Success Secrets ot the Institute for the Psychology of Eating with Emily Rosen

Transcription

Have you heard of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating? Well, they’re an amazing institute for certifying coaches, health coaches, nutritionists, with understanding the psychology of eating, all right.

More than just nutrients, more than just what’s coming in, but it’s about how we approach our food and our relationship we have with it. It’s such a great market that has really been built largely as a result of this amazing company. My good friends, Marc David and Emily Rosen, are the co-founders of that company, and I’m excited today to have Emily on the show. In fact, this is an interview that I’m pulling out in the archives and I’m bringing to you because we’re going to discover some of the success secrets that have led the Institute for the Psychology of Eating to become one of the most well-known certifying bodies for health coaches and health practitioners who want to add the skillset to their coaching.

It’s such a great, great tool to have in your toolbox considering that most people have emotional eating issues, right? Whether they’re aware of it or not. Emily, I’ve known for … I don’t even know, like almost, I don’t know, seven or eight years. What I love about Emily is that she is an amazing person. If you follow her on Instagram, you’ll see some of the most incredible poetry you’ve ever heard in your life. Check out Emily Rosen on Instagram, incredible. We’ve known each other for a long time. We’ve hung out.

She’s attended some of my masterminds and we’ve been at different events together. We’ve had dinner and lots of good conversations but she is a super smart entrepreneur, like I’m talking like she was the person who just figured everything out on her own with the right coaching and stuff in the early years and running Facebook ads, the operations, the marketing, everything. Then, she was just like, “Listen, I’m going to figure this stuff out,” and she did. She’s going to share some amazing insights in this interview with you with respect to what it takes to build a successful business.

I’m really excited to have Emily Rosen on the show. Without any further ado, let’s welcome her to the podcast.

Emily Rosen:                      Yeah. It’s so good to be here, Yuri.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah. It’s always fun to connect with you. We have a lot of fun and good time at the hangouts, Marc, your other half is a lot of fun to hang out with as well. I mean, you had done an amazing, amazing business with the Institute for the Psychology of Eating and what was … I mean, going back to the genesis of that, like what was your impetus for getting into business for yourselves?

Was there something where you’re like, “My God, I cannot stand working for other people”? Or is this something else that was really a big driver for you?

 

How Emily developed her business

Emily Rosen:                      Sure. My parents 0wn their own business, they’re practitioners, so I grew up not knowing that that was unique. I have a degree in fine arts so I always imagined being a solopreneur though I didn’t necessarily have that terminology. Then, when I left the art world and entered into nutrition world, I had a private practice.  I also had some periods in my life where I worked for major corporations and companies.

There are advantages to it. My nature, I do better working for myself and when Marc and I partnered around the institute, it really started out with me just being in charge of bringing the institute online and I didn’t know what it would grow into. I didn’t have as much strategic planning. I didn’t identify as an entrepreneur. I just knew that I wanted to get this work out there in a bigger way and this was the vehicle to do it.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Very cool. You also built like a massive business around … I mean, what some people might, like from the outside looking in, might think of is more of like a slightly intangible. It’s amazing what you’ve done with the psychology of eating. It’s not like a hardcore tangible, like hey, lose 20 pounds in this. How did you guys take that and really make it to what it is today? I don’t know if I’m asking the right question here but did you do something that’s more of an intangible to make it so concrete, so valuable in your customer’s eyes?

 

The challenges she faced and how she reverse-engineered the process

Emily Rosen:                      It’s a great question and I think it’s something that we still often talk about because we have this experience that  just yesterday I got back, we had a live event, and I got back all the testimonial videos and I was watching them. Repeatedly, what people would say in their interview was, “I just read this video. I just saw this video or just read this blog, and it gave language to an experience I was having in my internal world that I hadn’t been able to articulate.”

There was this like very common theme of that. I mean, we all have a relationship with food, whether or not we look at it or not, we make choices about what we eat based on our beliefs. We’re trying to bring attention to that conversation because it hasn’t always had attention, and there’s always been this focus on what to eat and when to eat, and I have a background in nutritional science. I think that information is incredibly valuable but I also had an eating disorder for 10 years that was very severe and I started looking at the food piece of it.

Actually, the deeper I went into the food piece, the less relief I experienced in my relationship with food and a lot of people can relate with that. A lot of people can relate to the idea of, “I know what to do but I just don’t do it or I’m doing everything right but I’m not getting the results that I was expecting, and I’m doing everything. I’m manipulating my macronutrients and I’m exercising in this way or that way.” I can speak to that gap in their experience as being the psychology, the driver behind why it’s not working for you in the ways that you maybe thought it would.

People who can relate to that can very much relate to that. There are a lot of people who can’t but there are more and more people who are struggling around food and body than ever before. I think there’s many reasons why and so we speak to that in a way that anybody who has struggled can immediately just connect with it and go, “That’s so me.” I’m the person at night where I planned on doing everything that I read about all day long.

Then, at night I find myself in a dark room eating three pints of ice cream, what is driving that behavior? That’s not necessarily a food issue.

Yuri Elkaim:                         I mean, the brilliance to that is every single human being for the most part is dealing with some degree of that.

Emily Rosen:                      Yeah.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Whether it’s ice cream or pizza, or whatever it is, we all have those hang ups for those issues, for those beliefs, and the brilliance I think is as you articulated earlier, it’s like you’re giving language or you’re … I guess you’re communicating to people what they cannot even express for themselves and that in a language of copyrighting in a lot of times, that’s pretty much the essence of influence.

Emily Rosen:                      Sure.

Yuri Elkaim:                         I guess you’re not doing it like in a copyrighting strategic fashion but you just really understand your market really well.

Emily Rosen:                      Yeah. I think I understand it for the perspective of having lived it and Marc understands it more from the perspective of having been a clinician for 30 years, and working with some of the most brilliant minds. You had to see the practice on Wall Street in New York City and would work with high powered people who had everything at their disposal, but were still struggling intensely with food or with symptom that wouldn’t go away.

He was working as a functional nutritionists and giving them meal plans and they weren’t doing it. I had the same experience. I worked in corporate weight loss for about seven years and we just see the same issues over and over again where people would experience temporary relief but it was not sustainable, and it’s not always the sexiest sell but we work out our bodies and we manipulate what we’re eating, but we don’t always learn to master our mind and it’s running the show for so many people.

A lot of people can’t even differentiate between the thoughts that they’re having and really who they are. A lot of the work we do, even though the food is the doorway, is the portal into their inner world, it changes their whole life. In a lot of ways, even though we’re in the health or nutrition space, we do see our company as evolving consciousness, about changing the conversation about who you are as an individual and who you wanted to be in the world, because I think if we’re in touch with the greater cause or mission, or a desire to do something bigger with our life, it can be challenging to inspire someone to be more healthy, or to change how they’re eating if they’re not in touch with a really important reason why.

 

Personal growth, mindset, and seeing lessons in challenges

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah. That’s amazing, and you’ve done an amazing job. Looking at the trajectory of your business from let’s say day one to now, obviously everything hasn’t been like peaches and roses. There’s been ups and downs like with most businesses, do you remember a time like what was like in your mind like the biggest challenge you have ever faced, and how did you end up overcoming that?

Emily Rosen:                      Yeah, so many. Yeah.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Well, that’s what the truth is.

Emily Rosen:                      Yes, yeah. Yeah, it’s like really. No, I think so a couple of things when I say about this, one of the things that I find, and what I respect so much about you, and I see you putting this into practice and why I’m so excited that you’re teaching about business development for conscious entrepreneurs, is because a lot of people will go to medical school for like six years, or they’ll go become a dietician, or they’ll read every book on health and wellness.

Then, when it comes to creating a health and wellness business, they want a quick fix, or they want to be able to send an e-mail and for people to buy stuff, and that’s just not how it works. You have to build relationship just like as you would with a client. You have to get knowledgeable about the systems to create the experience that you want for your people. It was incredibly challenging for me. My background was in program design, curriculum design as I mentioned to you before that, art.

I barely knew how to type. I mean, I typed with my two fingers and I had to learn this technology in order to get this work out there. That was the biggest hurdle for me. It was a huge hurdle internally because I had to believe that that was something that I didn’t know how to do or I couldn’t do, but I was so driven to get this work out there, and I really felt like it was important for me to be instrumental in that, not just to hire someone to come do it, because I wanted it to be authentic and I wanted to be an integrity.

I wanted to feel like I had control over the ecosystem that I was building, and so I started from like ground zero by buying other online programs that weren’t necessarily in the health space. Seeing how people were conveying information online and reversed engineering it and figuring out what do they like? What do they not like? Then the next step was finding the right person to help me actualize it. I’m not a developer.

I’m not a coder but I had a very clear vision of how I wanted the information that we had to be communicated, and that was a very rocky road, and it was quite labor-intensive and time-intensive. There was many pitfalls and challenges. That was about five years ago. I feel like now there are so much more available to entrepreneur to be able to plug and play into already existing software platforms. When I started five years ago, it really didn’t exist. Then, the other challenge was like, okay, so it was like now we have this amazing program.

We have an eight month certification training that certifies people as eating psychology coach. It’s overcharged in 50 hours of content. I feel great about the program but I had created the program and then I was like, “My God. We need customers.” Yeah. We need people to know about this program. I was like, “Now, I have to learn marketing.” I think one of the things that can feel very daunting is that, and I’m sure you have experience this, it’s like every step that you take actually shows you another step that you need to take, and it can feel so overwhelming.

You’re like, “My God. I need an e-mail list.” Then you get like 50,000 people on your e-mail list. Then the e-mail list program that you had no longer works and you can’t for those amount of people. Then you go, “I have to get a new e-mail software program. I have to learn how to use that.” Then your list gets to 150,000 and there’s all those issues with you can’t send to that many people all that once. It’s been like that the first three years that that kept happening. I would go like under every time.

I would be like so dramatic, like this is the worst thing ever and this is so overwhelming. Now, I meet that with a lot more grace and I see that as part of the fun of this, is that it’s an ongoing developmental process just as it is with your health. It’s like you find a diet that works for you for a year and then all of a sudden it doesn’t work, and you feel crappy whenever you eat it. Your lifestyle changes or you move to a new location.

It’s the same thing with business and I think when you treat it like that as an ongoing experiment or journey into curiosity, it can be a lot of fun, but I have faced so, so many challenges along the way. I can’t even think of one to give you.

Yuri Elkaim:                         I know. It’s crazy. I was recording a podcast earlier talking about like are you willing to pay the price? Because like if you were to sit down across, like this is absurd. If you work with a nutritional client and you sat down or someone said, “Listen, here’s the reality of what’s going to go down over the next couple of months or couple of years,” no one in their right mind would ever want to work with you, right?

Emily Rosen:                      Right.

Yuri Elkaim:                         It’s like as an entrepreneur, it’s like if you sat down and your future self were to look at you and say, “Okay, here’s what you’re going to go through for the next couple of years. Just sign here.” I don’t think anybody would do that but that’s a part of what makes us so unique as entrepreneurs, is like we know we have a gift and a message to get out, and like there’s a compelling force that just makes us drive through brick walls to make it happen.

Emily Rosen:                      Yeah.

Yuri Elkaim:                         One of the things that I’ve realized is that a lot of people think that making more money or growing their business to bigger levels is going to make everything better. Like in terms of  their life is going to be easier and blah, blah, blah, but I think a lot of times it actually becomes more complicated. It’s both becoming a bigger person in the process to be able to deal with all that, so yeah. I think it’s great to be able to take a lot of that stuff and strive now, and I guess it’s an evolution, right?

 

What she’s learned the most

Emily Rosen:                      It is, and I think if you use it as a personal growth experience, what is possible on the other end is greater than I ever could’ve like what you could’ve ever imagine. I think for myself, at first I felt like things were going wrong and it breaks all the time. You build a website. It’s beautiful and then WordPress doesn’t update and everything breaks, or there’s just like all of these things that happen. One of the beliefs that I hold is that everything is happening for my benefit and I choose to see everything through that filter.

When a team member quits or we have to let go of somebody or a system breaks, if I approach it with that mindset of like this is actually great because now we get to upgrade our programs to actually have the capacity to hold a lot more people, so we are positioning ourselves to scale as opposed to, “My God, this is the worst thing ever, worst timing ever,” which is a lot of times we’re used to. It’s just like with health or wellness, it’s like I don’t know if you’ve gone into juice cleanses.

You do them, the process is often freely awful. It’s like all these emotions come up and toxins. There’s an experience in the middle of cleanse that a lot of people experience where it almost feels like you’re going to die. Then, if you hold out through that on the other side, all of a sudden things taste better. Your system changes and acclimates. You have a different awareness and perception of reality learning marketing. I mean, marketing has quite a bad rap for a lot of really great reasons.

It definitely is people can use it to manipulate and deceive, but it’s basically just communication. Ultimately you can do with as much integrity as you want to so you’ll never see in our one of e-mails like we guarantee you this program is going to help you lose 10 pounds or we guarantee you this. We don’t talk to people in a way that sets them up to feel disenchanted or lied to, because that’s really important to us. Now, that might result in a little bit less sales but … or we fund rates across the board for all of our programs.

Anything we’ve ever done has been under 1% and I think it’s because we don’t talk to people in a way that underestimates their intelligence and we never ever tell them something that we know that we can’t deliver and we’ve built our business on that. You can have a business with whatever underlying ideology or philosophy you want to have and that’s what I think is so exciting about it being an entrepreneur, because I used to work for a big corporate program.

There would be times where there were guidelines I had to follow. I used to do the parent teacher conferences. I have like 300, 500 parents in a room and there were certain things that I had to do that just didn’t feel congruent for me and it was very challenging at times, but I had to play by the rules of the system that I was in. That was a huge turning point for me when I left that job of never again am I going to be in a situation where I have to say or do things that I don’t feel are congruent for me? That’s just the choice.

Yuri Elkaim:                         True. I think a lot of people in that position were just miserable because it’s like they’re being told to do stuff that they know in their soul is not right. Whether it’s to sit in a cubicle or to follow specific guidelines or whatever, and I think it’s also true with respect to you taught us on a really important with respect to refund rates, and I think that’s a reflection of how you guys market because through a lot of your messaging and just the presentation, you naturally filter people.

Emily Rosen:                      Yes.

Yuri Elkaim:                         It’s like, yes, you get it or you don’t. That’s a great mechanism to use especially in a day and age where people are driving down prices to acquire customers and they’re not really thinking about the quality of those people that they’re bringing in. As a result of that, they’re like, “I wonder why I’m getting 10% refund rates on a $10 product.”

Emily Rosen:                      That’s not uncommon. I think you know this and I’m shocked when I see people in the info space will have 20%, 30% refund rate sometimes. They’re like, “That’s just par for the course.” It’s I think it’s … Sometimes I think it’s like dating. It’s like you put up a dating profile that is completely like, I don’t like the beach. If I was like, “I love the beach and I love surfing, and I love water,” and then you attract that person. You’re just like totally not a match.

You’re like, “I thought you liked hiking,” and I’m like, “I like watching TV. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” There is a lot of … I feel like the tide is changing. I went to a lecture ones where they talked about we always think like now is the time. This is a new day and age but really it’s cyclical in terms of how people engage and respond to content. The place that I think we’re at now is where people are like, “Just don’t bullshit me.” I don’t want to be told like 15 amazing benefits that I might get from your eBook.

It’s like, no, you’re not. You might get an insight or an awareness. I’m like, “Let’s just be real here.” It’s the same thing, like there’s so many books. You go get like relationship books. It’s like 25 ways to like get the guy and it’s like, yeah, but then you’re with this person that doesn’t actually know or like you for who you are. You’re setting yourself up for a lifetime of misery and I think of it as the same way with marketing. I think just a more and integrity you are, the easier your journey is going to be.

The more connected people are going to feel to you, people all the time are like, “What did you guys do?” Because we built quite a large platform in a very short period of time and when I say short, I mean three to four years is really when our online platform started to be built out. We have hundreds of thousands of followers on various different platforms from all over the world and there definitely was strategy. I see you at marketing events.

I spent a lot of time learning the craft and trying to understand the systems but the other piece was just genuine connection, is what I think we really held as a core value, and from there, making decisions from that place became quite easy.

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s great. That’s awesome. There’s so much wisdom. For all of you guys listening, that doesn’t matter if it’s from this nutrition space or not, check it. Even if you just got on your list to find out how you communicate the videos she has put out, what’s the best website for them to check out your work?

Emily Rosen:                      Sure, psychologyofeating.com.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Okay, psychologyofeating.com, yeah. Just jump on the list and see how their e-mailing and see like you guys have e-mails that are just like ridiculously rich in content, like, “Hey, here are the latest five videos,” and it’s really good. It’s very, very good stuff, so there’s a lot of really cool insights that you guys could get from just … I consider myself more of a modeler than a learner. I would rather look at what someone is doing assuming it’s working than get the book on what they’re doing, if that makes sense, right?

If there’s a lot of wisdom to be on somebody’s list, assuming if they’re doing things well and they have a substantial track record, you’re just modeling what they’re doing and that’s why success leads clues, right?

Emily Rosen:                      Sure. I think that’s incredibly valuable like there are people like, “Why do you have so many newsletter list?” I have learned more from seeing what people are doing than from any comprehensive events I’ve gone to, because I’ll be frank, and I don’t mean to pull the curtain back too far. A lot of times at these marketing conferences, they’re teaching what they did last year. What’s actually interesting to what they’re doing is like what they were actually doing. To be that aware and cognizant, like who are the top 10 people that you really respect?

What they’re doing in their branding, in their marketing, in their messaging? That’s how I have learned the majority of what I do.

 

The way to stay sustainable as a business and the traits you must have

Yuri Elkaim:                         Sure. For you, like who will be the top three mentors/resources that have helped you learn and master the craft of marketing? For someone to say, “How do I even start?” What will be a couple recommendations?

Emily Rosen:                      Sure. Like actual marketer people, I don’t even know if that’s a term. Not the robots, the people. I mean, I definitely when I first got into the space, Brendon Burchard was very impactful for me, specifically around messaging. I think he’s very intelligent in terms of how he incorporates his different offerings. He has a lot of different tiers and he pretty … He’s automated a lot of his business in a way that actually still feels relatively personal.

I think he has a business model. I also really, what I like about him, is he runs really lean. I made a decision a long time ago, look, I don’t want to a have corporation with 300 employees. I love that I know everybody on my team. I know their names. I know their kids, you know what I mean? I love that personal touch so I really wanted to have a small group of people. I’ve learned a lot from Eben over the years. Eben Pagan was my first marketing event I ever went to and he brings in a lot of great people.

What I like about him is he’s a philosopher in a lot of ways, and so I really resonate with that. He is not just interested in what’s the next tactic or strategy. He’s interested in where we evolving as humans and where is consciousness taking us, and how can we look to that as a guide for how we talk to people. Those are two people that have probably had a pretty big impact on me who are in more of the marketing make money space.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Nice. Yeah, great. That’s all good to know. It’s interesting to see to the recommendations. There’s both for people and events and-

Emily Rosen:                      I love Dean. We just had Dean at one of your events and he was great.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Dean, he’s awesome.

Emily Rosen:                      Yeah. What I love about Dean is he just breaks it down. He’s like there’s no convoluted languaging, just like I got so much from, and when we spent a day with him, just how he’s very grounded, down to earth. He’s very real. I feel like he has helped me see things in a different way. He does a lot with real estate marketing and then the first time I heard him speak about how he engaged with people who are wanting to build their real estate practice, I think that the best innovation actually comes from outside of your industry.

If you’re in the health space, like don’t look at what people in the health space are doing. Look at what people in the money space are doing or in the personal growth space are doing. I think that’s a really smart place to go.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah. I totally agree. If you’re listening and like, “Who the hell is Dean?” Dean Jackson, is what we’re talking about. He runs I Love Marketing, which is another podcast with Joe Polish, just really, it’s one of the smartest thinkers as it pertains to marketing. It’s pretty amazing, so yeah. I would definitely agree with you on those. Those are great recommendations. If you look back and knowing what you know now, would you have done anything differently or would you do anything differently if you’re to start from scratch again?

Emily Rosen:                      I just went from stress so much, like it was very challenging for me when things would go wrong or systems would break because I felt like always, like I’m doing something wrong or I could do this better. I very hard on myself and I wouldn’t say I’m not stressed out. I still stress out a lot. I think that’s my nervous system like that state of being. I was like sensitive. It’s like so much adrenaline. No. I think, yeah. I would say here’s what I think.

About three years into it when we started getting really big, we started getting a lot of attention and a lot of the people that I would’ve died to have pay attention to me four years back, were starting to pay attention to me. I think I made some business decisions from a disempowered place like it was a little bit of like I didn’t uphold the integrity of what we offer and I said yes to things at times, really from a place of wanting people to like me as opposed to this is the best decision for our business.

I think that’s just a part of my character that I had to really look at and to learn that business for me is very personal and it’s okay to say no when I know it’s not going to be in service to the business, and to trust that if that person is someone that is going to be in my life, they’re going to be okay with that. They aren’t always. Some people were like, “No, we’re friends. I expect you to do X, Y and Z for me.” I’m like, “Our friendship is actually not a reflection of how much I mail for you and if you’re holding that as a belief, then we’re probably not a great match.”

That was actually a very hard process for me of really being like, “My God.” Now these people want to do business with us and they wanted to do joint ventures. They want to do partnerships. They want to create programs and I went from desperately wanting opportunities to having too many opportunities, and had to really, after about like six months of making some poor decisions, sit back and go, “What’s actually best for our business? What’s actually best for our brand?”

We came up with a list of, and I think you do this too, a list of what is a yes and what is a no based on our core values, so that when those opportunities come, we can easily make a decision because we have this philosophy as opposed to doing anything that just doesn’t feel super good from a place of wanting someone to like us or wanting someone to do something from us. I feel like we’ve really cleaned that up and we don’t do that anymore. There was definitely a period where I feel like I maybe going a little bit astray.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah. I can definitely relate to that because there was a good two years where we really got sucked into that and it’s tough to get out of that but you really have to remove yourself and let the filtering system, whatever you’re using, make the decision for you. Because as you mentioned, we end up doing business with very close friends in a lot of cases and it’s nothing personal. It’s just, “Hey, it’s just not a fit for audience.”

Emily Rosen:                      Yeah.

Yuri Elkaim:                         You based a lot of your decisions based on core values as well as what’s going to be best for our audience type thing. What are the two or three criteria that you’ve looked at?

Emily Rosen:                      Sure.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Just because I think it adds a lot of value to people listening, because if they’re in that position or if they’re eventually going to be in that position, it might be helpful to … Help like give them a set of basic criteria to consider before saying, “Yeah, I’m going to totally promote that,” and then be like, “Shit, what did I just do?”

Emily Rosen:                      Sure. Yeah, and it’s hard. I think you know. It’s so hard because so many of the people in our space are like good friends of mine and I don’t like all of their brands. It’s not even like it’s just like that’s not what we’re about and not what we want to be about. We are very clear that we want to change the paradigm around the way that people relate to food, body and health. We want to change the conversation.

Selling or pushing a program that is an extreme weight loss or extreme diet program that makes a really short-term promises, is just completely incongruent with who we are and what we’re about. We’re also definitely diet-agnostic for the most part. What that means is eating psychology is applicable to anybody. You could be Paleo. You could be raw food vegan and everything we teach is going to be applicable.

We wouldn’t want to take a stand for this is the way to eat any of program that is very strict or religious in terms of its how it talks about that. The other thing is, is we stay out of the recipe and cooking space right now. We don’t have anything about that on our site. We don’t have anything about that in any of our programs or offerings. When people come here, they’re like, “I want to learn how to do meal plans and I want to learn how to cook Kamut salad.” We’re not your home-based.

To market something about that just feels really incongruent and it’s not even a make wrong. I was an executive chef for three years. I love cooking. I went to culinary school. It’s not just what our brand is about and if we did go into that direction, we will want to create a lot of stuff around it so it made more sense. Those are the three things but the number one thing is really anything that is extreme diet ideology, pushing a very extreme program, making very extreme promises, is completely incongruent with what we do.

We really want to change that conversation and we want to help people navigate the relationship with food from a different place. Those would be the three things based on our content that we wouldn’t do. Then the piece is, is like there’s just starting business we don’t align with. I don’t know if you were there for this. I went to a lecture and it was done by the director of Yahoo! Health, and she was talking about millenials.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Mental Health Summit.

Emily Rosen:                      Yes. It was so good, and one of the things that she said that really stuck with me, which I think is happening more and more, is that people are not just looking at what you’re doing. They’re looking at who you associate with. You think about that in terms of friends. It’s like I just didn’t really apply it to marketing and I really didn’t apply it to how people perceive that, and especially with social networks now. People can go to my Facebook page and they can see who my friends are literally.

Who I’m in photos with, and I want to be aligned anyways in my social life with people who I feel like are doing things with integrity. I didn’t necessarily and frankly and it sounds silly now, think about it as much in terms of marketing, in terms of like, is this person actually marketing the way I like? We’ve done before one time, we sent, we mailed for somebody for an offer that they had and I felt great about the offer.

What I didn’t know as what they’re going to do after they took those leads. When I say leads, I mean the e-mails. We sent someone to an offer that I felt really good about. I thought it was really high value. We always take a look at what we’re mailing for. Then afterwards, they hammered them. They e-mailed them like two times a day, tons of third party offers, and I felt just sick to my stomach because I hadn’t thought, “Okay, what are these people going to do after I send them to this offer?”

I think you have to be really smart about that to your twice smart marketer, like your show. You have to be smart about, okay, so once they take your people that you spent, I spent with them years building relationship with people. We have people that have been in our list for 10 years and if I send them to something and they trust me, I want to feel really good about what’s going to happen after that. It’s really important who you associate with in terms of what they say but also in terms of how they market.

We are not aggressive. You’re never going to get seven e-mails from us in a day so I don’t want to send to somebody who’s going to hammer those people and e-mail them twice a day for two weeks to get them to buy something like a shake that we don’t even really, we didn’t even know was part of the offer thing.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, yeah. I agree, and I think the big lesson here for the listeners, thoughts that I’m getting here is the allure to get stuff out quickly and to make money online supersedes a lot of the deeper foundation stuff, which you guys have spent time building, which is the core values, which is the messaging, which is what do we stand for? What do we stand against? When you don’t have that stuff in place, you basically just end up selling your soul.

You’re prostituting your business in some degree and I think what you guys have done really well is the opposite of that. You said, “Okay, let’s start off with this is what we represent and we’re not going to associate with other stuff.” You stick to your guns that way because otherwise you’re just saying yes to everything and just all you’re looking out here is he’s going to make me money, just send him and swipe e-mails, blah, blah, blah.

It’s amazing how many conversations I’ve had about this and even just other interviews on the show. There’s so many people saying the same thing and I think the people, the businesses that are going to stay around the longest, are the ones that are building real relationships. It’s just not to go, “Hey, here’s the latest promo. Go buy it, or here’s somebody else’s stuff,” because it’s just a lot of businesses are turn and burn. You cannot sustain a business doing that.

Emily Rosen:                      You really can’t. There is no business that has been long-term sustainable doing those ways of marketing and I think there is nothing that you have that’s more valuable than your relationship in your word. It’s just nothing. There’s no shiny marketing or great branding that’s more valuable, and then it doesn’t even feel like it’s selling sometimes. You look at certain brands like brands like Apple. People are like, I don’t want to say it’s a religion, but like Apple doesn’t even have to sell the next product they put out because they’ve built this relationship with people.

In so many ways like, “Hey,” and people will have, myself included, it’s like I have the iPhone, the iPad, the iPod … I mean, I have everything, i-something. I don’t even need to have those stuff they have. It’s that relationship and the word and the integrity, and the congruency that I think will long surpass, and it depends on the game you want to play. I mean that seriously because I know some people, they’re like I have no … They’re in it to make money and retire.

That’s not what we’re about. I do think lifestyle is a value of ours. I want to be able to travel and see cool places and cool things, but my primary objective in creating this business was not to be rich. It just wasn’t. If that is your primary objective, is I want to make a lot of money really quickly and then get out, you’re going to make different decisions versus us, I want to have a legacy business. I want people to go, “That business changed my life.”

Then they’re sending their friends there not because they get more referral commission but because their experience was so profound and that that has a longevity to it. That’s really important to us. Really no judgment. Some people are just like, “I don’t want to do this for a very long time.” If you’re clear about where you want to go, that’s going to greatly inform the decisions you make.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah. I agree. That’s great. Awesome stuff. You’re obviously pretty savvy as it comes to marketing. What is for you, I mean I’ll just run this as a part of marketer show, what is a smarter marketing mean to you?

Emily Rosen:                      A couple of things come to mind just initially, which is everybody is marketed to everybody, day in and day out. It’s this interesting thing where we think of it as like this sitting outside of us or this illusive skillset. Ultimately, I think smart marketing is talking to people in a way that you wouldn’t want to be talked to, like it goes back to the old golden rule, where it’s like how would you … Because people all the time complain about, “I hate this commercial.”

We are constantly digesting information having really profound insights about it. I think being really cognizant of your thought process about that because for the people who are going to be doing breakthrough things, that are going to have to change the marketplace, are the ones that are actually not going to just replicate. They’re going to expand upon or change, so everybody within them as far as I’m concerned has a marketer, because they know how they liked to be talked to.

They know how they liked to be sold to. They know how they like to engage with content. It’s a little bit more challenging when your target market is completely different from who you are but if they’re in any way similar to who you are, smart marketing to me is just taking information that you have learned about yourself and learned about the people around you and applying it to marketing.

There is a place where I think it’s really valuable to learn tools and techniques, and skills. I mean, I spent time … I spent a whole lot of money learning and being in rooms with people who I think are smarter than me, who are doing things that are cooler than me, to learn skills and tricks. What I mean by that is like even just little things. I actually remember you, Yuri, saying this two and a half years ago when I met you in Florida, and you were talking about using your thank you page to make a sale.

I just hadn’t thought about it. I just thought use your thank you page to say thank you. Thanks to you, we’ve now made tens of thousands of dollars off our thank you page because I was like, “That’s so smart.” They’ve already opted in. They’re there on your page. You know they have some level of interest, why not talk to them on that page? There’s little things like that where I feel like that’s from being around people who are doing cool things and paying attention to what they’re doing.

Those two pieces, and marketing, I have a counseling background. I always say to people that marketing is just using those counseling tools that I have an immediate ROI. When you’re working with a client, you could take two years for them to realize they had an awareness. Now, I’m like, “That worked,” because I just made $100,000. It’s a fun way to engage with people but those would be the two things. Everybody is a marketer I think, not as great marketer but there is a marketer in some capacity.

To really attention to what you like and don’t like, I keep a notebook of this. I keep a notebook or it’s actually on my iPhone now but it’s like when I’m in the airport and I see something that’s really great that just grabs my attention, I’ll take a picture of it and take a note. I have turned that on in my brain. When I’m on a webpage and I’m there for more than 30 seconds, I’m like, “Why am I still here?” To ask yourself those questions and be like, “It’s because of the video or it’s because of the beautiful branding, or it’s because all their buttons we go when you hover it.”

To turn on that thought process and to keep detailed notes. I have just so many notes from everywhere I go, every event I have been to that I can refer back to, especially when I get not inspired, which happens. There’s times where I’m just like I can’t think of anything original to say, and to have that to resource back to, I have a folder in my e-mail of some of the best newsletters I’ve seen. I’m always collecting things that inspire me to go back to when I don’t feel inspired.

Yuri Elkaim:                         It’s good advice. It’s pretty good advice. Yeah. It’s so funny because earlier you talked about like learning from outside of your own industry and it’s just like you could be walking down. I remember I was in, I think I was in Walmart. I don’t even know why but I was in Walmart.

Emily Rosen:                      Shocking.

Yuri Elkaim:                         It feels amazing. There was a sign in there that said, it was a special sale on like some food item. It was limited to it said, “Limited to seven per customer.” I was like, “That’s brilliant,” because you were implying that you’re going to get seven items or less or up to seven. I was like, “That’s just so smart.” I was like picking up on things like that. I think as entrepreneurs and marketers, again turning on that channel in our brains, to start looking at stuff like that, taking notes as you said, whether it’s a notebook or an iPhone, or iPad, and just looking back on that.

Because that’s where the serious breakthrough is going to occur. I think that’s awesome advice. Just before we wrap up, what’s for you, what’s the number one skill entrepreneurs have to have for lasting success?

 

Tenacity, curiosity, and consistency

Emily Rosen:                      Three words come to mind. One was curiosity. The other one was tenacity and the other one was consistency. I think one of the things that is most challenging about being an entrepreneur is you have to stay self-motivated in a lot of ways. There’s nobody outside of you providing that support and so it can feel very challenging at times in that regard. The number one thing that I would attribute any of my success too is consistency like in the face of nobody responding or something not working.

I didn’t stop and throw my hands in the air, maybe for the afternoon, but I got up the next day and was like, “Okay, we’re going to keep going.” There was years. It took probably two years where I was like posting on social media and blogging, and very little was happening. If I had just been like, “Well, if nobody is going to like my post, I am over this.” I think people will say now, “You guys just kept showing up.”

Then just like one day they finally engaged. It’s changed now. It’s even more challenging for people to recognize your brand and connect with your or purchase from you because they’re so much available. Sometimes it takes 11 times for people to see you before they’ll even click the link. That consistency of just moving through it despite the fact that you’re maybe not getting the results right away I think is incredibly important as an entrepreneur curiosity because shit goes wrong, man.

You got to be curious about why. It’s like why did that go wrong or why did not work? When we have a launch that’s really successful, I don’t just go, “Great. That was successful.” I go, “What was different about this? What do we send e-mails at different times of day?” Do we talk to people differently? Do we send them different videos? I really get curious about it, and tenacity because you got to put your neck out there.

It’s very humbling. I think most entrepreneurs that I know that are successful are a little bit nuts and we all are willing to make mistakes in public. I’ve had some public flops and that’s never fun but to get curious, stay consistent, and do it despite of that, I think is the key to what I’ve seen to be success.

Yuri Elkaim:                         There you have it. I hope you enjoyed this interview with Emily Rosen from the Institute for the Psychology of Eating, a tremendous organization, a great company, really coming from a great place. Again, if you want to follow them online, just type in Institute for the Psychology of Eating. You can find them on Instagram. As I mentioned earlier, following Emily Rosen on Instagram, just really inspiring stuff.

Like the stuff she puts out, it’s pretty amazing. That’s all for today. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, remember to subscribe it to the podcast at Healthpreneur Podcast on iTunes. While you’re there, leave us a five star rating or review if you enjoyed it. In the meantime, have an amazing Friday. Have an amazing rest of your day and I can’t believe that next week is already December. We got a great solo around on Monday.

I’m going to be talking about Marketing Your Brand. Is quantity more important than quality or one or the vice-versa? We’ll see. Then we’ve got a great interview with Phil Caravaggio from Precision Nutrition coming up next Friday, so don’t go anywhere. Subscribe to the podcast. Make sure you don’t miss a single episode and I hope you have an amazing day. Continue to be great, to do great, and I’ll see you on Monday.

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