#139: Let’s Talk About Your Logo

Hello, health coaches. Thank you for being here. Really. No, really. Thank you for being here. I just looked at our podcast stats, which I don't really do very often, but I saw that we are about to go over the 200,000 download Mark, which is like huge. That is a milestone and I could not do it without you guys sharing the show, leaving reviews on Apple podcasts and showing up each week as we record right here via live stream into the health coach power community Facebook group. And yes, that's exactly what's happening right now. I am here live. So today we are going to do a little bit of let's get our heads on straight. That's kind of episode it's going to be for everybody who is getting started as a health coach, or really just trying to set up a business.

If that's you and you're here with me live, please say hello in the chat area today, I want to talk about logos and, as we get going and everyone starts to say, hello... Hello Sybil. Thanks for being here. This episode is sponsored by my free on-demand training for health coaches. It's called how to turn health coaching into a full-time salary. And that's available at healthcoachpower.com/earn. If you've ever wondered, like how to get your business out of hobby mode, you know, where it's just a fun thing that you do on the side, it'd be, don't actually make any money and turn it into a business that is profitable. This is the training for you. And again, that's available at healthcoachpower.com/earn.

So, listen, even though it's been 12 years since I started my health coaching practice, it feels like not very long ago at all. And before I was a health coach, I actually worked as an art director. My background is in graphic design. That's what I went to school for. My degree is in art, right? Like I had no nutrition background whatsoever, but when I started my business, I felt like, Hmm, I'm a little bit ahead of the game here. Right?

Like you better believe I was all over that logo design. Yeah. Cause I wanted to have a real business, the website design, let me in on that, the business cards, the flyers, all this and that. So I know exactly how you're feeling and how having a logo and a website makes you feel like, okay, now I have a real business. This is it. I'm official. It's almost like, you know, a shingle to hang out front. If you had a real brick and mortar establishment, right. This is going to make you feel legit. That's exactly how I felt and why I was so quick to jump on these things because right now, well, as you're getting going, you can feel like a giant imposter. I remember like literally having to introduce myself as a health coach. And if I had been hooked up to like a lie detector test, somehow it would have gone off.

I would have said, yeah, hi, I'm Michelle. And I'm a health coach. And the lie detector test would have gone crazy because that's how little I actually believed that I was a health coach. I was really quite lost in my identity for the first few years of my business, because, and get this despite having a logo, despite having a website and a better one than most of my peers. Okay. Of course, because this is what I used to do for a living. I still did not feel like the real deal. I was just a silly person parading around pretending to be a health coach or at least that's how I felt. So today I want to talk about your logo from a couple of different perspectives. And this topic comes from Morgan. She asked inside of our Facebook group. She said, anyone have any recommendations of who to go for to create a logo and brand my business, or even a good site where I could do it all myself, not looking to break the bank.

So for Morgan and for all newer coaches, secret, secret time, you don't need a logo at all whatsoever ever. Isn't that crazy? But you do need, you do need a mailing list. And if you haven't worked with any clients, yet you do need experience. That is what you absolutely need. And that's where I really want you to spend your time. Um, if you have no idea who your target, market's going to be, that's something to maybe worry about, right? But not a logo, not even for one hot second, should you be worrying about that? Secondly, when the time comes that you do get a logo, I need to tell you this because there are a lot of terrible, awful logos out there. So I do want to say on one hand, don't worry about it. You don't need a logo. And yet I've been doing this work a long time, and I know at least half of y'all listening are going, but I want one so fine, fine.

I want to equip you to get a logo that actually makes sense and that you can use, because I see, like I said, some really terrible logos out there, especially within the health and wellness world and among health coaches. And I think this makes sense because not everybody is trained in graphic design and health coaches come from all different backgrounds. So you might be new to the health and wellness industry, but you sure don't have any training in layout or design or color theory or typography or web design. It's cool. It's totally cool. Like of course, of course they teach you all about nutrition and health coach school, but they leave out the part about graphic design. Don't they? I got you. So today let's go over the basics so that you know what to look for when the time comes. Okay. So we're going to hit it from both angles. And hey to Julie and Niecy and Don. All you guys are here with me live.

Thanks. All right. Um, so let's back up to why you don't need a logo and then we'll, we'll, we'll move into all the things that you want to look for when you do finally, go ahead and ignore me and get a logo. Anyway, you don't need a logo because... Here's the reason, number one, you most likely, if you're like most health coaches, you don't have a product, you don't have something that you have to put a label on. Right? So your product as a coach is invisible. Um, it's kind of like, kind of like a dentist, right? Like, does your dentist need a logo? Do you really like recognize your dentist logo? You're driving down the street and you're like, ah, which dentist did I want to go to? Oh, that one, that one, I recognize the logo, right? No logos are good on products and visual, uh, things that people are buying because they're like looking for something recognizable.

Okay. So that's not the case in a service industry. It's much less important. And if you think about it, do most dentists have logos? Usually not. And if they do, it's a tooth and we're going to talk more about why that's stupid. It just a second. So in your case, the thing that is most recognizable about you is you it's your face. If you want to think of it as your face, being your logo, think of it that way. It's your name? Um, it can be your URL. Like these are the things people are going to see and remember about who you are. So what the, when they're like, Oh yeah. Who was that person that was talking about that great recipe? Oh yeah, it was her, right. That's what they're going to usually identify you according to either your photo or your URL or your name.

So, if you have a face, if you have a name great, you don't have to pay anybody. We can already identify you. All right. Um, the other thing like I was already saying is there are better places to spend your time and energy. Like in order to market yourself, you will absolutely need and want a mailing list and you're going to need a target market and you need to be getting your target market onto your mailing list. And with that, you can start seeing clients. You can be marketing yourself to new clients and you can be earning a whole salary just like that. And none of anything I just said requires a logo at all. It doesn't even need a website, so you can start your business and you can make money like good money. Even if you literally never have a logo because a logo plays zero part in anything that I just mentioned. Truth. Truth, you guys. All right.

And reason number three why I don't think you need a logo. And I think that, you know, this is a, this is like a non-issue in most cases, because if you go ahead and get a logo, it's probably going to be a bad one, especially if you're just starting out. Okay. So here's what happens. So either formally you're going to buy a logo or commission, someone to do a logo for you. And it's very likely it's going to like formally be a bad logo. We'll talk more about what makes a good logo and a bad logo in just a second. But when you're just starting out, uh, like the original, you know, question was posed. Like, I, I need a logo, but I don't have a lot of money. Yeah. You don't, you don't have a lot of money.

So, you're not going to have a lot of money to invest in a good logo. It's like anything else, you get what you pay for. And you probably don't even know what your business is really about or who you are as a coach. So then how can you translate something to a logo that really represents you? It's just kind of the cart before the horse. So all this stuff comes with time and experience. So either, you know, you're going to end up hiring that cheap designer to give you a cheap designs. Probably not going to be so great. I would just skip it. Or even if you get the most tasteful, most lovely logo of all time. Again, if you're new to the field in six months, a year, two years, you are going to evolve. Your business is going to change, and you're going to look back and you're going to hate that logo because it just does not represent who you are anymore.

Okay. So, I know some of you are here live, who have actually been in business for a while. Some of you will actually be ready to get a logo. At some point, you're going to feel the need for it. You're going to want to print it on the back of a business card, even though you don't have to. Let me tell you what makes a good logo. Cause I'm not sure that everyone knows this. I'm pretty positive. A lot of people don't think about logos this way. Everybody wants their logo to be, um, be cute, be to pop. A lot of people use that word. I want it to pop. You know, we want to identify with our logo somehow, almost like the way you would buy. I don’t know, a bag or a pair of shoes. Like something that represents you, something that looks like you.

The actually there's some more important things that need to come into play when we're talking about a logo being used for marketing purposes. So first and foremost, when the day comes that you hire someone to design a logo for you, this gets missed a lot. First and foremost, your logo needs to be legible. I know. Sounds crazy. Hear me out. A lot of times you see logos and some sort of scripty, fancy font that if you stare at it for like 30 seconds, you can figure out what it says, but most people are not going to do that. Right. It goes by in the blink of an eye and nobody saw what that logo said. Anyway. Nobody can identify it. Nobody can read it. Okay. Same goes for fancy designs with like lots of little details and contrast in colors. What that can often do is render the logo almost useless because once again, it is not legible.

Remember, we're usually not looking at a logo, this big, you know, the size of our computer screen, how big is a logo. It's usually like teeny tiny in the corner of a webpage or printed on the back of your business card. Right? So has to be legible at the bare minimum and legible at different sizes. So do think about that. Okay. This looks pretty good, but what happens when I shrink this logo down, down, down, down, down to like 200 pixels wide for the, you know, corner of my booking page on my website, can somebody still read that or even know what it is or does it just sort of look like a blob? Sometimes what happens is a logo will have some words very big and then some words very small. So, when you shrink it down, the very small words are completely obliterated and you just do not see them.

So what you want to look for in a logo is something that you can read when it's big, what small at every size in between. Okay. The next thing that I want you to look for when you get a logo, if you get a logo, is that needs to work. It needs to again be legible and be usable in color in all white and in all black, because your logo is going to appear. Well, I was going to say, it's going to appear many different places, but again, you don't really need it, but if you have a logo, you're going to feel like you want to put it in many different places, right? So you never know, and this is just true across all industries. You never know what sort of background a logo is going to go on. So, let's just say your logo is green and now you have to put it on a t-shirt for some like events, right?

That you're sponsoring, you know, sometimes there's logos on the back of a t-shirt for like a race or something like that. Let's pretend you're one of the sponsors fine. So the t-shirts green and your logo is green. That's not going to work. Um, if you, if you do that, no, one's going to be able to read it. So a good logo is always going to come in a black version and a white version. So that depending on the situation, you can use that version of your logo. Like you'd probably, if you had like a bright green shirt, you'd probably want to put a white logo on top of it, kind of a corollary to that is your logo should come with a transparent background. Any good logo designer is going to give you your, your logo graphic, not just one. You should. I have like 25 versions of the, it's not really a logo, but of the Mark that I use for my business.

You're going to get it as like a JPEG or a gif file. That's fine. But you're going to also need to have it as a transparent ping .png. That means that it's the logo without a white square behind it. Because again, let's say you're going to put your logo on a green shirt and your logo is like a circle of some kind. You want to see that circle. You don't want to see the circle with a square around it, where the edge of the graphic was. So when something like that's happening, like on your website, or, you know, you're going to put your logo on somebody else's site, or however the heck it's working, it is essential that you have a transparent ping that you can work with. Again, you're going to want that in color in white and also in black, because we don't want to have, I think you all know what I'm talking about. You go to put a logo on something. It has that white box around it.

Now, speaking of versioning, again, lots of versions should come with your logo for all the different needs. You may have, your logo should have a high res version for printing purposes, 300 DPI or more. So if you are ever going to like write a book or print this in some sort of packet that you're going to mail to your clients or whatever, and you want it to print nice and crisp. It needs to be at a high resolution. Otherwise it comes out all pixelated when it prints, right? You don't want that. So, you need a high-res version of your logo and you also need a low-res version of your logo because sometimes people only get one or the other.

You definitely want both. And the whole thing should be. And just remember these words, it doesn't matter if you know what they mean. The whole thing should be vector based so that it can scale beautifully to any size that you ever need from now until the end of time. So if your logo designer is not going to give you a vector file format, I would walk away. Cause there's going to be a time that you need to do something with that logo and you won't be able to do it if you don't have the vector file. So I hope that's helpful for starters, where are you going to get a logo? That's the question. Uh, first answer to that could be don't low-res bother, but if you're truly in the point in your career that you have all your bases covered, the logo is like the cherry on top.

I'm going to encourage you to hire a good graphic designer. That is my recommendation. You can, and I know lots of people who hire a low-cost designer on fiverr.com or a site like that. And you can find good designers on there too, right? Not all of them just charge $5, but careful with that, um, this is where you might start running into trouble. Like not getting logos that are legible, not getting logos that come in proper file formats. So you want to be careful with who you're using. And in the meantime, pick a font. You can do this on your computer, pick a font, pick a legible font, nothing too scripty or weird and type your name and boom, that's your logo done and done. You don't have to think about it ever again. So that is my other alternative for you. If you go to my website, if you go to healthcoachpower.com or shesgotpower.com, those are the two sides of my business.

Remember I've been in business for 12 years and I come from a graphic design background. My logo are the words she's got power and health coach power with my name underneath. And that's it. It does not need to be anything more than that. See, here's the thing, we focus on stuff like this when we are maybe subconsciously even busying ourselves and conveniently avoiding doing the real work. We don't have to do the scary parts. We don't have to go out there and like, hold a workshop or find clients reach out to our warm contacts, offer our program. We don't have to do that sort of thing. If we keep ourselves very conveniently behind a computer screen, like working on our website or working on our logo. But I promise you that this sort of busy work is not moving you forward. So again, I'm going to repeat what I said in the beginning.

If you're looking to go from hobby mode, or this is just a fun little thing I'm doing on the side to actually turning health coaching into a business, do check out my free training at healthcoachpower.com/earn, because I think you're going to get everything you need to know there. And you'll notice that at no point do I say you need a logo? Okay, thank you for letting me get that rant out every now and then I have to do it. This topic comes up repeatedly. And from now on, I'm just going to always point people to this episode.

Let's move on to a few other questions. And if you are here with me live and you have questions today, go ahead and put them into the comment area. I am looking for those. I do have one here from Bindia who posted into our Facebook group and said, I'm looking for recommendations. I hope it's okay to write here. I am looking at taking up functional medicine training after completing my IIN health coach training, any recommendations on courses. So I know that we already got a lot of feedback about this in the group. We have lots of coaches, myself included who have gone on after an initial health coach certification to do a deeper dive into certain aspects of health or functional medicine and it can be cool, right? I actually waited 10 years from the time that I graduated from IIN until doing the functional medicine training. It's not necessary. You can be a very effective, capable, profitable coach as a certified health coach with just one certification under your belt, okay. So, don't feel like you have to go on and do more trainings. However, I know that it's interesting for us to keep learning. We can bring more to our clients, more skills, more knowledge.

So I actually have several functional medicine certifications and, and schools coming onto the show. So over about the next month, you're going to see interviews with School of Applied Functional Medicine, Functional Medicine Coaching Academy, Functional Diagnostic Nutrition. I hope I'm not forgetting any. So that we can really talk to them, figure out what their program's all about, who it's good for, and then you can make a decision from there. So, I'm very happy to have that in the pipeline for you guys. Especially if you are in the process of figuring this out for yourself. So, hang tight in a couple of weeks, all those episodes will become available for you.

Okay. And I have a question here from Jackie and I, like, I loved, I love this question. I feel like this hits home for a lot of people. So I wanted to share it with everybody today. Jackie wrote, I'm really struggling right now with what steps to take next. I'm currently working part-time nights as an RN while trying to manage the business my husband owns, my own business and some other projects I'm working on. It's way too much for me. I don't have time to network for social media or to finish this course. And by that, I think she's referring to her health coach certification course. She says, to do the things that I really want to do with my business. I'm strongly considering using what I have in savings, as well as dipping into a retirement in order to be able to quit my part-time job so that I can put everything into my businesses.

I'm terrified that this is a terrible decision, but I'm also terrified that I won't be able to move forward if I don't. I'm confident that given the proper time and resources, I can do this, but there's that TNC part of me that says, what if I do fail? I would love input from others. Am I absolutely crazy to do it this way?

Jackie, I know that feeling. And so many health coaches come up against that where it's like, how am I going to know when it's time to leave my full-time job? I can't put in the time and energy to something else when I'm still working at this job. And in your case, you know, you're talking about how you're doing stuff for your business, your husband's business, other projects you have going on, right? You're, you're really spread thin at this point. Um, so what I, what I wanted to respond to was a couple of things.

First, some people were starting to talking about business coaching, and maybe you need business coaching. It sounds to me like you are in a state of overwhelm in life. And it's almost like more like life coaching is an order because business coaching is going to say, you know, here's what to do with, you know, social media and you need to target market and we need to do some networking. And all of that is involved with building your business. But if you were super overwhelmed with all of these other obligations and, uh, projects that you're involved with, like that has to come first. And I think, you know that because you're saying I'm overwhelmed, this is too much. So I would start by clearing your schedule. This is a skill that will serve you in your business when able to get to it. If you can't do it now, you won't be able to do it.

Then I don't think money is so much the problem as is the ability to structure your time and learn how to say no, I will tell you that within my own business, I get opportunities left, right and sideways right? Every day, do this, do that. I have ideas that I want to do. I have things I've promised people. I have clients. I have all the same thing. You can be spread way too thin. And one of the most important skills that you will ever hone is the ability to say, no, I think there's like a quote. Maybe somebody famous, like Steve Jobs said it. I have no idea. Something about like as a CEO, your most important job is to say no, because this allows you to get rid of this shiny object and that shiny object and all the things that are going to dilute your attention and your energy, and really focus on like the one or two things that is going to take you far.

So, I wanted to put that out there for you. So you could start by prioritizing your schedule, drawing some hard boundaries, and then maybe reassess the idea of dipping into savings when you're not in the same state of overwhelm, because I think you might come to a slightly different conclusion, but my heart is going out to you because I know it's always a hard call when to make the leap. And I always, always encourage health coaches to have a financial backup plan because any new business takes time to build. And I never want any of you to take that leap and have no, no safety net, no financial safety net, cause any new business does come with risk. Now albeit, as a health coach, a lot less risk than in other businesses, because it's not like you have to buy a warehouse and fill it with inventory and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars from the, from the get-go, but still take your time, lose the overwhelm.

It will serve you well, moving forward. Okay. I think I have time for like one or two more questions. What do we have here today? Um, Monica asked an interesting question. She said, what would a $10,000 client package look like to you guys? So think about that. If you were to charge $10,000, does your mind immediately go to, well, we would have weekly meetings or I would check in with them every morning or I would give them, I don't know this resource or that resource, or there would be a retreat involved. Right? All the things I'm going to encourage you Monica to. And I don't know how this was in your own mind. I'm just guessing at how most people would read the question. Right? What would a $10,000 client package look like? Don't think about the things that are included. Think about the problem that you are solving.

I've heard this as you want to solve a million dollar problem, because if you're solving a million dollar problem, and you're only charging $10,000, that is a deal. That's amazing. That's a steal, you know? So instead of, um, thinking about the stuff, yes. Think about what is the problem that if solved truly is worth a million dollars, it's easier to think about it. If you think about business, like let's say that you can help somebody, um, save their, whatever their, their bookstores, you know, whatever business they have and that business is worth a million dollars, right? If you're able to help them save that whole business, you only charged them $10,000. Uh, that's very much worth it to them because now they had this million dollar business. When it comes to health, you might have to think about it a little bit differently, or you might have to think beyond just the health, um, problem and the symptoms and how it's affecting their life and get to the part where it starts to be worth a million dollars, because then you can easily charge your $10,000 for. I hope that helps.

Okay. And one more. Let's do one more. Oh yes. I wanted to answer this question. This came from Janet, but I have been hearing this more and more from you guys. Janet said, where can I find information on the fast track program? So real quick, I want to let you know that in April, so, coming up real soon, we will be announcing the next fast track semester for healthy profit university. HPU is my course for health coaches to help you earn a full-time salary. HPU is available year round, but twice a year. And only twice a year, I run it live and we do more and we move fast and people get way bigger, better results faster during those fast track semesters. So, keep your eyes open because two things, number one, we'll be announcing the whole program in April, but number two next week, is it next week already?

We'll be announcing the wait list. So if you know you want in next week, I will have a wait list available for you and you can go and put your name on it. So you will be first in line when that fast track semester is open for registration, but I'll have much more about that next week as for today. Thank you for joining me. I hope we've got our heads on straight when it comes to logos and such so that you can focus on what's most important in your business and stop wasting time. I love you guys. Thanks for being here. See you later.