#105: Making Decision Based on Business Goals

Well. Hello there, health coaches, and welcome back to another episode of the health coach power community podcast. Today I want to talk about making decisions. Oh, it's hard. I know we get questions about this that come in all different varieties all the time. You know, it could be, Michelle, how do you decide how to spend your time? How do you block your calendar? How do you know how much time to spend on what tasks? Get that asked all the time. Of course, health coaches always want to know how do we price our services? That's like the billion dollar question right there. What kind of projects should we take on? When is it just shiny object syndrome? What should I write about when I sit down to email my list? Or if I'm going to blog? It's like we constantly have to be making decisions.

When you are a business owner, it's very different than working for someone where they're going to tell you, okay, Michelle, today I want you to sit down and write about XYZ. Or we actually have to hold the reins and make these types of decisions. And I know it can be difficult. So today I want to give you some insight into how to do this well, how to do this strategically and I also want to share an example of a decision that I made recently that was kind of confusing at first to arrive at, but I'm really happy with where we landed and that sort of playing out in my health coaching business right now. So I'll tell you all about that in just a few minutes. But before we get there, first of all, if you are here with me live, hello, it's so nice to see you.

You can ask questions, leave comments as we go along. I do have my eye over on the comments and I'm always here to answer your questions as we go because I love when these are interactive. That's why I do them live. Also, I want to say a big huge thank you to GreenieGang who left this five star review on iTunes for us. She said, first of all, the title is no nonsense. Yeah, baby. And she said as a new health coach, I went through Michelle's healthy profit university because it was so helpful to me. And because I like her no-nonsense style, I decided to start listening to her podcast. I'm trying to glean as much information and advice as I can about health coaching. And this podcast gives me everything I'm looking for. I've started at episode one and plan to work my way through all of them.

Oh my gosh. Well we are way over a hundred by now. She says she gives valuable insight and helpful tips to anyone wanting to hone their coaching and business skills. The thank you so much for that GreenieGang Shelley. I know it's you see, I know cause Shelly's one of our HPU members. Anyway, please send your mailing address to support@healthcoachpower.com cause we have a little thank you gift for you. Awesome. And for all of you guys, it would be so wonderful. I mean just from the bottom of my heart, I asked for a favor. If you could go into iTunes and leave a written review like Shelly did this week. Big huge kisses and hugs for me and I read your review on the air. We'll have a little thank you gift headed your way, so thanks in advance for that. It really helps us to reach more health coaches with all this useful information.

So how do we make decisions? Let's get back to it. How do we make decisions? I'm going to share what's been going on in my own health coaching business. Obviously right now is a little bit of a strange time. The past few months have been very odd for health coaching, for all small businesses and businesses in general and it's felt like, geez, this is really the time to look for clients. Is this really the time to run a program? I had been planning to run a program that I call Lift. It's a five day program. I usually charge $99 it's just one of these short quick programs that gets people quick wins, helps to build my audience, my fan base. It's a lot of fun. It often leads to paying clients, so, or I should say paying private clients. So, I had that on the calendar for this spring and I was going to run it in may.

I had my whole podcast, my, she's got power podcast planned with this goal in mind. So speaking of basing decisions based on business goals, when I was like, what am I going to do my podcast episodes on, what topic should I cover? I knew that I was going to be leading into selling this Lift program and so I mapped out topics that would make sense so I could start promoting Lift halfway through the podcast season. Well, that'll all kind of went out the window because when Corona virus hit, I really wasn't sure what I wanted to do or what felt appropriate and just kind of slammed the brakes on that. And now I think we've all had time to take a breath and I thought, you know, I feel like this Lift program is needed more than ever because it's the kind of program that is, you know, health coaches do a lot of these.

It's not a detox. I'm not going to call it a detox, but it's kind of that style where I give everybody a loose protocol to follow their recipes. Meal plan that's suggested some shopping lists, you know, it's just like something easy for people to latch onto. And when I've run it in the past, my clients do get really great results in just a couple of days. They feel so energetic, a lot of them lose a couple of pounds. It puts them on a good path. It makes them feel really positive. And I thought we do that more than ever right now because everyone has been stuck in quarantine for months now and we're feeling pretty burnt out. So I decided I am going to run this program. Okay, good, great. Now we have to make more decisions, right? So, a lot of times this is what happens, like, and maybe this has happened to you before, where you just want to do something, you just want to do something because it sounds like the right thing to do.

Okay, that's fine. But that's not the whole story. Really have to look at how is this serving my business? How is this helping me reach a business goal right now? Not just for the sake doing something, but does it make sense in the larger scheme of things? So first question does running my Lift program, my five day Lift program, help me reach a business goal? What are my business goals right now? The idea of making like a lot of sales, a lot of high ticket sales right now is not something that I've been aiming for, right? It just doesn't seem like the exact right time to be putting that as a number one priority. But I have been very much emphasizing staying relevant, staying top of mind, keeping my audience, paying attention to me even when they're totally overloaded with everything they have to do.

Right now, my, my audience for the most part are now working from home full time. Many of them have kids that they're needing to take care of, so, okay, all right. Running this Lift program, does that fit? And I thought, Hmm. I mean, yes and no. Yes they could really use it, but is do I want to put something extra on people's plate? Do I want to be? Do I want to run this for like however many women are going to sign up and make, you know, I'll make a couple of thousand dollars, it's no great shakes. Money-Wise doesn't really make sense. What should we charge? And kind of like back and forth on that for a while, like something didn't quite feel right about it. So I sat with that and sat with it and then I thought, you know what we really need to do right now more than making a couple thousand dollars, which is sort of a drop in the bucket for, you know, the scale that we're operating at.

More than running this program for, you know, X number of women who would sign up and pay the $99 for it or whatever. More than any of that. What I really want to do right now, what really could use my help in my health coaching business right now is my, she's got power podcast cause that podcast is pretty new. It's pretty new and I'm trying to get more subscribers. I'm trying to get more reviews. Like this is really important when you have a podcast, I want to make sure that it's worth my time to be doing this podcast, so I'm trying to beef up the following and I thought, Hmm, how can I make this? It's all work together. How can I give the women in my audience exactly what they need right now and how can I most benefit business-wise? So, we decided to do something really different.

I've never done this before. Usually when you run a five day program like this, you probably, if you haven't done it yourself, you've probably seen other coaches do this. You know, you give everybody some materials and there's a Facebook group and maybe you do some sort of live call with them in the beginning of the week and check in with them every day on Facebook and you send out an email every day. You know that that's the usual plan for that type of program. But I thought, what if I just combine this with a podcast effort? How could that work? Here's where we've landed. In fact, I just announced yesterday my five day Lift program and it's happening in such a way that people are being asked to sign up and give an email address. They're going to receive their materials and it's free, and then each day of the program, I'm actually going to release a mini episode on my, she's got power podcast, so they're being asked to subscribe to the podcast so that they don't miss any of those episodes.

They'll listen to a short five to 10 minute episode each day. That's going to guide them through this process. I've done it before, I've done it myself. I've done it with the clients so I know exactly you know the kind of questions that are going to come up and what everybody needs to hear on day number one and day number two, so I'm going to be providing that, but via podcast this way my podcast listeners are going to hear the episodes and if they haven't signed up for the program, hopefully they will. Right. Driving people to my mailing list and then for people on my mailing list of my audience already driving them to my podcast. So I'm hoping for this sort of bi-directional influx of people to the program and it's going to be super easy for me. That also became very, very apparent if I run this program right now in the spring, well, my two little boys do not have school.

I need it to be very simple for me. Like I just simply cannot handle very much more on my plate right now. Is anybody with me on that? Just like raise it if you know what I'm talking about. So it has to be easy. It has to feed people into my podcast and I want to get reviews on the podcast. So that's the next piece of it. We're releasing all the materials for free. I'm going to walk everybody through the process day by day via the podcast, hopefully increasing subscriptions that way. And in each of those episodes, since I'm not asking for any money for this, which is usually a paid program, the ask instead is going to be, please leave a review. In fact, I'm planning to also offer an incentive for anyone who leaves a review. There'll be entered into a giveaway and have secured a giveaway prize from one of my favorite brands.

So it's going to serve on several different levels. None of them have to do with directly making money. I mean surely in the long run. These are people who become big fans, they refer their friends and their family. They may become a client in the future, a future time. But I guess what I want to stress to you is understanding what your business needs right now in this moment can help you first of all get creative and second of all, do things that truly meet those needs as opposed to just doing what you think you should or what you kind of feel like doing. And when you act in a more strategic way, obviously you're going to move your business forward a little more quickly. So, I want to give you a couple of examples and if you're struggling with any decisions that you need to make right now as to should you do this or should you do that?

Go ahead and tell me in the comments and I'd be happy to sort that out with you. I think to yourself something like, how do I decide how to spend my time? I'm having that issue now. Like I said, very limited time these days. My calendar is usually booked, boom, boom, boom, boom, all day long, all week long. When my kids are out of the house, I've had to book my calendar at like half capacity just to be able to get through the day. So we're really limited on time. So how do we spend our time? I would encourage you to look at how you're spending your time and is that hour on Instagram really directly helping you reach a business goal? It might be if your business goal right now is to grow your Instagram following, which is perfectly legit, right? But maybe that's not your priority right now.

In which case, why are you spending an hour on it when you could be spending that time doing something else that is more important? So it's very much about deciding what does my business need right now? Your calendar or your I time block my day is, I don't know what you guys do, but the way that you spend your time during the day, almost like when I worked in advertising, if you guys have ever had to do time sheets, if you work in corporate, you have to do time sheets, right? You have to track how many minutes or how many hours did I spend on each of these tasks. That should perfectly match up to your priorities in your business, right? So how do you spend your time? What is my business goal? That's the answer every time. And sometimes there's things that you want to do or you feel like doing, but it's not really getting you anywhere.

And those are the things that you need to cut. And that's part of running your business and not just being an employee of your business. Same for pricing, right? So with my Lift program, how am I going to price this service? It actually made more sense to make it free because I'm going to have more people join at least even if they don't participate, they're going to download the materials and I'm going to add them to my mailing list. I'm going to have more people listening to the podcast. I'm going to have more people hopefully leaving a review. Then if I charged right, so it serves me on a different level to actually make this a free offering. You could go the opposite way. You could say, okay, right now I'm going to price my services very high because I only have time to take on like one client right now, just one.

And so I need that one person to be willing to pay me X, Y, Z in order to make it worth my time because I had like 5 billion other things to do right now. Okay. What is your business goal that can drive how you price your services? Let's do another one. What kind of projects should you take on? Okay. How many health coaches do I see out there starting a podcast because podcasting looks interesting. Podcasts and looks fun, or because other people have podcasts. Oh, so many reasons to start a podcast and those are all not good reasons. A good reason to start a podcast is if you have a plan for how that podcast is going to fuel your business. Where are you going to be doing with that podcast? How are you going to drive people to your mailing list? And then once you do, how are you going to then funnel them into becoming a pain client?

This is all kinds of stuff, but I talk about with my students inside healthy profit university where you don't want to just do stuff for the sake of doing stuff. We always want to be funneling people into a path that ultimately will lead to someplace where they are paying us money, right? And in order to do that, you might decide that a podcast is the right thing, but you're going to map it out real carefully. You're going to have a plan for how they go from point a to point B or you might decide you know what podcasts is going to take, how many hours per week. I mean it can be a lot, especially if you're scheduling guests or dealing with sponsors or if you're going to be doing a podcast with a partner and you have to coordinate all the stuff with the partner.

That's more time, how many hours and is it worth it to what you're trying to achieve right now in your business and then it's like weighing the pros and cons of this versus maybe you take on a very different kind of project. Maybe now is the time for you to put together an online workshop series and start finding venues, online venues for you to do your online workshop with because that could be helping you reach a business goal of increasing your mailing list much more quickly than a podcast would. I'm just using that as an example, right? But we all have to decide how to spend our time and which projects are worth our time right now. This also comes up heavily with the emails. Oh my goodness. How hard is it when you sit down at a blank screen and you're like, you, you hear my voice in your head or you hear you know the voice in your head that's like, I'm supposed to email my list.

I know I'm supposed to email my list. Okay, great. What am I going to write about? That's like the perennial question. So the same thing. If you sit down and stare at that blank screen and just start writing, chances are you're going to write something that's really boring. First of all, probably sounds like something else that I've read in the health and wellness sphere. Yeah, you should drink more water, you know, something like that. But if you pause and you're like, okay, what am I actually trying to achieve with this email? Like what do I want to happen when I send this email out? I want the reader to fill in the blank. Maybe you want them to click and go to a blog post cause you're working on building up your blog readership or maybe you want them to click and sign up for a program.

Maybe you're running some kind of five day program like I am. The email that I sent out this morning, you better believe I was directing people to sign up for my five day lift program. So you want to know what that one goal is and then you can craft an email around it. My email this morning was like four sentences. It doesn't have to be long, it doesn't have to be fancy, doesn't have to be like this work of art, but it does have to drive people to take the action that you want them to take and I promise this makes writing so much easier if you have a clue of what you want to have happen as a result of what you are writing. Does this make sense? We're not here like for creative writing class. This is marketing and it's a, what are you marketing?

What do you want to make happen? So good. It's the same way. When you sit down to write a blog post or as I shared earlier, if you are doing a podcast, what are you going to podcast about? It's all about what am I trying to achieve with this? So I've shared my story today of how the five day lift has come about for 2020. Will I do it again for free in the future? I don't know. We'll kind of see how it goes. I could very well see bringing it back and charging. Cause when I charge for it, I do offer more support, right? I do have a Facebook group, I am interacting with each of the members answering questions and fostering a community, you know, that's talking to each other. That's sort of an extra layer that's not happening this time around.

But if I bring it back and it's paid, maybe next year I would bring back that level of support as well. So we just have to keep pivoting in our business. Hey, what's happening in the world? What do I need right now? What does my business need? What do I need in order to move forward? And then craft your answer around that. By the way if you guys are interested in just kind of seeing how this goes down, it is a total experiment so I do not even know, I've never done anything like this before, but if you want to kind of view it from the participants and you can feel free to sign up, it's available at, https://shesgotpower.com/lift2020 go to that page, download your materials today and you'll get a sense of what you would need to provide if you did a program like this.

So if you download that, you'll see that I did create a suggested meal plan with shopping lists and all the recipes using that clean life. That is a service that many of us use in order to create these types of meal planning packages. I'm going to call it because it's so super easy. So in love with that. And if you want to check out that service, you can go to health coach, power.com/t C L that clean life. I put it together in like a couple of hours one evening and it's, it's beautiful. It's perfect. Sasha is asking if you sell to corporate or small to medium companies, what is most effective to reach out as an individual health coach to offer your services as a contractor or as a health coach company to offer the same services? I don't think that matters off the top of my head.

Sasha, if you are, I don't know what you're trying to sell, but like let's say you're trying to sell a workshops, theories like what I mentioned earlier. I mean I know that we have lots of coaches that do that all the time and they're not trying to portray themselves as a company larger than themselves. It's just, you know, Jane DOE, whomever, health coach offering their services. Yes. More as a contractor. So I would just present yourself with whoever you actually are. If you are a health coach company that employs several health coaches, then that would be a different story. Right? Then you would present yourself that way and is that a good thing to do right now? It could be what is your business goal? What is your business goal? Is it growing a mailing list? Is that earning money through corporate offerings?

Are you trying to scale in that direction? Right. In which case, yes, definitely. Go meet the HR the head of HR at every company that you can find, you know, find the types of companies where your target market is working. Yeah. Like go dive deep into that if that's going to really meet your needs right now in your business. The question anyway, you guys, thank you so much for joining me today. I hope this makes it a little bit easier for you to make decisions this week and beyond because goodness those, it's been a trying time, a difficult time to make decisions because we don't really know what to expect, don't really know what's going to happen to the summer, even the fall at this point with COVID. And so each day making a decision sometimes takes a little bit extra presence to make sure we're doing what is right for us. What makes sense for what we need right now. Wishing you the very, very best of luck with that.

And I'll be back next week to answer more of your questions. Take care everyone.