Hello, wellness entrepreneur! Welcome back. We are officially into fall and quarter four of the end of the year, which is pretty amazing. I can’t believe how fast this year has gone. How about for you?
But right now, you can create your online wellness program and have it launched by the end of the year. It can really be that simple. And today, we’re talking about how to make it legitimate.
Been talking to a lot of wellness entrepreneurs and I hear a fear where they feel like they have a legitimate in-person practice. Maybe they’re using their hands-on skills and techniques as a massage therapist, as a body worker, as a myofascial release therapist, as a physical therapist, an occupational therapist. They have a certification and even a state license to back that up. So it seems normal to say, “Okay, the people will come in my in-person business and I’m going to focus my skills and my knowledge and my money and my time on learning more practitioner skills to keep my business legitimate.”
And that’s not entirely true because you do need to learn business skills as well. Gone is that motto,
“If you build it, they will come.” You can really use that against yourself and slow yourself down because yes, sometimes they will come and you can definitely speed up the process. But a lot of that confidence really leaves the scene when we talk about transitioning your skills and your knowledge base online.
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Common Fears When Transitioning Online
Common fears are that you don’t want to just add to the noise out there like the other, all the other yoga teachers, all the other wellness practitioners because when you worked in-person, you’re legitimate. You have a doctor or a master’s degree or a state board license. When you move online, now you’re “competing” with all the other online practitioners with just, again, “certifications.” And that type of mindset does not serve you.
Another fear is that you don’t want to be spammy or scammy like all the other scammers out there. I’m sure you’ve been scammed or almost have been scammed on Instagram by some online practitioner, either selling you online business services or trying to psychically read your horoscope or what’s in the stars for you or trying to sell you Bitcoin. Did I even say that right? Or some get rich work from home in 10 hours a week or less. Scam.
Let’s be honest, they’re out there. They do exist on Instagram, especially on Facebook. You do have to protect yourself. But it doesn’t de-legitimate ties, if that is a word, the good work that can be done for people online, especially when you have a unique skillset and many years of experience as a practitioner and you could help more people by moving online and those people aren’t getting your help just because you either feel overwhelmed or fearful to move online. That’s a disservice to yourself, your business and the industry.
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How To Get Legitimate Online Certifications and Degrees
So let’s talk about how to get legitimate. First of all, there are many legitimate online wellness businesses out there doing very well for themselves, helping many people. Just take a tour on Instagram and you’ll see many, many skilled practitioners with maybe one certification, too many certifications and degrees, but they are legitimate.
Go have a conversation with them in their inbox. They will tell you and show you how they are legitimate and how they are helping people. And sometimes that’s enough to open your brain and just give you a little bit of confidence so you can get some momentum and flow.
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Focusing on the Results
Another area that you need to focus on to make sure that you are legitimate when moving online is focusing on the results, the promise that you’ll deliver when working with clients online.
You’ve heard me say this many, many times before in combination with pricing. So when it comes down to it, having a legitimate online business, it’s not about you, it’s about the client. It’s about the consumer of your service, just like in an in-person brick and mortar business. I’m sure that’s what you focus on unconsciously, right?
And that’s the whole reason why you want to take so many practitioners skilled training is because you do want to ensure that you’re giving high quality service, that you deliver upon results, that people see progress when they work with you. The same is true online, but for some reason during the transition, it all kind of gets muddled and overwhelming. But it really just comes back to the simplicity of that, focusing on the client and why they should pay to work with you and delivering upon that, or at least helping them to see progress every step along the way.
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Your Pricing
And then you want to price it so that you feel like you’re over-delivering, that the client in a way is on the better end of the deal without compromising your schedule and having to overwork. That is a big thing. There can be a balance and a sweet spot, a middle ground. So you want to feel good about your pricing. You want to feel like it’s a great deal. They’re getting a ton of value.
It’s also wise I haven’t raised my prices in a while, I think close to two years now in my online business coaching program is because I’ve been really tracking client results. If you look at my website, I have a ton of testimonials and on my Instagram in the highlight bubble, I have client wins. I need to clean that up some, but you will see a lot of client results.
But I’m trying to ensure that when I do raise my price, that the process is even more seamless for the client, that they know what they need to do to get results quicker and even more seamless. So I’m just taking my time here. I’m not in a rush to raise prices. I’m focusing on the client results to tell me to dictate when I’ll raise my price, even though I have the demand.
I’ve been fully booked at 15 business coaching clients and still my in-person patients for a while now. And I fluctuate between 13 and 16 or 12 and 17, depending on when someone’s starting and when someone’s ending and have had a wait list. And then I come back, I’ve kind of fluctuated between all of this for a while. And I’m just waiting and watching and continuing to get in my portal and refine videos, refine my workshops, continuing to track progress.
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And I have some metrics that I’m tracking to tell me based upon client’s results when I’m going to raise my price. So that when I do raise my price, I feel confident about it and I feel still in alignment with my business, helping to ensure I, for me, have a legitimate online business.
Working with Objective Parameters Within the Scope of Your License
So legitimate can be an objective word based upon parameters put out by governing bodies and legal practices, best practices for your industry, for the wellness industry. But it also can be a subjective perspective based upon your opinions and values.
So another way to ensure that you have a legitimate online business is to work with those objective parameters of within the scope of your license. And here’s another place where people kind of get hung up and frozen and not take that step forward to working online because they’re afraid to jeopardize their license.
Now, I’ve been having this conversation with several lawyers since prior to the pandemic when many practitioners did move online. And even then, I still heard the same thing. It’s consistent through every single lawyer I’ve talked to and Corey reinforces this several blogs back when he was on the blog as well is that it’s differentiating between your rehab, your healing practices that you’re doing in-person if you’re licensed by the state practitioner and how the work you’re doing online is wellness-based and different. And then you have contracts to support that.
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Shifting your Language
So once you get that in place, then it’s understanding the shifts in the languaging. So for example, instead of healing low back pain, you might want to say a program to support low back health so that you can up your golf game and never worry about getting stuck on the couch, for example, instead of saying heal your low back.
However, I did have an online program that said heal your low back. There are several yoga therapists and other practitioners that use the word healing online. So you get to choose how “risky” you step into that gray area with the language, the verbiage that you say with the lines of rehab versus wellness.
When I used to lead yoga trainings all across the world, I would get requests to work with me online from all across the world like Brazil and Portugal. I was honest with them in the consultation. I would say, “Okay, we’re not going to heal your knee pain. We’re not going to heal your low back. I’m going to work on you with wellness. We’ll work through yoga to help feel better in your body,” and I would mention the goals that I’d be working on with them based upon what they told me. But I wouldn’t use the same physical therapy rehab terms that I would say in-person. And I would also be transparent and honest with them that we are doing wellness, not rehab online because I’m only qualified to do rehabilitation in the state of California.
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Now, the whole soapbox about state licensing, I feel truthfully is a bigger conversation that needs to be had within the governing bodies itself because there are many practitioners like personal trainers, like yoga teachers, like yoga therapists that are not limited by state licensure and can work with people all over the world and not have to worry about the certain language and verbiage when working with people. But if you do have a state license, you do need to be aware of this to stay within your scope of practice.
I know practitioners who’ve decided to let go of their licensing for this reason because they felt very limited. At the same time, it’s been said that our boards do a lot of good work for us. I do think they’re working hard. They’re just a few years behind. You shouldn’t allow the slowness of how they work and politics to hold you back from this urge that you have to help more people online.
And plus, the fact that you can scale with more profit online than you can with a brick and mortar. And there’s many ways to back that up in terms of just looking at overhead costs in terms of the building that you’re renting and all that comes into place with high-low tables and all the other things needed in your facility to deliver treatments and such, not to mention staff. There’s usually more staff involved in brick and mortar in-person business versus online. Things can be a little bit more streamlined, which leads us to the other area of a legitimate business.
Making Money/Profit
If you’re making money, especially if you’re having profit, then your business is legitimate. If you’re making money, helping people, having a profit, you are legitimate. You have a business.
And here in the wellness industry, we are so very fortunate that our startup costs can be quite low to get off the ground and be profitable. My first year, I made $50,000 with profit. So it wasn’t a huge amount of money, but I was profitable. I was able to pay my personal and business expenses and reinvest some back into the business, which was great. That’s how I grew. Some bigger companies with a lot more overhead and startup costs take several years to become profitable. So we’re very lucky that we can have profit in the first year.
But again, don’t use that against yourself because every business does have expenses. In some years, you might choose to invest more back into your business to learn and grow more in future years faster or more seamlessly. You get to choose.
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The Technical Aspect
Another area where I see practitioners getting hung up on to ensure that they have a legitimate online business is just making sure that they have all the correct or right software and tech in place to have funnels. And for sure, you don’t need that to be legitimate.
All you could need is to show up on Zoom, for example, or a phone call even. You don’t even need Zoom to have an online business and accept payments. You don’t need funnels. You don’t need Kajabi or Cartra. You don’t need fancy webinar hosting platforms. You don’t need fancy all-in-one scheduling, email platforms. You don’t need any of that stuff.
Of course, all of that can come in time when you have the profit. But let’s say you have a busy brick-and-mortar clinic and you just want to start working online. You really are getting a lot of requests. Maybe you have a blog that goes viral or you have an Instagram channel that’s popular and people are requesting to work with you out of state, out of your local community. You can start easily working with them tomorrow by just responding to a direct message and say, “Hey, I’d love to work with you. Would you like to jump on a consult call?” If you have Zoom, do it on Zoom. If you don’t, do it over the phone.
Then from there, just instruct them how you’ll work one-to-one with them. And again, you can do it on Zoom or on the phone if it’s verbal coaching. And then do the work. Do the work on helping to get them to the goals that they mentioned on that consult call. There you have it. That’s it. It can be that simple.
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Scheduling
And then you’re fitting in those online one-to-one calls in your schedule just like you would when you were scheduling in-person sessions. In fact, in my schedule, I don’t have days where I’m all in-person or all online or I don’t really time block it that way. I keep it simple for people where I just send them a link. I have it differentiated for myself so I mentally prepare and I can have my shed set up for either online or in-person, but I can easily switch back and forth throughout my day.
So I send a link that says, “Ignite session in-person or virtual Ignite session.” And then I’ll know. And then it’s easy. I usually do two or three sessions in a row and then I always put in a break for myself. So if I have three sessions, sometimes I’ll go online, in-person, back online, or in-person and then two online. Usually these days the ratio is heavy on the online and less in the in-person, but I can switch over in less than three minutes. It’s so simple.
So I don’t have to complicate my day by trying to micromanage my schedule. I just send out my link and people can get booked in. Or Acuity and Calendly these days have so many options on how to put parameters on a specific type of appointment. So if you only wanted to do online appointments on Wednesdays, for example, you can categorize that in Acuity or Calendly quite easily. Then as you get more people online and get more confident online and show yourself, prove to yourself, “Oh, okay, this online thing can work,” then you can start to get fancy with tech and software and building out funnels and moving to group and on-demand and membership type programs.
But I think a lot of people get frozen because they try to do all of this at once and they’re not sure where to start. Or they’re not sure what it would be like to work online. And so then because it’s fuzzy there, then they don’t see how an online business can be legitimate. But when you do figure that out, it opens up your business to so much freedom. You have so much flexibility and you just have more choices in how you work with people. You never have to turn someone away when they reach out to you and be like, “Your Instagram reels have really been speaking to me. I think I need to work with you. You’re my practitioner.”
And you don’t have to say, “Oh, you’re outside of California. I’ll refer you to so-and-so,” or “Geez, I don’t know anyone in your area. I’m so sorry.” How disheartening is that for you and them? Plus, it’s like minimizing all your hard work. You put a lot of effort and time into your marketing, whether it is a blog or an Instagram. And if it’s bringing in people, that’s amazing. It’s working. So let’s utilize that and help it and create a scalable model in which you can still serve those people.
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Client Proof that Transitioning Online Works
This happened to my client, Justine. She was getting a lot of people reaching out to her from her website, from her blogs, from her Instagram. And she was having to turn them away. Plus, she didn’t feel like she was utilizing one of her certifications, low pressure fitness, all too much in the clinic. And she loved that type of work.
So we created her Fit2Be classes, which are really a hybrid of all her certifications and experience. She created her own methodology, what actually gave her a ton of confidence. And she not only created her online program, but she brought that work into the clinic, which better supported her patients. And she was able to better support her patients as well, because she had a three month wait list. And now instead of those people just having to wait three months, they get to work with Justine that week if they wanted coming into her Fit2Be classes. So she’s already prepping and giving them value, helping them to see progress and get results, working with them online before she actually sees them in the clinic.
When my client, Tymee, first started working with me, she had a lot of fears about being legitimate and having a viable business. She’s a speech pathologist and has a master’s. She already had her yoga teacher training in her 500-hour certification, but she was really worried if she moved online as a health coach, yoga teacher, could that really work? Would her community and her audience see her as legitimate? She had a lot of doubts and reservations, but we steadily worked on her confidence.
We worked on ensuring that her clients get results. We started out with just that one-to-one framework. All she worked as a speech pathologist in the schools full time. And she started signing clients and made her first few hundred dollars and eventually worked to a few thousand dollars a month and reduced being in the schools full time to part time. And just recently started hitting 9K months online. With some sessions still in-person, still driving around, but a lot less. We’re really cutting down on her driving around from yoga class to yoga class and all across the town of Boston.
But what would 9K months mean to you? If you were working a full time business and then a full time job, maybe that was quite exhausting, more of a mill back to back or like my physical therapy clinic where you are seeing multiple patients at the same time, you had a quota, they were urging you to see 20 plus patients in a day and you knew you could come home and see two people and make a few hundred dollars without ever leaving your house and build up that profit, build up the savings to reduce down to part time and so forth.
Had I known all this back then, that’s how I would have done it. Instead, I wasn’t quite as prepared because I was fired from my job way back then. But that’s a lesson learned. If I would do it over, that is how I would do it.
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Conclusion
So if you’re feeling stuck, if you are having fears or just frozen on where to start and what an online business would look like for you, the best thing you can do is to get coaching on it. Get your brain in the right mindset. Just learn a step, one step to move you forward so that it leads you to the next step. And by doing it that way, you’ll be seeing progress and before you know it, you’ll be signing your first few online clients and having a legitimate online wellness business that will give you so much flexibility and freedom in your life. Not to mention the ability to help more people in a very scalable way.
So if you want to do this work with me right now, it is the time. We’ve got 90 days about to the end of the year and you can finish it strong. I’m booking out. I have about four to five spots when I’m writing this, which is in September, available for the rest of the year. So you can put your deposit down for later this year or even early next year. And what we’re going to do is the 90-day Finish Strong.
So the first 90 days, we’re going to get your online business set up. You’re going to be totally prepared on what your offer is, if there is any branding that needs to be done or repackaging of your offers in person or if you’re already online, if there’s any structuring of those offers that need to be changed, we do that in the first session or two. We’re going to ditch the content overwhelm with the 90-minute a week grow your audience through the high converting social media framework. You’re going to implement the 90-day sign clients on-demand strategy.
Also, you can get streamlined and have repeatable processes set up before the holiday season. So you keep your business going during a busy time and you’re still able to spend time with family. You’re able to relax during the holiday season and you’ll feel fulfilled at the end of the year because you’ll know you gave it your all, you can hit your goals so you know you’ve completed a year that was well done. You will feel successful and accomplished.
And then the next 90 days in the beginning of the year, we’re going to capitalize on that momentum that we created at the end of the year. So the next 90 days, we’re going to launch and fill a wellness workshop and that can be in person and online and/or online or refine if you already do that, we’ll refine it and create your six-figure client funnel system using wellness workshops to bring in clients reliably. You’ll master e-mails with your 100K message makeover framework and you’ll leave location behind transitioning your revenue in the percentage that you desire from in-person to online.
So if you desire to have 20% of your revenue in-person and 80% online, we’ll work on that transition or if you want to flop that, that’s totally fine as well. It’ll all be dependent upon your goals and your desire. So that’s what I have in store for you for the next six months if you desire to work one to one with me.
All right, in the meantime, I’ll see you next week. Bye for now!
Important Links To Visit:
Mastering the Art of Growing Your Online
How To Get Clients From Social Media
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