How to Be a Leader in the Health Industry

Transcription

How would you like to be a leader in the health or fitness industry? Well, let’s have a look at how we can do that, right?

Welcome back to the show. Hope you’re doing great, and today we’ll be talking about that topic, how to be a leader in the health and fitness industry.

What matters first

Maybe you already are a leader and that’s awesome, keep up the great work. And if you’re somebody who’s not quite there in terms of where you want to be in terms of influence, impact, notoriety in the health space, first and foremost, let me say this, it doesn’t really matter because quite honestly all that matters is that you can help your clients achieve a specific result.

Who cares if you haven’t been on the top podcast, who cares if you haven’t been on TV? Who cares if you’re not speaking on the biggest stages?

A lot of this stuff is very ego driven and I’m guilty as much as anyone and I understand that there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be a leader, to being that prominent figure that everyone looks up to that’s like, “Oh my God, I want to be like that person.”

I understand that being more present, having more presence means that you can reach more people, you can impact more people’s lives, and that’s great.

So if that’s the end goal, if that’s the game you want to play, that’s totally fine because listen, I want to be a leader in this space. I think most of us could get into any space, why not plan to dominate? Why not play the game to win? And I think as a result of being in the game long enough and creating amazing results for your clients and being somebody who has massive value to the world, over time you become a leader.

 

Play the long game, lock down a process, and give away content

So I want to give you a couple tips, a couple ideas here to help you become a leader in the health industry. So first and foremost, it’s really important to play the long game because this is not going to happen overnight, and you have to be very realistic about that.

Now, the good news is that it doesn’t have to take you three to five years to see great results. Let me rephrase that. It depends on the business model you are following and that’s largely going to determine how fast you see the results you want to see. If you’re building your platform, playing on social media, reading tons of content and doing that slowly but surely, buckle down because it can be a very long ride. It took me close to 10 years to really build up a platform like that and yes, it’s nice to have, but you have to ask yourself, why am I doing this? What’s the ultimate goal?

And if we’re very honest with each other, the ultimate goal for anybody who runs their own business is to make money. Let’s just be honest, right?

So how do you make more money? Well, you help people, you transform their life. You don’t write blog posts. Because, “Why are you writing a blog post?” “Well, because then people get to know me and maybe it’ll help them a little bit and they’ll opt in for my free lead magnet and then eventually they might buy something from me or enroll as a client.” The likelihood of that happening is very, very low. Believe me, I’ve got a blog that reaches a million people per month. How many of those people turn into customers? You know, a certain percentage, but the average time on the site is one minute and 21 seconds. So how can you impact people in that amount of time? You can’t.

So if you’re following that type of process, that business model of playing the content marketing game, it’s going to take you a very long time. It’s very tough to crack that code. It’s going to take a lot of time and a lot of money. I would much rather do something that’s going to produce faster results, actually help people immediately and help me make a lot more money rather quickly. And that’s exactly what we help our clients do in our health business accelerator program and obviously in our luminaries masterminds.

So the number one thing is play the long game because no matter what business model you’re following, it’s not gonna happen overnight. It might take you six months, it might take you two years, it depends on your business, but you have to be longterm sighted.

Second is once you have some sales process in place, and this is important, like you have to have a process that can predictably attract and enroll new clients or customers, whether that’s Facebook ads to a webinar/call or whatever that might look like for your business. You have to have that before you do anything else.

But once you have that, you’re going to have a lot more freedom in your business because now you have a predictable way of making money, right? Once that is done, then you can start looking at creating some content. I really believe that you need to have the sales before you can waste your time with anything else.

The reason why I’ve got a podcast, the reason why I do YouTube videos is because, and only because I first spent a good amount of time building out our perfect client pipeline and really making sure that it was working properly.

I didn’t have a podcast from day one with Healthpreneur. I didn’t start doing YouTube videos with Healthpreneur from day one. I only started doing that when I had a lot more free time in my business. So, with that said, once you’re at that stage, I would strongly recommend picking  one content platform and consistently give away your best stuff for free.

A lot of the stuff you give away might be part of your program, but to be very honest, it’s not like people are going to accumulate all of your content all over the web that’s been provided for free and now piece together exactly what to do. They’re going to pay you for convenience, for access, for speed of results, for support, for accountability, so you can give away a lot of your best stuff for free and build that goodwill before you ask for anything in return. But remember, only do this once you have a predictable sales process in place because from that content you’re going to be driving people somewhere. Where are you driving them to? Hopefully it’s not a free lead magnet.  I really think that podcasting is the most powerful content platform. I really do believe that.

YouTube is nice, YouTube is great. My Healthpreneur channel has at the time of this recording maybe 30 subscribers, 30. Yeah, three zero. My health and fitness channel has 240,000 subscribers. Do I really care about the number of subscribers I have on YouTube for Healthpreneur? Not really, right? Because the vast majority of what we’re doing with Healthpreneur is actually YouTube ads and we’re sharing our content on YouTube to your existing audience anyway. So I’m not using it to necessarily attract new people, but I really do believe that a podcast is a great platform because it’s a very intimate experience and you’re listening to me for whatever, 10, 20, 30 minutes. You’re listening while you’re on a walk, while you’re in the car, there’s no distractions. I mean you might be doing this while you’re mowing the lawn or doing something else, but on YouTube, if you’re watching a YouTube video, there’s other videos that pop up, right? You might be distracted and jump off to something else. A podcast is a very, very powerful and high consumption type of platform.

So I think if you’re going to pick one platform and if you enjoy speaking, podcasting is great. And if you want to do a video podcast and then extract the audio, you can do that, all the power to you. But choose one. Start with one, okay?

 

Pick a niche and dominate it, network, and support others

Now, third thing to really be a leader in this space is to pick a small niche and dominate it. This is one of the big stumbling block. A lot of people have said, “Okay, if I go too narrow I’m going to alienate a lot of people. There’s not going to be enough pie left for me to have really.” And that’s a valid concern because you think, “Okay, well if I keep going narrow and narrow and narrow, there’s only going to be eventually a handful of people.” Just remember there are 7 billion people the planet. Let’s assume that 1 billion of those people, which is actually quite true, are on Facebook and let’s just say that you only need to speak with a very small percentage of those people, even if it was just 10,000 people out there to be your perfect clients.

Do you think you could get in front of 10,000 people if you were the person who specialized in like my friend, Izabella Wentz, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. Like if that was your specialty, do you think you’d do okay? Well, she’s done pretty well, right? So don’t come into this space and be known as the health and fitness expert, because that’s what I did with my health and fitness business and it’s very, very tough to scale that mountain. You want to come in and you want to be like the brain health person or the gut health person or the knee joint pain person or whatever that is. Because you want to occupy a drawer in the mind of your prospects. When they’re thinking knee pain, they think of you. When they’re thinking brain health, they think of you. When they’re thinking of something specific you come to mind. And there will be plenty, plenty of fish in your seat. Better off being a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in an ocean.

Next, this is the one thing that changed everything for me, is you need to attend industry events and connect with other influencers. You have to. You cannot become a leader hiding behind your computer. So you have to get out to events like Healthpreneur Live, even attending our workshops, stuff like that. And you have to be surrounded. You have to get on people’s radar. You have to be known as someone who’s like, “Yeah, I get out to these events and I do stuff and I network with people and build these relationships.” Because if you don’t, no one’s going to know who you are. And this is the one thing that I did in 2010 that changed everything for me. After doing things on my own for three years, I started to go to events and I continue to.

And it’s the single most important thing you can do to really build your presence and become known to other people in this space. Next one is do more to support others than you ever asked for in return. And this goes back to giving your best stuff away for free, playing the long game, stuff like that, is just be a good person. Give more than you ask. Going back to the industry events and so forth, one of the biggest mistakes people make is, “Okay, I want to go to this event, what am I going to get out of this? What am I going to get out of this event?” That’s the wrong mentality to have. You have to go to the event thinking, “How can I contribute? How can I give while I’m there?”

Because when you do so number one, you become a more valuable asset to everyone there, and two, you just build reciprocity and goodwill. Well you’re not saying, “Hey, here’s my business card. Can you promote my stuff?” It’s not the right attitude to have. I actually had a consultation call with one of our Healthpreneur members who is part of our community. She actually came to Healthpreneur Live as well. And we had a quick call and she’s like, “How do I get more affiliates?” Sorry, “I’m going to events and how can I position this to get more people to promote it?” And we obviously brought down the numbers so I assured her that it would never make sense. But secondly is like, that’s the wrong attitude to have. Don’t go into stuff expecting like, “How can I get people to sell this?” It’s not going to work.

The easiest way to connect with people is like, “Hey, great to meet you. Let’s kind of find some common ground. By the way, you said you’re kind of stuck at this one point, well there’s this guy that I know or this resource that I have that I think would really be of value to you. Is it okay if I sent it to you or make that introduction?” Just be a value adder. And if you keep doing that, over time you will become a leader. Now remember, the foundation of all of this is that you can actually help your clients achieve results. So that should be like a foregone conclusion. So in addition to that ability to really make an impact for your clients, play the long game, pick one content platform after you built out your sales process. Get your niche, attend events, do more to support others than you ask for in return, and that over time is how you become a leader.

I know there’s no secret sauce, there is no magic pill. That’s the way it is. Okay? And you can look at other things like speaking on stages and so forth. That’s all fine and good, writing books and so forth, but at the end of the day it’s about creating results for your clients, staying in the game long enough so that others drop out while you’re still going, and over time longevity makes a big difference. You’d be surprised at how many people I reach out to that I don’t even know. And they’re like, “Oh my God, I’ve been following your stuff for years.” Or, “I’ve heard lots of great things about you.” These are things that you would never expect to hear, but if you’re around long enough people pay attention.

 

Yuri’s Wrap Up

So those are a couple ideas of how you can become an industry leader in our health and fitness industry and if you enjoy this type of stuff, well you’ve got lots more good stuff coming your way.

We’ve got a great episode coming up your way on Wednesday. We got a great interview coming up Friday. Lots of great stuff over the next couple of weeks. So be sure to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. It’s called The Healthpreneur Podcast, just in case you’re wondering.

And thanks again for joining me today. Continue to get out there, be great, do great, and I’ll see you on our next episode.