#335: New Health Coach? 10 Small Steps to Getting Clients

Alright. Real quick before we start, just a reminder of our free upcoming session on how to turn supplements and lab tests into an income stream. Yes, for health coaches. And yes, while staying within your scope of practice, I want you to join us for this free event so you can learn how it all works. I can't wait to learn how it all works. And all you got to do is register@healthcoachpower.com/supplements. That event is coming up next week. Just a little announcement that I had to get out of the way before we do anything else. So last week I was in Florida with my boys for spring break and we went to the beach and we went to Kennedy Space Center. Have you ever been? I've never been there before. I thought it was really, really cool and I'm just a boy mom, right?

I am like, all right, we'll go to Kennedy Space Center. I have no interest in this, but it was really, really cool. And we even got to see a shuttle launch. I guess that happens every few days, but we never saw anything like that before. The boys loved it. Now you know how Neil Armstrong said one small step for man as he stepped onto the moon, like one step, no big deal, right? Except it was a huge deal. And today I am responding to a question from Dasia about taking small steps forward as a health coach. Now, Dasia texted me this question, and by the way, you can do the same if you're in the US or Canada. Go to healthcoachpower.com/text and submit your questions for an upcoming episode. And if you're lucky, like Dasia today, maybe I will respond to you in an upcoming show.

So again, that's healthcoachpower.com/text. So here's what she asked. Assia said, how do you market yourself when you don't have any clients yet? What are the small steps you need to get started with getting clients? I just loved this idea of small steps because if the astronauts were told to go run a marathon on the moon or go to the moon and build a small town there, that would've been too much and it wouldn't have gotten done. But to take one step that made all the difference. So here are 10 small steps that you can take to start getting clients, whether you are a brand new coach or a coach who's kind of been going in circles for a while, anyone can take these steps at any stage of business and you can do them like today. How about today? Today's a good day.

It'll be a giant leap forward for you. So as we go through, tell me in the chat area if you've tried these or if they worked really well or if you got stuck or I would hear any of your real life responses and experiences to all of these ideas. That helps lend a lot of color to the episode. So it's not just me, blah, blah, blah, but it's really about what's working for all of you and the questions that you have. So here we go with number one small step you can take is talk to people. That's it you guys. That's all there is to it. You got a mouth, you can do it. Conversations lead to clients, and I'm not even talking about conversations with potential clients, people who definitely are looking for health coaching and you definitely want to work with, I mean all conversations, conversations with your neighbor, the trainer at the gym, talk to the moms at soccer practice, talk to the owner of the natural food store in your town.

Talk to your kids' teachers. It doesn't matter who, you just need to start talking and you don't even have to talk about your business. I mean you can, but anything that comes up, just start talking, making friends, keeping up connections. And here's a really good idea, connecting people to each other. This is going to either directly or indirectly lead you to clients. It's all about relationships. So much of business is about relationships. So here's a random example. I was trying to think way, way, way, way, way back in my own health coaching career, how just talking to people like a human being made a big difference. And I thought of this one. So I used to teach a lunchtime yoga class at a gym in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And this one guy, he would come every week. His name was Mike and he wasn't very flexible and he wasn't particularly friendly or smiley or anything like that.

So I went out of my way to talk to him more. Actually, I always went out of my way to chat with all of my students. And over the course of weekend week out, I found out that he worked nearby one of the tech companies up there by MIT. And his wife was a doctor. Well, eventually I ran a program in my health coaching business and I would always mention that in my classes, just in passing, not in a salesy way. Anyway, he told his wife about it, she wanted in, she became a client. And that's an easy example of how real world relationships, and I know you have these and I know you could have more of these if done on purpose. These types of connections lead to clients. In fact, that woman, she told some of her friends and then they became clients too.

So you may not think that asking someone about where they work or how long they've been doing yoga would help with your marketing, but that is exactly how connections get made. So don't overlook it if you're not a chatty Kathy, you can work your way up. One conversation here, one conversation there. Who's tried this? Who's ever had a client fall into your lap just because you had a conversation with the right person? Alright, moving on to small step number two. Again, small steps are the key words here. There's lots of things you can do to grow your business. We talk about them week in and week out, but everything today is like teeny. And here's one and small step you can take that will lead to clients is to set up a way for someone to book a call with you. And I'm not saying this because you have to have this fancy online system, but I'm saying it because I know you know health coaches and I know that if you don't have some kind of system in place for booking calls, you're going to subconsciously use that as a reason to not invite people to book a call with you at all.

You're going to think I'm not ready. So let's just get you ready. Even if you don't want to talk to anybody today, why not take this small step? You can use a free tool like Calendly. That's one of the tools that I teach my fast trackers to use actually. And I use it myself. I have for many, many years. It's real easy to set up. It integrates with your Google calendar or whatever calendars you have. And this way if you find yourself in a conversation with someone who's maybe interested in working on their own health issues or maybe someone who has their own business and you want to set up a time to hear more about it and support each other, I mean, yes, you can go get a tea together, but what if they don't live in your town? Make it easy for someone to get on your calendar, have an easy link to share with them.
You could say Here, book a time on my calendar. It's very simple, it's very professional and it's free. Anyone have a link already who has set something up with Calendly, maybe with Acuity? That's another popular one. It's something anyone can do. I don't care if you're still in school to become a health coach, it doesn't matter. Just go to one of these sites, create a free account and you'll be up and running. All right, number three, here's a step that you can definitely do today. Why not tell your inner circle that you're accepting new clients at an intro rate. You're not going up to friends, family, and coworkers saying you want to be my client. Please, please be my client. We're not doing that. We're not begging, we're not putting them on the spot, but you're letting them know and you can even be really transparent with them that maybe you're feeling nervous because this is all new.

I know when I was starting my business, people would say, well, how's your business going? And I never knew what to say. You could say, well actually right now I'm kind of nervous, but I'm accepting my first clients at a special intro rate. And you could say, because I'm just getting started and I'm so excited. And maybe you're going to do that for your first five paying clients, you're going to offer some special intro package that might be all the motivation that someone needs to perk up and say, well actually, I've been meaning to talk to you. I can't tell you the number of times that somebody would hear me talk about my business and go, I've got to talk to you about. Or maybe they'll say, oh, well actually I was telling my sister about you. So just saying that you have this intro offer, a reason for them to then tell their sister they've been meaning to do it now they'll actually go do it.

And suddenly you might find yourself giving out that link to your calendar that we just talked about. And if not, and if nobody bites, no harm, no foul, you're just looking for low hanging fruit in the beginning, the people in your circle that may already be interested so that you can get experience and they can get a great deal. And I love the idea of an intro rate because it allows you to ease into asking for money. I recommend this over doing anything for free with friends and family. Friends and family can already be kind of difficult to work with because they don't know you as a health coach. And so when they're paying now you're putting yourself into that position of health coach professional and they are actually, there's some exchange of energy with that money. So even a small intro rate is better than doing it for free.

And this is a strategy that we use inside FastTrack all the time. You have to get used to asking for money and accepting money and you have to build confidence. So start with a smaller, lower priced package at that intro rate and it's a win-win for everybody. Let's see, Jamie says that she uses square appointments. I have never heard of Square being used for that, so that's really interesting. There's always new stuff coming out. So anything that you can use to book where people can book a time if you will work. Now, I did want to mention about that, that if you're on practice better, I wouldn't use that for a casual appointment. If you're like, oh, maybe we can collaborate you and a yoga teacher, you and a trainer from the gym, I wouldn't try to make them book through practice better because that's a client management tool.

When you're just looking to have a networking type meeting, it doesn't belong there. So that's when you would use something like Calendly, just a way for people to hop on your normal calendar, not your client calendar. Okay, what else can we do today? Small, not too scary steps. How about this? Can you get testimonials or case studies from anyone that you've worked with before? Practice clients, your first couple clients, your best friend who wasn't technically a client, but boy you really helped her clear up that eczema. Whatever it is, can you ask them for their feedback and plan to share their results with their permission? This is so important because social proof, that's what we call it, social proof. People can see your testimonials or even when you're talking about your clients, even just being able to refer to somebody's success story in the context of a conversation, the person on the other end goes, oh, this person works with clients.

Sounds like they do a really good job. It doesn't take much. So real quick, and I think we've talked about testimonials before here on the show, but I have always found that the easiest way to get testimonials is to actually write them myself and then offer it to that person and say, can I use this as is? Or would you like to make any edits? Would it be okay with you if I use this in my future marketing materials or would you like to edit it? And sometimes they'll change one or two words, but for the most part, everyone has always said to me, yeah, it looks good. They don't care. They don't have time to think about it. If you said, Hey, could you write me a thoughtful testimonial? They're good people, they want to do it, but they're busy and then it just doesn't happen.

So that's just a little tip from me to you on getting it done. And remember, it doesn't have to be someone who is a strict paying client of yours. It could be anyone that you've helped in any capacity, especially when you're just getting going, you want them to be able to say something about the results that they achieved as a result of working with you or communicating with you. Alright, let's move on here. We're moving on to my favorite step for you to take today because for some reason you guys will put it off and put it off and I'll talk to you a year from now and I'll say, have you started your email list? And you'll say, no, not yet. And I don't know why. This is another one of those things that is entirely free to get set up with. It's just one of these things you got to do.

You got to get in place in order for the rest of your business to build on it. I could not have a website, not have any social media, not have any client management tools or online course tools or anything like that. And I would be fine, but if I didn't have an email list, I'd have no business. I never would've had a business. So please find and set up a free tool where you can start to collect emails. Now I've got a free tutorial that walks you through exactly how to do this using my preferred email service for health coaches. And if you want that tutorial, you can grab it for free. It's at healthcoachpower.com/mailing. It goes step by step, click here, click there, boom, boom, boom. Before you know it, you're going to be all set up and ready to rock and you're going to feel so accomplished.

I did the thing. And when Michelle asks me a year from now, if I set up my mailing list, I can say yes. If you don't have any names to put on your mailing list yet, that's okay. Just get the system set up. It's the first small step. Here's the next one though. So if you got your email list set up already or if you took advantage of the tutorial that I just shared with you, another very small step that you can take that actually can make pretty big difference is to ask people if they'd like to be on your list. I mean, it really is that easy. And it's funny, I was preparing this episode and thinking about this and then I was just going through my own personal Facebook feed and came across an old friend of mine. We used to both teach yoga up in Boston and she had posted something about how she's doing something new in her business and kind of describing, and I was like, oh, that's so interesting.

And then she posted a link and said how she'll be sending out a newsletter and you better believe I went and checked it out because I was interested in what she was offering. And of course, because I know her, I was interested. You have people in your life like that too. Why not just ask? So this can be something like she did. She actually just posted on Facebook. She could do it that way. It could be as simple as a text message or a direct message, like one-to-one to an individual. Hey, I'm going to be sharing tips around health and wellness. Hey, I've got some events coming up this year in my health coaching business. Hey, I know one time we had a conversation about your arthritis. I've got some stuff coming up I think you'll be interested in. Would you like to be on my mailing list?

They're going to say yes or they're going to say no or they're not going to say anything. But I will tell you that this takes very little time and the payoff can be pretty big. Daniella, who's one of our live spring fast trackers going through the program right now, she said that just by asking her circle of contacts if they'd like to be on her mailing list, she went from basically no list at all to 20 new subscribers in the first week. So I think it's just the first and easiest step to take. We all start somewhere. I remember when my mailing list was a spreadsheet with just a couple names on it too, and now thousands and thousands and thousands of people later, that feels like a lifetime ago. You'll get there. It starts with just saying, Hey, doing this thing, thought you might be interested.

Want to be on my mailing list? You never know. What do you think about that? Doable. If you're here live, I know I can see you guys are here live with me. Just say doable. If anything I've said so far in this episode sounds like something you could probably do today. Maybe you could put aside 10, 15 minutes and get one or two of these done. Small steps. Alright, moving right along here. This one I will admit is a little bit bigger than some of the others. So depending where you're at in your business, some of those other steps might need to come first. Oh good, Amber said doable. And Jamie says she's done a few of these before and they're doable. Great. Does anyone feel these are not doable? That's okay. I won't take offense. We work it out. You know what we do with steps?

You'll do this with your clients too. If it's too big, it's too much. We just break it down into smaller ones. Boom, boom, boom, boom. You know how to do it. Alright, so the next one I was going to share with you, it might be like that, but maybe this is a good one for Jamie. I don't know if you've done this one. You guys workshops. Workshops are where it's at, especially in the early stage of your business. You don't have much tech know-how, you don't have a lot of tools or systems or things. Don't worry about the online marketing funnels and all that kind of garbage. Don't be running Facebook ads, it's not going to get you anywhere. What's going to get you somewhere real, real easily? Put yourself in a room with people and talk about what you know and love help people.

This is why you got into this work, right? So when you hold a workshop, you're just going to pick a simple topic, like I said, something that you know could talk about for like 30 minutes straight. And you don't have to, when you do a workshop, there's lots of opportunities to let the participants talk to each other or do a group share so you're really not talking the whole time. But that's just a good gauge. If you know off the top of your head, you could talk about something that long that could work for you. And if you need help with the whole workshop process, it's the kind of thing that you're going to want to do over and over again. You have to know how to book workshops so that you're not talking to an empty room. You want to put yourself places where there's going to be an audience.

You have to know what to do during the workshop. Of course, you want to know how to follow up after the workshop and funnel these people. Not email funnel, not online funnel, just like real life. Move these people from being workshop participants towards booking a call with you and potentially becoming a client. That whole process I have outlined in a very easy, affordable workshop that's available on my websites called Workshop Success. So if you want me to step you through all those pieces, it's at healthcoachpower.com/workshop. But man, I would do so many workshops in the early years of my business because it's not that hard. I know it can feel like, oh my God, I've never done this before. But when you compare it to doing things that require a bunch of technology, more complicated marketing, I mean, this is just you walking into a room and let's go back to number one, talking to people.

That's all it is. You're just formalizing talking to people. Jamie says she has her first workshop scheduled next month. Congratulations. That's fantastic. Book more. I don't know how long it took you to get that one set up, but I feel like the sticking point with workshops is that you have to wait for the venue to say yes. You have to wait for the owner of that yoga studio to get back to you. So don't wait to reach out because it's only going to take longer. Even if you just send, and I have this all outlined in Workshop Success, an email that you can send just to test the waters, just to say, would this be a possible venue for me? And that way you can get the ball rolling sooner than later. Alright, what other questions do we have here? Amber said workshop. Should they be paid or should they be free?

And how to decide. I talk about that inside workshop success. The short answer is either it doesn't matter. Whatever's going to get people there. Suko says, do you have landing page recommendations for, what do you mean by that? Like a service for landing pages or a landing page For what purpose? There's so many different kinds of landing pages. Maybe we'll come back to that. Alright, so we just talked about holding a workshop. Remember that was a little bit on the bigger, smaller step size. I know I'm going to just take it down a notch. For those of you who are like, whoa, Michelle, that was too much for me. How about this? How about just hosting a walking club in your neighborhood or a book club or a meditation sit or anything like this? Bring people to in your community in just a low key wellness focused kind of way.

Something that you might have done or maybe you have done even if you weren't a health coach. You don't have to go into it with a sales pitch. In fact, it's better if you don't. You want to build connection and trust without a whole salesy vibe going on. You just want to become the person that people think of when they think about their health. Because if you're in a walking club with people, you could just say, Hey, even here in my town, I like to go walk by the river. I'm so lucky. I live right by the Hudson River and I love to go walk up and down the river. There's other people in the town who love to do that too. What if I just put something out on our local next door app or we have a local Facebook group or whatever it is, or even just invited friends and we're walking together a more likely to get it done, more likely to go for the walk, be have more fun while we're at it.

See, now you're talking to people. Remember that one. And when that happens, you're more likely to start talking about health topics. You are walking presumably for your health and when things come up, oh wow. Now you have yourself in a conversation about that. Great segue to someone finding out about your health coaching business, finding out that, hey, she really knows a whole lot about X, Y, Z topic. That's it. You don't have to be salesy, you just have to talk to people. So this is a way of organizing a group where you can do exactly that or a book club. How fun is that going to be? And this is not marketing. This is just like you showing up in the world, helping people, connecting people. All good things are going to come out of this, I promise, promise, promise. Oh, okay. Let's go back to that question.

Ko said for the purpose of registering workshop participants. So this one I'm going to answer a little bit sideways because when you're holding your workshops, the idea is that you're putting yourself in front of someone else's audience. If you hold your own workshop, you know who you can invite. Your same circle of friends that you already told them about your intro offer, you already asked them if they want to be on your mailing list. They already know about you. You want new people to know about you. So typically, if you're going to do a workshop somewhere, they are going to collect the registrations. Typically, not always, but that would often happen anytime I ever held a workshop at like a yoga studio, they're collecting registrations for their own workshops. So that takes care of that. If you're doing it yourself, there's a hundred different ways to do it.

You can just set up a landing page through your email service. So if you don't have your email list set up, you would do that first and then you could create a landing page from there. That's very straightforward. And I've also heard of a lot of coaches doing well using something like Eventbrite or a meetup group or various things online that're already set up to handle event registrations. So those are all ideas for you, but do try to set things up with a venue that's going to do that part for you because that means that they are used to holding workshops, which means they're more likely to have an audience of people that are going to be there. Alrighty, so we are down to number nine. We are just whipping through these today. So I hope you got a couple ideas. And these are not beforehand new ideas, but what are they small, doable steps.
Yes. So number nine is share your story. And you can do this umpteen different ways. It might be just you talking to one individual and sharing your story today. It might be you writing up a whole blog post or an email or posting something on social media. You want to get real comfortable with your story though, because people need to get to know you. People need to feel like can trust you. And it could be about your personal health journey or why you became a health coach. Something brought you to health coaching. And for many of us, it's our own health issues. And I know I've even recorded episodes on this podcast about my story and how I ended up here. Real stories resonate. Real stories connect you. And sometimes you have to hone your story because it's in your head, it's your lived experience.

And you might think, oh Michelle, I don't have a story to tell. Talk to someone. Tell 'em your story. See what questions they ask you. See what fascinates them. I think it's an iterative process. So by the time you have to tell your story on a stage somewhere or write your book or whatever you're going to do in the future, you have an angle on your story that's really, really interesting to people. But you can start today by sharing your story in whatever way is most doable for you. And then number 10, small steps is to do everything we just talked about again. Yep, you heard me. You can't do just one workshop, you can't share your story one time. Pretty much everything we talked about today, you're going to repeat or you're going to iterate on. If you set up your mailing list today, great.

You don't have to set it up again tomorrow, but tomorrow maybe you start adding names and the day after that you maybe you're going to send your first email and the week after that, you're going to send your second email. So everything that we've talked about, it just builds on itself. These are not one and done ideas. So I laugh every time a health coach says, but I post it on Instagram and I still didn't get any bites for health coaching. No duh. Do we still say that? My kids asked me, mom, what's some of the slang from when you were our age? And I said, we used to say no, duh. And then we'd get in trouble because we say it to a parent or something and then they would get very mad. But anyway, no, duh, that one Instagram post didn't bring clients your way.

Keep going even when it feels slow. Another small step, another small step, another small step. That's the only way to do this. That's the only way to do anything new. So thank you so much for joining me today. If there's anything I mentioned in this episode that you're like, what was that link again, Michelle? Of course you can just re-listen to this episode or just go to the show notes on my website. We'll have them all listed out for you. So you could set up your mailing list. You can check out Workshop Success and you can text message me. We will repeat this one because if you have a question you'd like me to answer in a future show, this one's important. Go to healthcoachpower.com/text. Can't wait to hear from you and I'll see you all next week. Take care, everybody.