The 3-Part Flow for Consistent Health Coaching Income

Michelle Leotta:
Welcome to the Health Coach Power Community Podcast. I'm Michelle Leotta, ex-corporate girl turned certified health coach with over 15 years of experience growing a successful online practice. I started out with no idea what I was getting into and learned a lot of lessons along the way that have given me the freedom to do the work I love and raise two boys as a single mom.

I created the Health Coach Power Community over a decade ago to make it easier for health coaches to build a career they love and make the world a better place.

You're working your buns off, you're showing up, you're doing good work with the clients that you've had so far. But it doesn't feel like your health coaching business is gaining traction. Today, I'm gonna show you why and give you a three-part client flow that I invented, kind of, kind of invented, that generates consistent income that you can count on.

Now, I say kinda invented because it was the result of many years of trial and error in my own health coaching practice. This episode is gonna save you years. Now, I know the effort is there among health coaches. I see it. You're motivated, you're posting to Instagram, you're creating freebies, you're offering a detox or a cooking class here and there, a workshop.

I mean, you're doing the stuff, and I'm proud of you. But by now, you know, maybe you've been at it a year or two or more. I know when I was at that place in my own health coaching practice, I felt like, "Why aren't clients coming to me by now? I've put in the hard work. I should have a line out the door.

What's going on here?" People need help with their health everywhere you look, and yet I still kind of felt desperate for clients. Do you know what I mean? People can smell desperation, by the way. It is not your best look. And that desperation would lead me to, like, "What should I do next? Uh, maybe I should create a brand-new six-week group coaching program.

I know, for pregnant women. Or maybe for corporate nine-to-fivers. Or I know, I'll create an online course about fixing anxiety naturally, or a membership." Oh, my goodness, how many times are we just absolutely certain that a membership is gonna be the thing that they buy this time, and the answer to our consistent income problems?

It's probably not, by the way. That's a sidebar. Here's the thing. Each of these ideas would work. Like, they would generate some clients in the short term, and then a month or two months later, I'd do it again. I'd create and try to sell spots in the next thing and sell a few of those. So it was like a huge effort every time, reinventing the wheel every time, small payoffs again and again and again.

So this is what I mean by not gaining traction. It doesn't mean that you don't have some clients. You're probably making some money too, so that's awesome. Like, you know, three pregnant women join the group coaching program. Cool. A couple corporate nine-to-fivers did your next program. Okay, five people bought the anxiety course.

Same thing over and over, just a smattering of clients. But there's no repeatable pattern here. There's no consistency. There's no energy coming back that can even come close, can even compare to what you're giving out in this scenario. And this is why health coaches so often burn out and give up, and I have absolutely been there where I was like, "I am done with this."

We end up with a bunch of disconnected pieces that, yeah, they kind of all each earned a little bit of money along the way, but it doesn't add up to a consistent, successful, or a particularly profitable career. So at some point, and this took me far too long, but at some point I finally paid attention, and I noticed a trend.

I really wish I had noticed it sooner. But I noticed that my best clients, so these are the ones who, you know, they did sign up for private coaching. I loved working with them. They signed up for whatever larger program I was offering at the moment. They very often had done something else with me first.

They came to a workshop. They did one of my smaller programs. I don't know, they downloaded a free guide. They probably did all of those things. And sometimes it would take years, or even like a decade... That's how long I was coaching for, a really long time. I, I saw clients stay with me on my mailing list for like over a decade, and then they would finally say, "I'm ready."

They would ascend, as they say, to my higher-priced programs. So it kinda makes sense, right? Like, of course, people need to experience you and trust you. But for 10 years? I mean, that's not a business plan, you guys, and I'm not suggesting that you should spend 10 years creating, like I did, a bunch of random stuff and hoping that they maybe like some of it, and maybe they stick around, and maybe someday sign up for more.

So what if we could actually create a cohesive client journey that takes far less time than 10 years, please, and brings somebody into your world that's ready for change and ready to buy now, and keep them working with you over and over again? And that's such a gift. I don't know if you've had this experience, but to be able to work with a client over the course of years instead of just a couple weeks or a couple months.

I have so many clients in my world right now that have been with me for a long time, and it almost feels like chosen family. I don't think that's overstating it. They choose you, and you choose them. It's like a support system that you've created for yourself in that way. You're valuable in their life, they're valuable in yours.

And anyway, that's why I call it chosen family. But anyway, we can create that client journey on purpose. And I've kinda done it for you, at least the bones. We're gonna go over it today. It's pretty simple. I've distilled it down to just three parts, and they work together in flow. What does that mean? Every effort, every offer you make, every program you run, every workshop you do, they all work together to fuel the next.

So instead of your energy going out in, like, 99 different directions doing all kinds of things that are just a bunch of dead ends, now imagine all of your energy funneling together, going down the same path toward the same goal. You could even think of it, and sometimes I call it an ecosystem, where all the parts work together in relationship.

When it's done well, it doesn't take 10 years for them to ask about your highest-priced coaching package. It could take weeks or even days. Sounds good, right? So let's go through the three parts. Just be aware, just like I use the word ecosystems, just like any animal, any species, this ecosystem obviously needs to be different depending on who they are.

So what you would do for pregnant women would not be the same as what you would do for corporate men, and that would not be the same as what you would do for teen athletes. That goes without saying, but I just wanna say the three parts have to be customized to knowing who these people are. Before we build anything, we need to know who they are, where to find them, what they need, and most of all, what they want.

And then we can create an ecosystem built to support that sound like a plan? By the way, if right now you're not sure, you don't know who you should be working with as a health coach, that's okay. It sounds like you could use my super quick, super fun training. It's called The Good Niche, and it'll help you find a profitable niche that you can build your three-part flow around.

I'm gonna link to it in the show notes, or you can go to HealtCoachPower.com/GoodNiche. That's N-I-C-H-E. Okay, so here are the three parts of the ecosystem, and don't worry about taking notes. This will all be written up in our show notes on my website. We have, number one, your free offers; number two, your low-ticket offers that build trust; and then we have your premium signature program.

And what are they all doing? They are all built to support one type of person who's looking for a particular result, a particular transformation in their life, and they're all built so that one leads into the next. Even the signature program, that's not like the end of the line, get off the train, it all stops here.

If you build it the right way, clients can stay inside your signature program for years, or they can continue working with you in smaller ways, staying in that flow over time. When I figured this out, it was like, "Pff, pff, pff" in my brain. You know, this is the master plan that nobody teaches in health coaching school, and it's what's missing when we do a bunch of random things, whatever strikes our fancy in the moment, and I've been guilty of that many times, and then we wonder, "Why aren't we gaining traction?"

So when we think of these three parts, it seems reasonable, and most coaches would think, and maybe you're thinking, "All right, Michelle, I'll start at the beginning. I'm gonna build this step by step, one, two, three, pretty easy. I'm gonna start with the free offers." Absolutely logical, and it can be one of the slowest and most painful ways to go.

So I'm like throwing up a big caution flag here because when you're only focused on that first piece, offering freebies, growing your mailing list, which is good, but you aren't earning anything, so that's a rough place to be for an extended period of time. And worse, I have lived through this in my own health coaching journey, and I don't want you to repeat this mistake.

So, real quick story. Many years ago, I worked super hard on that first piece. I wanted to build an audience of moms, specifically moms of kids aged one through 10, moms who wanted to cook one meal for dinner. Who doesn't want that? Every mom wants that. One meal that the whole family would eat. And this really caught on.

I grew a big, engaged audience, this big, engaged mailing list, and I felt really super successful because these moms loved it. I thought I had it made in the shade. But when I started offering paid programs, even like very low-cost paid programs, the kind that would allow me to build trust and start, you know, earning something, nothing.

Nobody bought. I couldn't believe it. They were not interested. And trust me, I tried all kinds of offers with this group, and the only thing that they wanted was my free stuff. Have you had this problem? Now, it's not uncommon. Looking back, I can easily identify why this happened, but at the time, I didn't have a clue.

I had wasted about a year barking up the wrong client tree. So that was like a big lesson for me and a warning that I wanted to share with you. Just because you can build an audience does not mean that you're going to be able to build a profitable client base. So the real strategy, the one that I teach today, is to build your ecosystem, build your three-part client flow around something that is proven that people actually pay for.

I mean, that's the heart of it, right? They have to actually want to spend money to get this result, to solve this problem. Otherwise, as in my case, you know, the moms in my audience, yeah, they wanted to cook just one meal for the whole family. It would've been nice, but it wasn't a real super pressing problem for them.

It wasn't urgent. It wasn't particularly exciting. I don't know, it was just a nice-to-have. That's what I realize, most moms saw picky eaters as an annoyance or just like a season of life that they have to get through, but not something that they were super motivated to solve now. I don't know, maybe the working moms had bigger fish to fry, and if their kids ate hot dogs and chicken fingers, whatever.

That's fair. And stay-at-home moms, hmm, I don't know, maybe they had time to cook separate meals. So while I thought I was tapping into a major pain point, and maybe for me as a health coach, it was very important that my children didn't just eat hot dogs and chicken fingers, whatever. For them, it wasn't that big, wasn't that exciting, wasn't that important.

Clearly, that's what I learned because no one would spend a dime on it. So now you might have a totally different experience with moms. Don't let my experience cloud yours. Feel free to prove me wrong, and I hope that you will. But I do know one thing. If people aren't willing to buy your programs, then you have a hobby.

You do not have a business. You are running a club or a nonprofit. So the traction that you're looking for depends on meeting a proven existing demand, not guessing at it. And when you have that, okay, now that three-part flow all works together so beautifully. Your free offers and your free content speak to that thing that they want, and they're already looking for help with.

It's the kind of thing that they're happy to pay for. So you attract the right person. Your smaller, those lower price offers that are related to that same thing that they want, remember it all works together, those confirm that they're ready for change. Even a small purchase with you is a big step.

Somebody stopped, took out their credit card, oh my gosh, right? That means they're pretty serious. And then your premium signature program helps them get that thing that they want. It creates the exciting transformation. Now, if you're like most health coaches, you've tried freebies. You're like, "I've done this, Michelle.

I've tried smaller programs, bigger programs." But have they been designed to work together in this way as a system? Mine weren't, like in that unfortunate scenario that I was telling you about with the moms. Typically, these things are built around a demand that we think exists in our mind, right? But it doesn't actually.

Oops, nobody wanted it. Oops, I just wasted a whole year, I realized. Oops. So inside Empowered, this is exactly what I build with my health coaches. Your three-part flow, all centered around a niche that actually wants to pay for your help. We create your convertible signature program, which is something that you can offer one-to-one and with group clients.

We create freebies and low-ticket trust-building offers. Those are the three parts that work in tandem like a well-oiled machine. So if you want to see how this all comes together, how you can create more impact, get more clients, and have more consistent income, I've got a free video series to help. You could go watch that right now.

It's at HealthCoachPower.com/Grow. And remember, running around doing all the things is a recipe for burnout. That is the opposite of what we need to do as health coaches. So don't try to do everything. Do the three things that work together and start gaining traction.

Thank you so much for listening to the Health Coach Power Community Podcast. Please take a moment, leave a written review on Apple Podcasts. It helps us reach more coaches and allows me to bring you this free content every week. To join us live, ask your questions, and have a direct line to me, join our free Facebook group at HealthCoachPowerCommunity.com.