#204: Do You Have What It Takes To Run a Successful Health Coaching Business?

Hello there, health coaches. You know, for years, the topics of these podcast episodes have come from our Health Coach Power Community Facebook group. But today, I want to actually address something that popped up on my Instagram account. Yes, I am over there on Instagram. You can follow me @healthcoachpowercommunity. Now recently over on Instagram, I got into a little conversation with a health coach. Her name is Therea. Hi Theresa, if you're listening, who said she's feeling like she doesn't have what it takes to run her own business, to which I replied well, what do you feel it takes exactly?

We're gonna talk about that today. So you can decide if you have what it takes or not. But first I wanna remind you that the waitlist is open for weekly mentorship. I am live with my mentorship group and it is the best dang bargain on this side of the Hudson river. I mean, what are your options? When it comes to getting specific and personal support with your business, you can talk to your spouse. You can talk to your friends who I promise you do not understand what you're doing, or you can hire a business coach to the tune of $5,000, $10,000, or you can join weekly mentorship at a very, very affordable rate, because I know when you're starting out and maybe you're even still questioning, Hey, do I have what it takes? You're not ready to drop that kind of money. And you shouldn't. You really shouldn't at that stage of the game. What you should do is join our weekly calls for support, accountability, and most of all real life community. So let's do that. Put your name on the wait list. Enrollment will be opening later this summer, but the wait list is open for you now at healthcoachpower.com/mentorship.

I'll say that again, healthcoachpower.com/mentorship. If you can't type that out right now, wherever you're listening, go to the show notes for this episode, once it's published, we'll put them there wherever you're listening, Spotify, apple podcast, we'll have it all linked up for you. Now, I also need to give a shout out to KayBorcetti for leaving this five star review on apple podcast. Here's what she wrote said, Michelle is a gem for new coaches. Thank you. She said, I found Michelle a while back when I first dove into coaching and was looking for all sorts of answers. She answered the call. She serves her community with loads of great content that I, as a newbie coach soaked up. If you're new to coaching or even mid-career and needing a refreshing boost of wisdom and confidence, listen in to Michelle's show. Kay Borcetti we have a little thank you gift to send your way. So please send us your mailing address at support@healthcoachpower.com and reference this episode.

And for all of you with every new review on apple podcast, this month you're entered to win a coaching call with me, a coaching call you and me on the phone talking about whatever's going on in your business in life. This is something I'm doing giveaway in honor of our 200th episode. That just happened recently. So if you didn't listen to that episode, go back to number 200. I talk more about this giveaway, but for everyone listening right now, get those written reviews submitted to apple podcast because at the end of the month, I'm going announce our winner.

Now let's get back to this idea that you may not have what it takes to run a successful health coaching business. Is that true? What does it take? Tell me in the comments, if you're here with me live, what do you think it takes to run a successful health coaching business?

And do you have it? When I asked Theresa what she felt it would take, she said, focus, commitment, hustle, and a willingness to fail. And she said, I tend to get overwhelmed by all the possibilities and what I need to do. And then I just don't have the motivation to do anything at all. All right. If you've ever felt like Theresa, say me too in the comments right now and again, tell me what you think that it takes to be successful. You know, I think Theresa is right on all counts. So good job Theresa. You named off some really good ones. Success does depend on having focus, commitment, hustle, a willingness to fail. Katie's saying a belief that you can, that one's hard, but yes, a belief that you can and motivation, of course, any others just peeking over here to see what you guys are writing.

Here's what I want you to do. Think about a successful health coach, somebody that, you know, somebody that you're familiar with, maybe just somebody that you follow online or someone that you've heard about think of that person. Do you think that they have ever felt unfocused, you know, days where they just could not get their brain to do the thing? Of course they have, right? Sometimes they lack focus, same person. Do you think their commitment has ever flagged? Of course, of course there's been days like that. I bet just based on my own experience and all the coaches that I've worked with and known through the years, I bet some days they've almost given up, they've almost packed it in. I've had points in my business like that. There was one day where I quit everything. I just could not do it anymore. Have you had a day like that?

They happen, I assure you. And are there days where these successful coaches don't feel like hustling? Like at all, Uhuh, they're not gonna do it. They wanna stay under a blanket all day and watch Netflix. Yeah. You bet 1000% that happens. And has the thought of failure ever been so completely terrifying that they've procrastinated on a project or they've talked themselves out of a big opportunity? Absolutely. So, here's what I think. It's not that successful coaches have more focus than the next person or less fear of failure. It's all there. Right? I know it is all there for everyone, but I think the ones that succeed and write this down, they're the ones that do it anyway. You can just write that down, do it anyway. Three words. We have to have a growth mindset, right? We don't stay stuck in our fear. We move through it.

We don't stay stuck in the idea of, I don't know how we make mistakes. And then we learn from them and then we know a little better how, and we get smarter. So who has fear, hands up for fear who lacks focus, especially in the summertime, hands up for lack of focus. I know it well. Do you ever feel like giving up? Yes, no. Yes. For me it happens all the time. And so good. If you raise your hand for any of those, you're on the right track and you have what it takes. Now, you just have to keep going. That is the thing I'm gonna add. Two more tidbits to this things that really seem to separate those that succeed from those that give up and pack it in and go back to the corporate job or whatever you were doing before. One thing that really sets the stage for success is getting support.

When you need it, knowing, Hey, I need help. I don't know what I'm doing. I need help with this particular thing. Or sometimes just in general, you don't know exactly what you need help with, but you know, something isn't right and reaching out for that help. That is one way, of course, that our weekly mentorship group can be super duper helpful. So I wanna remind you again, that the wait list is open for that at healthcoachpower.com/mentorship. And then the other thing really important. You need to have a strong why you need to have a reason behind why you're doing what you're doing. Like, why are you here? Why are you watching this right now? Why are you listening to this right now? Why am I in your earbuds? So many coaches want to make the world a healthier place. And that's kinda it like, that's kind of, as far as the thought process has gone, they're they like to be healthy and wanna help more people be healthy.

Okay. That's all right. But without personal motivation, like a real driving force to do it now to get it done. What I see is your coaching business. Isn't nice to have, it's not front and center and super dDuper important. It's like, well maybe if it happens, that'd be nice. Which one are you honestly, you know, just check in with yourself. If you're keep running up against a wall, it's not working, I'm not making any headway. I suggest find yourself a bigger why behind your business is it so that you can move your kids into a better school system? That's a big driving force when we wanna do better for our family. Is it so that you can take that European vacation this summer? And I'm just like a little bit excited about my European vacation this summer. So that's why I use that as an example.

Anything like that? That's cool. You've got goals. You have profit related goals. It's awesome. Or maybe if you dig deep, you got into this business to help people. For example, avoid the health problems that you saw your mother suffer with. Maybe it's a way to channel your love for your mother and your anger at her disease. And you really wanna help people. But again, you have to want it so bad. It has to mean something very personal to you. Again, that story very much relates to my own experience of watching my own mother sleep for about 10 years battling what nobody could diagnose back then, right? That is a big motivator for me in my business, in addition to the European vacation. So you have to want it so bad if you don't know what that reason is, spend some time with that this week.

Why am I doing it? Why does it matter if I succeed or not? What's pushing me or else, you know what? It's so easy to just keep putting it off. Remember cuz it's like a nice to have not a must have. All right, we've got some time left on today's episode. So I am here to take your questions. If you're here with me live, go ahead and put them in the chat. You can, um, right here on Instagram, I'm looking at you, I'm looking at you over on Facebook. And I also have some that I pulled out of our Facebook group that were posted earlier this week. So let's hit those. This one came from Karen and Karen said, she's wondering if anyone has advice on best platforms for blogging or ones to avoid. She says, I hate the idea of rebuilding my website, but I've decided that this is part of my sales strategy and I need an engaging, but easy to use platform to help grow my list for health coaching. Any help is much appreciated.

Karen, I think this is a cool move for you. Blogging is certainly not the only way to put yourself out there, but it can be a really solid way to do it. And you know, what's gonna make a great, useful blog, something that's actually effective in your business. It's gonna be the content more than anything else. It's going to be the quality of what you write and how you write it. And if you write it on a WordPress blog, whoop to do good for you, if you do it on a Squarespace blog, okay, great. If you decide to write on medium.com instead of your own property, you know, you can post on a third party site like medium. That's great too. They all have their advantages and their disadvantages, but what they all have in common is that it depends on how good the stuff is, is the content worth reading.

And that's, what's going to garner you readers and fans and followers and down the line, clients, you may already know this about me, but I started my whole business based on a blog. And they were, my, my readers were my first clients. They were just like, yep, here's a check. Let's go. Let's do this thing. Cuz they had been reading my writing for about a year or two before I started offering my coaching services. So Karen, I love this idea for you. Just pick something and get started. The only concrete advice I will give is that all things being equal, tech savviness, you know, your ability to work on a learning curve, et cetera. WordPress is sort of the industry standard. My whole website runs on WordPress. WordPress is a little more complicated than other things though. So do whatever is easiest for you to get going and stick with hope that helps.

Okay. Mandy's here. Mandy's got questions. Love it. Let's see Mandy. She says advice for best health coaching apps for both me as a coach and for clients. Okay, I use two. Are they the best? I don't know. I've been doing okay for a bunch of years. So I'll tell you what they are. The first app that I use both for myself, like within my business and with my team members. Um, and uh, also with my clients is an app called Voxer. It's not specific to health and wellness at all. It's just like a walkie talkie kind of app. And it's a way for us to text and voice message each other and stay in touch. I love it. I just feel like I can just pick up my phone, shoot a message off. And maybe five minutes later, maybe five hours later, whatever. I get a message back.

And it's like having a phone call or a conversation that you don't have to schedule and put on the calendar. And it seems to work really well for people's schedules. So I live and die by Voxer. The only other app that I use is Practice Better. So of course I'm using that internally for my scheduling, for offering my programs for my billing, anything like that through practice better when it comes to my health coaching business. And it's very easy to use on a phone like the actual app for your phone or on a computer and then clients can log in and I have literally never had a client say, I can't figure this out. Like it's easy enough that they can use it too on the client side. And I really, really love that. So if you haven't already checked out, practice better, we do have a discount with them.

It is. Let me pull this out of my brain. It's uh, 30% off your first three months of practice better. You wanna go to healthcoachpower.com/practice and use code HCpower30. I literally like have that memorized. That's how often I give that out. it's a great service. And I think that it's all you need. Mandy says she has Voxer already. Okay. Then you know what I'm talking about? Okay. Shannon says, her five date... And Shannon is one of our fast trackers. Our fast trackers are coming up like woo. On like three months now we've been inside fast track and Shannon has her five-day challenge next week. Nice. She says, I'm going way out of my comfort zone and we'll be going live on Facebook. What do you do if nobody shows up or just your mom shows up yeah, that'll happen.

So you may have noticed just a few minutes ago, I said, I'm here to take your questions. And I offered for anyone. Who's watching to submit questions, which you did Shannon. And so did Mandy and maybe a few others of you will as well. But I also have a list in front of me of questions that I pulled out of our Facebook group earlier. Or if I was running a five day challenge, maybe I have questions in front of me that people had emailed me or even just questions that I think somebody might want the answer to. So always have stuff in the can to talk about just in case your audience is not there live or they are there live, but they're feeling shy that day. And that happens even if you're doing everything right. It doesn't mean anything about you. So just have enough content that you could carry on for your 15 minutes or 20 minutes, however long you're gonna do your lives with or without the participation.

Okay. What other questions do you guys have for me? Usually once it gets rolling, it gets rolling. Somebody's like, oh, Mandy asked a question. Shannon asked a question. I could ask a question too. That's why I'm here so that we can have this conversation. Okay. Um, another question for Mandy, she says, how many tiers of pricing do you recommend? So when you're offering to your, you know, you're on a consultation with your client, Mandy and you wanna be able to say, here are the packages that I offer and then you have your different tiers. Um, right now she says she has a free discovery call, one hour call for $150 one month, three month and six month pricing packages. I think that's good and not too overwhelming. Um, so I actually recommend that you have a signature program that has a fixed cost and that is what you offer.

It's sort of the difference between being, um, a blue collar service provider who charges hourly and lets the client decide how much they want you to come clean their house or mow their lawn versus being an expert who says, I can help you with this particular problem. And this is how I do it. it takes this long. It costs this much. Here's what's included you set the stage. I think it sets up a better coaching relationship where they're looking to you to be the leader and the expert. And you're not leaving it up to them to kind of nickel and dime. Well, I think I only wanna pay for one session this month when you know, darn well they're gonna need at least two or three. So that's my 2 cents on that. Um, in the past I did offer tiered pricing as you're describing a six month or three month.

And if you're gonna go that way, my best advice is to not let the client well, the client obviously can always choose if you're going to give them the options, but you can tell them about the options, share your options with them and then make a strong recommendation based on what they've told you. So if they are somebody who's like very into health and wellness and they just wanna be a little bit healthier, maybe they even wanna become a health coach. You know, they might be somebody that signs up for like your six month package because they really like this stuff, but they don't really have that much of a problem to solve. And what are you gonna do over six months together? It's just overkill and you're gonna be, be bored. You're gonna be bored with them as a client. So in that case you could say, I recommend my smallest package for however long, for this many dollars.

On the other hand, if somebody comes to you and they have, you know, a hundred pounds that they need to lose and multiple chronic diseases and you know, lots and lots and lots going on and they wanna do that small package, I mean, you know, in your heart, you're not gonna be able to make that much of a change happen in just one month. So in that case, I would strongly recommend to the client, the larger package. And you can explain, we have a lot to work on together. It's going to take time. The body doesn't change overnight. This would be the right package for you. And you know, that person may still say, well, I can't afford that. I'm gonna go with the other package, whatever, but I think that's the responsible thing to do again, putting yourself in the seat of expert, make a strong recommendation.

So, I hope that helps. I have a question here from Maureen. Maureen says, I want to know what calendar or scheduling apps you're all currently using. And did it take a lot of time to learn how to use it? Well, Maureen, I actually use two. I use practice better as I was just talking about. I feel like I talk about practice better all the time. I use practice better for my calendar when it comes to scheduling my client sessions or my free consultation calls. So anything I'm doing with paying clients, that's all happening through practice better, but I also use Calendly and Calendly is great for when I'm scheduling like a one off 30 minute session because some company wants to talk to me about their product or I'm scheduling. I've been doing a lot of this lately for my she's got power podcasts where I'm scheduling guests to record podcast interviews.

I use Calendly for basically everybody else, because Calendly is just so easy. You don't have to log in. It's a much lighter tool. I will say. It's just lighter. There's less to it. And it makes more sense when it's just somebody that you're scheduling one time with. So I use a combination of those two. Now obviously practice better has a cost associated with it. And Calendarly does not. They have a really excellent free version. I've been using it for years and years and years. And both of those tools integrate with your Google calendar, which I could not live without, because this way I have these different calendaring systems. But if on my Google calendar, I block off a whole day that I'm gonna be taking off or I block off two whole weeks, which I'm about to do because I'm going to be traveling. Yes, it automatically tells my two other calendar tools.

Michelle's not available at all during this blocked off time. So they all work really well together. I don't think there would be a reason that you need anything else. So see how you do with those. Okay. And I have another question here about, um, packaging and pricing, but this is in terms of group coaching. So, Aisha says, does anyone do group coaching? If so, how do you price it? And how long are the sessions in terms of the length of the session in hours and how long in terms of the months? Okay, so let's break that down. First of all, group coaching, I think is even more important to be focused around a particular type of person with a particular problem, cuz it's much more difficult and much less comfortable for the group members. If you have a group where like, let's say one person is a woman who's 65 years old and she's, you know, through menopause and she's having joint issues.

And another group member is 27 years old and recently married and thinking about getting pregnant for the first time. And someone else is a man and he wants to lose his beer belly. I mean, that's just not a cohesive group. That's gonna be served well together. And also it's gonna be very hard to know the answer to the question. How long do they need to start seeing results? They're all so different. But if you were exclusively working with women who are like in their mid sixties with arthritic joint pain, okay, now you have three, four or five women like that in your group and you would have to think, okay, how long will it reasonably take for these women to start feeling less pain? Can we accomplish this in one meeting? Probably not, right. Do we need three months? Do we need four months? Do we need six months?

I would make a decision based on the problem that you're solving and what you know about how the body changes and also perhaps what you know about clients and that they don't always do exactly what they say they're going to do. And they may need a little extra time. So that's how you determine length of program, whether it's one on one or a group situation, as for each meeting, my experience with groups that the hardest part is getting them there. So if you're gonna pick a day and time to meet and you can find an hour every week or every other week or whatever it is that everybody is available, that's amazing. I think it will become infinitely harder if you're trying to schedule 90 minutes, two hours, that everybody is available, it just becomes cumbersome on the calendar. So my instinct is to tell you to stick to one hour and see how that goes.

And then in terms of price. So this is a super duper ballpark answer, but I think it's helpful sometimes to just have, um, a guideline, right? So when you are working one on one, let's say you're working with these women. They're 65 years old. They have joint pain, they have arthritis and you work with them for three months and you're one on one, three month package costs $1,500. Now you're gonna run a group and it's gonna be essentially the same thing, except you're gonna have four or five people paying you. It is common to charge half what you charge for your one on one coaching. And when you're having a conversation with someone and you're offering them a spot in your program, it's a nice thing to be able to say, oh, if, um, if they say, oh, it's too expensive, I can't do this $1,500 package, whatever they're gonna back out, you can say, I also have group coming up and it's half the price.

That's just a very compelling way of describing it. And then of course it might happen by, uh, vice versa. I've noticed this a lot. When I offer a group program, I almost always sign private clients. It's so funny. You don't think that's going to happen, but you say have this group and here's how much it costs and this is what we're going to be doing. And someone's gonna raise their hand and go, do you work privately? Cause I really don't wanna be part of a group or I can't make it that day. Can I hire you privately? And you can say yes, and then you can tell them the price difference. And it's just gonna make sense. Like it's just a good, uh, variation in price between one offer and the next, so that's one way of thinking about it. But pricing is a huge issue.

If you go back into the archives of this podcast and search for pricing, you can find other episodes where I talk about pricing, not based on how long the call is or how long the program is or how many recipes they get or, you know, any of them, whatever Voxer support, you know, these are just the features price based on the result that someone's going to achieve by working with you price based on how valuable that is for them. And we could talk about this so much more. I just need more information about who you're planning to work with, 'cause there's just so many different... It's nuanced, you know, how you choose pricing and length for programs. Anyway, that's the kind of conversation that we can have inside of our weekly mentorship group. So, I'm just gonna tell you one more time that the wait list is open for that at healthcoachpower.com/mentorship.

That's all for today. You guys. Thanks for being here. Thanks for your questions. I'll see you soon. Bye bye.