the radar. You can put things in your product that are not on the label. The biggest challenge for us is creating products that are honest, that work, and that have a decent shelf life without using any preservatives.

We use plant preservatives like aspen bark and rosemary extract, but keeping true to that theme is really challenging. We would have 10-15 more SKUs right now if we could bend our rules, but we don’t. I would say that’s one of the hardest things for us, but we set that up for ourselves. That’s not something that every entrepreneur would have an issue with.

Cash flow is also quite a challenge. It’s a creative challenge, but I would rather do without managing that. That is not my favorite thing to do.

Yuri:                No kidding. What advice would you give to somebody starting a physical product business where there’s going to be inventory and cash flow issues?

Kevin:             It depends on what kind of budget they’re working with, but I would definitely pick the brain of someone who is a CFO. Get an idea of things that you can set up beforehand so that your cash flow management is good.

That is particularly important during crunch times, holidays, and if your business is seasonal. 35% of our revenue comes from the last six months of the year. In order to do that, you have to buy your product for the holidays in slow months like August or September.

Work on creative financing with manufacturers, bank financing, loans, and line of credit. That would also be a really nice way to start.

Yuri:                That’s good advice. It is so different from an information business because you never have to consider those things if you’re selling e-books or digital memberships. If you want to get into that and evolve as an entrepreneur and business owner, it’s a stress you must learn how to deal with.

Kevin:             One of the best ways to move into products is to start with an information business. You can get cash from it and then turn that cash into your seed investment.

Yuri:                Totally. It helps if you have an audience to sell to.

Kevin:             Absolutely.

Leveraging a mature business to grow a new one

Yuri:                How did you merge Renegade Health with Annmarie in terms of audience and products?

Kevin:             It wasn’t even a separate business, really. We had branded the products as Annmarie, and launched the products out of our Renegade Health store. We didn’t even have a separate website for Annmarie when we started. We tested the market, and it started to work.

We started rolling out one product nearly every two months, to the point where we now have 35 to 40 SKUs. There was a point when I realized that I was spending about 70% of my time on Renegade Health and it was bringing about 30% of the gross revenue, and 30% of my time on the skincare business and it was bringing 70% of the gross revenue.

I realized that something had to give.

Lucky enough, Fred had been working with me for a while so we made a deal and he took over that business.

Yuri:                That’s cool. You leveraged both platforms at the same time. It’s challenging to start from scratch, especially in the physical product business. I spoke with someone who had 70 SKUs with no audience.

Kevin:             Oh my gosh.

Yuri:                I’m like, “Dude, holy cow. Let’s rewind a couple years.”

Kevin:             They need an audience. Our audience was great. We had a pretty deep network of friends and partners from Renegade Health since we had done summits for a long time.

We rolled out an offer that converted really well for people, and it still converts just as well as it did in the beginning. We’re still using that same offer, which is crazy. We’ve had that offer going for about six years.

Yuri:                It’s like one of those old Italian restaurants that don’t change the menu for 40 years. It works. It’s all good. Just pass the calzone. So 40 SKUs?

Kevin:             Yes.

Yuri:                I’m sure you’ve probably noticed the even 20.

Kevin:             Yes.

Yuri:                Do the 20% that account for 80% of revenue appeal to more pain points and desires at a deeper level for people? What do these products have in common that make them bigger sellers than the others?

Product sales and FDA protocol

Kevin:             For us, it’s anti-aging. Those products sell the best. It’s not preventative. It’s pain point. Our audience is in the 40 to 60-year-old range.

As you know, it’s hard to sell prevention. We have products for oily skin, but oily skin doesn’t tend to be in the 40 to 60-year-old market. Oily skin tends to be a younger audience, and our products aren’t cheap because they have high-quality ingredients. Oily skin products are a harder sale, so they’re on the lower end.

Yuri:                So less wrinkles, better skin elasticity, things that people of that age might be dealing with?

Kevin:             Reducing the appearance of wrinkles and fine lines, yes.

Yuri:                That’s right. Just the FTC, FDA compliance.

Kevin:             FDA, FTC.

Yuri:                Actually let’s talk about that. What are some things that you weren’t aware of, that you didn’t know you didn’t know, when you got into this? Any FTC things?

Kevin:             We got an FDA letter, so we were well aware of what we could and couldn’t say in the market. In skincare, you can’t really say anything. That’s why you see, “Reduce the appearance of…” or, “Diminish the look of…” You can’t say that it does anything to change the structure or function of your skin.

But you can change the appearance of your skin, so you can say that. It’s easier with supplements, to be honest with you. You can say things and you can cite studies. With skin care, you don’t even touch it, really.

Yuri:                Apply to your face. That’s pretty much it.

Kevin:             We joked after we got the letter that we should write, “This formula was brought down on the back of a unicorn to …” Just to give it just a fun, goofy spin. We didn’t know what we could say until we consulted with our attorneys. The whole FDA protocol document is probably about 60 pages long.

Yuri:                Wow.

Kevin:             It’s very detailed. If any listeners want it, we can pass it along.

Yuri:                That’s valuable. If you get slapped by the FDA, they’re not looking to slap you on the wrist. They’re looking to take you down.

Kevin:             Absolutely. It’s not a joke. You don’t mess around. You do exactly what they say and be a good citizen.

Yuri:                Yeah. No kidding. What’s one mistake you’ve made in your business? What did it cost you?

A mistake and its cost: The importance of keeping passwords secure

Kevin:             One that sticks out for me is not being diligent about securing our passwords, logins, and that sort of thing. That mistake led to a $200,000 breach from Nigerian hackers last year.

Yuri:                Oh, wow.

Kevin:             We just thought that we’d keep our passwords on a Google doc or something like that. Definitely don’t be loose about your passwords; that type of fraud is becoming more prevalent, and it’s definitely painful when it happens.

Yuri:                Are you guys using a shared LastPass now? How are you managing passwords?

Kevin:             Yes, we use LastPass, but we also have a specific protocol as to how we share passwords with vendors. We were hacked by someone disguising themselves in an email.

I don’t know if they hacked into our actual email account or if they hacked into someone else’s email account. They asked for passwords through email, so now we verbally confirm if someone asks for a password.

Yuri:                That’s a good lesson. We’ve learned the hard way, too. We had hacker issues on our websites so Bill, our web developer, changed the whole protocol for sharing passwords so nothing is ever shared by Gmail. The password must be texted and the login is sent separately.

Kevin:             Absolutely. You have to do it separate.

The Rapid 5 & Bonus Question

Yuri:                Cool, man. Well this has been fun. Are you ready for the rapid five?

Kevin:             I love rapid five.

Yuri:                You have no idea what these questions are, but you’re going to love them. I’ve got a surprise question for you at the end, outside of the rapid five, because you’re special so you get a special question.

Kevin:             Great.

Yuri:                Here we go. Number one: What is your biggest weakness?

Kevin:             Management.

Yuri:                Actually, hold on. Let me jump off on that for a second. So you’ve basically delegated all the marketing now, so what is your main role at Annmarie Gianni Skin Care?

Kevin:             Strategist.

Yuri:                So you just sit like a mad scientist with pen and paper, strategize, and hand it off?

Kevin:             No, I do a lot of reading and meet with consultants to figure out how to move forward. It’s a lot of work. It’s not as cushy as it seems because it bends me.

I’ll listen to a consultant, and they’ll be saying one thing, and I’ll think it’s hard and something I don’t want to do. But if I look at our goals, I realize that they’re right. It’s what we have to do even if I’m not really interested in doing it.

Yuri:                Cool. Number two: What is your biggest strength?

Kevin:             My biggest strength is strategy.

Yuri:                I would agree with that, other than your personal charm.

Kevin:             Oh, thank you.

Yuri:                And that amazing beard. Are you still wearing that bad boy out?

Kevin:             Yeah, it’s here.

Yuri:                It’s incredible.

Kevin:             It’s here with me. It’s not a part of me. It’s separate.

Yuri:                Totally. All right, number three: What’s one skill you’ve become dangerously good at in order to grow your business?

Kevin:             Dangerously. Dangerously is interesting. To be honest, I think I’ve been dangerous the whole time. I’ve always tried to hack things before I knew much about them.

In the beginning I was building web pages; I was always willing to do the stuff that I didn’t have any money to pay someone to do, and 50% of the time I’d screw it up. So I’ve been dangerous for a long time, much to the dismay of many of our team members. Our CEO has had to fix stuff when I break it.

Yuri:                Totally. Thank God those Dreamweaver days are over.

Kevin:             Oh, man. Dreamweaver. I love it.

Yuri:    I can’t believe I used to build pages in Dreamweaver. I get that for sure.

Kevin:             It’s amazing.

Yuri:                All right, number four: What do you do first thing in the morning?

Kevin:             No, I make a cup of puer tea. It’s fermented green tea.

Yuri:                I’ve never heard of it. That’s cool.

Kevin:             It’s really nice. I can’t drink coffee because if I drink one cup I want six. So I have my puer. It’s just enough caffeine. Then I sit down with my kids and we make breakfast.

Yuri:                Number five: Complete this sentence. I know I’m being successful when…

Kevin:             A challenge I have is that I’m not easily satisfied, so I honestly don’t even know the answer to that question.

Yuri:                All right. Ponder that for the next couple months or years. Here’s the bonus question: Speaking about your kids, what has having kids taught you about marketing, business, and being an entrepreneur?

Kevin:             This is a great question. Kids have definitely made me calmer. You’ve known me for awhile. I don’t seem like an intense person, but I tend to lean towards that.

In the beginning before we had kids, we hired Rachel, who was our COO. She knew me before and after kids, and after kids she said, “You’re so much cooler, so much calmer.” I guess I was more forgiving, and that’s definitely because of the kids.

Once you have a little life in front of you that you can’t control in the way that you can control yourself or maybe even your team members, things change. Control is a weird word but you know what I’m saying.

You don’t have as much influence over them. You do, but you don’t because they’re going to do the things that they want to do. You start to realize that all the stuff that you thought before is probably just a sham. For me, having a child made me realize what life is all about.

I’ve definitely been humbled. I’ve learned how to be more patient, more calm, and also how to speak to people in a different way.

Everyone still has a child in them and I’ve learned to honor that. I’ve realized, “Wait a minute. Maybe they’re scared, maybe they’re unhappy, or maybe they want to cry.” That’s been really cool and empathetic experience for me because I didn’t think that way before.

Yuri:                That’s awesome, man. It’s definitely a good journey. If you don’t have kids and you’re listening to this, by all means, go for it.

Kevin:             Yeah, just do it. Tonight.

Yuri:                You’ll be more productive. You’ll become a better human.

Kevin:             Number one entrepreneur tip.

Yuri:                Exactly. Kevin, this has been awesome. It’s good to chat business and life. What is the best place for listeners to learn more about what you’re up to and learn more about Annmarie Gianni Skin Care?

Kevin:             AnnMarieGianni.com.

Yuri:                We’ll make sure we link up to that in the show notes. Are you still writing your blog where you were randomly posting stuff?

Kevin:             No. I know I have the entrepreneurs’ disease, so I have to keep myself to one business, just one. That’s it. No more.

Yuri:                I totally appreciate that. This has been a pleasure as always. Thank you once again for your time, the amazing work you’ve done, your friendship, the team you’ve built, and for raising the bar in what you guys are doing not just in skincare, but in the way you’re building your culture.

It’is inspiring, man. So thank you for all that.

Kevin:             Thanks for having me, man.

Yuri:                Bye.

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Yuri’s Take

That was a lot of fun. I hope you enjoyed it as well. We had some good laughs and some good experiences to remember. If you haven’t used their skincare, I’d strongly recommend it. It’s awesome. I even use their stuff, and I’m not a woman. There’s nothing wrong with a man using skincare.

I really believe in what they offer and what they’ve created. It’s integral to their core values; they don’t go the cheap route by putting stuff in their products that would give more shelf life and profit, yet they still built a very successful business.

Again, the website is AnnmarieGianni.com, and we’ll provide that in the show notes if you want to check out their products. They offer skin care, sunscreens, lip balms, and more. If you’re a woman over the age of 40 who wants to reduce the appearance of wrinkles, check out their awesome anti-aging products as well.

I want to leave you with a little thinking exercise. Kevin mentioned the fact that he was bored so he went on a road trip. Oftentimes, as entrepreneurs, we have a very high level of creativity and always want to start new things. That is an absolute gift, but it can also be pretty dangerous if you’re not careful. We tend to jump ship a little too soon, especially if we don’t have the support around us to continue seeing the previous project to its completion.

My challenge to you is this: Asking yourself, “Am I looking to pursue something new?” If you are, ask yourself, “Am I looking to pursue something new, or am I distracting myself from what I’m currently doing? Am I doing this because I’m bored or because I really feel in my core that it is going to serve my higher purpose and my business?”

If it’s something you’re doing solely to get more excitement in your business, be careful. You  need to be able to tell the difference between entertainment and what’s actually good for the business. I want to leave you with that thought and plant that seed in your mind.

Is that new thing simply entertaining, or is it actually important to move your business to the next level?

Announcements:

1.) If you haven’t subscribed to the podcast, be sure to do so today. Head on over to iTunes, click the little subscribe button beside Healthpreneur podcast, and you’ll get all the episodes right to your phone, computer, or listening device. We’ve got lots of amazing interviews coming your way that you don’t want to miss.

2.) We would  greatly appreciate a rating or review on iTunes. It would mean a lot to me and help me sleep better at night.

3.) If you still haven’t grabbed your copy of Health Profits Secrets, you can do so over at healthpreneurbook.com. It’s an awesome book that will walk you through the four underlying secrets that all successful health businesses have in common, whether it’s Kevin’s business with Annmarie, a business like mine, or any other businesses that are doing big things.

You’ll learn how to implement those secrets into your business, and a scorecard inside the book will help you score yourself and your business in those four areas. You’ll learn exactly how to close the gap, if there is one.

The book is yours. My gift to you. Free over at healthpreneurbook.com. Just cover the minimal cost of shipping. With that said, I want to thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to join me for another great interview. Keep doing your awesomeness, keep serving more people, go out there, continue to be great and do great, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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Follow Kevin Gianni At:

https://www.annmariegianni.com/

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Free Healthpreneur Health Profit Secrets Book

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

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

Transcription

Hey, guys. Welcome to the Healthpreneur podcast! Yuri with you. Hope you’re having a great day.

For today’s interview we’ve got a really cool guest, all the way from the UK—England’s south west coast to be exact. Her name is Laura Rimmer, and she is actually a fellow Hay House author, which is always great.

She has a great book called The Alkaline 5 Diet, and I’m excited to talk with her not about the diet, but about her journey. She’s been online for quite some time now—over 15 years, I believe. And the cool thing about our conversation is that we’re going to talk about not only how she went about getting her book published by one of the top publishing houses in the world … But also how her business has transitioned over the past couple years to a business model that is more fulfilling for Laura andmuch more meaningful to her customers and clients.

It’s a really interesting trend that I’m noticing right now in the industry, and I think you’ll get a lot of cool insight from this interview. Let me give you a bit more background as to who Laura is. She’s a natural health coach, plant-based nutritionist, speaker and author of the acclaimed book, The Alkaline 5 Diet, which was published by Hay House back in 2015.

Her journey started by being overweight and unhealthy. She was a tired smoker as a student in her 20s and she became a lean, fit and vibrant ultra marathoner in her late 30s. She has researched and applied the true principles of optimum nutrition for 15 years and coached hundreds of people around the world to great health and permanent weight loss.

She’s also a former medical research manager for the UK’s Health Organization, a qualified advanced gym instructor and organizer of the Natural Health and Vitality conference. Lots of great stuff that she’s up to—you can learn more about her over at laurarimmer.com.

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

Yuri:                Hey, Laura. Welcome to the Healthpreneur podcast, how are you doing?

 Laura:             Hello, Yuri. Yeah. I’m doing great, thanks.

 Yuri:                That’s terrific. And you are over in the UK, is that correct?

 Laura:             I am. I’m in England. I’m by the sea, so I’m in the southwest of England in Devon.

 Yuri:                Very nice. Southwest, is that a pretty big summer hotspot for a lot of Brits?

 Laura:             Yeah. It is. I live in Devon, which is near Cornwall and both of those counties are kind of like the UK’s south of France, I guess, but maybe slightly less warm. But when there’s nice weather, it’s glorious down here, beautiful beaches. Yeah. I feel really blessed to be down here.

Yuri:                That’s awesome. Very cool. It’s always great to connect with people across the pond and also a fellow Hay House author, which is very exciting.

I want to talk about that, because Hay House, for me, they were always the publisher that I wanted to be with. I just loved everything they stood for and continue to stand for. You’ve got a book called The Alkaline 5 Diet, how did you go about getting published with Hay House?

The story of publishing The Alkaline 5 Diet

Laura:             Well, it’s interesting because I wrote my book, The Alkaline 5 Diet, in about 2011, I think it was. And it just sat on my computer hard drive for a couple of years. I wrote the whole thing in advance.

I don’t know what it was, I just thought I’ll get around to publishing it at some point. And I had always thought that I was going to self publish it. And then when I read the thing back—you get a bit of perspective on it, don’t you, when you leave things for a while?

When I read it back I was like, “Actually, this is pretty good. It’s a pretty good book. Why don’t I just go for a major publishing deal? I’ve got nothing to lose. And if not, I can just go back to my original plan, which is to self publish.

And I guess like you, in my mind at that time, I thought Hay House was instantly the publisher I had in mind. I was like, “If I’m going to get published, Hay House would be brilliant.” I just approached them, and having read a lot of their books and looked at their website, looked at the types of books they like to promote and publish—in the natural health space, especially—I just contacted them.

I contacted the editor—one of the editors up in London—and just pitched in a very natural way. It was funny because I got an instant email back saying, “Can you come up to London for a meeting?” And I don’t know why Yuri, but I just thought, “Okay. This is a standard response.” I emailed back and said, “I’m quite busy, can we just do a Skype conversation.”

Yuri:                Nice, playing hard to get.

Laura:             And so I then got an email back saying, “Well, actually, we’d like you to meet with our managing director, our chief editor, our publicist.” And I said, “Okay. This sounds like the real deal.” I thought, “I should probably make space in my diary for this.”

I went up to London, had the meeting and was pretty much offered a book deal there and then. Yeah, I didn’t go through an agent, I didn’t approach hundreds and hundreds of companies or anything like that—it was my first stab at getting a major deal and I got it. I’m really thankful for that.

Yuri:                That’s awesome. Yeah, Hay House was a very similar process for me because I was actually in the same room as Reid Tracy at a mastermind. I didn’t even know that ahead of time, I was like, “Well, this is amazing. I have this idea, what do you think?” And then it kind of just went from there.

They’re really good like that. Because you hear a lot of stories of people like, “I had my book turned down by 50 publishers, and then finally self-published,” and all this stuff. What advice would you give?

In that whole publishing journey from the time you sat down on your computer for about two years, you finally got the deal with Hay House … What were some of the obstacles and challenges that you dealt with going through the published routes?

Laura’s Hay House story

Laura:             Well, I think firstly, like I said, I guess I didn’t have belief in myself to start. I didn’t believe that this thing could actually get published by a major publisher. Going back and reading the book again and getting that perspective, gave me the perspective that this is actually a pretty good book.

I would say to anyone who’s wondering whether their book is good enough, just go for it. You’ve got nothing to lose by trying to get a major publishing deal—that’s what I would say. Now, I guess I’m not in a typical situation, most people produce a proposal and then write the book. So you might want to do it that way, but I would say just go for it and have fun with it, number one.

Number two, when I actually got to that meeting with Hay House, I had done my homework. And with that initial email that I sent to them, again, I’d done a lot of research. I wasn’t coming in cold or blind.

I knew the type of people they like to publish, I knew what they were looking for. I knew they were looking for people who had a platform already.

When I got to the meeting, they wanted to know how big my email list was, how big my social-media followings were and things like that. I really had to be on it.

Don’t just go in there with a book. A book is part of the process, and it’s part of the thing they’re looking for, but they’re also looking for how personable are you, if you can promote this thing, if you’re speaking already at different events, and will you continue to do that? Have you got an email list that you can promote your book to? etc.

You really need to go in with the whole marketing plan. If not completely fleshed out, at least a good idea in your mind. And to be honest Yuri, and you probably know this as well, you need to be able to pitch it. You need to be able to present in front of three or four high-powered people and say why you think your book needs to be out there in the world.

Yuri:                That’s really good advice. The funny thing is, for health and nutrition people like ourselves there’s always this apprehension of selling where we say, “I don’t want to feel like a salesperson.”

But at the end of the day, you’re always selling yourself. You’re selling yourself, you’re selling your idea, your book. You mentioned not having that belief in yourself for the book initially and building that belief to the point where you’re just kind of like, “Listen, you guys have to publish this thing. It’s amazing, it’s going help a lot of people.”

It makes a big difference, because a lot of times they’re just buying your confidence.

And as you said too, another great point for our listeners is that a lot of publishers are simply looking for a good book, but they want to see that you can sell the books, because the publishers are not going to move a lot of books by themselves.

You have to go into that thinking, “All right. I’m going to show you how I’m going to sell this book and in return you guys are going to hook me up with a cool deal.

Laura:             Yeah. Exactly.

The evolution of Laura’s business (as well as online health businesses in general)

Yuri:                Yeah. Awesome. Outside of the book now, so for our listeners who aren’t familiar with your business, what does the rest of the business look like? When someone buys a book, what’s the next step of engagement with that reader or how do you kind of cultivate your tribe through your business?

Laura:             So, I have moved. My business model has slightly changed over the last couple years, since the book came out actually. I used to focus a lot of my business online. Most of it, from my point of view, as the business owner and content producer was kind of hands-off.

I had things like eBooks and online courses that I would just sell. I’d have an automated marketing and sales process and sell those online, really without too much engagement from me. What I found was that it was kind of like the low ticket model and high volume.

In the UK, we’ve got a really cheap clothing store here called Primark. I always think of it like I used to be in the Primark model, shift a lot of product at low price.

What I discovered though, after selling lots of things and connecting with people who’d bought my products and books and saying, “Hey, I see you bought my course. Have you gone through it?” And I’d get an email back saying, “Your course is wonderful, your book’s great.” And I’m like, “Okay. Cool. How has it changed your life?”

And then I’d get another response saying, “Yeah. I haven’t actually started it yet, I’m going to start it next week when I’m less busy,” or, “I need to go and get the foods.” There would usually be excuses.

I knew that if people would actually follow the advice in my courses they would get great results. But because there wasn’t that accountability, that one-on-one support, they weren’t getting the best results they could.

Since my book’s come out, now I’ve got a really easily accessible product. My book is $14 USD. That’s a really low barrier of entry price point product. Anyone can buy that book. And if they’ve got the willpower, the determination to go and read that book and put it into practice, great. And obviously, there will be a certain proportion of people who will do that.

However, my business model now has moved into coaching one-on-one and in group programs with people, and there’s a lot more accountability factored in. My signature program, called Alkaline Slim and Energized is eight weeks and it’s one-on-one.

There’s eight online modules that they get every single week with just two simple actions. And it’s based around forming habits. Then at the end of each week, I get on the phone with them and say, “Right. Okay. Have you done these two habits this week? Where have you struggled with them? What have you done well?” And really hold them accountable and they get far, far better results.

It’s still on the premise of my book, it’s all in line with my book, but it’s just got that added layer of accountability. And so, that’s the model that I’ve moved into more over the last couple of years.

 Yuri:                That’s so smart. That’s great.

Have you noticed a shift in the market? Because you’re not the first person I’ve spoken to about this. And maybe you can speak to this in terms of how you feel about your business now. A lot of other people that I’ve spoken to who have been in the same thing, high volume, low touch—they get to a point where they’re just like, “I’m not really fulfilled doing this work anymore.”

Did you have that moment in time where you were like, “I actually really enjoy connecting with people and that’s why I want to build up more of a coaching model”? Was there a moment or a transition, or was it just a gradual thing for you? Did you more fulfilled with his current model?

Turning the old sales model on its head

Laura:             Yeah. You’ve hit the nail right on the head. That’s exactly what happened. Yeah.

I was feeling unfulfilled and frustrated that I had this great information and I knew this stuff would work for people, but not many people proportionally were doing it and getting those results.

You know what it’s like working online, even sometimes if I get emails from people saying, “This has really worked from me,” it’s not quite the same as actually speaking to people and getting to know them and hearing their struggles and hearing their successes in a more personal way.

So, yeah. Absolutely. Since I’ve moved to a much more high touch model, I feel a lot more fulfilled. And I think one of the things that prevented me from doing that in the first place—because I set up my website originally in 2008, I’ve been in business almost 10 years now—part of it was confidence, to be completely honest.

The thought of, “Oh, I’ve actually got to get on the phone and coach people and speak to people and sell over the phone” was quite daunting for a few years.

The other thing was that I spent a lot of time in the beginning year or so of my business going to events which were trying to sell the laptop lifestyle—work from anywhere, sit on the beach, work for two hours and then take the rest of the day off. You’d never have to speak to a customer. You just make sales overnight and that was it.

I kind of bought into that model and part of that can work I guess—and by all means I make sales overnight and while I’m not there or on automation. I’ve certainly got that passive income arm to my business, but that’s only a piece of the puzzle in my mind. And it’s not going to give you, as a business owner, the real fulfillment that you can have in business. In my view, I think there’s a place for both of those things.

Yuri:                Yeah. I totally agree. And what I’ve noticed online in the past decade is this price erosion—when I came online, it was a lot easier to sell eBooks at a higher price point. Now, because people are publishing all this stuff for free on a blog, people are less willing to spend that kind of money.

People are still buying information, but I think there’s a shift in the fulfillment of business owners like yourself who want to feel more connected to their customers and really just feel more fulfilled with their work.

But what I’ve also recognized is that there’s much more profitability in a service based component to your business, because it’s obviously your time that you’re putting in, but if you set it up in a leveraged fashion it can become a lot more profitable than selling 10 to $20 dollar eBooks or even courses of 50 to $100.

So if someone was setting up a coaching model, what advice would you give them based on your experience? What has worked and what are maybe some of the lessons that you’ve had to learn the hard way?

 Laura:             I would say keep it simple. I’m just thinking maybe six, seven years ago, I used to have a long protracted sales funnel. I followed some advice which said you should have a low-end front offer and then be adding value and then offer people a high end offer, kind of once you’ve built rapport.

That process could take maybe weeks or even months, and it’s on the basis that people sign up for your email lists—for your free product on the front end—then they buy a low ticket offer product. And then once you’ve nurtured that relationship, eventually they might buy something like my eight-week coaching program.

I’ve turned that on its head over the last couple of years and it works much better because the reality is, especially in our business where people are struggling with health issues, if people want to lose weight or reverse diabetes or get out of pain—if they’re serious about it, they’re not going to want to wait two months and go through this whole buying a $7 product process.

It doesn’t make too much sense to do it that way.

Now, a simple sales funnel, for example, would be traffic to your website, some kind of easily consumable front-end free offer … I don’t know, a test, an assessment of some sort. So on my new branded website, laurarimmer.com, my front-end lead magnet offer is a scorecard—an optimum health scorecard which is literally just 30 questions, yes/no questions so it’s easily consumable in five minutes or less. And at the end of that, you get a score. So, here is your health score.

It’s a lot simpler. It’s a lot cleaner than this long protracted 10-day video series, which can still work for sure, but it’s easily consumable on the front end. And then from there, maybe the offer something like a webinar or a video series, I guess, but keep it short so that whole process is done in less than a week.

And then at the end of the video series or the webinar, invite people. In my model, I then invite people onto a one-on-one call with me. It’s so much easier when I’m on the phone with them, I’m speaking to them, I’m asking them about their struggles, their fears, the things that they want to achieve, their goals, their dreams, their frustrations.

And it’s such a faster way to build rapport, hear their intimate struggles and problems, which then I can use to re-engage with my audience because I’ve got a real pulse on what’s going on and what people want, what they need.

And then I can just make a very simple sales offer, “Look, this is what I’ve got. I believe this can help you, do you want it or not?” And it’s really a case of, “Yeah. Let’s do it,” or “I don’t think this is right for me.” And that’s the simple process really.

 Yuri:                It’s so good. I love it. And that’s such a proven model too. For everyone listening, that free initial thing. I love the idea of an assessment health scorecard because it’s so personalized and people want to know, “Okay. What’s my score? What box do I fit into based on my responses?”

I think that’s just such a smart way to begin the dialogue because people want to know about themselves. That’s really smart.

So, assessments to webinar or video training series and then invite them onto a strategy/onboarding/initial call and then making the offer from there. Simple. I love it. It’s elegant. And it makes sense if you’re selling something that’s more expensive than a $10 ebook obviously.

The other thing too, and I’m sure you’ve noticed this, is because people are spending more they’re paying more attention to actually doing the work and getting the results. It’s like we value what we invest in. If someone invests $10 in you, there’s not a lot of skin in the game. But if they’re investing $1,000 it’s a very different response.

Is that something you’ve noticed with your clients as well?

 Laura:             Yeah. For sure. Absolutely. And, in fact, since I’ve raised my prices from $1,000 up to $2,000 for my eight-week course, I’m getting better results from people.

 Yuri:                That’s awesome. A lot of people in our space have this notion that no one’s going to spend that kind of money on their health. How do you help them overcome that? Or was that a limiting belief that you had when you were looking at pricing your coaching back in the day?

Laura:             I probably did have that limiting belief for a little while. And then it dawned on me really, when I started getting on the phone with people and hearing the details of how day-to-day ill health affects every aspect of life—happiness, job, family, social life, the ability to enjoy sport or fitness—the fact that it’s such an all-encompassing thing if you’ve not got great health…

It made me realize that, of course people should and would want to invest in this area because it does affect every other area of life. And my experience has been that those people who say they haven’t got the money or they’re not willing to invest, they’re not actually that serious. That’s been my experience anyway.

Yuri:                That’s good. I would totally agree with you. I think it’s funny because those same—and this is a generalization—those same people might have three flat-screen TVs, an iPad, an iPhone and all the latest gadgets, yet they don’t have the money to invest in their health.

It’s always, I think, a reflection of their values. It’s a good point.

You’ve been at this for a long time helping a lot of people, what’s been your biggest challenge that you’ve ever faced in your business?

SEO challenges and the ever-changing Google algorithms

Laura:             Biggest challenge. So, when I started my website initially in 2008, I very much focused on search engine optimization to get the majority of traffic to my website and spent quite a long while doing SEO on my website and building up my rankings in Google.

And I was never getting hundreds of thousands of visitors to my site. I’ve always looked at what you do, Yuri, and really admired it. I remember back in the day looking at eating for energy and just really loving the way you were doing things. And I don’t know whether you were using SEO, but I used to see you on ClickBank and was in some ways modeling what you were doing, but very much using search engine optimization.

And that was working well for me. And then I think it was 2010 or 2011 when Google’s algorithm had a major algorithm change with Penguin, Panda and then finally Hummingbird and it just cut my traffic overnight.

I was getting about a quarter of what I was getting before. So, my income just plummeted overnight, because at that time I was doing the ebook model. Yeah. That was a real struggle.

 Yuri:                It was like a digital hurricane. Yeah. It’s funny because back in the day before I really understood SEO properly, we would do all sorts of stupid things. We had seven different blogs and all sorts of link wheels and crazy stuff.

And then I remember all that work we had done was just washed away, it was gone overnight and I’m like, “Wow, that sucks.”

For you, what did you learn from that experience, and then how have you kind of maybe set things up to prevent that from happening again?

Laura:             Well, I’ve probably learned not to rely just on one traffic source. And I learned that I was at really at the mercy of Google to a large extent, at that point, and social media marketing was really coming into its own at that point as well.

To me, it just said, “I need to be factoring in other ways of generating traffic and leads and customers into my business.” I started doing some paid advertising, social media marketing, speaking at events. And now, one of my strategies that I’m going to be doing is a podcast like you.

Yuri:                Awesome. Very cool. And what do you think is the number one skill that entrepreneurs must possess for success—that lasts?

Persistence and confidence 

Laura:             I think there’s tons of skills, but I would say the number one that’s seen me through is persistence. And if I can have two, but it’s linked with persistence, is just confidence to keep going in the face of adversity, in the face of setbacks and disappointments, things not going quite how you wanted, and frustrations. Just to keep going.

I wouldn’t even say necessarily belief in yourself—I think we focus too much on “just believe in yourself and everything will be fine.” I think it’s a belief that if you do the work and keep going, you will get good results.

Yuri:                That’s good. I love it. It’s so funny because I think the vast majority of goals that I’ve set have never been realized. And just like you said, you have to kind of say, ” All right. That didn’t work out, let’s just keep going. And it takes a lot of muster, just internally to keep going.

That’s great advice, persistence and just keep on going when crap hits the fan. Laura are you ready for the rapid five?

The Rapid-five questions

Laura:             Yes, I am.

Yuri:                Here we go, so this is the five rapid-fire questions, you have no idea what they are. Whatever comes to the top of your mind, tip of your tongue, is the right answer.

Here we go. Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

Laura:             Oh, I guess weakness, food. I like to eat and I focus on food a lot.

Yuri:                So let me ask you this, because I’m very much a believer of the same kind of dietary approach as you, but I’m also a healthy foodie. I love going to restaurants. Are you liberal or do you really follow the alkaline plant-based approach with all that your meals, for the most part?

Laura:             Well, I’m completely vegan, so completely plant-based. In terms of the alkaline diet, I work on about a 70/30 ratio. I will eat things like oven chips, and I have dark chocolate pretty much every day.

But on the other hand, I eat loads of raw vegetables, fruits, whole grains. I would say it’s a balanced approach, but I’m always vegan.

Yuri:                That’s awesome. Actually, as we’re talking here, I’m drinking a green juice. I guess I’m on par here with that whole alkaline mission, which is so important. If you’re listening to this and you’re not greening it up, you’re missing the boat big time.

All right. Cool. Number two, what is your biggest strength?

Laura:             My biggest strength. Well, I don’t know if you’ve heard of this lady, Sally Hogshead has got this book. She originally wrote a book could Fascinate, but her newest book is called How the World Sees You.

And it’s got a “strength finder test,” but instead of classic ones like Colby or Myers Brigs—which is how you view the world—this is how the world sees you and your biggest strength. And I, having done that Fascinate assessment, I came out as having two major strengths.

The first being mystique, which says that I’m great at analyzing facts. I sit back, I listen, I take in everything, I consolidate the evidence and then I form a decision. That’s my number one.

And closely related to that is power. Once I’ve analyzed all those facts, I’m very certain with coming out with an opinion that’s well thought out.

Yuri:                That’s great. What’s one skill, you have become dangerously good at in order to grow your business?

Laura:             Phone sales.

Yuri:                Very nice. And are there specific references or teachers that you learn, from so that our listeners might be able to pursue that, or is it just trial and error?

Laura:             It’s spending ten years part-time working as a cold telesales consultant for an insurance company.

Yuri:                Oh, that will do it. That’s awesome.

Laura:             Yeah. I was one of the top three in my company of hundreds of people. Cut my teeth in the sales industry in there.

 Yuri:                What do you say to someone who doesn’t like sales? Is this a learnable skill or is it you either have it or you don’t?

 Laura:             Oh, for sure it’s a learnable skill. I was shy, I was quiet. I didn’t have good communication skills. And in my early 20s when I left University, I made that my mission to master those skills.

With the job that I had, I was on the phone for four hours a day cold calling people. And I did this for years. Cold calling people, selling insurance and you get to know, “Okay. If I use this inflection in my voice at this point in the script, that doesn’t work. People will put the phone down on me. Oh, if I ask these type of questions, that works.”

That really generates rapport. It was completely a learnable skill.

Yuri:                That’s so good. That’s such a great skill set to develop. And I know we’re going off on a tangent here, but I’ve got one more question related to that. For someone who is getting into more phone sales and strategy calls to get people into their coaching programs, what would you say is the number one thing they must do to improve their conversions on the phone?

 Laura:             Ask really detailed questions, because that shows that you care. If you just get on the phone and try to speak and sell, two things will happen. Number one, you’ll burn yourself out. And number two, the person will just feel like you don’t care and you’re just here to sell them a product.

You need to spend the majority of the time listening and really getting into the details of that person’s life issues, problems and doing it in a really empathetic way, in a compassionate way.

 Yuri:                That’s great. And it’s just such good advice, it’s just how we would communicate with a normal human being in-person that we care about, I guess. That’s great. I know that’s going to be super helpful for people listening. Back to the rapid five, question number four, what do you do first thing in the morning?

 Laura:             I read my Bible and pray, first thing every day.

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

 Laura:             That’s a difficult one, Yuri. I know I’m being successful when—I’m going to say something which is a little bit out of left field—when my husband’s happy. Because everything else can be going right, but if my relationship with my husband’s a bit off, then I don’t feel successful and the rest of life grinds.

When him and I are getting on well, other things tend to follow.

 Yuri:                Awesome. I love it. This has been so good, Laura. Thank you so much for sharing everything you’ve shared with us here. Tons of great nuggets and inspiration to help our listeners.

What is the best place for people to stay in touch with what you’re up to and check out your work online?

 Laura:             Okay, If you go to laurarimmer.com, you can get my free optimum health scorecard there—where you’ll get an assessment and see how healthy you really are and tips on how to improve that. I’ve just launched my podcast as well called Eternal Health, which can be found on iTunes.

Yuri:                Beautiful. Awesome. Well there you go guys. Laura once again, thank you so much for taking the time and joining us all the way from the UK. It’s been a lot of fun connecting and chatting and hope to have you back soon.

Laura:             Thanks, Yuri. Thanks for the great work that you do too.

Yuri:                Thank you.

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Yuri’s take

And we’re back. I hope you’ve enjoyed this interview with Laura. And I want to leave you with another thinking exercise, as I’m starting to do more and more with these episodes.

I want to leave you with this notion of your business or your business model. We talked about how a lot of business owners in our space who have been doing this for a while get to the point where they’re less fulfilled with their business. And I want to help you avoid that—and it’s not to say that that’s never going to happen because I think it is part of the journey and I think there is value in having that realization.

But I want to ask you a question, and I want you to really think about this and reflect upon this. Is what I’m doing truly fulfilling me? Is it nourishing my spirit? Is it nourishing my soul or am I solely looking to make money? Is what you’re doing nourishing your soul, really fulfilling your true life’s purpose, or is it simply a way of making money for you?

And I would strongly, strongly hope and suggest that what you do should fulfill you at a deep level. Because if you’re chasing money or if you’re just worrying about the dollars and bills—and believe me, I’ve been there more than enough times. I understand we have to worry about payroll and paying ourselves and making ends meet, but we also want to build a business that we love.

So what does the business model look like? Is it selling eBooks or is it building out a coaching program? Or do you not like working one-on-one with people and maybe a group coaching program is better for you? Maybe it’s virtual?

And this is the realization that I’ve had, and it’s the reason that Healthpreneur is very high touch, low volume. I’m not selling $10 eBooks with this business. The way I best serve people like yourself is in person—small, connected, intimate implementation workshops, through our yearly healthpreneur live events and through our luminaries mastermind. That’s the best way I work with people like yourself who want to grow their business using the internet.

So leverage your awesomeness.

And yes, we have a couple courses online and we do have people that buy those and go through those. But for the most part, the most impact I can have in someone’s business and their life is through that connected, in-person work.

Now, it’s a very different business model than selling eBooks and online courses—which has been the foundation of my health business. However, I’m much more fulfilled doing this because I love that human interaction.

I’m not saying that you have to replicate what I’m doing, I’m just asking you to be honest with yourself. What is the type of life you want to live, what is the type of feeling you want to experience on a daily basis? And then designing your business around that.

Okay. Those are my thoughts to ponder for this day. And just a couple announcements before we finish off. As always, remember to subscribe to the Healthpreneur podcast on iTunes. While you’re there, leave a rating or review. That’d be awesome.

And if you haven’t already grabbed your copy of Health Profit Secrets, you can do so today. I’m basically covering the cost of the book and you can just cover the cost of shipping, which is a couple of bucks. You’ll discover the four underlying secrets that all health businesses have in common and how you can score yourself in those four areas, which will help you start to really bridge the gap. You can grab that over at healthpreneurgroup.com.

And that is all for today. Once again, thank you so much for being awesome, for committing your time, for being with me and indulging in my nonsense (sometimes) and obviously these great conversations.

I really appreciate you, I appreciate the work that you’re doing in this world because it does make a difference. Never forget that. Fall in love with you, fall in love with what you’re offering—because the more you do, the easier it is for you to generate that enthusiasm to serve more people.

Continue to be great, do great, and I’ll see you in our next episode.

 

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Follow Laura Rimmer At:

https://www.laurarimmer.com/

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Free Healthpreneur Health Profits Secret Book

Transcription

Welcome back to another episode of the Healthpreneur Podcast. It is the middle of February and man, it’s a little bit chilly here in Toronto. But the good news is that I’m headed down to Scottsdale in two weeks for our health business accelerator workshop. We’ve got an amazing crew of healthpreneurs coming down and we’re going to show them how to get a lot more clarity, better clients and more profit.

If you’d like to join us at an upcoming workshop just let me know. Head on over to the website, Healthpreneurgroup.com/workshop and see if you qualify to join us at our next one.

I just got back from Park City, Utah and I was over there with a group of colleagues and friends for another little mastermind. You can tell that I’m constantly investing in myself. Relationships are really the key to growing your business sustainably, I think, because the power of relationships—whether they’re joint venture partners or colleagues that you can bounce ideas off of—is really very important for your growth and business.

It’s one of the things I tell my kids, I’m like, “If nothing else your surroundings are going to determine your future so make sure you choose your friends wisely.” We had a great time in Park City, Utah–did some skiing, did some spa, some facials and massages.

It was a really nice weekend of pampering and I’ve got to thank my good friend Dr. Trevor Cates for hosting us there which was a lot of fun. Now I’m back in the nice cold weather in Toronto.

Differentiating between importance and impact

Today I want to pick up on what we talked about last Monday. We talked about building your income before your influence. I want to talk about another concept I’ve talked about from stage, which is this whole idea of getting clear on what is important to you.

Is it importance or impact?

A lot of people confuse the two, and I’ll give you an example from myself because I’m the most guilty of all parties here. Back in 2014 my first book, The All-Day Energy Diet, was coming out. It was a published book and my sole focus for that book was for it to hit the number one spot on the New York Times list.

What I did was I went to Google Images, I typed in New York Times list, I got this really cool image of the top ten list. I printed it out, scratched out or whited out the number one spot, and I put my book, The Energy Diet by Yuri Elkaim in the number one spot.

I attached that to my vision board and I had that vision board on my phone as well. Every single day I was looking at that image. That’s all I was focused on, it was number one New York Times, number one New York Times, number one New York Times list.

I’m telling you, the power of attention is undeniable. You put your mind to something and you’ve got extreme clarity on it, it’s amazing what can happen. So, that was probably about eight months, maybe even a bit longer before the book came out, so it was this maniacal obsession about that.

I remember when the book released a couple weeks later, I got a phone call from my agent. I’m having dinner with the family, it’s like 6:30 on a Tuesday night and I get a call. She’s like, “You’ve hit number two. You hit number two.”

I was like, “Sorry, number two what?” She was like, “You hit number two on the New York Times list.”

I was like, “Holy freakin’ amazing.” I was jumping up and down, I was so excited. The number one spot was Peter Thiel with his book Zero to One which was released at the same time as mine.

I was like, “You know what? The co-founder of PayPal and Facebook, I’ll give him that. That’s totally fine.” I wasn’t upset, I was not upset that I didn’t hit number one. Number two was absolutely amazing.

We beat out Steve Harvey and some really, really big authors and books. It was an amazing accomplishment and I was so proud of it. We sold a lot of books and hopefully helped a lot of people, but I want to just clarify something with you. This whole story, if you haven’t taken note, was all about me. It was all about me feeling important and me building my ego and meputting another badge on my sash of accomplishments, if you will.

It had nothing to do with impact. And here’s the thing that I realized. I’m not saying that this is true for every author or everyone, I’m just saying from what I’ve observed. It’s not in all cases, but in some cases.

A book won’t transform someone’s life

I’ve been on both sides of this. I’ve been on the front of stage side of things where we think that someone wants to write a New York Times bestselling book because it’s going to impact a lot of people and they’re going to get their name out there. But behind the curtains what’s really going on are conversations like, “Oh, what spot did you hit on the list? How many books did you sell? What kind of advance did you get?” It has nothing to do with impacting people’s lives.

When I even talk about this it kind of makes me nauseous, to be very honest with you. I’m not trying to throw anyone under the bus here because I’m the most hypocritical person who can possibly be talking about this—because I was that guy.

But I’m sharing this with you from the perspective of having done that and seeing the nonsense that other people, other “gurus” in our space have gone through to get their book on the list. For what reason?

They say it’s impact but it’s really, in a lot of cases, importance.

There was actually a really interesting article in the New York Times… An author who had written 14 books—bestselling books—encouraging people not to even bother writing a book because he said it was nothing more than an exercise in stroking your ego.

That was pretty much what it was. And I still do believe that everybody has a book inside them and I believe it’s a great endeavor to write a book and share your thoughts and do all that stuff. I think it’s great for your business if it’s used properly.

But I want us to be very honest about something. Why are we doing this? Why are we doing the things that we do? Why do we care if we have a huge social media following? Why is it important that we hit the New York Times list—which is almost impossible nowadays—with your book?

Is it because you truly want to impact people or is it because you need a level of significance that you’re not currently getting? If the answer to that question is impact, then I’m going to challenge you.

I’m going to call BS on this, because a book is never going to transform someone’s life. It won’t. There have been books that have been impactful for me in my life and have given me ideas that I turn back to, but nothing has been more impactful than the investment I’ve made to work at a very close level with coaches and mentors.

There’s a big distinction here, because the level of investment we make in terms of our time and money is really what will determine how committed someone is, how committed we are to achieving a specific goal.

If you really want to impact someone’s life, it’s not going to come through a book or a product.

We sell some amazing high quality supplements. I don’t even call them supplements, they’re really custom formulated foods—like our greens powder. And yes we have amazing testimonials, it gives people more energy and all this sort of stuff … but it’s not the level of impact that we think it is.

That’s why I really want to get clear about this; if impact is the thing you’re after then the true, most honest way of doing that is working more closely with fewer people at higher price points and really walking them step-by-step from where they are to where they want to be.

What that means to your business is it moves away from becoming a very disconnected—just a “buy my products” type of business—to a much more involved, “Let’s do this together” type of business.

I want to clarify just one more thing with that. I’m not saying you should do one-on-one coaching, because it’s a waste of time and you’re not going to trade your time for money.

Running the numbers

But what I am saying is, building a business that is built around some degree of expertise you have to help people achieve a specific outcome. And the cool thing is that you can build a coaching program around your book. Everything you talk about in your book can be the milestones and steps you walk people through in a smaller group coaching program.

And I’ll give you an example of this. Actually, if you haven’t attended our new webinar, the Seven Figure Health Business Blueprint please do so. It’ll really illuminate you, it’ll open your eyes. Check  it out, Healthpreneurgroup.com/9.

In the webinar, I give an example. Let’s say you want to make $60,000/month, which for a lot of people is beyond comprehension. You’ve got a book on one end which you sell for $30 and you have a coaching program which you sell for $3,000. Maybe the coaching program is over eight weeks and the desired outcome is the same—they say they want to lose weight.

So with this example, if you’re selling the book, in order to make $60,000 a month at a $30 price point you need 2,000 customers to buy that every single month. To get 2,000 customers let’s assume a 1% conversion rate, which is very typical for a sales page when selling a product of that nature.

In order to get 2,000 people to buy, assuming a 1% conversion rate, you need 200,000 people landing on your web page. I don’t know about you, but 99% of people I know in this space are not generating that type of traffic. Most people just want to build their list because they’ve got a hundred people on them.

If you think that having a list of a hundred or a thousand or even 10,000 people is going to move the needle for you when you’re selling a $30 book—it’s not going to happen. I can guarantee that.

So you need 200,000 people to land on that webpage. If you don’t have it internally then how else can you get it? The simplest way would be to go buy some Facebook ads, right? Now, assuming a cost per click of 50 cents, that is going to cost you $100,000 to drive 200,000 visits to that web page.

But remember, we’re only making $60,000 in revenue. So we’re actually in the hole $40,000. That model doesn’t make sense at all.

By contrast, let’s say you’re selling a $3,000 coaching program. For $60,000 a month you would need 20 people, 20 clients per month to achieve that. You don’t need 200,000 people visiting your website if you do things properly.

And our model is very simple—we run Facebook ads, do a webinar. On the webinar we move people or invite the right people to a strategy call. When you do that you’ll find that it’s a lot easier to engage with people and move them to the next level—if it’s done properly.

Because as you probably know, there’s a big difference between having a Facebook ad and having one that works. Having a webinar and having one that works. Having a phone call with someone and having a phone call that enrolls them into your coaching programs.

This is what we do every single day, this is how we’re helping our clients build their businesses, this is exactly how we built Healthpreneur as well. We’re doing this stuff every single day in the trenches.

A lot of people say, “Well Facebook ads didn’t work for me.” That’s because you didn’t know what you’re doing! Or, “All webinars don’t work any more.” Well they do. We’ve been using them for ten years and they’re only getting better.

You have to know how to do this stuff properly. But when you only have to bring on 20 clients per month, I’ll tell you from historical data, you’re looking at maybe having 40 conversations. Maybe. If you’re not closing or enrolling one out of two people you speak with, then they’re not qualified properly.

That’s on the high end. So, you’re spending 20 hours a month (if it’s a 30 minute call) to enroll 20 people and then you’re spending another handful of hours per week—anywhere from two to four hours a week—delivering the coaching program to these clients to make $60,000 a month.

I’m not saying you’re going to absolutely do this. I’m not saying everyone’s going to make this type of money. Some people make a lot less, some people make a lot more. There’s little nuances in terms of how good you are when it comes to presenting your offer, connecting with people, what the offer is, the price point, all that type of stuff.

The whole moral of the story is that you don’t need 200,000 people to be earning that type of income.

So if we look at Facebook ads for a second … Let’s say you want to make $60,000 on a $3,000 price point. Again, from our data your Facebook ad spend would be anywhere from about $8,000 to $15,000.

Let’s say it’s on the high end, let’s just ballpark it—that’s a four to one return on your investment. You spend $15,000, you made $60,000. So your profit is $45,000. That’s a lot better than being in the hole $40,000. Wouldn’t you agree?

We want to make money and there’s nothing wrong with that

I know that’s a lot of math and hopefully it all got into your brain. Again, if you want a more detailed explanation of all this attend the webinar. I’m telling you it’ll blow your mind. All of this is to say, let’s just be real about what we’re doing. Let’s cut the bullshit, let’s just be honest about why we’re in business.

We want to make money and there’s nothing wrong with that.

You should be very rich for what you do, but in order to get rich you have to really impact people’s lives. There are two ways of doing that, you either sell a mass amount of low-priced products. (Good luck doing that.) Or you take your expertise, the thing that you do best, and you work with a smaller group of people at a higher price point and you move them to that desired outcome.

That’s the secret, and that’s the future. It really, really is.

Here’s another thing to really hit this home. In a world where we’re becoming more technologically advanced, where everyone’s sucked into their iPhones, the need for human connection is going to be greater than ever. If you think that building a business selling ten or $30 eBooks, or even courses, is going to get you to where you want to be… I hope I’m doing a public service announcement by telling you that’s not going to happen.

Again, unless you’re driving massive amounts of volume to your offers and you’re willing to work with very, very tight margins with the hope of being profitable. But the reason I think this is such a great opportunity for the health industry is that whether you’re a health coach, a trainer, nutritionist, naturopath, chiropractor, medical doctor—it doesn’t matter.

You have the skill set and the expertise

You’re someone who has expertise. You spent years in school to learn protocols to help people and it’s a waste to give those things away for $100 an hour. It’s a waste to put those into a book that no one really takes action on because there’s no financial commitment on their end.

But when you walk somebody through that exact same protocol at a higher price point, you’re only going to be working with the best people. The people who are committed to getting results.

There are a lot of people out there who are suffering with excess weight, with thyroid issues, autoimmunity, whatever it might be that you may have a solution to. Why should we water that down? Why commoditize yourself? Why compare yourself to what other people are doing? Why compare yourself to what other people are charging? Unless they’re getting the results you want, don’t even do that.

I was talking to a friend that I know who’s in the online fitness space and he was working with 48 clients per month, one-on-one, charging a hundred bucks for like a month’s work. That’s not even $5,000 a month for 48 hours of his time!

I’m like, “Dude, you’re insane. Are most of these people going after the same goal?” He’s like, “Yeah.” I’m like, “Well why don’t you work with them all at the same time and put together what we call a dream-come-true system, that they can all follow with a few nuances here and there to make them more individualized.

That’s going to save you a ton of time. This is where the opportunity lies, and if you’re someone who’s really wanting to build your income and you’re tired of spending your time becoming a marketer, writing sales copy, setting up funnels, split testing, doing all that kind of nonsense that none of us really enjoy doing … Then it’s time for a change.

But again, in all honesty I’m very glad I spent a long time mastering direct response. Because writing sales copy is a breeze for me—understanding why we do things is very easy for me. Having set up hundreds of funnels—more funnels than I even want to remember—has been very valuable for me.

The value that I can impart on you is, what’s the point of optimizing and split testing a funnel that is going to increase the average card value from $19 to $22? For what? The level of attention to detail and effort and energy that goes into that is going to suck the life out of you compared to the same energy that you can put to enrolling clients at $3,000 or $5,000 into a program that can really transform your lives.

Do you see where I’m going with this? This is a big opportunity. And it’s a big opportunity if you have expertise that can really solve a problem for someone, which I’m sure you do have.

Again, if you want to explore this in a little bit more detail I strongly recommend you attend the Seven Figure Health Business Blueprint webinar. Healthpreneurgroup.com/9 will take you right over there.

Just sit through it. It’s 71 minutes and I guarantee it will really shatter a lot of conventional wisdom around this. This is what it’s all about, this is how we built our business, this is how we’re helping our clients and you will not hear me talk about ascension funnels, trip wire offers, lead magnets anymore.

That stuff is dead to me, and it’s no longer going to be part of the conversation because it’s not relevant anymore.

Does that make sense? I know this is very polarizing and it if makes you angsty, upset, whatever—I’m not going to apologize, because I’m actually doing you a big service here by getting you to think a bit differently. I would be doing you a disservice by saying, “Yeah, continue cranking the lead magnets and build your list and all this stuff to sell a $10 product.”

That would be a disservice to you. But as a coach, even if we don’t know each other, I feel it’s my duty to stir the pot a little bit and give you the real deal. If you want to impact people, that’s great. Do it at a deep level.

If you want to feel important and you want to spend all your time trying to get on the New York Times list or building your Instagram following, then just be honest about that. Because none of that stuff is going to bring you the money you’re after.

I’m telling you, I’ve written a New York Times bestselling book. My advance for that book wasn’t very significant. It was more than what most first-time authors make, but what that did allow me to do is get a nice, big advance for my second and third books.

But still, had I put all of that energy from writing and marketing all those books into this type of premium-priced group coaching, man—the returns would have been ten times as much.

And having the New York Times bestseller thing behind your name, it’s like having an MBA or a PHD. It’s nice to have and no-one can ever take it away from you, but it doesn’t change much. My business didn’t really change overnight. It’s a nice credibility tool but that’s about it.

Don’t think you have to do that stuff to help people. It’s nonsense. You have the skill set, you have expertise that people are looking for. Don’t be disillusioned by feeling like you have to have a book and do all that kind of stuff. Again, the webinar is over at Healthpreneurgroup.com/9, and if this message finds you well then I’d love to hear feedback on it.

This week we’ve got, ironically, some really cool interviews with Laura Rimmer who’s going to be talking about publishing a book (after I’ve just talked about all this stuff) and my good buddy Kevin Gianni who will talk about how to build a successful physical product business. He’s got an amazing skin care business.

I bring these people on because I want to highlight how authors build their business, the highs and lows, the journey they’ve been on, and really allow you to make the best decision for you.

I’m not saying you have to do this or you have to do that. I want to expose you to different models—what other people have done, what their challenges have been, and what their opportunities are. Really just allow you to decide what is best for you.

What I have found is, I think, the fastest path to more income and more impact—but again, that’s up to you to decide for yourself. Thanks so much for joining me today, I look forward to speaking with you again on Wednesday.

Have an awesome day, continue to go out there, be great, do great and we’ll see you then.

Transcription

Remember back in episode four—literally right after launching this podcast—we spoke to Thrive Market’s founder, Gunnar Lovelace, and we talked about how they exploded that company from one to 500 employees in under three years? How they became one of the fastest growing companies that I’ve ever known in the health space?

Remember that episode? If you haven’t listened to it, go back, rewind, and check it out.

The reason I’m bringing that up is because today’s guest is kind of the behind-the-scenes person who is working side-by-side with Gunnar to develop, build, and scale Thrive’s renowned influencer program, which was single-handedly responsible for the growth in that first year.

Her name is Stefani Beckerman, and she is a brand strategist committed to helping people integrate well-being effortlessly into their daily routine—both at a wellness level, but also with the businesses that she works with in the health and wellness space.

As I mentioned, she was part of the core team that launched and grew Thrive Market to over 4 million registered users in under two years. That’s pretty impressive, right? At Thrive, she developed a unique understanding of how to grow a brand quickly at scale and decided to eventually branch out on her own in order to support other health-centered brands accomplish these same objectives.

She has a boutique consulting business where she works with lifestyle brands who fall under the umbrella of living well, and helps them grow and really get their brand and their message out to more people.

I’m really excited to have Stefani on the podcast today because she’s a wealth of knowledge. She brings a really cool, bubbly energy to what she does and the things that she touches. I think you’ll get a lot of value out of this episode. If you want to learn more about Stefani, you can check out her website, stefanibeckerman.com.

Without any further ado, let’s bring Stefani on to the show.

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Yuri:                Stefani, welcome to The Healthpreneur Podcast.

Stefani:           Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

Yuri:                Yes, I’m excited to have you here because we actually interviewed one of your former team members, Gunnar Lovelace. It’s actually one of the first episodes in the podcast, talking about Thrive Market and the amazing growth. But what a lot of people don’t realize, before listening to this episode, is that you were very instrumental in a large part of that growth.

Can we go back to day one? You were employee number four, I believe, at Thrive Market. How did that come about? How did they find you, how did you find them? And then, how did you guys create this amazing, “monster” that just grew so fast?

How Stefani got involved in Thrive Market

Stefani:           Well, I mean Thrive, Gunnar and Thrive have been some of the greatest lessons and teachers of my life.

I was in entertainment. I went from talent rep to wanting to start a digital department at the company I was at. They weren’t quite ready for that, so I left to start the business that I’m working on now, but I left the company I was at and worked on this for like a month, and then was introduced by Sam Teller.

He was a really influential player in the space, and he ran Launchpad—the incubator program—back in the day. He is one of Nick Green’s best friends from Harvard. He was like, “I know you want to consult for Thrive, but I’m going to introduce you to them. I think if you have an opportunity to work with them in a bigger way, you should take it. They’re going to be a really big deal.”

I met Nick and Gunnar, and their energy was like rocket ship energy from day one. As a team, Nick and Gunnar, they’re just funny. They’re great. They’re so opposite, and they just bring such different skill sets to the table.

It was inspiring, and I’m passionate about the space, so I just jumped on board. It was really exciting. It was really all hands-on-deck—do whatever, from research to cold calling brands to whatever we needed in the very beginning.

Then as we sort of stabilized, I wound up working side-by-side with Gunnar to develop, build, and scale our influencer program—which has become really well-known and was single-handedly responsible for our growth the whole first year.

It was really interesting, because getting it to be as impactful as it was required so many subtle steps and systems—from assets, to conversations, to the way you pitch the company, to the way we’re building incentives, to how we were creating this coalition of value-aligned influencers and having them help us be referred to other influencers.

It was just all very systematic, so there were a lot of learnings in that, but it was also just so inspiring because just from day one, everyone was so excited about the mission of Thrive and what it could do.

It was really cool to be a part of that.

Yuri:                Yeah, I bet. That’s amazing.

Stefani:           Yeah.

Yuri:                Gunnar was telling us how they had approached 60 venture capital firms, and they were all shut down, like they were turned down. They’re like, “Ah, this is not a good idea. It’s never going to fly.”

Then he came back and shifted the business model … And I think you guys were one of the first companies I’ve ever heard of to build a business model around this type of influencer/investor type of platform.

How did you guys even come up with that, and how did you get people excited to jump on the ship with what you guys were doing?

Influencers, ambassadors and brands

Stefani:           Well, I mean, Gunnar had a lot of great ideas about how to incentivize the influencers from the beginning. So for every referred member, they received a combination of cash and equity.

It was a very lucrative opportunity, but because so many of our influencers either were investors, or once we connected with them and developed a relationship, they were so excited that they became investors, the equity compensation became really exciting. And because they had skin in the game they did more, I think.

That’s something that was a great learning too, to get people not just excited about what you’re doing but to make sure that they feel that they’re really involved is so great. And then because it was a natural value-add to their communities, it just made sense.

It didn’t feel selly for them, it didn’t feel like, “Oh, here’s another thing I have to endorse to my audience.” It was genuine. They all really believed in the mission and their audiences. It was helpful. It was genuinely helpful to people.

Yuri:                Yeah, well, I think it really fills a gap. It’s like, “Hey, do you guys want healthy foods without retail prices?” I mean, who wouldn’t want that? You would tell your friend about that. Why not tell your audience?

I think it’s done so well, partly because it’s just a no-brainer offer. Everyone sees the value in that.

Stefani:           Totally, and if you are into this space and these products, you know how much of a savings that you’re getting on Thrive. The fact that it was curated, you really have help in filtering through not only what’s available but what you could possibly want that you don’t know you need yet. You know what I mean?

Yuri:                Totally.

Stefani:           I think it all just contributed to being really, I keep saying the word helpful, but it was helpful to people.

Yuri:                Yeah, absolutely, and it continues to be. I mean, it’s amazing what you guys have done and what they’ve done over the past couple of years. It really is a rocket ship. It’s phenomenal.

Stefani:           Yeah.

Yuri:                You are kind of, I don’t want to say the brand whisperer—because I don’t know if anyone’s ever said that—but I’m just going to put you in a little box for a second.

I mean, you specialize in helping brands develop, build, and scale. How do you do that? When you look at a company, when you’re working or consulting with a company, what does that process look like for you?

The brand consulting world

Stefani:           First of all, thank you so much for the brand whisper comment.

Yuri:                You can use that if you want.

Stefani:           Yeah, I don’t know if I can take that much credit, but I absolutely love it, and thank you.

Yuri:                You’re welcome.

Stefani:           I think, first of all, I really am inspired and focused on these brands that fall under the category of living well. A lot of these brands have so much heart and so much value but don’t have as much experience on the business side.

And what I have learned over the years in many different ways—but I will attribute so much of the lesson from Thrive—is that there are so many pieces you need to support growth, infrastructure-wise. And some of them are very subtle and you don’t know what they are until you know what they are.

I think because I had the opportunity to learn about all of that and see it all happen simultaneously, I’m very clear on what these brands need, what they have to offer, what they’re missing and how to quickly set it up for them, with success. Because you really need that strong foundation in order to grow successfully and scale the way that everyone wants to.

I think because I genuinely live the lifestyle of the brands that I work with, because I’m so passionate about it, I just get their message and I experience it. I know what the value is that these products or people or places offer because I have that feeling directly, and I just help them craft their message in a way that is accessible to people.

I also have an amazing team that I work with, from anything from social media to ads to content to photography, video, web data—I have a very trusted team of talent that can support the whole process. They’re awesome.

Yuri:                That’s great. I mean, your website—for anyone who hasn’t checked it out, www.stefanibeckerman.com—it’s very clean, very simple. And I’m sure there’s a lot of work that goes into simplifying those messages, which is something you’re obviously very good at and you help people with.

When someone says, “I want to build my brand,” or, “I want a brand,” how do you define brand or branding?

Stefani:           So… What people normally refer to as a brand is that visual, the name, the way it looks, how it feels. Those touchpoints have usually already been established by the time the brand gets to me.

What they’re trying to do when we connect is usually build community, increase their audiences, continue a flow of content that gets people excited, which can also be used to drive sales. But the messaging and the verticals are usually about creating community and making the message easy for people to understand and get excited about.

Yuri:                That makes sense. Are you seeing any trends in the marketplace with respect to what brands are looking for—some of the things that their communities are looking for compared to a couple of years ago?

Ambassadors and Partnerships

Stefani:           Well, I think ambassador programs are huge. I know the affiliate programs have been around, but I think there’s just a new take on that whole landscape that is always changing, but it’s important.

I think content marketing is obviously huge. I think educational content—people are wanting to know what they don’t know. They want quick tips and tricks. There’s so many ways that you can create that value-add content into sales funnels that is really easy and effective.

Social media, obviously, is an animal of its own, and I think that there’s two ways you can tackle social media. You can just make your images look pretty and say some quick snappy content around it, which is a nice visual representation of your brand.

Or you can work with someone, like the girl on my team who geeks out on social media algorithms and staying current with them and really understands how to make social media a truly viable revenue stream and channel for growth. I think that’s really important to handle social media in the right way and use it for good.

And partnerships as well. I’m a big fan of partnerships. I think partnerships are a big trend, and tackling partnerships in different ways is huge. Being as creative as possible with them, from co-branding assets to giveaways to co-reg sweeps to offline events. I think collaboration is really key these days.

Yuri:                Sure, absolutely. For point of clarification, how do you, for people listening, what’s the difference between ambassadors and partners?

Stefani:           I would call a partner more of a brand, like if Osea skincare is aligning with Torii Labs to co-brand a bunch of assets and promote a giveaway. Versus, ambassadors are individual people with lists and they’re promoting your brand for a reason.

Yuri:                Sure. That makes sense. So with what you guys have done, what you’re seeing, what do you think separates successful brands? And success being, let’s say, impact or how people perceive those brands as being good in the marketplace versus brands that are not doing so well.

Stefani:           I genuinely believe it’s operating from a place of integrity, always. Time and time again, I’ve seen that people that talk the talk and don’t walk the walk can’t seem to get it right, and vice versa.

If you really live authentically to what you’re trying to promote and get out there, it’s successful, it’s heart-centered. Those are woo-woo terms, but they’re true.

 Yuri:                Sure. No, I completely agree with you, and I’ve noticed a shift in the market since I came online 12 years ago, where people are moving away from this automated, systemized, robotic type of business to being much more connected to their audience in a way that’s actually genuine, hopefully.

I think it’s good because it’s needed, and I think business owners are feeling less fulfilled if they’re not doing that stuff.

Stefani:           I totally agree with you, and that’s why I’m inspired by what I do because I want to help the businesses that care about that do more of it.

 Yuri:                Yeah, totally. In your journey, what’s been one of the biggest challenges that you’ve had to face, growing the consulting side or even maybe with Thrive Market.

Growing pains

Stefani:           For me, the overarching lesson and challenge that always comes up is growing pains. Growing too fast is usually more common, but just … Growing is challenging.

I struggle with impatience, wanting to have something or be somewhere or do something faster than it is occurring naturally, but yet if you move too fast you don’t learn the lessons. You create more problems in the foundation, and long term, I think you’re not as successful.

I think that concept of growth—it’s in business, it’s in our personal evolution, it’s in relationships. That’s just the thing that I’m constantly working with. The balance of pushing and resting and moving and staying.

Yuri:                Yup. Yeah, I think we can all relate to that for sure.

With that said, do you think all businesses are built to scale? Not every business is going to be a Thrive Market. Should every business strive to continue growing and scaling? Or are some businesses maybe better off at a lower revenue level, maybe more lifestyle-related? How do you see that? What’s your take on that?

Stefani:           I definitely think everyone should grow as much as they want, and that idea that abundance is available for everyone and everything—I truly subscribe to that.

But I think it’s, again, about growing too fast. I think it’s pacing your growth. I think it’s sequencing your rhythm and making sure that you are always anchored and stable and centered, so that as you layer on your growth and your channels and your people, every piece of the puzzle—you’re going to be effective and you’re going to be strong.

I think that would be the message to everyone. Just get that right.

Yuri:                So, I know that personnel and team and all that stuff is a big pain point for a lot of people listening here as they’re growing their health and fitness business.

How do you know when it’s the right time to bring someone in? You want to grow, you want to scale, you want to help more people, but do we focus on just selling a lot first and then dealing with the infrastructure later? Or do we think proactively to create those systems first, bring the people in, then worry about selling … What advice do you to that type of person?

Stefani:           That’s a really good question. I mean, I’m a big believer in team, and like I said, collaboration. I think we should all have support. It’s necessary, and it makes things easier.

That being said, you might not be able to afford the support you need before you sell the product or bring in a particularly priced client or whatnot. But I think if you can align with at least some form of support, whether that’s one person on your team or something that you outsource, some way that you can take things off your plate … I guess the message is to stay in your zone of genius as much as you can. If that means spending before you have what your goals are to get that support, I think it’s worth it.

 Yuri:                Cool. Interesting. Good to know. It’s also cool to see different perspectives. Because I remember, I don’t know if you know Dan Sullivan, the strategic coach?

Stefani:           Yeah.

Yuri:                I worked with him for a number of years, and one of the things that I recently came back to—with Healthpreneur being more of a new company compared to our health and business, which has been around for 12 years—is he has this whole concept of a self-managing company.

And it’s the whole concept you just talked about, which is spending only your time only in your unique ability, your zone of genius. But again, when you’re in year one, if you’re starting everything from scratch, you almost have to wear all the hats.

Stefani:           Yeah. Oh yeah.

Yuri:                I remember him saying, for a lot of companies, it almost takes like three years—and every company’s different—to get to the point where you’re generating, as an entrepreneur, at least six figures in take-home revenue and you can start bringing people in to support you and really start that self-managing company.

It was interesting just to hear the different perspectives. I don’t think one is more right or more wrong than the other. I guess it just depends on the business owner, the way they’re building their business, and what they have access to, but it’s cool. Thank you for the insight.

 Stefani:           Yeah, of course. I mean, I think there’s so much, I think there’s a lot of value in his perspective as well. I definitely wore all the hats for almost the first year, and I think that is important in itself.

But you also sometimes can’t move to the next level without the support. But also, self-care is such an important piece of this. Bandwidth is connected to that—understanding what yours is and when to stop or pause or how do you recharge.

I guess maybe that’s more of my point, and staying connected to that and listening to yourself and then figuring how to give yourself what you need to refuel is more of the method.

Yuri:                Yeah, no, and I agree because otherwise you just burn yourself out. You’re working 20 hours a day, and you’re like, “Why the hell did I start this business, which is essentially a job, because I can’t step away from it.”

I totally agree with you, for sure, because the way I look at it is any time we have a little boost in income or revenue, I’m looking at, who do I bring in now to simplify things even more for me?

Stefani:           That’s exactly how I am too. I am the same way. I mean, and look, that’s more value for the people you work with too. When I started outsourcing certain things to my team, I realized that it’s actually going to do the clients a service because it’s going to make X, Y, and Z better for them. So if I take a little bit less of that retainer, it’s worth it for everyone because that’s going to help me grow with while staying inspired and energized.

I think that’s the struggle for all of us entrepreneurs—we started doing this because we’re totally passionate and inspired and excited by something. So we followed it. But building a business is not for the faint of heart, and you’ve got to give a lot.

How do we stay excited and energized and creative, but not deteriorate? Or when we deteriorate, what do we do and how do we know that’s happening? How to we heal it? I think those are all just parts of the Healthpreneur conversation that are really important.

Yuri:                Yeah, totally. One of the trends that I’ve noticed too is that most people in the health and wellness space start off in business as a technician. They’re a great nutritionist or a health coach or a trainer, and that’s what they’re really great at doing. They love creating the contents around that and servicing their audience.

But then as their business grows, they become more of the operator and doing a lot more stuff in their business, and then they take on the role of the CEO. Then they like run into this existential crisis where they’re like, “What the hell am I doing? I just want to do videos about stuff I know.”

Is this something you’ve run into with the brands that you work with as they’ve grown?

How can I make this more fun?

Stefani:           Oh, yeah. I’ve run into it with the brands I worked with, I’ve run into it with myself. I think, yeah, that is something that is very prevalent. And I think, again, that goes back to why support can be very helpful and the whole zone of genius conversation.

I have a mantra on my mirror right now that just says, “How can I make this more fun?” and that is what I am trying to bring in to the pieces that are not my natural skillset. Because when you have to do a lot that’s not in your natural skillset, that’s where we get like, “Ugh.”

So how can we make it more fun? How can I bring more creativity to this, how can I approach this with a lighter energy and experience it differently? I think it’s in the intention that that shifts.

Yuri:                Sure, because that’s a great lens to look at stuff through. Because you can be like, “Oh, I hate doing this,” and just live there—or you have your perspective, which is, “How do I make this more fun?” A totally different experience, which is very cool.

Stefani:           Yeah, yeah. It’s, I think, a glass half-full perspective. That’s how I operate naturally, and then when I’m not there naturally, I try to remind myself to go back there because everything is always working out for us.

That’s what we forget. I mean, I’m a very spiritual person. I have a strong practice. I don’t know if that’s a term that everyone relates to, but I think that understanding how our mind and bodies work together, and leaning into that and finding practices that support the balance of the two really does help with all of the work and the business life and the teams and the leadership. All of it.

Yuri:                Yeah, and I often say that entrepreneur is the ultimate spiritual journey-

Stefani:           I think so.

Yuri:                Because you learn so much about yourself than you wouldn’t otherwise learn if you were an employee.

Stefani:           That couldn’t be more right. You’re forced to. You have to look inside, because you have to learn how to support yourself and how to nurture yourself and how to nourish yourself. These are not things that we’re taught in everyday life.

Yuri:                Yup, totally. That’s why entrepreneurs are just cooler people! That’s it.

Stefani:           I’m into that. I like that a lot.

Yuri:                That’s right. But don’t tell anyone else. Everyone listening, it’s between us here, so it’s all good. Cool. Stef, this has been a lot of fun. Are you ready for the rapid five?

Stefani:           Yeah, I’m ready.

The Rapid-five questions

Yuri:                Alright, you’ve had no prior knowledge of these questions. I’m just going to fire them at you. Whatever comes to mind is the right answer.

Stefani:           Okay.

Yuri:                All right. Here we go. Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

Stefani:           I try to do too much.

Yuri:                Cool, number two, what is your biggest strength?

Stefani:           I’m a people-person and a connector.

Yuri:                Nice. That’s one of the most common answers from this question, just so you know.

Stefani:           Really? Oh, wow.

Yuri:                Emotional intelligence, I’m telling you. It’s such an important thing for entrepreneurs to have. It’s great.

Stefani:           Yeah, I agree.

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

Stefani:           I would say organization.

Yuri:                Nice. That’s a good one because I’m not very organized and I’ve had to become organized to save myself.

Stefani:           Yeah, exactly. It really helps.

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

Stefani:           I meditate and I drink my coffee, and I wrote in my journal 10 things I’m grateful for and just a couple of pages of free-write. I try to keep my first hour of waking up that little morning routine.

Yuri:                Nice. It’s a good way to start the day.

Stefani:           Yeah.

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

Stefani:           I’m happy.

Yuri:                Cool, and how do you know when you’re happy?

Stefani:           I think that I just feel joy and energy and no expectations. Just happy in the moment. Present.

Yuri:                Very cool. Stefani, this has been a lot of fun. Thank you so much for joining us. What is the best place for people to follow your work and maybe inquire a bunch of services?

Stefani:           My personal website, stefanibeckerman.com is a great place to inquire about my services. I am also building my own lifestyle brand—slowly, but surely—and welldone.guide is where you can check it out, stay tuned for updates, and be part of the process as I move through that one.

Yuri:                Awesome. Welldone.guide. Is that a new extension now, dot guide?

Stefani:           That’s just what you settle for when you can’t get the ones you want.

Yuri:                That’s cool. I mean, why not? Let’s just do what we can. Awesome, well Stefani, once again, thank you so much for taking the time. I just wanted to acknowledge you for all the great work you’ve done and continue to do—just the energy that you bring to you everything you’re working on, so thank you so much.

Stefani:           Thank you so much for having me, and right back at you for all that you’re doing, I’m excited to collaborate in the future.

Yuri:                Yeah, thank you so much.

Stefani:           Cool. Thank you.

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Yuri’s Take

I’m back. I hope you’ve enjoyed this interview with Stefani Beckerman. I want to leave you with a little thinking exercise. We didn’t really get too much into the branding side of things in this interview, but I want to leave you with something.

When people think of you, what do they think of? What is the drawer that you occupy in their filing cabinet? Because when people think about you or any business, they’re typically going to categorize you, they’re going to categorize us.

We categorize everything in very box-like categories just to simplify the way our minds work. Not that we’re going to do a whole branding exercise here, but I want to leave you with a little thinking exercise—who do you want to be known for? What do you want to be known for? what is the space you want to occupy in your prospects’ minds, where when they think of X, they think of you.

That’s what I’m going to leave you with today. And if you’ve enjoyed this episode, by all means, leave a rating and review over on iTunes if you haven’t already done so for the podcast. And if you still haven’t subscribed, please do so today because you won’t miss any other awesome episodes we’ve got coming your way.

I’ve got a great solo round coming for you next week. We’re also speaking with a fellow Hay House author and my main man Kevin Gianni who I’ve known forever. Great friends running a great business, and that’s going to be a great conversation as well. Lots of great stuff coming your way.

If you’ve missed any of the previous episodes, by all means, go back through the feed, download and listen to them. There’s a lot of really good stuff, and as I mentioned in the beginning of this episode, listen to episode four with Gunnar Lovelace from Thrive Market, if you haven’t already, to get the inside scoop. To go even a little bit deeper as to some of the stuff Thrive Market did and some of the challenges they went through as they grew their business so rapidly.

Once again, I want to thank you so much for joining us. Finally, if you haven’t grabbed your copy of Health Profit Secrets, well, now is your chance. Remember, you get it for free. Just cover a couple of dollars in shipping, and I will send it right to your front door. Pretty good, right?

You can grab that over at healthpreneurbook.com. Inside the book, you’re going to discover the four underlying secrets that all successful health businesses have in common and you’ll also get a cool scorecard to score yourself in those four areas. Again, healthpreneurbook.com.

That is all for today, my friends. I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. It’s always a pleasure to bring amazing guests to you because I believe in what you’re doing.

I believe you have a message, you have a story, you have a gift that can transform people’s lives, and my hope is that you will never give up. Even though crap will hit the fan, even though it’s going to be a bumpy ride, there’s the highs and lows, I’m here to let you know that it’s worth it.

Even though you don’t hit your goals, you get close, but you don’t quite hit them, that’s fine. That’s all good. It’s about who you become in the process, the number of people you serve in the process, and obviously, helping you live a great life on your journey.

Thank you so much again for listening in. Go out there, continue to be great and do great, and I’ll see you in our next episode.

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Follow Stefani Beckerman At:

https://www.stefanibeckerman.com/

https://www.welldone.guide/

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Free Healthpreneur Health Profit Secrets Book

Transcription

Healthpreneurs, what’s up? Yuri here. Welcome back to another episode of the Healthpreneur Podcast.

I’m pumped. Why am I pumped? Well, I’m pumped because it’s another day to help people. It’s another day to get out there and share your awesomeness, just really live life on your terms. And that’s what I get to do when I interview awesome entrepreneurs like I get to do on the show.

Today, I am speaking with a really cool person. Her name is Cynthia Thurlow, and she’s had a really interesting journey because she’s actually a western-trained nurse practitioner. So she grew up, in her professional career, working in hospitals in that kind of medical setting.

And then she realized that she didn’t want to do that anymore and ventured out onto her own to start up a functional nutrition practice. She’s now working with clients all around the world, as well as locally, where she lives. She supports women with a lot of the hormone issues that they’re working through.

So, in this interview you’re going to discover some really cool things. We’ve got some really cool conversations about the entrepreneurial journey, entrepreneurial DNA, how you really kind of discover your path—whether it’s really right for you.

If you’re transitioning out of a corporation job where you’re working nine to five … How to know it’s right. And, if it’s not right, to kind of venture off and do your own thing. And we’ll talk about the number one skill or trait that Cynthia has really honed in on, which has allowed her to flourish even in the craziness of what she was doing before in the hospital setting.

So, I’m excited to speak with Cynthia. She’s doing some really cool things, helping a lot of cool people, and I think you’ll really enjoy this conversation. Just to give you a little bit more about her—she has actually been kind of a go-to expert on ABC morning shows in her local area. And she has kind of become the go-to person for a lot of women who are struggling with hormone issues.

She has brought her background in the medical space with her passion for nutrition together, and she really bridges the gap between the holistic area and the medical profession—she merges it all together beautifully.

So, without any further ado, let’s bring Cynthia Thurlow on to the show. And let’s get into it.

Yuri:                Hey Cynthia. Welcome to the Healthpreneur Podcast. How’s it going?

Cynthia:         I’m doing great. Thank you so much for having me this afternoon.

Yuri:                Yes, I am excited to chat because it’s always awesome to chat with other amazing people doing some cool things in our space. Let’s jump right into it.

So, for our listeners, tell them a little bit about what your business looks like. What is the business model? How do you serve people? Just give our listeners a bit of context there.

Cynthia’s journey and the niche she created

Cynthia:         Yeah. So, I am a Western-medicine-trained nurse practitioner and also a functional nutritionist. And my main niche that I created for myself is helping to support female hormones. That includes adrenals and thyroid and sex hormones.

And I do that in a variety of ways. I always explain that I work well with others. So, I get a lot of referrals from my Western-medicine peers.

I work very savily with nutrition and/or food supplements and then targeted testing. So, looking at saliva-based testing modalities, dried urine, serum labs as well—and the thing that I love is that I get to use my Western-medicine training. My whole background was in cardiology and ER medicine, and I get to apply it in a very different way.

I find it incredibly gratifying to be able to enact some really incredible change in my female clients lives, and in many ways, filling in gaps that are in the conventional Western medicine model.

Yuri:                That’s awesome. So, you kind of bridge the gap between the Western side and maybe more the holistic side?

 Cynthia:         Yes. Absolutely. And I’ve really been humbled. When I started out in this whole medical community process 20 years ago, I was the person that loved writing scripts. And we used to spout off research constantly with my patients. I’m sure they probably grew tired of it.

And I felt I was validated in every decision. I didn’t look at people necessarily as individuals, per se.

Then, through my own family and health journeys, I kind of evolved. And I always say, “It’s good to evolve. It’s good to learn new things.” And, certainly filling a void that I saw was really becoming more pronounced as Western medicine is starting to lose some footwork in chronic and preventive management of health and wellness.

Yuri:                Yeah. So, was there a pivotal moment where you said like, “This model is broken. I no longer want to take part in this”? What did that moment look like for you to say, “This is what I want to do.”

 Cynthia:         Yeah. I think it was a couple things. I think I’ve always been a really healthy individual. Certainly working with the sickest of the sick in Western medicine ensured that I ate well and took care of myself. And same with my husband.

But my oldest child, at four months of age, developed pretty significant eczema, and I was the kind of mom that avoided a lot of foods while I was pregnant, while I was breastfeeding.

And the more digging I did … The conventional western medicine model of dealing with eczema is to prescribe steroid creams, and they don’t really look at what may be causing the eczema to develop. And so, the long and short of it was, after a while I really pushed to have some allergy testing and what I came to realize was that my son had some severe, life-threatening food allergies.

And the more I started to learn about the impact of food in our environment, on our children—this whole generation growing up with much higher rates of food allergies and vaccine injuries and things like that, I think I grew tired of writing prescriptions.

I think it was multifaceted. I think it was my son’s health issues and combined with just the fatigue—I felt like every time I turned on the TV, there was a pharmaceutical company that was telling my patients they needed to be asking for X drug for X symptoms.

And that’s really the focus of what western medicine has become. We look at every patient as a symptom, “I’ve got to give you a pill to treat this symptom.” And I just wanted to know more.

I had a desire and a hunger to better understand, because I thought that there was more to it than that. And so, part of it became my own intellectual journey to learn more and to do better by our patients.

Because I felt in many ways, in both the preventive and chronic disease states we were really missing the boat. We do a great job in western medicine with emergencies and surgeries, and I think we’re missing the boat in the other areas.

So, that’s where it started and then it kind of evolved as I got more vested in it.

Yuri:                That’s cool. I definitely agree with that. With the patients or clients you see now, are you finding people are more receptive to the alternatives and understand that maybe the pharmaceuticals are not the be-all and end-all?

 Cynthia:         It’s funny. I think people usually end up in my lap, if you will, because they’ve grown frustrated with current western medicine’s answers to their health concerns.

Some people are tepid, meaning that they’re receptive but they haven’t 100% bought in, but then I have a large majority of clients who are really open to doing just about anything to feel better.

I’ll give you one example …

There’s a really lovely woman that is a new client of mine. I’ve worked with her for the past month and every time she ends an email she says, “I’ve been waiting for you for 15 years. I’ve been doing this journey mostly on my own, but I’ve been waiting to meet you for 15 years.”

And what a, kind of, profound statement. It wasn’t something that was solicited.

But she keeps saying, “More people need the kind of services that you provide and I know there are other people in your tribe but, we just need to be aware that there are more of you. That having your unique perspectives in training and can offer more than just the center management perspective.”

Yuri:                That’s great. How does it make you feel?

“Becoming” an entreprenuer

Cynthia:         Oh. I mean, I’m a softy. It really hits at my core. It makes me feel validated.

My decision to completely derail—walking away from western medicine 18 months ago … You have moments as an entrepreneur where you second guess yourself, and you have a bad month or you have a month that’s disappointing. And in moments like that, it makes you feel really grateful that you took that leap of faith because, that’s really what it is.

When you become an entrepreneur, you’re following your passion and trying to put into place other mechanisms that can make you as successful as possible, as successful as you know you can be.

Yuri:                Yeah. Totally. So, you said “become an entrepreneur,” do you believe that you become an entrepreneur, or do you believe you’ve always had that inside your DNA?

 Cynthia:         Oh. That’s a loaded question. I think it’s two-fold.

I think I matured into believing I was an entrepreneur. I think that for many years, I was very much on the path of enjoying being an employee, because I didn’t have to think as much as I did if I were on my own. I think my emotional maturity, my growth, my own health struggles that I’ve had over the last three years definitely pushed me.

Dream big, that’s kind of the mantra I live my life by. Dream big because I don’t want to look back on my life and perceive or feel that I didn’t push myself enough, that I didn’t grow enough as a person.

I want my children and my husband to be able to look at me and see that I’m an example of a successful female entrepreneur.

I want to continue to develop a tribe of people that feel similarly. So, I think there are people, honestly, that are born entrepreneurs—they really think differently than the rest of us—and I think there are other people that grow into that role.

I think that it can be two-fold. It’s not one or the other. I think you can go from being an employee mindset to becoming an entrepreneur with maturity.

Yuri:                Yes. Good perspective there, for sure. What would you say if you’re sitting down with a friend of yours who was in the employee space or in the medical space for … And they’ve had enough of the system or they’ve had enough of their job, they’re thinking about doing their own thing—what would you tell them?

 Cynthia:         I would tell them to really spend time thinking about what they want, because for many people, the reason why they enjoy being an employee is that there’s a lot of security. Some people might like the concept of a side job, where they’re an entrepreneur really in name but not in spirit.

I think that you have to be willing to take some degree of risk. I think that you have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. I’ll give you an example. The skill set that I’ve had for 20 plus years is a very different skill set than what I operate under now.

If you want to be an entrepreneur or if you want to be your own boss, you have to be willing to get uncomfortable—and some people lack the ability to do that. They don’t have the fail-set mechanism of just pushing forth and trusting in the process and understanding that it’s a heck of a lot of work.

If anyone thinks leaving your eight to five, Monday through Friday job is hard—becoming an entrepreneur is 10 times harder. You put in more hours, more effort, more blood, sweat and tears.

My children actually said this to me the other day; “Mommy, you used to work part-time as an NP, now you work more.” And I said, “Your right.”

Because ultimately, you’re the only person—everything falls on you, ultimately.

So, to get back to your original question, I think that they have to understand there’s a certain amount of risk, they have to feel comfortable with feeling uncomfortable, and they have to understand that there may be many years where you’re not necessarily making a big profit.

You may be breaking even, but you may not be making huge profits from day one. So, if you think you’re going to replace income off the mark, that’s probably less common then it taking several years.

Even our financial planner told us that it’s going to take several years before I’m going to replace the income I was at before.

So, I think people have to be aware of that. If they take a leap without thinking, then that could be detrimental on many levels.

Yuri:                That’s great advice and I think it’s very valid to you. I think a lot of people who think of starting an online business—or even a business in general—they’re looking at what other people are posting on social and they’re like, “Oh my God. That’s what I’ve got to be doing. I need to be making $1,000,000 by tomorrow. Here’s a product I have, why isn’t it selling?”

It’s a journey. It does not happen overnight and part of the reason for this podcast is to remind people that it takes time. And sure, there are business models that can earn profit more quickly than others—but either way, you have to come into this being realistic about what’s in store for you.

It’s like having kids. You don’t know what it’s going to be like until you have them.

Cynthia:         That’s so true.

 Yuri:                With the kids, you can’t give them back. With a business, you could always full chop and do something else. Yeah. It’s a good reminder, so thank you for bringing that up.

Cynthia:         Yeah. It’s interesting. I’m married to an engineer—so you can imagine the engineer mentality when I woke up one day and said, “Today is the day I’m leaving my NP job.”

He was like, “What?” We had talked about it—but for him, he likes security. He likes knowing that he’s going to get a paycheck every two weeks, he prefers that.

And also, he’s the main breadwinner. So, that could have had something to do with it. But he would never do what I’m doing. He’s like, “I couldn’t just do that. That would cut against the grain of my internal introvert.”

Yuri:                Well, having said that, there are a handful of people I know that are good friends that are massively successful. I’m talking about eight figure businesses online, and they are engineers. So, it’s interesting to see how they’ve built their business with that type of mindset, versus others who are more creative or whatever.

I think part of it is just really understanding who you are and then kind of figuring out what business model you want and what is best for you. But that’s a good point to bring out for sure.

As you’ve built your business, what would you say is one of the biggest challenges that you’ve had to face as you ventured out on your own?

Why Cynthia is always calm, cool and collected

Cynthia:         Oh gosh. Well, here’s the deal—a lot of people in the medical field are introverts. If you were to meet me at a social event, I don’t think you would think I was an introvert per se, but for me, I think my greatest challenge is that I got to hide in a lab coat for years and I would see patients in the hospital or in my office. And I got to call the shots in terms of how much interaction and face to face I wanted to have.

But when I had to switch gears and I became an entrepreneur, going to events, as an introvert—sometimes networking events—they drain me. That stresses me out, to have to work a room.

So, for me personally, I’ve had to really recognize that I’ve got to step up. I’ve got to push myself out of my comfort zone in a very safe way, but the only way to get myself out there and for people to connect with me, is to meet me.

And so, that’s probably been my greatest challenge, just personally. My internal drive is generally to be the extroverted introvert, but really I’m more of an introvert than extrovert.

So, pushing myself to do things that make me a little uncomfortable every day, are things that I’ve had to kind of learn some new behavioral patterns, to make sure that I’m  doing that in a way that I can be successful and moist, calm, cool, and collected. If you ask anybody, that’s the one thing you need me, I’m calm, cool, and collected always. So, I keep that in check.

 Yuri:                Honestly, I’ve worked with a lot of people in my years, and that’s a good trait to have because—especially if you’re running operations or running your business—you don’t want to be going crazy when crap hits the fan.

And it’s also really good for people I work with. Because if you’re emotional and erratic, it’s not good for others around you. So that’s a good trait.

Cynthia:         For me, those traits are probably intrinsic to who I am anyway, but if you work in ER medicine or cardiology and at the moment there’s an emergency, if you’re not calm, cool, and collected—the entire team is not going to be calm, cool, and collected, including the patient.

So, those things are really reinforced with me consistently over time.

Yuri:                Yeah. Totally. I remember when I was getting my pilot’s license, I realized that you actually spend all of your time training for emergencies. Right?

Cynthia:         It’s true.

Yuri:                It’s just because if they were to happen in real life, you have to be like, “Okay, cool. I’ve done this 1,000 times. It’s all good. So, I need to fly up to 5,000 feet and just turn the plane off. Okay. Now what we do?”

But the cool thing is that, once you understand how to do that, it’s really actually pretty cool. It’s actually fun.

But if you don’t practice that, then people would panic and honestly, would rather jump out of the plane I think. It’s nice to be exposed to different situations. It obviously helps if you have a predisposition of being cool and collected, because you can manage yourself a lot more effectively.

 Cynthia:         Exactly. Well, and the other piece is, at least in my line of work, there is nothing that is going to happen that is going to be an emergency—really.

So, that’s the one thing I always stress to clients—there is nothing that is going to happen that is going to be an emergency because, I’ve dealt with real emergencies. I’m always like, “Okay. Let’s walk back through this. Everyone, be calm, cool, and collected.”

And much like you were saying about the things that you prepare for, on so many levels it gives me great perspective. People are freaking out and I’m like, “Okay.” In my mind I’m thinking, “This is not a real emergency. Let’s just calm down, let’s get focused. Everything will fall into place.”

But I can tell you that I’m glad there are people like yourselves that enjoy flying, because that’s not my favorite thing to do.

Yuri:                Would you say you know you’re in really good hands when you have a pilot who’s flown 10, 20000 hours because, they’re pretty amazing at what they do.

Cynthia:         Yes. Exactly.

Yuri:                But you talked about perspective and I think that’s a really good word because, two people experience the same situation, they give a completely different meaning to it, and they respond to it very differently based on how they see that situation.

So, if you’re coming from a background where there are emergencies and people’s lives are at stake—that’s a great reference point, to understand that everything else is really not that bad in comparison.

Cynthia:         Right. Although it’s funny, I teach at one of the local universities—that’s how I kind of give back. I think it’s important to give back in my profession.

So, I was with a nursing student and we’re dealing with really low level emergency kinds of things, and I looked at her and said, “The only thing you need to focus on right now is what’s going to blow you off the planet. What’s going to blow that patient off the planet. Everything else doesn’t matter right now.”

She was like, “Oh. That makes sense.”

I said, “Don’t worry about anything else. Don’t worry about the ingrown toenail. That isn’t important, focus on the big picture.” So, that’s much like the entrepreneurial spirit. There’s one thing that all my medical training prepares me well for—I can get laser focused and be like, “What do I need to worry about right now? Everything else doesn’t matter.”

So, I was trying to get her to focus on that one thing, so she could get through this task. But it’s no different in my business. There are days where—I’m sure you and any other entrepreneur experience this—the shit’s hitting the fan, the day’s crazy and I’m like, “What’s the one thing you have to focus on? Everything else doesn’t matter right now.”

Yuri:                That’s awesome. So, one of the biggest challenges for entrepreneurs is that we’re excessively creative—to the point where medical professionals would probably diagnosis us all with ADHD.

Do you feel that you’re more focused? That you’re not distracted by a lot of those shiny objects or other things? That your super focused on what you want to do, and kind of go after it?

Cynthia:         If you ask my business coach, she might tell you I have a little bit of ADD. But no. I think that I’m great with focusing on what needs to be done. I’m learning that I need to create funnels for things that I can task to someone who’s better at it.

That’s the one thing that I really realize. There are things I’m much better at than others.

But I definitely think that in the beginning, it was very hard to make sense of what I needed my focus to be on. It just felt like there was so much that needed to be done, I was almost paralyzed.

Having a really great business coach and having people to help support my business has been a great investment and I fully acknowledge that, even those that teach others need teaching themselves. So, recognizing you need resources in place so that you stay focused on what you need to worry about.

Yuri:                Sure. That’s great advice. When you’re starting a business, what is most important? With all the stuff going on for you, what was the most important thing for you to focus on?

Trusting in the process

Cynthia:         I think if I were to look back retrospectively, I would say, have trust in the process. And it is a process. It’s not as if you go from being an employee to being an entrepreneur and everything is clear.

So, recognizing that you’re going to make mistakes, that you need to have mechanisms in place for support—and for me, it was acknowledging that as a teacher, I needed a teacher myself.

Putting things into place that can help me stay focused on moving forward. I think being open-minded and flexible is important. I think acknowledging that it doesn’t all fall into place all at once, it’s not all pretty and tied in a bow.

I think it’s funny when you come from being an employee—where you show up and someone from HR takes care of the paperwork and your admin takes care of this extraneous task, and then you’ve got a nurse that’s supporting you…

You don’t have that support system as an entrepreneur, so you start to figure out for yourself how to fill in the gaps.

I think flexibility is another big thing. You can’t be rigid. If you’re rigid, it’s just not the right thing for you to be doing, because you’ll end up being grumpy.

Yuri:                Hah, a curmudgeon—that’s always fun to be around.

 Cynthia:         Yeah. Grumpy old man.

 Yuri:                Not at all. So, what do you think has been the number one key to your success? Whatever success means to you really?

Cynthia:         I think trusting intrinsically in the process—that I have something unique, I’ve got a gift that no one else does better, to connect with people and provide great value.

I’m sure that’s a general blanket statement a lot of people could make, but there’s something unique about me and my background, that I can leverage and provide a service to many people who are looking for a missing link or are looking for answers that they can’t find or support that isn’t available to them.

Very objectively, because of my background, I can look and I can say, “Okay. These are things that this part of medicine does really well. These are things that functional medicine does really well—and in between, there is this nebulous area that isn’t being met.” I know—because I have friends in both spheres—I can look at that objectively.

So, I think that would probably be my answer.

Yuri:                It’s always cool to see what people say. Not that there’s a right or wrong answer, but it’s cool to see the different perspectives and stuff, which is awesome.

If you could outsource one task that you’re doing right now that you can’t stand, what would that be?

 Cynthia:         Oh God. In a heartbeat, all the social media stuff—because it’s hard to keep up with it. In fact, I was texting with my VA right before we got on, and I gave her a couple of other things to do.

I was like, “Okay. I need you to handle three things because I don’t even want to learn how to use that app.” For me personally, that’s just not the stuff I enjoy as much.

The technical, behind the scenes stuff for social media … I just don’t love. I like interacting with people on social media, but I don’t want to get stuck with the back-end things that take me far longer than they need to.

 Yuri:                I totally agree. And if there is only one activity that you could do, what would that one thing be?

 Cynthia:         I really feel like my gift is teaching. So, having a larger network of people to teach and instruct on. For example, there’s a program that I created because I felt like women were coming to me with the same symptoms and complaints over and over and over again.

And so, having an opportunity to share that information with a larger group of people, I think that’s what I would enjoy most. If I didn’t have to do anything else, that probably would by my greatest joy.

The Rapid-five questions 

Yuri:                Awesome. Cool. Are you ready for the rapid five?

 Cynthia:         Yes.

Yuri:                Alright. So, if you’ve been listening, you guys know that all my guests have no idea what these questions are ahead of time. I know what they are, you guys might know what they are, but I don’t think Cynthia does.

Alright, here we go. What is your biggest weakness?

Cynthia:         Oh. I’m really hard on myself, like ridiculously hard on myself. 

Yuri:                Okay. That’s actually one of the reasons I stopped playing soccer.

Cynthia:         Really? 

Yuri:                Because I would keep this journal and I would rate myself after every game, and I was always focusing on the gap. It’s a very tough way to live.

Cynthia:         It is. And to be fair, it’s one of the things that I’ve had to work on the most because it’s easy an an entrepreneur to take things personally. So, I’ve had to learn to think more like a guy, and to not take things so personally. I’m like, “Just keep moving forward.”

Yuri:                Cool. I don’t know if you want to think like a guy. I don’t know if we really think that uh…

Cynthia:         I meant more like, when I talk to male entrepreneurs, they seem not to worry. They don’t take things quite as—I don’t want to use the word personally, because I’m not particularly emotional, but I’m very hard on myself. So, I’ve just had to learn to kind of just let it go.

Yuri:                Cool. What is your biggest strength?

Cynthia:         It is one of two things; I’m incredibly compassionate, but I’m so intellectually curious. I want to understand it. So, I always explain to clients that I’m going to get that answer and going to figure out what it is—I’m your biggest detective, I’m going to figure it out.

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

Cynthia:         I think probably that laser focus. The ability to shut everything out and just focus on what I need to be doing right then.

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

Cynthia:         Exercise.

Yuri:                Cardio, strength training, yoga?

Cynthia:         Depends. I do hiit two day a week or tabata, and I lift two days a week—and then I try to take two days off, I either do yoga or bar class. For me, it just gets me in the right frame of mind and it’s the only time that’s really my own. So, it’s my selfish time.

Yuri:                Yeah. Sure. That’s awesome. And finally, complete this sentence, I know I’m being successful when _____.

Cynthia:         It’s a great question. I know I’m been successful when my calendar stays booked with all the things I enjoy doing. That includes client work, but consistently booked.

Yuri:                Cool. I like that. I haven’t heard that one yet. That’s cool.

Cynthia:         Well, I’m sure you get a lot of when I make X number of dollars or when I have X number of clients. I think my perspective on success will be when it’s consistently booked week after week.

Yuri:                Sure. Nice. Well Cynthia, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. What is the best place for people to follow you online? Or you don’t do social? No, I’m just kidding.

Cynthia:         So, my website is www.chtwellness.com and you can reach out to me there. You can send me messages or link up for a consultation. And then I’m also on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, I’m all over the place.

Yuri:                Cool. Cynthia, thank you so much again for taking the time and for doing all the awesome work you’re doing. Helping women just kind of get back to life with their hormones, it really makes a difference. So, thank you.

Cynthia:         Thank you. Have a great afternoon.

Yuri:                You too.

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Yuri’s take

Hey guys, Yuri back with you. One of the things I really enjoyed about this interview was just the reality of … Maybe being an entrepreneur and doing your own thing is not right for you.

Cynthia shared some of her perspectives on that, which I completely agree with—because listen, not everyone is cut out to have their own business. You are going to go through some serious stuff and if you can’t deal with that, well, as the saying goes “if you can’t deal with the fire, get out of the kitchen,” right?

So, it’s just a reality check and it’s always important to remind yourself or for me to remind you that this isn’t cut out for everyone. Just like the Navy SEALs aren’t right for all people in the military.

Being an entrepreneur, it’s a special opportunity, it’s a gift, it’s a responsibility, and it requires you to be the best version of yourself—and the best version of yourself can only be achieved by becoming a better version of who you are today.

Sadly, that doesn’t really happen as much in an employee-based world, because there’s “security.” But I don’t really believe being an employee is more secure, and the reason for that is because I have had to let people go in my company.

And I know what those conversations look like, it’s me sitting down and making a decision to be like, “I don’t think this person should be in our company anymore.” That doesn’t really feel like secure to me if you’re the employee. You know what I’m saying?

So, if you’re working for a company, believe me, there will be people higher up in the chain who are having these conversations. And they’re going to be looking at, “Well, we need to save some money here, we need to cut costs. Who do we let go?”

I guarantee you those conversations are happening, and if those conversations are happening, that does not equate to security for you as an employee.

Ultimate security is when you control your own fate. Now, as an entrepreneur, do you have the stability or the predictability of a steady paycheck week in and week out? Maybe not right off the bat, but I’ll tell you this; I love knowing that if I want something, if I want to experience something or buy something or do anything, I know that I can make that happen.

Whereas if I’m getting a steady paycheck week in and week out, for me that’s the worst.

I’m like, “That’s the ceiling. I know what the ceiling is. I can only make that much money.” But if I want to make more money, and experience more things in life, I just think to myself, “How can I create more value? How can I create more value for the people that I serve?” And as a by product, I will receive more monetary value—money in the sense of compensation.

And that’s the beautiful thing about being an entrepreneur—you take ideas out of the ether and you turn them into things that help people. We have ideas, we turn them into creations. It’s an absolute blessing to have that ability.

So, I believe being an entrepreneur is the best—as you probably have heard. If you’ve been listening to me you already probably know that.

It’s a gift. It’s responsibility. It’s really, truly special. So, with that said, I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode and I hope you’ve enjoyed other episodes that we’ve been sharing with you for the past couple of months—and if you’ve enjoyed this, then be sure to subscribe on iTunes if you haven’t already.

If you haven’t left a review already, that’d be awesome if you could because that means a lot to us, right? It helps our podcast grow, it helps more people learn about it, and we can keep inspiring more health entrepreneurs to get to their next level.

Finally, if you haven’t yet grabbed the book Health Profits Secrets, you can do so today over at healthpreneurbook.com and I’m going to hook you up for free—just cover a couple dollars for shipping, and I’ll send it off to your front door.

So, that’s all for today. I want to thank you so much for joining me and Cynthia in this inspiring conversation. I hope it’s found you well. I hope it has opened your eyes to some truths about running your own business, if you happen to recognize those already.

And as always, go out there, serve more people, be great, do great, and I will see you in our next episode.

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Follow Cynthia Thurlow At:

https://chtwellness.com/

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Free Healthpreneur Health Profits Secret Book

Transcription:

Hey guys how’s it going? Yuri here. Welcome to another solo round of the Healthpreneur podcast! I hope you’re doing great.

So, life has been good on my end—hopefully life has been great for you. I was just in Mexico for a four day mastermind. I got to do one of my first surfing lessons, which was a lot of fun. I’ve only surfed once before, and it wasn’t really surfing, it was kind of baby waves, not any good instruction.

So that was fun. We had a great beach, beautiful waves, it was just a really great experience. Caught a few, got crushed by a few, overall it was a lot of fun.

Now, before my trip to Mexico, I was actually speaking at an event put on by my good friend Dr. Isaac Jones called 10X Doctor. I want to share one of the concepts I shared with everyone on stage, which is this whole idea of building income before influence.

This is something that—especially in the last six months—has really hit home for me. And I’m going to share exactly why. I feel this is important for you to understand.

Building income before influence

First and foremost, a lot of people in the health—and really in any space, but we will obviously focus on the health space—a lot of practitioners, experts, they want to come online and they want to build their influence. They look at everyone else and what they’re doing on social media, they look at all these Instagram followers, these YouTube channels, and they’re like, “Wow, my God! That’s what I need to do.”

And they get sidetracked into spending months—if not years—building their “platform,” without generating any significant revenue.

And there’s nothing wrong with doing that. There’s nothing wrong with building your platform, building your influence—because that’s exactly what I did for a long time in my health and fitness business.

But you have understand that that’s a three to five year game plan. Okay?

This podcast is not an overnight success. I told myself, “Listen, if you’re going to do this podcast, do this for the long haul. This is not going to show any noticeable results in the first year.”

So, this is an example of something that, for me, is the long game, but it’s not something I spend all of my time doing.

I see this time and time again, where people online think they have to do a summit to grow their list, or they’re going to do Facebook live’s every single day, or they’re going to do things other people are telling them to do, and that’s how they’re going to build their business.

A lot of this has to do with stuff that distracts us from the most important thing in our business—which is first and foremost, to make money.

If you’re not making money, you’re not going to be in business very long. So the key concept that I shared from stage was to build your income before your influence.

Here’s what I mean by that: Everything you’re currently doing in your business that is not generating income for you is literally a waste of time. Okay?

I know that sounds like a bold statement, but that’s the truth. If what you are doing is not producing income in a significant way, I’m going to challenge you to stop doing it.

Here’s an example of what I mean—and I’m guilty of this for teaching it for way too long, and I apologize because I had the rude awakening a little while ago. For the longest time I had been teaching people how to build their platforms and their business with content—creating an amazing blog and a YouTube channel all that kind of stuff.

That’s great. And our process really works, but it takes a long time to see the results. It takes a long time to see traction from what you’re doing with your blog, right? Constant, endless, production of content.

So, earlier last year we had a workshop called the Content Mastery Workshop, and it was terrific. We ran it a few times, had some great attendees, and they were in a position in their business where they really wanted to focus on content.

But there were a few people there that were kind of starting off in their online venture. And I gave them the exact recipe to do this—to follow this process for building this content machine that would generate revenue for their business.

But I recognized that for a lot of them it was taking forever to actually see monetary results from this. And it was frustrating because this is something that has really worked for me over the past ten years. But again, I go back to day one … And I didn’t do anything properly for the first three years. It was just a lot of incongruent actions, chasing a lot of shiny objects, not really being focused on anything, and certainly not focused on building my income.

So, I made a decision after Healthpreneur Live—our event in September last year. I said, “Listen. I’m no longer going to be teaching people how to build a content-based business because it takes forever, and it’s actually a disservice to teach someone to do that before they’re generating a predictable source of revenue.”

Using Healthpreneur as an example

What I’ve really shifted my focus on is looking at how we have built Healthpreneur. And it has nothing to do with content—I mean our podcast is our main content driver, and this is not a lot of effort on my part.

So, I really started to look at, what are people doing? What is not working? And what is working for us?

A lot of people are building businesses in the old model; which is build your influence, put out a ton of lead magnets, put out low end offers, seven dollar tripwires—we call them no-brainer offers—upsell people into your main off for 47 dollars … And then maybe you’ll get that person to spend one hundred dollars with you over the course of that transaction or a couple weeks.

I started to look at this model and I was like “Wow, this is really ridiculous, this is such a waste of time.” Why are we spending all of this time and effort trying to get someone to opt into our list with such a low barrier to commitment?

If somebody is opting in to a lead magnet, the likelihood they are engaged with you at a high level is very, very small. Instead of doing that, I want to suggest something that’s going to be a lot more powerful.

Looking at Instagram … Why are people spending all their time doing Instagram stories all day long? They’ve got their phone with them, taking pictures and videos of everything they eat, every single thing they do.

And I’m just like “What’s the point?” It’s such a waste, for me personally. If it’s working for you, that’s great.

And when I say working for you … There’s a very strong distinction here. Working as in actually making a lot of money for your business, okay? Not like, there’s a few opt-in’s from all this stuff and that’s it.

But for me, I don’t want to have my phone on me at all. I don’t want to be on my phone when my kids are around, I don’t want to be on my phone when I’m eating food—I want to be present in whatever I’m doing. We do have an Instagram presence, but I don’t really spend any time doing Instagram stories anymore.

I don’t care what the “Gary V’s” say. There are a lot of different ways to grow your business, there are a lot of different ways to scale the mountain. If you feel like you need to be on social 24/7 and you love doing that—and it’s actually producing revenue for you—great. But if you feel like you have to do that because the so-called experts are telling you to do that, and you’re miserable in the process, that’s just ridiculous.

Remember, Gary V built his influence over a decade, okay? It took him more than a decade to get where he’s at right now. He’s been doing it for a long time.

Most “gurus” and influencers that you see have been around for a very long time. Here’s the thing you often don’t recognize: Most of these people started off with driving traffic to some kind of core offer.

I’m not going to name any specific names, but there’s a very popular podcaster who’s a friend of mine now, he’s got one of the top podcasts in the world, but he started off selling a LinkedIn business building system. Eh? That is how everything started for him, and now he’s shifted to building out his podcast and his influence from there.

When we look at guys like Gary V, he started off building winelibraryTV, right? And now he’s in a position where he doesn’t really need to worry about making money because he’s got VaynerMedia doing its thing.

So, I think it’s very distracting to be watching what other people are doing and thinking you have to do the same. What I would strongly propose is that whatever you are doing in your business has to be strongly centered around building your income. And then you can worry about building your influence. Right?

The old way of building an online business is dying

You need to have a predictable machine that is generating leads and clients for you and your business every single day, without your constant involvement. If you don’t have that you will continue to struggle—or if you’re not struggling, you will struggle at a very high level.

I say this because I’ve spoken with hundreds of entrepreneurs in our space and I’ve helped a lot of them. I’ve seen what they’re going through. They’re either charging way too little for their personal services or they’re putting out little products, like “Here’s a lead magnet, here’s a ten dollar ebook.”

And again, I am part of the problem because that’s what I was teaching for a little bit too long. So I do want to apologize for putting that message out there.

At the time that is what I thought people wanted, and then I recognized that it just wasn’t producing any appreciable results for people. And yes, you might be making a couple sales off your ten dollar product, but what is 50 dollars going to do for you? Not a lot.

What’s 5,000 dollars going to do for you? Well, that’s a little more interesting.

I really want to challenge you to think about the fact that the old way of building an online business is dying. It really, really is dying. And that means selling low information products—information products in general are dying because information is ubiquitous, it’s all over the place.

Anything that becomes digitized will become de-monetized. We’ve already seen this—you’ve got an amazing blog post that covers everything you would sell in an ebook for free. So now the ebook becomes commoditized and obsolete. How are you gonna sell that? Right?

We’ve got people that are doing 30 day challenges for free, which is fine. Or 30 day challenges for 47 dollars, and they get ten people in there. They’re making 470 dollars over the course of a month. They’ve put all this effort into doing something and they’re not even making a thousand dollars. It’s just ridiculous.

Simplifying your business

The big opportunity moving forward in 2018 and beyond is moving away from products. Unless you’ve got a very high quality supplement that can’t be commoditized and is priced compared to everything else on Amazon.

Or, the big opportunity for you as an expert is to really focus on higher level, premium priced coaching. When I say coaching, I’m not talking one-on-one—I’m talking about group-based coaching where you can work with 10, 20, even 50 people at the same time. Moving them towards a common goal.

As a result, you’re charging anywhere from 3-5,000 dollars. Now here’s the thing to realize … The effort that goes into selling a 3-5,000 dollar program is the exact same that goes in to selling a ten dollar ebook. Why would we waste our time selling ten dollar eBooks?

And here’s the other thing to remember: when someone buys a ten dollar product, there’s very little commitment from them. Ten dollars is less than going to a movie. So there’s very little commitment from the client or customer’s perspective. But if you charge someone three thousand dollars to really help them get a desired result, is that person maybe a bit more committed? Absolutely.

So, getting away from the low-end nonsense and really moving towards simplifying your business, offering what we call a “dream come true” system in a way that is higher priced … That only attracts the best possible clients to your business.

Best possible clients means people who actually show up and do the work because they are committed. And it forces you to be your best because people are paying you a good sum of money.

So everyone wins. And that’s really where the opportunity lies moving forward.

Even with our Healthpreneur business, we’ve simplified it in a very big way. We’ve taken away all of our lead magnets, taken away all of our courses.

But even that, we know people who buy that book are not committed, right? They’re not committed to really moving to the next level.

So for us, we looked at … If our main mission is to give people the training they need and the personal touch they deserve to grow their businesses, and grow their income, then for us, it’s two things.

We’ve got our workshop and our mastermind. That’s it. Those are the only two ways we can serve our audience.

I’m at a point now where I have no intention of putting out ten dollars offers to capture the low-hanging fruit of people who don’t want to invest, to attend and go through our workshop with us. Because that’s not worth our time, that’s not worth our customer service effort. It really, really is not.

I would personally rather have a much smaller business in terms of volume, and work with people more in-depth, really help impact their business, than serving thousands of clients with a five or ten dollar product which no on really takes action on.

I’m not saying that this is what you have to do, but this is the way we’re moving. This is exactly the way we’ve built our business, and this is exactly what we’re recommending.

All other Healthpreneurs who love dealing with people—coaching, teaching, serving, instead of spending all your time marketing, setting up funnels, writing sales copy, split testing, optimizing, all the stuff we can’t stand doing … If you’d rather teach and coach your clients, actually work with them deeply to create an amazing result for them (and as a byproduct of that, be making five to ten times more profit in your business) then this is the way forward.

It really, really is the way forward.

Because you’ve got two options. Number one is you sell low end information—and you need a massive volume to make that happen. I don’t know about you, but if you’ve got a million people on your email list, go for it. But, I guarantee most people listening to this are not there.

So, you can do that and struggle, and even if you’re running Facebook ads to that type of information, it’s going to be very tough to have any kind of margin to make it worthwhile.

The flip side, is you say: “Listen, I would much rather spend my time teaching, coaching, serving people, and really helping them achieve an amazing result. I’m willing to charge a higher price point, work with fewer people, and spend the same amount of energy and a lot less time doing that.

As a result, as I’ve built up this predictable marketing machine around me, I don’t have to spend all my time doing the marketing.

So, you need to build a way of predictably generating leads and predictably generating clients from those leads—without your constant involvement.

The Seven Figure Health Business Blueprint

Now, the good news for you is that we’ve figured this out. If you want to go deeper on this, we’ve got a great webinar that we have newly released. It’s called The Seven Figure Health Business Blueprint.

If you want the step by step on how to do this, I strongly recommend you attend the webinar. It’s awesome, you can do so over at healthpreneurgroup.com/9. You can register for the webinar over there.

Now, I really, really feel strongly about this. It’s something that, again, we don’t even want to move forward with people who don’t get this. And if you do get it, that’s great. If you still want to stay in the world of selling books and low end information products, that’s awesome. Continue to do that if you like and if it’s working for you.

But, if you really want to take your business to a very high level in terms of profit, so that you can enjoy more of what you got into business for—the freedom, more time with your family, the ability to travel, not having to deal with thousands of pain in the ass clients or customers who are complaining about ten dollars or are looking for a download link from the five dollar product…

If you want to avoid all that and really live a better quality life, serve the clients you care about—then this webinar is really important to take in.

We’ve had a lot of people go through the webinar, and they’re like “Holy cow, this has been the best 71 minutes of my time.” It’s opened their eyes to what is possible, and how the dying model that is currently the online business world is dying a slow—and in some cases very fast—death.

If you want the new way to build your income before your influence and actually put more money in the bank so you can sleep better at night and really achieve the things you want in life, this is a must-attend webinar.

So again, it’s healthpreneurgroup.com/9, and I strongly recommend you check it out today. Do not wait any longer, your future really depends on this information, so, go there now.

 

Transcription

Hey guys. Yuri here, welcome to the Healthpreneur podcast! Hope your day is going great.

Today, I’ve got a great interview to bring your way. It’s going to be a little bit different than some of the other interviews where we talk more about the journey, the ups and downs of being an entrepreneur.

Today, we’re going to have a conversation with Heidi Hanna, who is a New York Times best selling author, chief energy officer and founder of SYNERGY, which is a consulting company providing brain based health and performance programs to organizations. And she’s the executive director of the American Institute of Stress.

So, if you haven’t kind of clued into who we’re talking to here—I call her the stress master, because she’s really kind of figured out this stress thing pretty amazingly well. And it’s all because she’s had to deal with her own journey, which she’ll tell us about in this interview.

I had some big “a-ha’s” and epiphanies from our discussion. This will be extremely valuable to you if you ever feel overwhelmed, if you ever feel like you have too much to do, if you ever feel like you’re rushing and if you ever feel stressed out.

What Heidi is going to share with us are some really cool insights and ideas to help you make sense of this and help you combat some of those feelings, so you can come back down to planet Earth and just kind of feel good again.

So, really good stuff, I’m telling you. You’ll want to listen to this entire episode with no distractions.

I’ll give you a little bit more about who Heidi is. She’s also a global speaker. She’s been featured in Fortune magazine’s most successful women in business, The ESPN Women in Leadership summits and the Million Dollar Roundtable—which to be quite honest with you, I don’t even know what that is, but it sounds pretty cool.

Her clients have included Microsoft, General Electric, Google, Starbucks, Boeing, Morgan Stanley, Nationwide and many, many more. There’s just a ton of cool stuff that she’s doing.

When people think about brain health, stress, energy, they think of Heidi. And I’m excited to bring her to you right here on the Healthpreneur Podcast. Without any further ado, let’s bring her onto the show.

 

Yuri:                Hey Heidi, welcome to the Healthpreneur Podcast. How is it going?

 Heidi:              Thank you. It’s going great, and I am so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Yuri:                You’re welcome. You and I have a lot in common because we talk a lot about energy.

You’re kind of the stress master, which is something I think a lot of people can relate to. I want to jump right into that for a second. How did you get into stress and why do you think it’s an important topic, not just for everyday people, but specifically for entrepreneurs?

Heidi’s Journey of Handling Stress Since Childhood

Heidi:              Oh my gosh. Yes, of course it makes me chuckle to be known as the stress master.

Let me just start by saying the only way you master anything—and I’m sure everyone who’s listening to this will appreciate this and understand this—the only way you do that is through a lot of challenge, a lot of discomfort, probably a sprinkle of pain, and a lot of work.

I think in the past I considered myself a stress expert, meaning I did a lot of the research—and I have actually been studying this my whole life because of my own personal struggles. And that is also something I’ve found with so many people in this space. Oftentimes, we teach what we most need to learn and we’re also fascinated by the fact that we can have all of this information that is still not really helping us to make the transformation.

So, I very early on suffered from an anxiety disorder that caused me to actually faint. Around the age of 10, I started passing out and no one could figure out what was wrong with me.

Because of that, I went to a lot of different doctors. Some of them thought I might be having some sort of minor seizure, it might be blood sugar. They weren’t really sure, but everyone at some point said it’s probably stress related.

And when you hear that something is stress related, it’s easy to think that it’s just all in your head. You should be stronger than that, you should just get over it. You should learn to cope with it.

And so, essentially, I struggled with that for about 30 years before I finally discovered that I have a condition called vasovagal syndrome, which if you think about the stress response, most people think of fight or flight. But even if you look at the animal kingdom, there’s a lot of animals out there that actually play dead when there’s something really stressful going on.

That’s essentially what was happening in my body. I have almost a reverse reaction where the blood pulls the bottom of my feet and gets out of my brain and I have to faint to get that blood back to my head.

I guess I was forced to learn how to act in order to manage that. Interestingly enough, my two biggest fears in life were flying and public speaking, and I found myself in a career where I was flying and public speaking.

Yuri:                Just a little bit.

Stress Addiction

 Heidi:              And literally, 15 years of doing this, honestly, almost every single day, is part of the reason I also uncovered this whole area of stress addiction. It turns out that things that cause stress can also be highly addictive and keep us in this vicious cycle.

I say that just to say that we can get a lot of information and I think many times if we’re going to truly feel called into a certain type of work, there is a lot of pain that’s involved with that.

So even as I got better at coping with stress and managing anxiety, which also had the very difficult side effects with things like depression and other ways that I tried to cope that were not healthy.

Even going through all of that … Just a year and a half ago, I went through another really difficult time where I feel like life was kind of exposing me, emotionally, or breaking me open in a sense to just how difficult this journey can be.

And in that moment, really having the choice to say, “Do I want to get out of this because I can’t handle it anymore? Or am I going to really look into it and dig in deeper and have the tough conversations and really learn how to use this to my advantage?”

I’m grateful to say I had people around me that were really supportive and I was able to do that. So, I feel like going through the difficult times are really what broke me open to the depth of how important this topic really is.

Yuri:                That’s awesome. That’s why I love our industry of health experts—well, health is the broad category—because we’re all coming from a place of our own challenges or struggles and we are trying to solve them for ourselves and the people we’re serving.

It’s such a cool place to work in and kind of connect with people like yourself are doing some really great things from a place of service.

I want to touch on two things. You talked about stress—the things that cause us stress are also very addictive. Can you elaborate on that?

The first thing that comes to my mind is people who are working 20 hours a day, they’re addicted to the work. How does it all kind of work and can you maybe elaborate on that a bit?

What is stress?

Heidi:              To do that, let me take a step back and first. I think one of the most important things is to clearly define what stress is. Because one of the things I’ve found, even going through my challenges last year, is that I would go to the stress experts and say, “Well, what is stress exactly?”

And everyone would have a different answer.

And usually, the answer would take 20 minutes to get to. And so, if we know we have this stress epidemic—like, we know that 75 to 90% of medical visits are stress related, we know that stress costs the business economy $600 billion a year in the U.S….

We’re using all of these statements to categorize something where no one really even knows what it is.

I worked really hard to come up with a definition that I believe is helpful. You could define it in a million different ways, but this is the way I think is most helpful: it’s what happens in the gap between demand and capacity.

So, it’s an experience, an energy, a pressure, attention—you can define a lot of different ways depending on the circumstances. But it’s essentially what our brain and body are trying to do to help us cope when demands are greater than our existing capacity.

So, as you know, physical exercise is stressful and it causes our system to need to adapt and adjust. As long as we have the resources, we can rebuild and we get stronger as a result.

But, if you were to do weight training and the same muscle groups day after day after day after day, you obviously wouldn’t have the resources, you wouldn’t be able to adapt and there would be a chronic stress response. As a result of that you would break down, cause inflammation all of that kind of stuff.

So, I think this is important to understand because it’s not just the demands and it’s not just our capacity. There’s one other factor that I have just been fascinated with. I look at demand versus capacity as being your stress load—so that’s the load or the tension that’s existing on your energy, your time, your resources.

The other thing that’s really important is your stress lens, and that’s the perspective that you have on stress. And that is actually primarily genetics and early life experiences.

Those two factors combined are going to create the mindset that you have, which we know is flexible and adaptable—and that’s what stress mastery is all about. How do you change your lens while also navigating that demand and capacity? That’s that’s the first piece that, I think, is really important to understand.

The second piece is that what we think of as the stress response is actually not totally accurate. As I mentioned, fight or flight is just part of the picture. We actually have identified six primary stress reactions, and this is going to tie in to why stress is addictive, so hang in there for one second.

Fight or flight is one, and that’s primarily adrenaline based. It gives you the rush and you get more things done and you’re like hyper-focused, feeling like you have tons of energy and it’s this sweet spot for a lot of people, especially entrepreneurs. We wait until the last minute, we get a surge of adrenaline and we’re awesome.

Then, we have what’s known as the freeze or faint response, and this is more of a chronic response. This is what causes me to actually faint, even though most people wouldn’t get there for a long time, because of childhood trauma, genetic predispositions, my system is a little bit hijacked, so I go there quicker than most people.

But you also have a freeze response, where you get kind of analysis paralysis. If you stay stuck in stress too long, most people will get there. Their body and their brain are actually now kind of starting to break down, you have more fatigue, maybe chronic pain. This is more of the freeze-faint response.

Then there’s two others that are really fascinating, they’re more oxytocin driven. When you’re having a stress response and there’s a surge of oxytocin—which is a bonding chemical—there’s a reaction we call tender befriend.

More women than men happen to have this because we produce more oxytocin and it has to do with estrogen, and we can get into all the details of that.

Simply put, some people when they’re experiencing stress will react first by trying to help other people or by trying to create relationships and social support. And in the big scheme of things, all of those reactions are healthy as long as we use them as information for positive change.

Here’s where it gets addictive; that initial kick that we get from primarily the adrenaline response helps us to get things done. And so, when we are low on energy, it’s kind of like backup energy. It’s almost like having a cup of coffee or having some sugar, it gives us that surge and it feels good.

What happens as that starts to wear down is, we just don’t feel good. People who are constantly running, a lot of times under the surface, they are so tired that they’re afraid if they stop they’re not going to get started again.

And so, mentally and even emotionally, they’re kind of hanging on to their stress. And I know so many people who I work with will say, “I don’t want you to get rid of my stress. I need my stress. I need that energy because I’m afraid if I don’t have it, I might not get out of bed in the morning.”

So, there’s actually a few different factors, one is just the literal, physical stimulation that we get from stress. The other thing is stress has become a bonding experience. So we just live in a culture where the busier we are, the more stress we have, the more validated we feel by that.

I remember one time driving in my car and looking down at my email, which I never do, and I did it this one time, I was needing to feel connected. I was actually kind of nervous about something and I needed that hit that told me that people needed me.

I looked down, I didn’t have any emails and I started to cry. I was like, “This is so weird, it’s been 20 minutes, my phone must be broken. Nobody needs me.”

Yuri:                So true though.

Addictive stress, and why you need to recharge

Heidi:              So there’s connection through stimulation and technology, there’s validation. We crave more information all the time. We know the brain is hardwired for new novel experiences, new novel information.

And again, I want to say that all of that is positive, it’s just that the brain and the brain’s cravings, when they get hijacked by a world that’s telling us, “You’re not enough, you don’t have enough, you need to be hacking your system, you need to be hustling, you need to outrun everybody” … that gets us stuck in this state where under the surface of that false energy, it’s kind of like a credit card.

If you’re spending a bunch of money and you’re getting a rush from that, but you’re not opening your credit card statement, you’re never even going to know what’s going on. It’s the same thing with the body.

If you don’t really slow down and check in with yourself, you may not realize that you’re speeding up the development of diseases and disorders. You may not even realize that that fatigue you’re feeling, if you were to really slow down, that is your body’s way of saying, “This is not working for us, long term you cannot sustain this.”

So, you can either pay attention to the signs—which are the little things that try to get your attention, like a little headache or mild fatigue—or you get to the point where you have serious symptoms, and that’s usually when people start paying attention because so much of our health is impacted by our level of stress.

It’s essentially just speeding up the development of anything that’s already going wrong in our system.

Yuri:                Yeah, that’s that’s really cool. That’s stuff that I have never even heard, which is good to know.

I was going to ask you … I think fight or flight is what people kind of tend to associate with, with respect to stress—but even then a lot of people just don’t recognize it. How does someone know when they’re in that state? Because, I’ll just give an example, at our Healthpreneur Live events … I don’t know if I’ve ever felt that. I use the example of like, I was nourished from like a spiritual level.

I just felt really good all day long and people like, “Aren’t you tired? Don’t you need any food?” And I was like “No, I just feel nourished.”

One of our Mastermind members, Steven, said, “that’s called fight or flight.” And I was like, “Well, is it or is there something else going on?” And after the event I was like, “Okay, now I’m pretty tired. I’m going to just chill out for a couple of days.” I kind of felt the aftereffects of that.

But how do you know, in the moment, if you’re just doing what you are called to do and you’re feeling really good. How do you separate that, from that addictive, elation type of experience? Or is there a difference?

Heidi:              That’s a great question. I think we can benefit from, again, looking at what stress is.

There’s a big difference between acute and chronic stress. Acute is in the moment, you’re really actually needing those heightened levels of energy, and there’s nothing wrong with that for a shorter period of time. It’s different for everyone, how long that they can sustain that.

Let’s go back again to the exercise metaphor, if you are training someone physically, you would be looking at things like type, duration and intensity, right? Same thing with stress.

What kind of stress are you having? How long is it going on? What is the intensity level? And that’s going to kind of determine the effect it has on you.

Let’s say you go to an event, it’s a weekend long event and you’re just on this high—and spiritual energy, by the way, is one of the buckets that we fuel that can make us feel like we don’t need physical energy for a while, because we’re just overflowing with that. We can sustain that for a period of time.

Let’s say the intensity goes way up and you’re at this two or three day event. Yes, you have more stress, but you’re also getting the reward through that process and you know that there’s a time coming that you’re going to be able to recharge and repair.

So, the most important thing in that is if you’re aware of it and you appreciate what’s happening, you build in your own recovery period afterwards. You know that you’re going to have a decrease. I’m sitting here using my hands as if anyone could see me—but everything about the human system is designed to oscillate, so we have these ups and downs.

The problem is not that we go up and have this really exciting, stressful, intense time—and I say stress, by the way, there as a positive. Stress is positive up to a tipping point. You have this stress energy that’s awesome, as long as you know that it’s going to come back down, and then you recharge.

So, you schedule time where you’re going to go get a massage or you’re going to spend time in nature, you’re going to reflect, you’re going to journal, you’re going to listen to music, you’re going to get more sleep, you’re going to eat in a way that’s restorative.

All of those things to rebuild your system, you can then go back into that high stress state again, it’s just like performing in sports.

But, what most people do is they kick it up like that for a weekend and they push really hard and they come back and they actually come back to more work. They spread themselves too thin and they never take that recharge break.

So that is what I think is so important. It’s not the level of stress, but are we matching that for our own unique makeup? Are we matching that with the level of recovery that we need to then come back to that optimal state?

And through sports and exercise too, you can continue to push and push and push to levels you never thought possible, as long as you’re getting the recovery that matches that, for you to then be able to do the repair.

Yuri:                That’s such a great “a-ha.” I hope all the listeners are getting this, because I think as an entrepreneur, we often think we’re invincible and we’re just going to keep going and going and going.

One of the big epiphanies I had about this, I guess a couple of years ago, is when I was working with Dan Sullivan as a strategic coach. He has this whole three-day system, which is where you’ve got your prep days, your focus days and your off days, or your buffer days.

The off days or the free days, you do nothing. It has nothing to do with business. And that was a real big challenge for me because I’m always thinking about all this stuff. I think a lot of us are being real creative, we’re always in our heads, we are always thinking about all that stuff.

How do you get someone to switch off? And how do you advice someone to chill out, take a day off, take a couple of days off?

Heidi:              This is the hardest thing to do. This is why I decided to make this my whole life, honestly.

Because I started off teaching nutrition. I was teaching nutrition, exercise, physiology, a little bit of performance psychology. I was doing that for a long time, but what I kept finding more and more was that people know what to do.

People have access to information for the most part. Now, there’s still great need to work with people through that, to customize it. There’s also all sorts of cool things going on with nutrigenomics, there is a space for that, but the one thing I kept bumping into time and time again, was I couldn’t get people to do nothing.

It’s like everyone would say, “Okay, I know meditation is the best thing for me, but just teach me how to workout or just teach me what to eat.” Like, “Teach me what to do.”

And I would say, “The most important thing that you could do, is not do.”

And that’s just so opposite of not only how we’re wired as entrepreneurs, but also the messages the world is telling us. Even when we go to these mastermind programs and all of that. I just did one for a couple of days and literally by the end of the day,  I’m like, “I’m full, I can’t take in another thing.”

And I recognize every time I go to something like that it’s like I’m wasting my money if I don’t build in at least a day or two to actually let that stuff settle in.

Because otherwise, it’s just like over stuffing ourselves with nutrition. Our body needs the time to actually utilize that to our advantage or else it just shoves it away into storage, and we do the same thing with all of our notes from all of our events.

I really think the only way to do this is, there’s some re-programming that needs to happen in our own mind—and it’s different for everybody, how you do this—that says that taking care of yourself is not an option, recharging is not an option.

I have a wristband I wear that says, “I’d rather be extraordinary at less, than ordinary at more.” And I focus on that.

All the little things that you can do to remind yourself of that and mandate it to the point where you put it in your schedule, and I know for you, that had to be super hard to say, “I’m going to put a day in my schedule where I’m doing nothing.”

It’s almost like the opposite of what most people do. We have to catch ourselves going off into like, “I’m building a new business in my mind while I’m getting a massage,” and catch it.

I call it catching the monkey.

That’s your monkey mind that’s being hyperactive and saying, “You can’t slow down because you have to hustle, you have to hustle, you have to hustle.” No, actually you don’t.

As an entrepreneur, you are wired to hustle, so all those messages that everybody is giving you that you have to hustle, really, are for everybody else. You don’t need that, you’re wired that way already. You need to learn how to slow down and let that stuff sink in so that you can really connect to the deeper part of who you are and what matters most to you. And be fueled from what you’re saying, that spiritual level, where it’s like, “This is a calling, this is bigger than me.”

When you have that kind of fuel, you can do extraordinary things.

But the other piece I’ll just mention about the neuroscience aspect of all of this, which is another thing I think most people know but they don’t practice as if it were real. It’s that the way we get to true insight and intuition and that kind of deeper level of processing, is through relaxation.

You have your best ideas in the shower. I get a massage every week and it’s the best money I ever spent on my business, because even though I’m trying to quiet my mind, after that, I let myself just free flow.

I’ve written books an hour after a massage because it’s like I’m finally making these connections that I couldn’t make when I was in that adrenaline based fight or flight, get things done, go to hustle mode.

Whatever it takes for you as an individual listener. As you’re listening to this, I would say, what would it take for you to truly commit to recharging your own energy? How do you do it? Because it’s going to be unique for everybody.

What’s your reaction type? What’s your best recovery technique? It’s a little different for everybody.

And how do you put that in your schedule as important, if not more important, than anything else you do during the day? Because it’s going to empower you to do everything else more effectively and minimize that tension or strain you’re getting from stressing beyond your limits.

Yuri:                That’s so good. I know this is kind of like going off on a “how-to,” which is perfect because I think everything happens for a reason. And I think our listeners will greatly appreciate this interview.

I know that, just in my mind, I’ve got so many notes here, and one of the things that I’m challenging myself with is, I like driving fast. I don’t tailgate people, I just like driving fast, I guess.

For me, a challenge would be, ‘Let me drive five kilometers, or five miles below the speed limit and just deal with that,” and I think there’s a lot of different moments in our lives, where we’re trying to get things done so quickly, it’s like, “just step back and slow down.”

And that’s challenging, but I think you brought up some really, really good thinking exercises and points to reflect upon. And I think a lot of our listeners can relate to who we are as entrepreneurs, at a DNA level. So this is extremely valuable. Thank you for sharing.

Relaxation tips and tricks

Heidi:              Let me also just say to you, I just want to reemphasize that what you just said about driving slower, is a perfect practice.

So, really think about even things like that. If you just notice yourself in a situation where you can slow down, that may not seem like it’s going to impact all of these other things, but these are mental and emotional trainings that you’re breaking a pattern of rushing—and I call this rushing syndrome.

Most of us have rushing syndrome and we’re stuck in that, so any little thing that you can do to break that pattern is going to have a training impact that will affect everything else. That’s a great practical example.

Yuri:                I’ll give you another one, which is, on Thursdays I usually record most of my podcasts episodes. I batch out anywhere from four to eight interviews in a day. And that’s like, go, go, go, nonstop, and I recognized that.

After doing that for the first time, I was like, I feel pretty exhausted. So what I mandated, I built in was, every, after every second interview, I would give myself five or ten minutes to just sit down in my chair and close my eyes and breathe deeply to slow down, because if I just kept going through the interviews, I’d be exhausted by the end of the day.

For me, that’s something else that I do now with all my interviews—to show up to the best of my ability for every person, but also to conserve my health. That’s something that’s working well for me.

Heidi:              And what you’re doing there, I think everyone needs to recognize too, is that it’s not that you couldn’t push through those interviews, you absolutely could. And maybe they wouldn’t be super impacted with the quality and all those things that are important to you, but the difference is how you feel after that.

Here’s something people have to keep in mind, what else in your life is important outside of your business? You push and push and push, and at the end of the day, how do you show up for your spouse or your friends or your kids, or anything else in your life that you say you’re doing all of your work for? And I think that’s really important.

So, catching yourself in those moments and even talking to yourself. I literally talk to my brain, because my brain has some pretty crazy thoughts that are not aligned with how I really feel.

They’d say, “Just push, just push, just push.” And it’s like, “Hey, I appreciate what you’re trying to do here, but we’re going to just settle down for a few minutes.” And what happens is, by the end of the day, you still actually have energy—so you could even just do that as an experiment.

What happens if every hour you were to stop for three to five minutes, to listen to a song or do some deep breathing, or go for a walk outside. I’ll just do, literally, a lap around my house and come back.

What can you do to break that pattern of pushing and rushing that will then allow you, at the end of the day, to feel good. And that’s when you know you’re oscillating in a way that’s consistent with the amount of stress that’s positive and the amount of recovery that you need to be sustainable.

Yuri:                That’s so good. You bring up such a good point because if we have families, if we have a spouse, what’s the point of doing everything we’re doing if we’re vegetable by the end of the day?

We’re not fully present with them. That’s not really serving you or them.

Yeah, I think it’s just a matter of reflection, it’s being like, “Okay, what’s really happening here?” Another interesting example is from tennis—I love tennis. We’ve seen people like Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, in their 30s now, come back stronger than ever before because they took six months off. And that’s almost unheard of.

Roger Federer takes six months off, comes back, and he’s playing the best tennis of his life. And arguably, a few years back, everyone was saying he’s never going to win another Major. And I think that is going to start an interesting trend in sports.

I think athletes or entrepreneurs are very similar because we’re all looking to push the edge, and I think it’s just such a great example. This has been extremely illuminating and useful, Heidi, so thank you so much for sharing all this stuff.

Physical and mental recovery

Heidi:              I want to add one quick thing—and I promise I’ll make it quick—but one of the biggest trends right now in fitness is going to be recovery. We are absolutely at that point where we’re looking at things like float tanks, hyperbaric chambers, how do you really optimize that recovery time?

And so, think of yourself as a business person, as needing brain health and fitness. What does your brain need to be pushed and then also to recover that energy? And when you look at sports, those sports that are more just reactive, let’s say, soccer for example, you still need that physical recovery for sure, there’s a strategy to it, but it’s much more kind of primal reactions.

If you look at things like tennis or golf—and I do most of my consulting and even personally I like playing golf to challenge my own mind—you’re looking at things that really require this level of intention and focus. We know how much of those games are actually what happens in the mind, that then changes the way the body operates.

If your brain is important to your business, then you absolutely need to be thinking about the same thing as well. How do you integrate all of your energy in a way that’s going to help you to perform.

Yuri:                That’s awesome. And we can talk about this forever. I think it’s going to stimulate some interesting conversations.

I completely agree with you that recovery is the next big trend, because we’re seeing a lot of things like CrossFit, American Ninja Warrior, Orange Three, like these go-go-go high intensity metabolic workouts—and everyone’s laying on the ground after like they are in a coma.

There’s an oscillation to that and I think you’re completely bang on with there being a big need for recovery. That’s why yoga has been so huge—restorative yoga, not like crazy Bikram.

Heidi:              Yeah. But most people still want to do the hot yoga, and it’s like “I do yoga and then I’ll also do the hot yoga” because I don’t like the other kind.” It’s like, “Yeah, because you don’t like slowing down!”

 Yuri:                “I want to feel like I worked out.”

 Heidi:              And if you don’t like doing it, then that’s even more reason why you need to practice. Relaxing is hard work, because we don’t do it—so we’re retraining something that’s so fundamental for our system.

And there’s a lot of great ways to do that. I think when people start getting more familiar with things like heart rate variability training and the different types of meditation that are restorative, that are more suited for entrepreneurs than say, sitting and thinking about nothing for 20 minutes—which is torture for an entrepreneur.

There are ways to do that that will help you center and focus, and learn how to practice that on your own. It just takes training like anything else.

Yuri:                Yeah. Well, before we jump into the rapid five, what’s one technology, or app, or feedback mechanism that we can use to get a better sense of how relaxed we are or how stressed we are?

Heidi:              Yeah. I’m in the process of evaluating some of these, right now my favorite is still HeartMath. The HeartMath Technology, which essentially just gives you a clip that you put on your ear—HeartMath is really only looking at heart beats.

And there are other technologies, there’s a company called Thought Technology, actually out of Canada that has a sensor that incorporates heartbeat as well as temperature and skin conductance, or sweating of the finger as well.

So there’s different ways to do this, depending on how deep you want to go into that process. But I do think that biofeedback, when you’re looking at the beat to beat change of the heart, it’s the number one way to evaluate resilience.

We use it a lot with our athletes, and I think for entrepreneurs, it’s a quick way to just kind of get a quick check—looking under the hood, how’s the heart beating, how’s the breath working for you.

And it will also give you a way to identify your unique breath rate. We know that studies have shown about six breaths per minute is ideal for most people, but it may be a little bit faster, a little bit slower, so you can really customize your experience and then you’re getting feedback through your computer or cellular device that will tell you when you’re in that optimal state.

That feedback is really programming your brain to recognize what that feels like, so you don’t always need the device—you could then do that quick breathing technique for two to three minutes before giving a talk or doing something else that’s important.

But the research really shows we need at least 10 minutes of training time. So, I would recommend everyone really build that in.

10 minutes of training time every morning of breath work with biofeedback, and then, once you’re training that skill just like anything else, then you can do the quick-shift techniques of two to three minutes as needed. But those aren’t going to work very well for you until you’ve kind of build that fundamental ability to get into that state through consistent training.

So, two to three weeks of training, ten minutes a day, would dramatically change most people’s ability to get into that ideal state.

Yuri:                That’s awesome. Six breaths per minute. That’s the kind of a standard? That’s what we’re looking for?

Heidi:              Yeah, that’s the standard and you can do this. It’s about 10 seconds of five seconds breathing in, five seconds breathing out.

Some people like to breathe out a little bit longer than breathing in, the research actually shows that that steady state is optimal for most people. But just like any research, there’s always people that’ll fluctuate on that.

You could breathe in to four, breathe out to five, or breath in to four or breathe out to six. When you’re breathing out, you could think about it as that’s when you’re actually pushing the relaxation brake on your system.

So, breathing out just a little bit longer than you’re breathing in may be more beneficial for some people, but if you have some trauma in your background, like I do, and someone says just take a deep breath—that’s actually really stimulating. I say that because if breath work is challenging for you out there, and a lot of entrepreneurs actually have had some trauma in their history, then do something first to help you get into a relaxed state.

For me, I actually listen to music, or sounds of nature, or I’ll use aromatherapy as I’m breathing, and that really helps me to calm down the system more quickly.

And then I’ll use that same aroma therapy before I give a talk, without even doing the breathing, and it cues me to get back to that state as well. So, you can kind of pair techniques to do it even more quickly.

Yuri:                That’s great. This has been so good, Heidi. Thank you. So, are you ready for the rapid five?

Heidi:              I’m ready. Let me do a couple of deep breaths and then I’ll be ready.

The Rapid-Five Questions

Yuri:                All right, so here we go. Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

Heidi:              I’m very sensitive.

Yuri:                Cool. What is your biggest strength?

Heidi:              Let me just say, my biggest weakness is also my biggest strength, though! You just took me right there so, I didn’t mean to cut you off.

My biggest strength is also my sensitivity. I have learned that sensitivity is both, and so just like stress, it’s all a matter of how you learn to navigate it.

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

Heidi:              Oh gosh, that’s good. This is so terrible, I don’t feel like I’ve gotten really good at anything yet.

Well, you know what, because I’m looking at all these papers, I’m getting way better at kicking out content. But in order to do that, I have to kind of manage my sensitivity.

I’ve gotten really good at prioritizing taking care of myself, and that has allowed me to then fine tune some of these other skills. Because if I am stuck in that stress state, it makes me hypersensitive, and I won’t get any work done because I feel like it’s never good enough.

So, I think prioritizing self care, I’m real close to being a master at that.

Yuri:                That’s great, awesome. What do you do first thing in the morning?

 Heidi:              First thing in the morning, I move my body. For me, I have to get some sort of physical exercise or activity before my brain even comes online.

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

 Heidi:              I’m smiling. I just smiled! I know I’m being successful when I’m smiling.

 Yuri:                That’s great. Well, there you have it guys, Heidi Hanna in the house. Heidi, thank you so much. Where is the best place for people to stay up to date with what you’re up to and your work online?

Heidi:              You can find me at heidihanna.com, that’s my website. And I’m so excited, we have some new programs launching this year, 2018. Hard to believe I’m saying that. People can take a free stress assessment, which is at mystress360.com, and that will actually help you to identify your stress load, your stress lens, and even your reaction type so you can figure out what kind of recovery technique is going to be most effective for you.

That is the one tool I’m most excited about sharing with the world because I do think you really have to understand your unique relationship with stress in order to figure out how to master that. There is no one size fits all approach.

 Yuri:                That’s great. Heidi, once again thank you so much for all the work you do for giving me a couple of epiphanies today. This has been really great for myself and I have no doubt for our listeners as well. Thank you so much for being with us and sharing your awesomeness.

 Heidi:              Thank you and thanks for all the great work you’re doing, I look forward to connecting with you again soon.

 Yuri:                Thank you.

 Heidi:              Thanks.

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Yuri’s take

I don’t know about you, but I had some serious breakthroughs from that discussion with Heidi. And I’m already planning some cool things to help me just do nothing.

And if you have a tough time doing nothing, I challenge you to do nothing with me. Is that good? Is that a challenge? We’re going to do that together? We’re going to do nothing together.

We’re going to bring this simmer down in our body—that pot of water that’s boiling all the time, and always doing, doing, doing. We’re going to do nothing. We’re going to just simmer down and chill.

So one, as I mentioned, when I’m recording these podcasts I’ll take a five to ten minute break every two interviews and I’ll just sit down close my eyes and breathe. That’s something I’ve forced myself to do, because otherwise it just spirals out of control.

One of the things that I suggest to anybody—and this goes back to my nutrition, health, energy coaching because I’ve obviously written the book, The All-Day Energy Diet, which was a number two New York Times bestseller, plug, plug.

One of the things I recommend to people when I’m doing these types of interviews on other podcasts is that when you feel the day’s rushing away from you, when you feel like mid-afternoon you’re just going, going, going, going and you’re not even aware of what’s happening anymore … That’s when you have to turn everything off and just stop and chill out.

The key though, as we’ve identified in this episode, is being aware. Being conscious of what’s happening. Because if you’re not aware of what you’re doing, it’s really tough to identify it and obviously make a positive change.

If you’re somebody who just wants to feel more relaxed, more in tune with who you are, less stressed out, less busy, you need to slow down.

And as I mentioned to Heidi, I’m going to challenge myself to drive five kilometers per hour below the speed limit. That’ll be interesting, that’ll be interesting. I’m usually the one driving like 20 to 40 over the speed limit—not in residential areas, by the way, only on highways. Because I have three kids, and I can’t stand when people drive like maniacs like that.

But I’m going to challenge you to figure out, for you, how are you going to slow down? What’s the one thing that you can implement into your life to help you slow down? Is it meditation? Is it to sit outside and look at the birds? I don’t know.

But I want to challenge you to really figure that out, because when you can build that practice into your daily life, it will really make a difference for you. You’ll feel more connected to what you’re doing, you’ll feel more relaxed, you’ll feel that you have more time, and you’ll feel less rushed.

I think it’s a great message that Heidi was able to share with us, and that’s why I’m so pumped to have her on the podcast. I love what she’s doing, she’s doing amazing work and she’s also worked with ELPGA, NFL—a lot of amazing organizations who need to hear this message just as much as we do.

That’s all for today, thank you so much for taking the time for joining me. I know that Heidi and I had a lot of fun bringing this to you.

And as always, go out there, serve more people, share your message, share your stories, share your magic, continue to be great and do great. And I look forward to seeing you in our next episode.

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Transcription

Hey guys. What’s up? Yuri here. Are you ready to have some fun today? Well, if so, this is not the place. We’re going to have fun today. We’re going to get down to business. I’m going to introduce you to a dear friend of mine who I’ve known almost since I started my business online.

I was introduced to our guest Shawna when I joined my first mastermind group after struggling online for three years—because I thought that I could figure out all this stuff on my own, which apparently, I couldn’t. And then I made the realization, “Hey, you know what? Maybe I should get a coach. Maybe I should follow the proven path.” And that’s when I was introduced to Shawna. We were actually in the same mastermind group and we developed a nice friendship. We’ve kept in contact for almost the last eight years now, which is pretty amazing.

The other thing that’s cool about Shawna is that she’s a Canadian, and I love featuring Canadians on the show because I’m a proud Canadian, and I think Canadians are awesome. I also think Americans and every other culture in this world is awesome as well, but I’ve got a soft spot for my fellow Canucks.

Shawna is doing some really cool things, and what I’m most impressed with about her is that this is her second career. This is her second career, and she’s been crushing it.

She was actually a school teacher for 20 years and then she got into small-group training. Then she had her own boot camp, and then she came online back in about 2009-ish. She has a Bachelor’s in Kinesiology and a Bachelor of Education, in addition to a number of different certifications—which are probably too many to mention, like a lot of other fitness pros.

When she came online, she started building information products, and one of them really took off and became super successful. She is going to share with us exactly how that all happened, along with the number one skill she really believes that most entrepreneurs online must possess in order for their programs and services to do well.

Shawna  was also a guest fitness expert on Spike TV’s Gym Rescue. She’s authored many articles in both local and national publications, and she has been a lead instructor for Fit Body Boot Camp University—where she also helped to create the curriculum for them.

The cool thing here is that Shawna’s in her 50s. She’s got two children and a one-eyed rescue dog.

She’s really awesome. We’ve had a lot of fun hanging out together over the years, and I’m really excited to bring Shawna on the Healthpreneur podcast, because I think what she’s going to share with you will really make a big difference in the way that you look at your business and the way you approach your business moving forward.

With that said, let’s welcome Shawna to the show, and let’s get down into it.

 

Yuri:                Hey, Shawna. How’s it going? Welcome to the Healthpreneur podcast.

 Shawna:         Oh, it’s great to be here, Yuri.

 Yuri:    Yes, it’s always good to connect with you because we’ve known each other for years and we’ve got many similarities, in the sense that we both love dogs, fitness, we’re both Canadian …

 Shawna:         Absolutely.

Shawna’s journey into her second career and the value of coaching

 Yuri:                … lots of good stuff, and you’ve been, I mean, you’ve been doing this for so long now. It’s just great to see your journey over the past several years. Let’s get right into it.

You started off as a one-on-one coach, then you had the boot camps, then you came online. Talk to us about that journey. What was the moment were you decided, “I gotta start to maybe leverage my time a little bit more, and how do I do that?”

 Shawna:         Well, it’s interesting because you missed the first 20 years—you forget that I’m almost a hundred years.

 Yuri:                No…

 Shawna:         I was a school teacher for 20 years, and then I started small-group training, and then fitness boot camp.

In 2009, I realized I couldn’t reach enough people so I went online with my first information product in late 2009, early 2010. I still have one fitness boot camp and have just continued on since there, developing more and more on my programs and coaching. And the rest is history.

Yuri:                What was the moment? Do you remember, was there a pivotal moment where you were working with people in person and you were like, “I can’t do this anymore. I need to figure out a way to leverage myself better, help more people.” Was there a moment in time where there’s like an epiphany for that?

Leveraging and repurposing content

 Shawna:         Yes, based on laziness. I had so many people that were in my fitness boot camp or couldn’t train with me personally that were asking, “Hey, I’m going on holiday and I need some help,” “Hey, I can’t come to your boot camp. I need some help.”

I found myself doing program after program, and it’s like, why am I doing this several times when I can actually do it once and leverage that one program to hit a number of people? Then I realized, hey, I can actually hit people that I don’t even know. I can help people that are lost and at home.

The whole idea is it basically started out with wanting to do less work and help more people, and one way that I was able to leverage my time was by developing that very first program, Female Fat Loss Over 40—which, when I look back at the 1.0 version of, it was horrific.

But it was the best I could do at the time, and that’s the key to success is just go forward.

The Value of Getting A Coach

Yuri:    That’s awesome. How did you get started online? You came online and … I don’t, I mean, for me, I was working with a coach, I think a few years before I met you, and he’s like, “Why don’t you set up a website?” I’m like, “I’ve got no idea how to do any of that so just lead the way.” How did you know what to do when you started online?

Shawna:         I got a coach. Anybody that is listening and is thinking about doing something online or something out of the ordinary or something that you have no skillset for, you just need to buy speed and get a coach.

Back then, I had started coaching with Bedros Keuilian in 2008 for my offline businesses, and at that time, I had spoken to him, and he said, “Hang on. I’m going to be running a mastermind starting in … ” I guess it was 2009, maybe in April when I spoke to him, and he ran his first event, I think it was in November of 2009, and I just hopped on board with him and Craig Ballantyneright from the beginning because they just guided me through because otherwise, it takes a lot longer. You need to springboard to success just by investing in coaching.

Yuri:                Yup, totally, and we were in that group together, which was how we met, I think. Which is pretty cool.

Shawna:         I think so. Yeah, that’s right.

Yuri:                Yeah, and I keep telling people, it’s tough to know the exact ROI going into a coaching group like that but you develop these friendships that last forever and people in the group—we’re still in contact with many of them, and it’s amazing to see nine years later. It’s incredible.

Shawna:         Exactly. Right, and it’s fun to watch how we’ve spread out over the industry, but we still have those solid relationships and we help each other out. The value of coaching is not only the coach and marching orders, but the relationships that you develop with the coach and the people that you’re surrounding yourself with.

I can’t speak more emphatically about surrounding yourself. You need to find the people that are doing the things that you want to do and model and learn from them.

Yuri:                That’s awesome.That’s been one of the most common trends in all the interviews we’ve had so far is finding a mentor, hiring a coach, and really being surrounded by those people who’ve already paved that path. Because if you don’t, you’re just trying to figure things out on your own, and that can take a long time and a lot of wasted time and energy. Great advice.

You started with your digital eBook program. What were some of the initial challenges that you had with that?

Outsourcing, picking your 5%, and copywriting

 Shawna:         Well, initially … The thing is—lots of your audience are probably fitness trainers, and they’re probably amazing trainers, but there is an entirely different skillset in taking your knowledge and putting it online.

Initially, for me, it was just those technological things, “How do I do this,” that sort of thing. I’m actually not sure if I would change that because you want to learn the process, you want to know what goes into making an online program, but you don’t have to do it all.

I think the thing that I would do sooner is maybe outsource a little bit more. Of course for anybody starting out, finances are a little bit challenging, probably, because you don’t know the return on your program. But with Fiverr and 99designs and all that kind of thing, there’s so many services out there that are really affordable—and a coach or a mentor can put you in touch with those things so that you’re not doing every single thing.

The challenge for me, at first, was I hooked up everything to ClickBank and then to AWeber. It’s great that I learned the process, but I think just an understanding of the process is necessary. You don’t necessarily have to do every single thing.

 Yuri:                Yeah, that’s good advice. Of all the things that you didn’t like doing or realized you didn’t need to do, what was the one or two things that, as you started to get some traction online, you realized, “These are the big needle movers, and these are the things I need to keep doing myself?”

 Shawna:         Well, I mean, that’s the big thing is making that list of, these are the jobs that I need to do, and I’m picking out the 5%.

There’s very few things that I actually have to do. I don’t need to build my website. I don’t need to connect everything to ClickBank. I don’t need to do the technology.

But what I do need to do is write the sales copy. I need to be connecting with my list. I need to be developing a list. I need to meet people, introduce myself to people so that they know who I am, that sort of thing.

The things that I don’t need to do are, really, I don’t need to do that technology aspect. I don’t need to know the technical end of it. I need to trust in someone that will connect those dots for me so that I can put my energy into creating a great sales letter, a great product, that sort of thing.

Yuri:                Writing sales copy, connecting with your audience, obviously creating something of value for them, which you’ve done numerous times. What would you say to people who don’t like writing copy? Let’s say we’re talking to a doctor or trainer or artist—a technician like we all are—who doesn’t want to do that stuff, but they still want to build their presence online. What do you say to that?

Shawna:         The best copywriter is the person that is the most passionate about the program. I really feel like everybody has to take a stab at writing sales copy, and then maybe outsourcing it. But I really feel like everyone should have a hand in the writing of their own sales copy. You can get help with it, you can hire a professional, but you have to be careful because unless you’re paying top dollar, if you just do a bit of studying you’re probably going to do just as good a job as an entry-level sales copywriter.

Yuri:                Sure. 

Shawna:         I feel like it’s one of those things that you need to study. And there are great courses, but some of the best sales copy is just … go to other programs that are doing well and study what’s going on in their sales copy.

And then don’t copy it, but model it. Look at the template and model it.

Yeah, I do some information marketing coaching as well, and that is always one of the hardest things that actually should be done first. And I’d to just throw this out there—a lot of people go ahead and build a great program, but then they go to write the sales copy, and it’s more difficult. Whereas if you start with a sales copy, then you can build your program a little bit that way.

Yuri:                Yeah, that makes sense. It’s funny because starting with the marketing before the product is backwards for a lot of people because we’re all so creative. We’re like, “I’ve got this amazing idea. I just want to put it out there,” and then it’s like, “Why does no one want it?”

For everyone listening, we’re trying to prevent and stop you from in making all the mistakes that we made back in the day.

Shawna:         Right, yes, yes.

Yuri:                That’s why we’re here. That’s why we’re here.

Shawna:         That’s right.

Building a better mousetrap

Yuri:                What’s your process look like? Without turning into this a sales copy writing workshop, what does your process look like when you’re sitting down to write some copy? Just so people can kind of get a sense of, “okay, it doesn’t have to be that complicated.”

What does your process look like? You’ve got this idea. How do you start to flush it out and what are some things that our listeners can keep in mind with getting them started? Or if they’re a little bit more advanced, some things that they can keep in mind to make their sales copy more effective.

Shawna:         Well, It’s basically building a better mousetrap.

“Why would somebody want to buy what I have to offer over what’s already available? I need to have something that’s innovative and different, not a me-too program or product because especially when I’m just starting out, there’s some big names that people are going to probably want to gravitate towards.”

So you have to have something new and different, what is called a hook.

What makes your program different, better or more appealing than what’s already out there? You have to have the hook, and you have to know who your perfect buyer is.

Creating that avatar, giving that person a name, a job, visualizing exactly who that person is so that when you’re writing your sales copy, that person on the other end is saying, “Oh my goodness, they’re speaking exactly to me.”

Those are two really important things. And I know that the beginners I’ve worked with—say they’re building a fitness program, for example. “Well, it’s for men and women, it’s for people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s because I don’t want to eliminate anyone.”

When you make something that’s for everyone—you really make something that’s for no one, so it’s better to go narrow and deep in your niche and say, “This is for this person at this age group” and eliminate, polarize your crowd so that some people click away and say, “This is not for me.”

Because then, there’ll be some people that say, “Man, this is for me!” But I mean, you don’t want to be targetting 35-year-old women that play chess. That’s a little narrow, so …

 Yuri:                You never know. 

Shawna:         You never know. I just threw that out there. Maybe, who knows, that might be a huge market.

But there’s a little bit of research that goes into figuring out who you want to speak to and finding that person. And then figuring out what else is out there that solves that person’s problem and then how you can solve it better, faster, more innovatively to get that person to buy from you as opposed to what’s already on the market.

Yuri:                Yeah, that’s really good advice. There’s so many little nuggets in there, guys. If you missed any of that, rewind it, play it at half speed.

Just a couple of things I want to touch on. Narrow down your niche. We talked about this several times. We’re in a very competitive space, obviously, so at the core, you and I do the same stuff. We help people lose weight, we help them get in shape, and so does everyone else in our space.

And as you mention, if you’re coming up with something, it’s gotta be unique, different, better, faster, and more innovative. So that’s really important.

If you’re listening to this, that’ll save you a lot of time if you just start thinking with that as a framework to begin with.

Speaking of niche, you really hit it out of the park with one of your more recent programs called Lose Your Menopause Belly. Talk to us about that—how did that happen? Because I know that you guys were at the top of ClickBank for a while with that product, and I think a lot of people were doing really well promoting it.

What was the difference there? What was the real inflection point with that specific offer versus some of the previous ones for you.

Keep it simple, stupid

Shawna:         That program is called My Bikini Belly, and full transparency, I didn’t write the sales copy.

There was a bit of falling out with my sales copywriter, and no one is going to get thrown under the bus, but we are no longer working together. He did a great job in writing that copy. What differentiated that program from others on the market is its simplicity.

In the offer—this is another mistake that beginners make—you know those commercials about the Ginsu knives that, “You get this and this and this, and then I’m going to throw in this, and I’m going to double your value,”?

What we did with My Bikini Belly is we made it very, very simple. The offer was super simple, so there was no confusion, and it really targeted in on women over 35 that had, it solved a very specific problem of what was called menopause belly.

Since that program in 2015, what do we all see now everywhere, Yuri? I mean, right now, there’s a huge launch going on, menopause belly. Everybody has jumped on the bandwagon for using menopause belly, that term, and hitting women over 35, over 45, over 50. That just turned out to be such a huge demographic.

It’s funny because I started with that exact demographic in 2010. Who would’ve thunk that my page and being the age that I am.

You always think, “Oh, it’s awful getting older,” but the fact is, that probably makes me the most credible to sell that program.

So, a couple things. It was a simple program. It was represented by someone, me, who’s that exact, fits that demographic, so it was credible.

Yuri:                Yup, that’s really good advice. The cool thing too is that you’re serving the same market, for the most part, that you were years prior. But now, it’s just a slightly different angle, slightly different hook, and it’s stuck. It really made sense for them.

When you say, just so everyone knows, the simplicity of the offer, you’re basically saying you didn’t throw in like 20 bonuses when you buy now type of thing, right?

Shawna:         Exactly. While those can be appealing, people are more confused than ever, so you just want something very simple and straightforward. Yes, you want to be having terrific value with your offer, but sometimes you just complicate it, and when people get confused or overwhelmed, they will not click the buy button.

It worked because it was a very straightforward and clear with a clear call-to-action, plus it was a low-barrier offer. It went for $15, so it was really an irresistible offer.

And then, of course, you can be adding value with your upsell flow by adding nutrition, adding a short, seven-day solution, adding other workouts, that sort of thing. You can be adding that value in an order bump and in upsells, but you want to make what you’re offering amazingly clear.

This is what we’re offering, this is what the benefit is.

Yuri:                Awesome. Good advice, and it’s funny because when we both started, it seems like so long ago now, it was almost the opposite. It was almost like, slap them with bonuses until they’re blue in the face. And I think that kind of fed the monster, and now people want simplicity, so that’s really good advice.

Looking back over the journey—and obviously, the journey isn’t over—what’s been the biggest challenge you’ve ever faced in your business, and what did you learn from that experience?

Being ‘everywhere’ on social media and Dean Jackson’s cow milking analogy

Shawna:         Recently, I feel like the industry is changing a lot because the buyer is getting so savvy. Your Gmail, the way it’s configured—your emails can end up in junk, in the promo folder. It’s changing quite a bit, so just navigating and learning how to use social media … You really have to be everywhere now.

You can’t just be in a buyer’s inbox or a prospect’s inbox. Although you want to have their email and be hitting them with email. You have to be on social media, you have to be on Instagram, on Facebook, doing Facebook Lives, maybe on a podcast.

And it’s a double-edged sword.

I feel like it separates the true pros that are the real meal deal from the scammers, and we all know that there are people out there that might have something that’s not as genuine, but if you’ve got a great brand and you live your message through social media and email, then you can create a more meaningful bond with your listeners, with your buyers and followers.

Whereas before, you could have a list of a hundred thousand people, you could send an email and it would get delivered. Now, it just won’t get delivered and you don’t get the opens.

You know what I’m talking about.

Yuri:                Yeah, totally. That’s such a good point, and it’s so interesting because the pace at which things are changing now is incredible. You said brand, and I think we are in a day and age where direct response and brand go hand in hand together.

If you just do one or the other, you’re really going to miss the boat. I love how you talked about doing social because you can’t just email people anymore. A lot of people are either not receiving the emails or they don’t take action on them.

A lot of people now do most of the research before even considering buying something, so they’re going to Amazon or they’re looking online, they’re looking to see if you’re a scam artist or a reputable company. So, as you said, being everywhere is important.

But how do you navigate that? It’s a challenge because people want a bit more simplicity in their business so they have more free time instead of working 28 hours a day—how do you navigate being everywhere without burning yourself out?

Shawna:         Well, the beauty of being in this business a long time is I have a ton of content over the years, and I’m really learning how to repurpose content.

I’ve got some strategies to go, “Alright, I’ve got something on my blog,” or if I do a Facebook Live, “Alright, I’m going to do a YouTube practice video first,” because anyone doing Facebook Live knows it’s a little unnerving to turn on the camera and go.

Oftentimes, what I’ll do is I’ll do a three-minute YouTube video first to practice, and then I’ll go live, and then I’ll take part of that and put it in Instagram, and then I’ll take the YouTube video and I’ll put it on my blog. I’m just going to be starting a podcast, so I’m going to take that same idea and then do a podcast with it.

It’s just a matter of taking one piece of content and then duplicating it and having some support along the way. I’m just learning, even now—and I guess I’m a real slow learner on getting help—outsourcing. And saying, “Okay, this person is going to take this content and put it on the podcast, this person is going to put it on YouTube for me.”

Taking those small jobs—you know how they are, Yuri. It’s like, “Oh, it only takes 10 minutes, I’ll just do it.” Then all those 10 minutes adds up to the 24-hour day.

Yuri:                Yup.

Shawna:         Right? Outsourcing some of those smaller things. Our job is to create the content, and then if we can get virtual help or administrative help within our circle to do those rinse and repeat jobs so that that we’re not always doing the blog post, putting it up on YouTube, that sort of thing.

Our job is to create the content and then become content-creating machines, and then our viewers are seeing us. “Oh. I see them on YouTube. I see them here. I see them there.” You’re hitting your audience from a variety of modalities, and you become all the more reputable. It’s like, “Wow. He or she must be something else. I keep seeing them. They’re just showing up everywhere.”

Yuri:                Yup, that’s really good. I don’t know if you know Dean Jackson. He runs I Love Marketing with Joe Polish?

 Shawna:         Yes.

 Yuri:                He’s a good friend and such a smart mind, and he talks about this concept of the self-milking cow where we are essentially cows. We’re the thought leaders, the idea generators, the content creators, and we’ve got more milk than we could ever supply to the market, I mean, we have more milk than people can ever know what to do with.

It’s tough. If you think of a cow trying to milk themselves with these hooves, it’s tough to do. So when you mention finding people to support you, where they can take your content from YouTube, repurpose it on the blog, it’s almost like they’re the farmers extracting the milk from you. And the more of those farmers you have around you, the more you’re able to just share and share and share.

So yeah, it was a cool analogy that came up as you’re were talking about that.

Shawna:         It’s exactly true, and the thing is, when you surround yourself with those people—those are their unique abilities. It takes them a shorter amount of time, but my unique ability is not doing the technological aspect of my business.

It might take me six hours to do something that takes my webmaster 10 minutes, and so that goes for all the aspects of … It’s so important to list, what are the jobs that I need to do?

What’s the 5% that I actually need to do that’s going to move the lever forward in my business, and then I can empower other people around me to do the things that they have a unique ability to do.

Yuri:                Awesome. Love it. One more question before we jump into the rapid five. What do you think has been the number one key to your success?

Shawna:         Failure. Honestly? I am awesome, and was it Churchill that said, “success is going from failure to failure without the loss of enthusiasm”?

Yuri:                Yeah, totally. That’s the best quote of all time.

 Shawna:         That is me. It’s like, “Okay, well, that didn’t work. What do I learn from that, and what do I take forward to build that better mousetrap … ”

The other thing is, I’m really passionate about helping women over 40 in particular. And so, for example, say I had a great idea about financial stuff, and I had a great product. But I had to get up every day and read stats and do things in the financial world, and it’s not my passion—I would soon lose enthusiasm.

It would just become work, but when you’re passionate about what you do, it doesn’t feel like work, which sometimes can get problematic because then you do work a lot, but I would say my biggest success trait is being able to fail and bounce back. I’m just advising all your listeners to make sure that they’re in an area of passion.

Don’t be chasing dollars. Chase your passion, and the dollar will follow.

Yuri:                Yup, totally. It’s like a magnet. I refer to this concept I call delusional optimism where you almost have to be, you have to get to a point where you’re just like, “Okay, I just got knocked down. Let’s get right back up,” and it’s like, “All right. This is going work it, it didn’t work it. All right, let’s keep on going and try something else.”

And everyone around is like, “Are you crazy, man? What’s going on with you? How many times do you have to fail before something actually works out?” but I think that’s what separates us from everyone else who doesn’t do what we do in the entrepreneurial world.

Shawna:         Right, because the problem is, you never know when you’re just at the cusp of success. It could be just around the corner and likely is.

So when you’ve invested so much, it’s just like you have to have this undying confidence in yourself. It’s not like I’ve failed miserably every time.

And this is how everybody goes. You’re always taking these baby steps forward, and so then when you look back, it’s like, “Man, I’ve come a long way.”

Yuri:                Yup. Totally. That’s great advice. That’s so good. I mean, that’s why I wanted to have you on the show. That’s why I’ve wanted to interview all these amazing entrepreneurs because no one’s figured it out.

We’re all just failing and learning a little bit every single time.

I think it’s so important, especially in today’s day and age where everyone wants that overnight success. Because we’re looking at what everyone’s doing on Instagram or Facebook, and it’s like, “Oh my God, that’s what I want,” and we don’t realize that it took them forever to get there. Still, it’s the highlight of real. You’re not looking at all the crap that’s happening behind the scenes.

So yeah, thank you for bringing some perspective once again to our listeners.

Shawna:         My pleasure.

The Rapid-Five Questions

Yuri:                Are you ready for the rapid five?

Shawna:         No, I’m a little nervous, but yes, I’m ready.

Yuri:                You got no prior knowledge of these questions. Whatever comes to mind is the right answer, so here we go. Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

Shawna:         Biggest weakness. There’s just so many. What do I pick? Well, the thing that hits me right away is just social situations.

I feel like such a social misfit, and I know that I can put it on pretty well, and people would think, “Oh, you must be an extrovert. You’re so comfortable in these situation.”

I think for me, I don’t know if it’s a weakness or a challenge that I have to overcome, but it is just constantly stepping out of that introvert personality. Nobody gets anywhere by standing on the wall and being quiet. I feel like that that is a constant challenge for me—just stepping up and stepping into situations that an extrovert would just love.

And as an introvert, it’s just like, “Oh my gosh. Keep, just keep going. The rest of you will catch up.”

Yuri:                Well, it’s funny. I would not have said that about you, knowing what I know about you. So thank you for sharing that. Number two, what is your biggest strength?

Shawna:         Resilience, I feel like. I feel like you can knock me down, and then I will not stay down.

Yuri:                Nice.

Shawna:         I will always find the silver lining and say, “Okay, well, this was a challenge, but these are the good things. I’m going to go with the good things, whatever the silver lining is, and then build on that.”

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

Shawna:         Hmm. Oh, man. These are hard questions, Yuri. Dangerously good? I think building relationships with people. I think because, obviously, we’re Canadian, Yuri. 

Yuri:                Of course.

Shawna:         We’re very genuine and sincere people, and I feel like I have a good connection with all the people that I’ve had the opportunity to meet within the industry. I feel like I have good relationships with them, and I think that that has really helped my business.

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

Shawna:         First thing in the morning, I have some quiet time to reflect on gratitude, and I move from gratitude to what the big thing I want to achieve that day is. And dog walking.

Yuri:                Nice.

Shawna:         It kind of happens all at once.

Yuri:                Cool. I love, I find that dog walking is like a meditation for me.

Shawna:         Absolutely, and I go a lot. In the middle of the day, I need some … I need get up and move from my laptop, and then I get such great ideas.

Yuri:                Yup. I was actually thinking of a dog-walking business. If I wasn’t doing what I’m doing now, I would probably be walking dogs, I think, for 20 bucks an hour. I’d be totally broke, but it’d be awesome.

Shawna:         But you would be zen-like.

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

Shawna:         I know I’m being successful when I get feedback from my customer, from the person. I get goosebumps when I get a Facebook message, a post, a text of other people’s success. When I’ve touched somebody’s life, whether it be through fitness or nutrition or info marketing information—any way that I’ve helped someone, and they are achieving success, that is my success.

 Yuri:                Awesome. Love it. That’s great. Shawna, this has been a lot of fun. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us. What is the best place for people to follow what you’re up to online?

Shawna:         You know what? I just started a free Facebook Group called Healthy Secrets for Women 40-plus, but I vet every person, so women can only get in that group-

 Yuri:                Sorry, men.

 Shawna:         That’s a great place, though, to, whether you’re in information marketing or whether you’re in fitness, just to see what’s going on. That is an amazing group that we’ve started.

I’m also on Instagram, just Shawna, Facebook Shawna Kaminski. I think I might be the only one in those with that name, so

Yuri:                That’s pretty good.

Shawna:         Yeah, I’m lucky that way, although there are some imposters, which really means I’ve made it, Yuri.

Yuri:                Yeah, exactly.

 Shawna:         I’m pretty happy about that.

 Yuri:                Then you can you just own the domain shawna.com.

 Shawna:         Shawnak, actually, it’s shawnak.com.

 Yuri:                Exactly. Cool, so Instagram, Facebook, and the Facebook Group.

Shawna, once again, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to join us and sharing a bit about your journey. Thank you for your friendship over the years and for all the amazing work you continue to do and all the people you continue to serve.

It’s awesome, so thank you so much.

Shawna:         It has been a pleasure. Thank you, Yuri.

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Yuri’s Take

There you have it. Another great interview with Shawna this time around, and I hope you’ve enjoyed this one.

It’s always fun reconnecting with friends who I haven’t been able to connect with in person for a while, and to be very honest with you, that’s actually one of the selfish reasons I do this podcast, is because it gives me the opportunity to reconnect with people that I really have a dear friendship with or I kind of hold them dearly in my heart. Or they’re just people I want to connect with.

Here’s a little tip for you guys. If you want to grow your business like Shawna and I have mentioned in this episode, you need to be surrounded by other people who are doing what you want to do.

There’s no other way around it.

It doesn’t matter what your business model is, it doesn’t matter how you want to build things, it doesn’t matter what product you’re selling. The fastest way to accelerate the results is to get around other people who are doing what it is that you want to do. And that means being part of a group, attending an event, hiring a coach.

All of those things are going to help you, they’re essentially helping buy success. You’re buying speed.

I tell you this because, as I mentioned before, trying to figure this out on your own is not going to happen. It’s just not going to happen. Well, it will happen and it can happen, it’s just going to take a lot longer.

I’ve mentioned my story before where I struggled for three years, trying to do things on my own. It didn’t happen. It did happen very slowly. When I look at a lot of other people that I know in our space and I see their success, I really congratulate them because they were smart out of the gates—you find the right coaching.

Even if you don’t have the money, there comes a point where you’re going to get to a crossroad and there’s going to be an opportunity presented to you.

It’s going to seem uncomfortable. It’s going to seem like a stretch, but I can tell you, if it feels right in your gut, if it feels right in your soul where you’re saying to yourself, “I know this is the right person to guide me,” or, “I know this is the right opportunity for me,” but you’re a little bit hesitant because of the financial component … As long as it’s not way out of left field and you have to remortgage your house, I’m going to encourage you to follow that.

Because if you’re following the right kind of guidance and the right kind of coach, you will get a return on your investments.

It may take a little bit longer than you want, I don’t really know. It depends on the nature of your business and the program, but what I can say from experience is that every single time I have invested in a coach, I’ve invested in an event to round myself with other people, every single time it’s paid off in multiple ways.

At our Healthpreneur Live event back in September, one of my presentations, I was talking about this journey of every single event I went to and I showed on my slides, I’m like, “I went to this event, then this happened, and this happened from that, and this happened, and this happened and … ” and it literally connected the dots of the most impactful decisions I made, and it all came back to people.

Every single thing I’ve experienced in my business, The New York Times Bestselling books, Dr. Oz, all this other stuff, all the success we’ve enjoyed, the only reason I’ve been able to enjoy the success is because of the people, the relationships that I’ve built over the past 12 years.

Please, I urge you, this is one of the most important things you can do for your business, and if it’s uncomfortable, if you have to get on an airplane, if you have to stretch yourself financially, I’m telling you from the bottom of my heart, it will make a difference for you.

You will find a way. You will find a way to make it work because when you pay, you pay attention. And as an entrepreneur, when you put yourself out there, we sink or swim, and I have no doubt that you will swim because I know who you are at the core. I don’t necessarily know you personally, but at your core, I know that you can make magic happen when you put your mind to something. So never, never doubt that.

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Follow Shawna Kaminski At:

https://shawnak.com/

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Free Healthpreneur Health Profit Secrets Book

Transcription:

Hey, welcome back to the podcast, it’s Yuri here, hope life is going great. It is the end of January, which means that the weather is getting a little bit warmer, which is awesome, but it’s still pretty cold. But it’s all good, right? Because this too shall pass, good or bad. It’s all cyclical.

So, in today’s episode I’m going to walk you through the three biggest sales boosters. No matter what you’re selling, no matter what you’re offering, the following three things are going to make a massive difference in the conversion or the response to your offer.

If you’re selling a $10 eBook—which I strongly recommend you don’t do—or if you’re offering higher-end coaching—which I strongly recommend you do do—or supplements or anything else in between … These three can be applied to any type of offer.

So if you want better response from anything you put out there—this is the way to go about it.

The first booster

Now, let me give you a bit of context. If you’ve ever done a product launch or if you’ve ever seen product launches, typically there’s a couple of things that happen there, right? There are a couple videos that are put out, then there’s the sales video, and then there is a finite amount of time where people can join the program. After that, it’s closed down for a year or six months, or however long.

So typically what people see during product launches or any kind of promotion—maybe it’s a 48 hour promotion, whatever you want—is that the greatest number of sales come in near the deadline. You’ve got a sale that ends at midnight tonight and you’re sending out your last email at 9:00pm, huge surge in sales.

That’s because one of the greatest motivators for human behavior is scarcity.  So that’s the first big sales booster—if you can inject scarcity into what you’re doing, you will always have a greater response. So how do we do that?

Well, we can inject scarcity in the form of a deadline—this ends tonight at midnight—or in the form of quantity—we only have x number of spots for this workshop, we only have x number of copies left of this program—and that’s it. That simple addition will make a massive difference to the number of people that take action, it’s crazy.

If you haven’t done this, please try it. If you’re working in clients in person or virtually, throw it in—“I can only take on 20 people.” Now all of a sudden there’s a finite limit, people are going to be motivated to take action.

The second booster

Now the second booster is a really cool addition to any higher end offer. Think about this. I love flying—as I’ve probably mentioned way too many times—and I usually fly business class, that’s just the way I roll. I refuse to sit in economy anymore unless it’s under an hour and a half flight or so.

So why do people fly first class, or business class? Well, there’s an ego boost, there’s a sense of significance—and I’ll be very honest with you, there’s that nonsense going on as well, even on my part. Which is pretty stupid, but that’s the way it is.

But here’s the thing. You’re part of an exclusive cabin, there’s only so many spots—tying back into scarcity—and you’re part of this upper echelon, if you will. None of this stuff really makes sense if you think about it—it’s irrational—but it’s exclusive.

And when it’s exclusive you can charge more and you attract better clients into your business.

So how can you do this in your business? Well, exclusivity on a $10 eBook is probably not the right sales booster to use. But if you offer some type of high-end coaching group, then exclusivity basically says, “Well, this is only for these types of people and you have to apply to be accepted. Nobody can just walk on in.”

Another example of this is our Healthpreneur live events which we throw every September—which by the way, if you haven’t checked out, you’ve got to check out, assuming you meet our criteria.

See what I’m doing there? So if you want to check it out, healthpreneurgroup.com/live is our live events in September. It’s a maximum of 150 people. It’s our annual global gathering of amazing health and fitness coaches, entrepreneurs and practitioners, who come together to take their businesses to new levels.

But again, part of the magic of that experience is the curation that we do. So we don’t just let anyone walk in. We have you fill out an application. We review that application. If you fit our criteria, you’re in. See how that works?

I’ll give you another example. We have a great workshop—which is actually coming up in less than a month—called the Health Business Accelerator. I talked about it a little bit last week.

What we do in this case is we limit it to 20 people. Because I can only service and personalize this delivery to 20 people—otherwise it just gets out of hand and I can’t give you the personal attention that you deserve.

So we say it’s limited to 20 people, and again, it’s by application only. It’s a $4995 investment, so $5000 to join us. You can’t just give us the money. You have to apply, and if we approve the application—based on meeting our ideal criteria—then you can complete the registration.

You see how this works? We’re using exclusivity as a takeaway. Because we often want more of what we can’t have. I tell my kids, “Hey guys, you can’t have a brownie after dinner tonight,” and then they want it even more. Right?

If we say, “You can’t do this,” people tend to want it more.  So exclusivity plays on that big time. If you have a higher end offer, exclusivity is a great way to position it.

The third booster

The third sales booster is, lo and behold, called empathy. Wow, what an idea, right? Empathize with your prospects. This really comes down to understanding them.

Here’s a simple exercise for you to do. I want you to write down the fears and frustrations of your ideal prospects and clients. What are they currently experiencing and going through that is frustrating them? What are they afraid of encountering in the future? Then write down what their desires are.

You’re just writing down the frustrations, the things that they’re currently experiencing that are holding them back, that are standing in their way, and you’re also writing down the things that they want to achieve.

Now this becomes a foundational inventory type of process to go through, and I recommend to our mastermind clients, keep this in front of you—like on your wall—because the more you do this, the more you understand your audience. The more you can use that language and those fears, frustrations and desires in your communication.

When you can tell them, “Hey, I understand you perhaps even better than you understand yourself.” Or, “I can understand the challenges you’re going through, because I too have been there.” Or, “I have a client who went through the same thing.” Now we’re using empathy.

In order to empathize, you have to understand where people are at.  In order to understand where people are at, you just have to spend a little bit of time either speaking with them, or based on what you know of them, writing down all of the fears and frustrations and desires they’re currently going through, so that when you build out your messaging and communications, you can use that to better resonate with them.

When they feel understood by you, they will move to action.

Review and Wrap Up

So let’s review, the three biggest sales boosters: scarcity, put a deadline, limit the quantity; exclusivity, use a takeaway, make an exclusive group that only certain people can apply to join; and use empathy, which is basically just telling people, “Hey, I understand what you’re going through. I can resonate with that. I’ve been through that myself. I have helped other people in your position.” When people feel understood, they will move to action.

Sound good?

Now, if you enjoy this type of stuff and you want to go a little bit deeper, we have a great new free online training webinar called The Seven Figure Health Business Blueprint. I’m going to walk you through five secrets to building a hassle-free seven figure online health business, and I’m also going to show you the nine business accelerators to help you get there even faster.

It’s completely free and I’m revealing some of my biggest revelations in the past couple of months—some big shifts in terms of where I see businesses going and some of the biggest mistakes you need to avoid. And obviously, laying out a blueprint that is working like gangbusters, that you can employ as well.

So you can join us for free over at healthpreneurgroup.com/9, that’s just the number 9. And you can register for free on that page right there.

I hope this finds you well. Hope it makes sense. Hope you put them into action.

Have an awesome day. Continue to go out there, be great, do great.

 

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