Really Bad Advice From A Guru

What’s up, Healthpreneurs? Yuri here back in the gym today. Just got back from our Mastermind in Clearwater, and getting back into the flow of things.

I just came across a really interesting video, and I want to share what I think is some of the worst advice anybody could give for somebody who’s starting out.

Premature Advice For Most People

If you’re watching this, you want to grow your health coaching business, your fitness coaching business, whether that’s online or offline, doesn’t really matter. The principles, the fundamentals are the same. And so I was just watching a video by Gary Vee, and he’s a great guy. He’s done a lot of great stuff for online entrepreneurship, but I got a little bit irritated by this one video because… Here’s the deal. He was saying that in order to grow your Instagram following, the best thing you should be doing if you don’t have a million followers, if you’re relatively new, you should be spending 10 hours a day commenting on people’s posts.

And I’m thinking to myself, okay, I understand that there’s some benefits, obviously social interaction and doing that kind of stuff. But here’s the thing is if you’re starting out, that’s the last thing you should be doing unless you want to effort your way to growing your business. And this is why it’s challenging sometimes when there’s so many people that are giving advice. You have to understand what is the advice that is right for you and what is advice that is not right for you.

And so what Gary Vee had mentioned, again, I have nothing against him. I think he’s a great guy, but I think the advice is a little bit premature for most people. So, spending 10 hours a day on Instagram, commenting on people’s posts and starting that conversation, it’s a long-term play. He firmly talks with the only reason that he’s doing what he does now in the position he’s in now is because he spent four years again doing 10 hours a day of going back and forth with people on Twitter and Instagram. But people forget that he also had Wine Library TV 10 years before that, and he built that up to $65 million.

More Is Not Necessarily Better

I want to just kind of give you some perspective So my buddy Dan, who’s one of our Mastermind clients, we were in the car together from the airport going to our Mastermind, and I was talking about how his deadlift training was going because he’s really big into deadlifts and kind of getting stronger. And I asked him, “How often are you training? How often are you doing deadlifts?” And what he told me was actually very interesting. He said, “Listen, I only do deadlifts once a week.” And he’s seen massive improvements in his strength. He’s basically doubled his body weight in terms of what he’s lifting.

And I thought that was a really interesting analogy because we tend to think that more is better, but very often, less is better.  You can build your business posting on Instagram all day long, commenting in social media 10 hours a day. You can certainly do that. But here’s the challenge is you’re going to burn yourself out, right? Is that, you have built a business that is dependent on your efforts, and that’s also known as a job. Because if you step away from doing that, no one else is doing that.

The Coaching Success Ladder

Actually you know what? I’m going to show you something. Check this out. All right. This is kind of like a whiteboard wall. This is actually something that, I can’t even erase it. I can’t even erase it off my whiteboards. That’s kind of why it’s sitting here. I call this the coaching success ladder, okay?

Seven stages in any coaching business: dream, start, survive, stabilize, optimize, scale, and dominate. Now here’s the thing is that everyone starts with a dream. Everyone starts at the same level. Everyone starts with an idea for what they want to do. The challenge though is that advice like post 10 times a day on social media, 10 hours a day commenting back and forth, that is the last thing you want to be doing in these first two stages. It’s the last thing you want to be doing because the road to domination is going to be so much longer.

And listen, I’m all for when you get to the point, do stuff like that but maybe not necessarily you yourself. Because if in this stage, right, so dream you have no revenue coming in. You’ve got nothing going on. When you start, the only thing you should be doing is getting clients and transforming their lives. That’s all you should be doing. How do you do that? Well, there’s a lot of different ways obviously, right? That’s why there’s so many different businesses showing you how to get clients and make money.

A Better Way To Grow Your Business

But here’s the thing is that there are ways that are more effective than others. And what I really believe to be the most effective way is you figure out how to make paid advertising work. So you could spend 10 hours a day, right, commenting and posting on people’s stuff on social, and you could do that. And a lot of people we speak to are just sick and tired of that whole nonsense. Or you could have one Facebook ad, as an example, that you put some thought into. You put some money behind, and now that one ad is going to be put in front of your perfect clients every single minute of the day without you doing anything. Now, those people comment on your ad. You can engage with them if you want.

And this is what I’m talking about, about working smarter, not harder. So you’ve got one ad, Facebook is doing the heavy lifting for you. You’re telling Facebook, “Hey, spend 20 bucks a day. Spend $1,000 a day,” whatever it is. Get this ad in front of these people and let that do its work. Until you’re at a point where up on that success ladder, until you’re at the point where you’re looking at really kind of scaling, nothing below that should be time wasted posting a thousand times on social media because you’re going to be spinning your wheels. You’re going to be working way too hard.

And the thing is you’re not building systems that are self-multiplying, which means that you can remove yourself from the situation, and they’re still going to multiply in your absence. The problem with being you posting every single time on people’s comments and their threads and stuff like that is that it’s dependent upon you. So you can certainly do that. I’m not saying it’s a bad strategy. I just think based on where you’re at your business, you have to be very smart about what you’re doing. And if you’re at a point in your business where you can outsource that type of stuff to a VA or someone on your team who can have value added conversations on social, hey, have them do it. But you have to figure out what you love to do. And if you love spending 10 hours a day posting on social media and engaging comments, that’s fine. I don’t personally think it’s the best thing for you to do.

With that said, I’m not devaluing the importance of social media, right? So for instance, our Instagram account, we’ve got what, just over 7,000 followers. It’s not huge, but the way we’ve been doing things on Instagram has resulted in probably more than $100,000 to my business since the beginning of the new year. So now we’re what, almost middle of February. So in six weeks, we’ve probably accounted for almost more than six figures just from what we’ve done on Instagram. So Instagram is very, very powerful, but you have to be smart about what you’re doing.

Keeping Things In Perspective

So anyways, I hope this makes sense guys. I’m going to shut things down for now. I’m going to go have some breakfast. Anyways, I just thought I’d share that with you because I see that kind of stuff all the time, and it kind of drives me crazy because you see that advice, and you’re like, “Oh, my God. That’s what I got to do.” But as you guys probably know, I’m all about building predictable systems that work for you, not having you have to do all the work. Yeah. If you’re interested in how this might work for you, what this might look like for you, we’ve got a couple ways.

What was the number seven again? Dominate. So starting at dream, start, survive, really treading water, right, which is you made a couple thousand a month, and you’re just kind of surviving. Then you get to stabilize. Things are usually anywhere from about five to 10,000 a month at that point. You’re starting to get some momentum. Optimize is, okay, let’s make a couple tweaks to what we’re doing, and you’re going to see some big improvements. That’s in the optimized stage. Then we move into scale, which is all right, now we can really start to tax this bad boy. And then you hit dominate. What dominate basically means, you are the player in your niche, and that I believe can take anywhere from about one to three years. I don’t think it needs to take 10 if you’re doing things in an intelligent way.

Okay, does that makes sense? Cool. Awesome, guys. Well, I’m going to go have some breakfast. Hope you guys have a great day. If you guys want our help in terms of helping you get more clients, helping you build your business, just send me a direct message, and we can figure out where you’re at, where you want to go, and see if we could help. All right, guys, talk to you soon.