Anyone who’s started their own business knows feedback is critical to ensure you get your business off on the right foot and heading in the right direction.
Early on in our journey, I connected with a prominent health coach, Dr. Steve Feyrer-Melk, to get his thoughts on what was to become the concept for our company and product, Nudge Coach, and more importantly, if it was worth pursuing.
The meeting opened my eyes to the countless difficulties health and wellness coaches and other wellness professionals encounter when trying to start a business. For example, many wellness entrepreneurs struggle to find clients, market yourself, figure out how to begin managing clients… you know, figure out the real business stuff.
But what’s also insane is how time-consuming a coaching business can really become once you start working with clients.
For instance, I heard an eye-opening statistic recently that for every hour you spend face-to-face with clients, you should expect to spend another 1-2 running and promoting your business.
Wait, what?!
This means that without the right systems in place you may max out your time each week with only 10-12 clients.
But what if you want to work with more clients and increase your earnings potential?
Case Study of a Scalable Wellness Coaching Business
Dr. Steve Feyrer-Melk currently runs the lifestyle program at the Optimal Heart Center in Scottsdale, Arizona, and is responsible for overlooking the wellness programs offered to everyone who comes through the facility.
Steve was stretched thin and grasping for ideas on how to better manage everyone, and he ultimately realized that trying to incorporate health tracking apps was one of the best ways he could imagine.
But there were some issues.
My jaw dropped…
“It is a nightmare. And here’s why.
For me to see the data from my clients’ wearable devices, I have to log into each individual patient or clients personal account. Yes, that’s right, I keep a spreadsheet of all 75 to 100 clients with their usernames and passwords.
As you can imagine, the problems with this seem endless, but one of the biggest issues is how long this takes. This is a logistical nightmare, especially as I need to take the information I see once I get into their account, and convert it into a usable form so I can email or call them with personal information and guidance that matches what they are actually doing.
I’m going back-and-forth and it’s very frustrating and extremely time-consuming.”
Dr. Steve Feyrer-Melk (The Optimal Heart Center)
Does any of this sound familiar?
Steve’s story isn’t rare and it just goes to show how critical it is to find a process that scales so you don’t find yourself in a similar situation, forced to spend countless hours simply trying to check in with all your clients each week.
I’ve heard similar stories from countless health and wellness professionals so I wanted to take a moment to share the lessons I’ve learned from some of the leading influencers in the coaching world to make your life easier and help you develop a coaching business that can be as flexible as you want it.
3 Strategies to Create a Scalable Wellness Coaching Practice
1. It’s NEVER too early to begin developing your brand and audience
I watched a recent webinar with Derek Halpern where he shared his company’s journey, and how he made roughly $100K his first month of generating revenue. The secret was that his first month of revenue was actually his 13th month in business, but for the first year, he ONLY focused on creating content and building his audience.
Why? It’s MUCH easier to build a business when you have an established audience to which you can market your coaching products and services.
Even if you are a year from working with clients, start putting together your content strategy NOW.
Use a combination of social media and your wellness blog to create authentic, valuable content that will provide value to your audience, help them see you as a credible source of information, and an obvious choice as their coach.
2. Email Automation Will Save Hours for Coaching
Email automation is critical if you want to ensure you reach all your prospects consistently and at the appropriate times, but most people don’t realize that it is also a massive time saver.
Consider this…
Statistics show that 90% of visitors to your website will NOT be ready to purchase your service upon the first visit, but 60% of those visitors WILL be at some point in the future. That means that once you’ve begun collecting email addresses on your site you need to find a way to stay in front of those people and maintain a line of communication.
Hence the need for email automation. Email Marketing services like ConvertKit and MailChimp have automation capabilities allowing you to create and schedule multi-email campaigns to be sent to contacts over time.
This is incredibly valuable because you can use pre-crafted, 4-6 emails to begin sending someone immediately after you collect their email, initially providing exceptional value, then asking for a purchase towards the end.
Each email should tell a story and provide undeniable value to your readers, stretching out several weeks from the time you first collected the email address.
Imagine if you tried to do all of this manually from your email list? It would be a total mess, so please don’t try it ☺
Online marketing is really a numbers game: a certain percentage of site visitors become prospects, and a percentage of prospects become customers.
The goal is to use automated processes to help weed out the folks who will NOT be great coaching clients so that you can quickly find the ones who will.
3. Leverage Mobile Health Tools to Expand Your Coaching Client Reach
Remember Steve? As I mentioned he had put himself in an issue where he had trouble scaling his coaching business. He was…
- Balancing multiple communication channels
- Struggling to use mobile health apps with clients
- Unable to understand which clients really needed extra attention
It was a tough situation and he felt like he had clients falling through the cracks because of it.
Incorporating health tracking apps within your model can be great to help you better understand where to spend your time, providing a new dimension to your coaching that can be structured either as a premium offering or a simple way to launch a digital low-touch offering to a larger population.
Streamline Your Wellness Coaching Process
If you’re feeling overextended in your health coaching business, the first step is to look at your entire client process and find those areas where you can simplify.
This might mean automating or eliminating steps, getting outside help (like a virtual assistant) or looking at technology that can bring the necessary information into a single location. As our software, Nudge Coach, combines multiple client fitness tracker data into a single portal, we helped Steve streamline that part of his process. In the end, Steve was able to work with more clients, but more importantly grow stronger connections with each client.
We removed those countless hours Steve was spending each week sorting through client lifestyle data and worked with him to build an alerts system for all our coaches ensuring that you never miss a timely touch-point with a client.
Using the right technology can help streamline your processes, from social media posts all the way to client management, allowing you to be more efficient and effective with your time – and ultimately doing more of what you love – working with clients!
This article is a guest post by Mac Gambill of Nudge Coach.
Note: some links within this article are affiliate links.