#104: Why (Some) Health Coaches Aren’t Profitable

Welcome health coaches. So nice to see you for another episode of the health coach power community podcast. Today we are talking about making money. Yup. We talked a little bit about it last week. We talked about all the little ways that you can make money and save money and think about money today. I want to talk about like the big ways, the ways that really start to impact your business in a major long-term, big picture kind of way. So I have some big news to share with you today. I mean in a couple of regards. First of all, this is sort of an aside, but first of all I hope you are experiencing some improved sound quality. I have upgraded the microphone. I'm trying to use this microphone for our recordings and when we publish to iTunes, we have a new intro and outro.

So anyway, hopefully an overall better audio experience and working on that for you. Second piece of big news, I have a free five day challenge coming up to teach you how to make some money. Now we're going to talk about the big picture ideas today and then I'm going to lead you step by step in implementing them, particularly right now during quarantine, when we're all feeling like maybe a little bit handcuffed around finding new clients and thinking that it's impossible because of the economy and it's impossible because of this and it's impossible. But because of that, well, I'm going to show you that you can and my goal is to help you earn some of that dough that you need because we all have bills to pay. So you can sign up for that free challenge at health coach, power.com/make money, make money, make money.

Okay, I think you got the theme of today's show, but the last bits of big news are really the points that I want to cover today. So as we get into this, if you have any questions for me, please go ahead and put those into the chat area. I'm always very happy to take your questions and answer them. That's why we do these live also. So you can see me screw up and make mistakes and realize that it happens and it's okay. So I have been doing this for a long time, right? I have been working with health coaches for years and years and years. I have seen health coaches start from nothing and build huge, booming businesses bigger than mine. I have seen health coaches do basically nothing with their business and quit and then everything in between. So, what I'm, what I want to share with you are sort of the big overarching themes as to why health coaches struggle.

Why sometimes feels like it's not going to work. It's not working, we're not getting anywhere. And of course there's financial pressure unless you are independently wealthy or you're doing this really is just a side hobby. And I, from what I gather from you guys and you know I talked to so many health coaches every single week. Most of us are not doing this as a hobby. Most of us do need to turn some sort of profit in order to continue doing this work. Right? It's like one part work that we love and that we're so, so passionate about. It's one part. Well yeah, I mean if I don't make money doing it, I'll have to go back to filing TPS reports or whatever. Right? Whatever your version of that is. So, tell me in the comments actually for those of you that I can see or hear live, like what does it for you, is it important to make money and what kind of salary are you even going after here?

Is it like, you know, a little piggy bank on the side or for a rainy day fund? Is that the kind of money that you want to make as a health coach or are you really going after like a full time bigwig salary? It's always interesting to hear where you guys are at, but the number one thing, I'm just going to like cut to the chase. The number one reason. If you're not making enough money, if you, if you're in my healthy profit university program, you already know the answer to this or you damn well should, if you're not making enough money by and large, it's because you're not making enough offers. That's it. I mean that is at the crux of it. So think about this. Let's say that you our brand new health coach and you have no experience at all. And let's say you know absolutely nothing about selling, right?

Like you really couldn't sell. What do they say? I don't think it's politically correct to say this anymore about selling ice to Eskimos, but okay, you get the point. You can't sell sand to the beach. But let's say that you just like stood outside your house and every person that walked by you offered them your health coaching program. Now you're not going to make a lot of sales that way, but if you did that long enough, somebody it's going to be interested, right? You're just going to hit someone on the right day at the right time when they just happened to be out walking. Cause they were worried about their weight or whatever and you're gonna make sale eventually. You might have to stand out there for 10 years. I don't know. I've never tried that technique. You see my point now, if you sat inside and you spoke to nobody and you never offered your health coaching program, how many sales would you make?

Big fat. Zero. Right? So it's sort of, there's a lot of nuance, but there's sort of just a math game at play when it comes to making offers and making money. The more I say it with me, the more offers you make, the more money you will earn. I'm going to say a little bit more about this cause offers come in different shapes and sizes. I think for most of us, like the most common offer that we're going to make would be in the form of, we're having a health history consultation or whatever you're calling it and you're going to offer somebody a spot in your private coaching program. Okay. That's the kind of thing the health coaches do all the time. That's an offer. So, if you had back-to-back consultations all day long and you worked like an eight-hour day and I really hope your consultations are not an hour long, so let's say that they're 30 minutes, you would make 16 offers per day.

If you took no breaks, that would, that would be a lot for one on one coaching. So anyway, that would be one way to do it. But there are other ways to increase the number of offers that you're making. Right? And offer is just really you saying like, and this is going to sound kind of crass, but really is just Hey, buy this thing, give me money. Right? Like just think of it in like a very simple way. We would never say that of course, but an offer could be, maybe you're an affiliate for a brand that you love and you write an email to your list and let's say your list has 200 people on it and you say something about why you love this brand so much and why it's so relevant right now and why you know that if you're reading this, you could really benefit from, or you would really love this product as well.

And click here to check it out and you make, you can make sales that way and earn money from your affiliate link. Just an example, then you have made, well if everybody opened up your email, that would be 200 offers. But even if you only a quarter of your mailing list opened up the email, that would be, what's the math 50 offers? Okay, so that's more offers. And maybe you did that on the same day. You did all the consultations and now, Oh my God, what did you do? You made like 66 offers. So you know, you can think of all different ways to make offers. You might be, I'm inviting people to join some sort of group program. You might hold a webinar and then maybe you have a bunch of people sign up for that and you're making an offer at the end of your webinar to join your next detox program.

There are so many different ways to make offers, right? So what I'm trying to impress upon you is it doesn't have to be done in a one to one manner. It doesn't have to be done with your I wanna say with your voice, it doesn't have to happen over the phone or in person. You know, as you would in the consultation. It could happen via email, it could happen over a webinar. It could happen on social media, right? Anytime that you are offering people away for you to earn money, basically. That's all I'm saying. So more offers is always going to lead to more money. Does that make sense? The everybody getting that concept? It's so important that I would like you to write that down and put it on a little piece of paper and stick it to your computer. Because when you sit down to quote work, are you working on income generating activities or is your work and I mean we all fall into this sometimes work is like, I'm going to update my website or I'm going to, I don't know, I'm going to post something to my Instagram stories that I think is going to really resonate with my audience.

I mean all that stuff is fine, but it can be easy to fall into a trap where you not generating income because you're not working on income generating activities, so you want to at least dedicate part of your day or part of your week a significant part of your week to doing things that are intended to directly generate income. Capeesh? All right. This is mind blowing like it's so simple. It's so simple. You're like, why did I never think of this before? But when I heard this for the first time, I was like, that's what I've been doing wrong. That is exactly what I've been doing wrong. I've been putting my efforts in all the wrong places. I've been putting it into things that maybe make people happy or make me feel happy, maybe spread the word about health and healthy living and healthy eating, but are not tied to making any sort of money.

All right? So if you want to make money, make more offers and I'm always happy to brainstorm ideas with you on how you can be making more offers. Again, this is like a big, big pitfall for so many coaches. In fact, inside healthy profit university I decided early on that we're going to make this like a core piece of the curriculum. So every single week, every Monday we post in the group. What offers are you going to make this week? It's just a simple question. You can do this for yourself. What offers am I going to make this week? Not what am I going to work on, but what offers am I going to make this week? Because if the answer is none, and there will be weeks like that, but if the answer is consistently none, then really no surprise when you're not making any money, right?

Or if you're not making enough money. So I want you to start asking yourself that question and then we do the same thing on Friday or we, we follow up on Friday and you can do the same. Follow up with yourself at the end of the week. What offers did I make this week? How much money did I earn? Sometimes the answer is zero again. That's all right. Sometimes you know in my business the answer is we made six figures this week. Nice. But then there's other weeks where it's zero, so you know it ebbs and it flows and there's everything in between. But the point is to keep your eye on the moneymaking prize or else it has a way of not happening on its own. Shockingly. Has anyone just found themselves making a lot of money without trying? No. Okay. You got it. You got it. All right, good. You with me?
Alrighty then let's move on to the other big reason that health coaches are not profitable across the board drives me crazy you guys, because we need you. I need you. I like to think that I do this work with you guys because I can't work with everybody, nor am I the right health coach for everybody who needs a health coach. I do really awesome work, I think with the women that I work with, but a, you know, I want to see big changes in health and healthcare and all kinds of things across, across the country, in the world. So anyway, I need you to make money so that you can have a sustainable business so that we can all do this together. Right? All right, so the other thing that you guys are doing wrong, by and large, did you not in that targeting anybody with your message?

We talk about this a lot. It has a lot to do with making money. Here's why. If you're out there going healthy living one Oh one sign up for my workshop or sign up for my health coaching program, I'm going to help you feel your best and live up to your potential and be more vibrant, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. First of all, it sounds like white noise. We've all heard it before. Nobody's really paying attention. Very unlikely that they're going to sign up. Second of all, let's say they do sign up the like the person who's walking outside your house on a random day, right? Let's just say you hit them on the right day. It happens, it happens. Great. They sign up. How much can you charge for that? How much can you charge for this promise of feeling better or being more vibrant?

Like what does that exactly mean? How can you measure that? How do you know when you got there? It's hard. It's hard, which is I think a lot of times why health coaches struggle with their pricing and we talked about that a few episodes ago. So compare that to, and I'm going to use an example of one of our HPU members that kind of has just popped into my head. Compare that to Jennifer, who is selling a program to help put chronic Lyme into remission. Compare.... So that's what, that's her promise. We're going to help with this chronic Lyme situation. We're going to make your life better, even though you've been suffering from chronic Lyme, the person who has chronic Lyme disease and they want to solve that problem, whatever that means, and don't worry about scope of practice. I'll use scope of practice police.
We're not saying we're curing anything, we're not blah, blah, blah, we're, but that is the path we're going to make your life better despite the fact that you have chronic Lyme disease, right? We're going to get rid of symptoms. We're going to help you feel better despite the line. Okay, that's a huge problem. They've probably been dealing with it for years. They probably got into like a zillion doctors and spent a lot of money on different things. Ultimately haven't worked for them. So if you could solve the problem, they know how much that's worth. They've already spent a lot of money trying to solve that problem. Jennifer can be charging thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars. Honestly, if she can, if she can deliver results like that consistently for her clients, that is a thing that you want to consider. So, if you're offering, again, something very big, something that you can't really put a price tag against because it's so vague, you can't anticipate your prices to be lower and that fewer people will buy.

Right. But when you have a target market who is ready, willing, and able and has a big problem that you are focused on helping them solve. Yeah, the money starts to add up and the clients are much more likely to sign up for your program. Even during an economic recession, people still have money and people definitely still have problems, right? So they're out there, they're out there, but they may not be out there going like, Oh yeah, probably would like to be a little healthier. Let me spend a lot of money on that. Like that person may not be your client this week, but someone who has a big problem, they very well could be. And that kind of bleeds over into my last point, which is about, and I know this isn't a tough one, this is a tough one to swallow because we're health coaches and we sell health coaching. Maybe it's your six month coaching program. Okay. But I want you to stop trying to sell health coaching cause nobody wants it. Honestly, nobody wants it. It's kind of the same with personal training, except people do have a better idea of what personal training is all about. And when they think about personal training, they immediately associate that in their mind with building muscle, with losing weight. Like they immediately know what the result is. Health coaching less so.

Yeah. And they're less likely to buy it. So if you say standing outside your house, hi, I'm selling health coaching package. Hi, I'm selling health coaching package. More and more people are gonna walk by. But if you stand outside your house and you say, I'm selling more energy, you would phrase it differently of course. But if the message behind what you're saying is, I'm selling more energy, I'm going to help you fit in your jeans again, I'm going to help bring your blood pressure down, et cetera. I'm going to get rid of your chronic Lyme disease. Ah. Now people are going to go, Oh, what's that? What's that? What'd you say? And much, much more likely that they're going to have a listen to what you're all about. Nobody wants health coaching, so stop trying to sell it. You want to sell the result, write that down.

Stop selling health coaching, start selling a result. This is true across industries by the way, but I think it's particularly relevant for health coaches because like I said, people don't really know what we do. The term health really could be all over the map and let's be honest, we are all over the map. I mean even within our group, we have like 9,000 people in our group right now and some of us are vegan and some of us are doing the carnivore diet and some of us are really into yoga and some of us are not. And like what we do as health coaches varies so much that to call yourself a health coach and to sell health coaching, how could it mean anything? Right? We are also so very different. But if you can get somebody the result that they're after, it doesn't really matter how you get there.

It doesn't matter if you get there with the keto diet or you get there doing Reiki like it doesn't matter. People just want to solve their big problems. So stop selling health coach health coaching and start selling a result. We're going to take these sort of big ideas. I want you to take these big ideas please and like run with them in your business, but we're going to put them into practice in the five day. Make money challenge. Now, we're not gonna be able to revamp your entire business model in five days, but I'm going to help you see how implementing these ideas in small ways that you can do right now. We'll start to bring you in more income right now because I know you might be needing it like there are people getting laid off. If it's not you, you know, maybe it's your, your spouse has been laid off, there's economic hardship.

There are definitely, there's only not enough happening with these small business loans and grants. So my goal is to help you make the most of this time and I want you to join me for that challenge. We're going to start May 17th you can sign up again at healthcoachpower.com/makemoney.

Lisa has a comment here that five years still don't get target market. Yeah, most health coaches don't. It's, it's a simple concept. It's a, it's a business concept, right? It's not like, Oh I'm a health coach and I just really, my passion lies in the keto diet. So I'm going to be all about the keto diet. Like that's not it. You know, and I see a lot of health coaches going down that route. Like where their target, Oh like gut health. I'm just so into gut health. That's the wrong way to approach it.

So if your target market, quote unquote hasn't been working for you, it might be because you're going about it a little bit backwards and that's okay. Cause we're not really taught this in school. This truly is a business topic. So if you didn't go to business school major in like marketing and even people who did probably weren't paying attention. If I remember all you marketing majors back in college, y'all were just like drunk all the time. But this is stuff that we can learn now as entrepreneurs and we can put into practice. Now the other thing I see with people in there, and by the way, we're going to get into target markets a lot during the five day challenge because it truly does drive so many decisions. For example, huh? When I mentioned earlier that we just redid the audio for the show.

So in the show publishes, you know, to podcast the intro and outro is going to be brand new and part of that was picking music, picking new music. So how do you, how do you do that? How do I pick new music? I mean there's like a billion songs that I could have chosen and I can listen to them and I can say, I like this song or I think the song fits me. But because I know you guys, it's not really about necessarily what I like. It's partially that, I mean this is my show, right? But it's really about what's a kind of song that's, that makes sense to my target market. What feeling do they want to have going into this show? What feelings do they have about their business as a health coach? Right? So, if that's a silly, that's like one little tiny decision that had to be made in a whole like my whole business.

But even that, I have to think about you guys, my target market, who I am trying to work with essentially. So, so a lot of times we just think about the target market backwards. That's my point. And we will definitely get more into that during the challenge. That is a huge one for So, so, so many. I'm going to say it one more time. Sign up to join us and start making money now at healthcoachpower.com/makemoney short term quick strategies that will all build on themselves towards a long-term sustainable business. You can make money today doing something kind of weird and you know, underhanded. I'm not suggesting that, I'm not suggesting any crazy salesy, yucky marketing thing that you do. Just to make a quick buck. Today I'm talking about get smart, get smart on your whole business plan, and then like let's take it piece by piece and do something small with that today. That's going to make sense so you can earn some money now you can pay your bills and you can reinvest in your business to see it continue growing into the future. How does that sound to everybody? Yeah. I want to say thank you so much for joining me today for this episode of podcast. I will be back next week and I will see then.