Well, hello ladies and gents, Robert Sykes, Keto savage.com
and today I have special guest Yuri from Healthpreneur on the
line and we dive into business. This one is definitely a
business centric podcast episode.
So if you're interested in business, by all means, keep
listening. But he has been a very
successful entrepreneur in scaling his own operation, his
own practice, and then helping others do the same.
So we dive deep into that. We talk about conversion rates,
paid advertising, marketing, customer acquisition, all the
good details on that content. So without further delay, sit
back, relax and do the podcast with Yuri.
And we are live. Yuri, how are you, Sir?
I'm doing great, Robert, how are you?
I'm good, I'm good. So I am super passionate about
health and I'm super passionate about entrepreneurship.
And you have eloquently combined them both into health
preneurship, which is pretty freaking cool, man.
Nice man. Yeah, it's it's just been a
natural extension of my journey, so it's made the most sense.
I started off very active, got into health later on and then
started to recognize that a lot of other health professionals
needed business help and kind of figured that piece out after
many years of struggle. So it's just like the next
chapter in my journey. Well.
I want to peel the curtain back on the the back story, man, I
love a good origin story. So you, you had, you had like a
bunch of autoimmune issues in the beginning, right?
Yeah, so I actually lost all my hair to an autoimmune condition
at just before my 17th birthday. And for context, my dad's
Moroccan. I had a lot of hair to begin
with. And in the space of about six
weeks, I lost all of it, including pubic hair, eyebrows,
everything. So that was a big shock to the
system. And at the time I was really
active and fit. I was playing soccer at a very
high level. My goal was to play a pro, and I
was just really determined to make that happen.
So I thought, OK, I'm, I'm, I'm fit, like I must be healthy.
But apparently I wasn't. And that was a big wake up call
for me because I had the fitness and kind of active lifestyle
piece down. But I didn't realize that if you
eat garbage all the time and your body is polluted from heavy
metals, you know, all sorts of junk that may have been injected
into the body if over years, at least in my case, all that
compounded so that all, you know, culminated in that
autoimmune condition. And it sent me on a journey to
really figure out why that happens, to figure out how I
could solve it, at least for myself.
So for the next 8 years, you know, tried everything under the
sun, visited all the different specialists, the doctors and,
you know, all sorts of stuff. Nothing really provided a
tenable, sustainable solution. And so I just kind of lived with
it for, for that time. And you know, it was, it was
there, but it didn't really compromise my day-to-day life
other than just, you know, how I looked.
The bigger thing for me to be honest was just really low
energy. And I, and I, I was, I thought I
was low energy or fatigue because I was just so active.
And so for about 50% of my life, I was sleeping and I thought,
oh, 'cause I'm playing soccer and training so much, I must be
tired. And I realized that that maybe
it wasn't the full picture. So I ended up playing pro soccer
in my early 20s. I retired when I was just about
25. And then I came back.
I was playing in France. I came back to Toronto and
started working as a trainer and nutritionist because I'd
previously gone to school for kinesiology.
And I wanted to further my, my understanding of nutrition
because I really had no clue. Like even when I was playing
soccer professionally, I was eating like traipse with Nutella
a couple hours before a match. Like, I thought that was like
normal. So I had no clue.
And so I went back to school for nutrition.
And then my eyes were just completely blown open.
And I started to learn things about how to eat well that I
started applying. And very, very quickly, I
started to notice a very significant difference in terms
of how I felt that I'd never experienced before.
And it was probably the most significant moment of my life
because it was like, Oh my God, like where it's been my whole
life. And as a byproduct of feeling
better, my hair re grew. So I re grew all my hair in it's
face of about two months, although I kept my head shaved
just because it was so natural to me at that point.
But my eyebrows and facial hair, all that stuff came back and it
was really powerful like that. And I just thought, I'm like,
man, I got to share this with other people.
So I actually started writing a book in the back of nutrition
school and it was in the back burner for a while.
But nine years later that initial book became a New York
Times bestseller called the all day energy Diet.
And during that process I built a very, very successful company
online after seven years of the one-on-one grind in person seen,
you know, clients all day long, which was great, but very, very
exhausting. And you know, I, I felt that
back in 2005 when I started my online business, I thought that
was going to be the dream of laptop lifestyle, but it was, it
was not easy at all. And I had to learn the hard way,
like how to grow a business, how to get better at marketing, how
to, you know, become known and seen because it doesn't matter
how good you are, if known knows who you are.
So I had to learn all of that. So in addition to my technical
expertise as a trainer, nutritionist, I started to, to
really develop the skills of being a business owner.
And eventually, you know, we built that business to a very
sizeable level, sold it about seven years ago.
And during that process, a lot of other people in our space
start asking me for business advice.
And I thought, huh, maybe there's an opportunity here to
serve more health professionals so they can help more people.
And that's where Health Primer was born.
And that's what we do is, is help health professionals who
are amazing at what they do, But sadly, no one knows they exist.
And we help them bridge that gap between their knowledge and the
people they can serve in a way that's transformational,
authentic, and without the grind.
So that's that's the journey in a nutshell.
I love it. OK, I definitely want to dive
deeper. I've had several like my podcast
is the key of savage podcast, but I talk about everything and
I've had several health related or episodes as of late.
So I'm just going to pull the curtain back and we'll dive full
head on to the entrepreneurship business side of it because I
think and that is often times not talked about enough.
And like when you're in the health space, the like you've
got a passion for working out, for eating the right foods, like
the, the journey just, it always is.
OK, I'm going to do one-on-one coaching.
I'm going to start with people locally to me, I'm going to
train my aunt, my uncle, charge them nothing like the worst
clients because they're not being charged anything.
And you just kind of scale up from there.
And that's how so many people start.
What what is the the primary avatar demographic of the
typical client pool that you're working with within
Healthpreneur? Yeah.
So our bread and butter really are experienced health
professionals who are the best of what they do.
So a lot of them are. And it really, you know, it
doesn't matter if they're a dietitian or medical doctor or a
chiropractor or naturopath. Our best clients typically are
those who see a better way of helping people.
And they're typically root cause type of practitioners.
So they don't just push pills, potions and magic powders.
They actually help their clients, like solve their
issues, like get to the root cause.
So our, our part of our vision is to actually disrupt the
healthcare system because I think it's, I mean, I don't
think I know it's completely broken and it doesn't work in
the slightest unless you have a broken leg.
Cool. But for anything chronic, it's
a, it's a joke. So part of our mission is to
disrupt the broken system that doesn't serve the practitioner
nor the patient and to ultimately equip practitioners
with better vehicles to reach the people they want to serve
who may not know they exist. So for us, the most important
thing is like, you have to be an expert because I can't, I can't
help you if you don't, if you're not good at what you do.
That's the only prerequisite for me is like, you have to be an
expert at what you do. Like you've already put in the
time that you've spent a lot of money on school, you've worked
with patients or clients already.
And as long as you have somewhat of a big vision, like you don't
just want to cover the bills and just get by.
Those are the two biggest things like expertise and drive.
Everything else is figure out able.
It's not easy, but it's a million percent worth it to
actually build a business that gives you more time and location
freedom, that gives you more leverage so you're not having to
trade time and money forever. That helps you unpack more
lives. So it really comes down to those
two things. So like having that expertise,
having to drive. And I guess the third piece
would be being willing to be the CEO of your business, not just
the practitioner. Like you can't just work in your
business forever. And if he wants you, that's
fine, but you'll burn out. Like that's there's, there's no
way around it. That's the biggest problem in a
service based business is, is burn out.
So being able to create systems and leverage around you while
helping more people in a bigger way, in a better way.
If someone's open minded to that, then those are really the
ideal people we love to work with.
And it's unfortunate because if you're truly an expert, that is,
you know, doing innovative things, going against the status
quo and just creating a new technique, a new form, a new a
new service. Like when you're the best at
anything that you do, it's hard to have and completely, you
know, different bandwidth allocated to being the best in
business you can be because ideally they are intertwined,
but they both require quite a little lot of, you know, mental
bandwidth. So I would imagine you've got
quite a quite a large clamp pool that is amazing from a health
standpoint, but have no idea how to go about it from a business
standpoint. I may never have gone to
Business School, and I went to Business School, but I honestly
didn't really learn many applicable tasks in Business
School. Most of mine learning was boots
on the ground. So I think a lot of people just
lack the basic fundamental business skills that would allow
them to scale their practice. Yeah, 100%.
And you know, like we have two categories of clients, like
either people who've tried things before, like they've
invested in courses rather coaching programs and they've
started to build some of the skills around marketing,
messaging, sales, etcetera. And those people typically move
faster, right, because they have more of a foundation.
And then others are completely wet behind the ears.
And maybe they already have a clinic or a gym.
And that's also a good foundation because if they've
had success there, like a lot of that stuff is transferable.
Even though the difference in a brick and mortar is that people
fall into your lap pretty much online, that never happens.
Like you actually have to proactively put yourself out
there. So there are nuances to becoming
a better communicator. That's essentially the most
important skill we help our clients develop is, is becoming
a better communicator, whether that's in the written word,
spoken word, being able to speak with people 1 to one, one to
many. The more influential persuasive
you are in that, the better off you will be in business.
So, but again, it's everything's a learnable skill.
Like when I started in business, I was an exceptional strength
and conditioning coach, nutritionist.
I was very good at helping people transform their body and
their health. I had no clue about how to build
a business. And I learned the problem that
I, the, the problem that I ran into was I, I tried to learn it
by myself, which is kind of ridiculous now that I think
about it, because I spent 4, you know, five years in school, a
lot of money to learn my technical skills, yet I didn't
do the same on the business side.
But all of that changed when I hired my first business coach
three years after dealing with poverty and incoming business,
because when I hired a coach who had actually been where I want
to go, then it was like, cool. Like I was certain to be.
I was, I was being exposed to concepts, ways of thinking,
different skills that I had to build.
And then it was just a matter of putting that stuff into
practice. And there isn't like part of it
is awareness, like understanding, like, here's what
you need to do. Like that's like the first
thing. The second thing is knowing how
to do it well, which is obviously the benefit of having
the right type of mentor. And 3rd is just doing it over
and over again so you can become proficient at it.
And that's kind of like the three-step process to your
mastery in anything. And everyone has that same
capability. It's just understanding, OK,
well, here's what I need to do. Here's how I do it well, and let
me just do it over and over again.
And so if you're, you know, a technical expert, you know, as a
doctor or a functional practitioner or a trainer, it
doesn't matter. It's like you have like that
skill you have is never going to leave you.
Like you could, you could lose your, your license, your, the
letters behind your name. Not that we'd want that to
happen necessarily, but if you ever did, it doesn't mean you
lose your knowledge of how to help someone improve their
health. So it's like you have that cool,
put that in the back burner for a second.
And now we have to put a bit more time and focus into
building the skills on the business side that you simply
don't have yet. And that's going to come down to
communication as a large umbrella.
But if we break that down, it's going to come down to lead
generation, lead nurture, sales, conversion, delivery, retention,
ascension. And these are all skills that
anyone can learn, right? It doesn't matter if you know
you don't have to be a superhero or genetically gifted.
It's just a matter of desire to want to learn it.
Because if you see the payoff that it creates in helping you
amplify your message, because if you want to reach, teach, and
influence more people, that's never going to happen if no one
knows you exist. And marketing is simply the
ability to help people see that you actually exist.
And that's a very, very important skill in today's day
and age. Totally agree.
The unfortunate thing is that a lot of these people that are
experts in their field that have the mode motivation and drive to
create their own, you know, business to begin with are often
times plagued with this inability to relinquish control
and they want to do everything themselves.
I'm going to go through this. I think we all probably are to
some extent because we're all like type A personalities that
are just go, go, go. And we know that the
information's out there like how to build a successful,
profitable business. That information exists for free
online, but the problem is there's so much information that
you can easily get sidetracked, distracted, and not know which
way to turn. And I feel like that's where a
lot of people get hung up because they're trying to do
everything themselves, muscle through it, and they just lose
so much time in the process. Yeah, 100%.
I mean, I would consider myself a pretty, you know, I'm not
going to call myself a control freak, but you know, in that, in
that, in that genre. But the reality is like, I think
there's a lot of benefit to being a very controlling type of
person. And I, and I say that in, in not
a way you're controlling people, but like, you just want to be,
you want to have your hands and the whole thing because it means
you care. Like it means you give a shit.
And I think that's really important in a world where most
businesses are very, very mediocre at best.
And it doesn't mean that you have to control every aspect of
the business, but there's an aspect of like, I care enough so
that when I have other people working with me, there's going
to be a certain level of standard and principles adhered
to that will ensure that our clients and business have this
just great experience and reputation.
So, but on the on the flip side of that, be like there's,
there's two sides to the spectrum.
One is control, the other is freedom.
And you can't really have both to the fullest.
Like if you want to be controlling about everything,
then you will never have any freedom.
And the goal in business is to continually give away more
control so you can regain more freedom.
And freedom is not necessarily like doing nothing and chilling
at the beach. It's the ability to choose.
It's the ability to choose what you want to do with your time.
And I love working. I work harder now than I did
when I was a Burnt Air personal trainer.
But the difference is choice. Like I had to train.
I had to do that back in the day.
I choose to wake up at 5:00 in the morning.
I choose to, you know, work 4050 to 60 hour weeks because I love
the work I do. And I could choose not to work
and it would make, you know, little to no difference to my
business. But because I want to build a
very, very big brand that it would last my life.
And I love the work I do. It's, it's very fulfilling for
me. So my goal is to continually
audit what I'm doing with my time and saying, is this my
task? Is this the most important thing
for me to do? Is this my genius zone?
If not, I always have to be looking at how do I delegate
this and elevate? How do I delegate this to
someone else? How do I train them up, coach
them up to a point where they're at least 80% or better than what
I could do. And that's good enough that I
can move on to higher level, higher leverage activities.
But you know, early on in my business, like I didn't do that
stuff. Like I was doing everything.
I was building websites on Dreamweaver, like learning HTML.
And it's actually to, to, to my detriment, something I still
understand because I can very easily get back in the weeds
because I know that stuff. So sometimes the benefit of
bootstrapping and learning everything yourself is also the
very thing that holds you back because you can also do
everything yourself. And sometimes we're like, well,
I could just do it quicker as opposed to giving it to someone
else and going back and forth with them a bit.
But in the long term, unless you're able to relinquish
control, you're never going to be able to scale because you
will always be the bottleneck. When for you personally did you
feel like you were on the brink of burnout and that this just
was not sustainable? And what was the catalyst for
you when you recognize? That you had.
To switch gears. Yeah, there were.
There were two moments, one in person, I remember I would like
a typical day for me would have been wake up at 6, rushed out of
the house or I should say tiny third floor apartment at the
time rush across the city for 7:00 AM client and I remember,
you know, I'd be I'd be there all day like at the gym or, you
know, going from client to client until 7:00 tonight.
And I remember 1 morning I was driving to a client's condo and
you know, it's like dead of the winter.
I live in Toronto, freezing cold and all this nonsense.
And I park in the garage. I'm looking at the concrete wall
in front of me and I'm asking myself, the hell am I doing?
Like, what am I doing here? This is as much as I enjoy
working with these clients, like what am I doing?
This is not the life I want to live.
This is not where I want to be in the future.
And that was a that was a moment where I was like, this, this has
to stop. And that was a big I got.
I just got pissed off. And that started to become a
really big motivator for me to start making, taking the first
steps to start into a more emphasis to build my online
business. And then the second thing, which
was not so much of A burnout thing, the more of a recognition
that the business model of one-on-one was never going to
get me where I want to go was, was I'd saved up a good amount
of money, I guess relative at the time, to go on a six week
trip with my then girlfriend, now wife.
We went to Europe for six weeks. And I remember while I was over
there, I wasn't working, so I had no money coming in.
And every single time we bought anything, whether it was a
coffee or food or anything, that money went down.
And it was the worst feeling in the world knowing that I, I
like, it's probably the most scarce I've ever felt because
money was leaving and nothing was coming in.
And I thought to myself, I never want to experience this again.
I want to be able to travel like this and also help people and
make money without me needing to be there.
And that was those two moments were really big for catalyzing
my movements and building my online business.
And then you know that that started that.
But even with that first online health business, it was a very
complex business. Like we helped half a million
people. We had a, we had probably by the
end of it close to 100 different products.
When I say products, I mean like e-books, courses, supplements,
everything. Like it was very, very
complicated. And we instead of focusing, we
just kept adding. And I started to recognize that
like the business was I, I like, I wanted to get out of the
business. Not that it wasn't doing well,
it's just I wanted to get out of it because it was a nightmare
like I was, it was like every month it's like, what are we
promoting next? Like tomorrow, what are we
pushing to make money like it was non-stop like a promotional
machine. And although the stuff we were
doing was very helpful and the products were excellent, I just
didn't like the business model. I didn't like the fact that we
had to keep pushing and promoting just to make sense on
the back end of acquiring customers at a loss in the front
end. And I started to see the
landscape shift because in 2005, you know, you could sell an
e-book for 50 bucks and by 2015 that same e-book was a 10,000
word blog post for free. And so things very like very
quickly shifted over that time. And I started to look at, you
know, like, am I really being fulfilled selling products to
people that I don't even know? And I wasn't very happy in that
business and I was burnt out because it was just like this
non-stop. It wasn't burnout from
one-on-one like I had in person. It was a different burnout.
It was a burnout of of just being on this hamster wiggle of
constantly churning out new products and new promotions.
And again, not from a place of choice, but from a place of
necessity. And I'm like, I never want to do
this again. And those are probably like the
two biggest moments of burnout that I'd experienced.
And how old were you at both those moments, if you don't mind
me asking? Early on in person would have
been 202829 and then I'd say probably by 3334 with the online
business. Gotcha.
Yeah, I. Feel like, I mean I was AI was a
late bloomer with the online stuff.
I mean I look at guys now they're like 18/19/20.
I'm like dude I didn't get any traction online until I was like
3031. So like, good on you for
starting early. Totally.
What what are the, the main common denominators or pitfalls
you're seeing people make as they're going through as that
they're onboarding with you And like, I'm assuming they're doing
the one-on-one model. They've got a great product or
service, they're trying to scale it and they're just not getting
any traction doing so. Or maybe they've reached a point
where they recognize that the one-on-one is just simply not
scalable. It's trading time for money and
that's just no bueno after a certain point.
So like what? What is the common denominator
that you're seeing in the majority of the people?
So I'll, I'll kind of talk about like clients and just our market
in general, which I think is applicable to any entrepreneur.
I'd say the first thing is just very short sighted, like they're
looking for very fast results. And I think that creates a lot
of problems because I, I think we're pretty honest in our
marketing. We don't tell people it's going
to be easy. We tell them it's going to be
the hardest thing to ever do, but it's a million percent worth
it. And like, yeah, like we can
guarantee a path. We can't guarantee the results
because like you have to do the work.
So we try to be very clear with people expectation wise.
But the biggest problem is when people expect things to be
easier or faster because resetting expectations is very
challenging. But I think in general, people
have to understand, especially online, although technology is
an amazing amplifier, it's very hard to build the business
online because obscurity is the biggest danger everyone faces.
No one knows to be exist. And you have to hustle initially
to do what you got to do to, to become more visible.
And then over time you can employ more leverage in the form
of systems, advertising people, etcetera.
But it's not easy in the slightest.
Like in a brick and mortar, people walk by your your
storefronts and they walk in cool.
That never happens online. Like never.
And so being very realistic about what it actually takes to
succeed online, I think a lot of people are delusional about, oh,
it's going to be like, I was delusional when I came online.
I'm like, oh, I'm going to live the laptop lifestyle.
I'm going to write an e-book and sell it and like make millions
doing nothing. It didn't happen.
So like the work required is, is significant.
But the thing too is like once you do the work and you do the
right work, you're creating assets and a tremendous amount
of leverage that will work for you forever if you're doing
things you know, properly. So as long as someone is willing
to put in a short quote UN quote, short term effort for
long term gain, I think it's, it's very important to
understand what short term looks like.
It's not a month, it's not six months.
Sometimes it's not even a year, right?
It might be one 2-3 years before people hit their, you know,
their breakthrough. But it's all very, very
important because when I say, like a lot of people are looking
for short term results, part of the problem is like, you know,
like we're seeing all the flash around us, right?
All the bells and whistles, the bling, all the nonsense.
And we think that that's going to happen very quickly.
And it can happen quickly depending on the type of
business model you have and the skill set you have.
But at the same time, it's like, don't expect it to happen
quickly. Like for us, if we're talking
with the medical Doctor Who's been in school for 10 years, so
like it took you 10 years to become a medical doctor, what
makes you think you're going to become like this world class
business owner in 10 weeks? Like it's delusional right now.
It's not going to take you 10 years.
But can you commit to this for the next 12 months at least so
that we can build the foundation like you would in a skyscraper
so that when you start building the floors above ground, they go
up a lot faster. So that short sightedness is a
very big problem in a world where everyone wants quick
fixes. I'd say that's the first kind of
big pitfall because what happens is people start something, they
don't see the results and then they're like, I'm going to do
something different and they go right back to Ground Zero and
they start all over again. As opposed to recognizing the
foundation they're building and continuing to build on that with
a longer term perspective. Yeah, 100% agree.
I feel like there's so many people, especially with content
creation because like online, you're the marketing efforts are
a direct result of the amount and quality of the content
you're producing. And like with podcasts as an
example, like this is episode 700 something of this podcast.
I've been doing this for 2000 since 2016, 2018 podcasting.
So many people get in and have three podcast episodes and they
throw in the towel. Like you have to endure the
length of time to get noticed with online content creation.
Yeah, I'm sure like the first year of the podcast wasn't like
a massive success for you in terms of downloads, right?
No. Yeah, like it's, I remember I
was on Lewis House's School of Greatness a number of years ago
and I was at his place and I remember him telling me he's
like, honestly, man, like where he was at the time.
He's like, we're just at the point where we're starting to
see the inflection. And this is three years after he
started the podcast. And I was like, yeah, like that.
That's amazing. And it's it like no one is like,
no one is exempt from the journey.
Like you just, you have to go through it.
And it's nice because you don't need any special superpowers.
You know, you just keep like persistence and longevity, I
think are the two most important things in business.
The only reason that I'm here is like, I've been at this now for
20 years. And like, you don't stay in
business for 20 years if the business is not profitable, if
the business has a bad reputation, if you're doing
shady stuff, you don't last for 20 years.
And I think part of the reason I've been able to last so long
is because for me, my reputation matters more than anything else.
And I would never do anything to shortcut that.
So I'm always looking at taking the highest path, you know,
wherever possible. And I was thinking long term,
like this current business health printer.
I have no intention to sell it, although we could.
It's, it's built to sell, but I've no intention of doing so.
And I want to build a business that becomes as recognizable as
Coca-Cola, but with a better, you know, connotation to it.
And that's going to take a long time, But I'm OK because I, I, I
firmly believe in what we're doing and I see the results are
our clients are getting with their with their clients.
So helping couples conceive naturally who had dropped
$40,000 in IVF with no results like all sorts of stories.
And This is why we exist is to help those clients improve their
health. And it's, you know, being
alliance with a bigger time frame, a bigger, bigger longer
term view, I think is very closely aligned with the type of
business you're running in, like why you're doing it.
So I think having an origin story that is very connected to
your business is important because if you're not really
connected to the business, you're not going to want to stay
in the business. And so, you know, being part of
something that you've really, really in your DNA believe is
your life's work is very important because anyone can
make money, but like, who cares? Like you're going to make poor
decisions if it's all about the money, if it's short sighted,
it's, you know, it's, it's only a matter of time before that
type of business fizzles out. So I think that's one of the
biggest ones is just the philosophical approach to like
how we look at the business and it's growth and, and, and what
is if you think of like goal setting anyways?
Like it's all just subjective. Like, oh, I'm going to like I
got to make $1,000,000. Cool.
By when? Like do you think you might make
$1,000,000 over the next 10 years?
Yeah, Do you have to make it in the next 30 days?
Probably not. So it's like some of like some
of this is just like mindset stuff, just working through
these preconceived beliefs or notions that, you know, we feel
that we have to hit certain milestones by certain time
frames that are 100% arbitrary and just made-up in general.
I think the second thing on a bit more of a tactical level is
there's, there's four reasons that most people don't succeed
in business online. One is people don't know you
exist. 2 is they know you exist, but they don't understand what
you offer, which is a messaging and positioning thing.
Three, they understand what you offer, but they don't want it,
which again comes down to a bit of a positioning and and offer
creation thing. And then 4th is they want what
you offer or have to offer, but they simply don't trust you.
So when we kind of unpack those, it really comes down to, all
right, we have to become very good at specializing in a
specific niche where we have messaging that speaks to a very
specific avatar that offers a solution that solves a very big
pain point they want solved. And in a way that is either
irresistible or in, in the case of like a higher priced coaching
offer, which is not necessarily an irresistible offer, you have
to do whatever you can to build trust in your marketplace.
And trust takes time. So again, like it's this
repeated exposure, it's this repeated adding of value, It's
this being an expert because people can sniff out beat us
from a mile away. And it's constantly being
present, whether it's in the form of content or ads or
whatever. People like when people see
something they're familiar with, that's where they start to build
trust. And that doesn't happen in a in
a day, like it happens in a lot of repeated exposure.
But again, like going back to the first point, that takes
time, like the first, like the first two and three, like
crafting a good message, positioning an offer can happen
fairly quickly. But becoming visible and
building trust, that can take a little bit of time depending on
the type of business model you run.
So again, it's like taking this longer term perspective of, OK,
like this is the game and I'm just going to commit to it
because it's a, it's not a Sprint, it's a marathon.
And the marathon never rents. It's really just a matter of
like, how long can you keep playing the game?
Because if you can keep playing longer than other people, you'll
win. Yeah, I feel like in the health
space specifically, there's a the common pitfall of people
trying to just serve to the masses.
And in reality, they wound up serving to no one because they
don't go niche enough. And I feel like you've just got
to really figure out where your expertise lies and then just
double down on going like uncomfortably narrow with it
until you can build the traction to then broaden if need be.
Yeah, that was my problem with my first business because I was,
I was a generalist. I wanted to help everyone.
So like, I mean, our brand was like almost everything under the
sun and it took a very long time to, to, to grow that.
And I think that was part of the reason.
And you know, one of the first things that we advise anyone we
work with is what's the like, what's the problem you can
solve? Who has that problem, you can
help. And everything starts from
there. Because if you're trying to be a
generalist, you're toast. Like your messaging becomes
diluted. You can't scale the delivery
because now everyone's a special snowflake and it's an impossible
business to scale. So you can certainly be a
generalist online and you simply buy yourself another one-on-one
job. But if you want to build a
business that's scalable and stands out amongst all the
competition, you got to start by narrowing down for sure. 100% Is
there a specific style of offer or model that you try and have
people incorporate? Like is it more so like the the
coaching basis or like a course or what type of model do you try
to to encourage people to follow or is there?
Yeah, for, I mean, our whole philosophy is like what's going
to produce the best results for the client.
And the reality is no one does anything on their own.
So if we look at the stats, less than 10% of people who start a
course online actually complete it, not even like get results
from it, but they complete it. So they went through all the
modules in Kajabi or Thinkific. That's that's astonishingly low.
So in from a place of integrity as a health expert, if I want to
help people improve their health, I can't just sell a
course and expect them to get better.
It's never going to happen. So that's the first fundamental
issue with that. The second issue is that in
today's landscape, it's close to impossible to scale a low price
course. And I and I, and I say that with
a caveat, like advertising has only gone up in price.
So unless you have a massive organic following already in
which you can just here's a link, go buy it and you've got
that warm trust, maybe you can make that work.
But for most mere mortals who don't have a large following and
need to get some type of traffic and you're using, let's say paid
media, it's, it's, it's very, very hard to make that work.
Like I was talking with two business owners actually in this
space. So like health, fitness based,
the health coaches and they're having a very hard time scale in
their business because they're offer their price point is
between 6000 and $9000 for their coaching program.
But the problem even for them is they're their their margins are
becoming so squeezed because of the cost of advertising has gone
up. Skepticism has also gone up
because there's so many coaches and therefore their sales cycles
longer, their conversion rates are lower, and they can't even
make sense of a 6 to $9000 price point.
So for someone to sell a course for 234500 bucks to cold
traffic, go to a webinar or a sales page and click buy now.
It's near impossible to make that happen unless you are the
world's most unbelievable marketer.
I have, I've not seen that happen.
Like even my previous business was largely based around
information like selling information and it was very hard
and it became harder as the cost of advertising went up.
So what ends up happening in that type of business is you
have to acquire customers at a loss on the front end and then
you have to promote the shit out of them on the back end.
It's like you start selling your soul with affiliate offers and
you're just like pushing stuff down people's throats every
single day by e-mail because you have to make up the numbers on
the back end. And it's, it's, I mean, I have
friends in that space who they're six months in the red
before they break even. I'm like, I would never want to
run that type of business ever again.
So the, the, the economics of that business don't make sense
to me. And then more importantly is
they actually don't fundamentally help the customer.
So our whole approach is a coaching model.
Premium price. When I say premium in the
context of health, let's call it anywhere from 2 to $10,000 for
an outcome. And that could be, you know,
3456 months, whatever it is. And you know, obviously people
object to that. Healthcare should be free.
It's like, cool, awesome. How's that working out?
Right? Like I live in Canada with a
free healthcare system. It's a disaster.
Like, you know how it's not ethical of you to charge to help
people through health? Cool.
Well, you're not going to do anything if you if you don't get
charged. And the reality is, and this
took me a very long time to realize, until people pay it,
they don't do anything. And the sad part about that is
that I'm not talking like when I talked about this, some people
think that we're only working with wealthy people, like our
clients don't work with anyone wealthy.
They're working with teachers, regular Joe's and Jane's.
Then we're not talking. We're working with people who
are like fly private jets. All it comes down to you is
helping people understand that if your health is a priority and
the list of symptoms you've just given me and all the side
effects of the drugs you've been taking and all this shit you've
been dealing with is a big enough priority for you, then
you'll find a way to make an investment that is less than the
cost of the trip you just took last summer.
And, you know, people are walking around with 15 and $100
iPhones in their pocket. They're watching televisions
that cost $3000. They're driving in cars that
cost them 20, thirty, $50,000. And I find it appalling when
people are like, oh, $2000. I would never pay that for, you
know, some type of health transformation program.
I'm like, well, that's why you're 100 lbs overweight and
you're going to die young. And I have no problem telling
people that because nothing else in life matters if you don't
have your health and if you're not willing to make an
investment in your real house, the one you live in 24/7, then
you got to, you got to like, you got to check yourself.
So because what we see happens when people invest, they show up
at a whole new level. And even if you just have people
do the basics, go walk, drink some more water, you know, basic
stuff, the very fact that they're paying you to do that
means they're going to do it. And because they do it, they get
results. And because they get results,
they've changed their life and they change their life.
They become a beacon of hope and inspiration for those around
them. And then those around them want
to follow suits because they've seen what the results have been
for their mom, their dad, their friend, whatever.
And that's fundamentally how we create change.
No, I totally, but there's a large percentage of the
population that's not going to be able to afford that or that
are not willing to find a way to afford that.
And that's just, that's just the way it's going to be.
And so our whole philosophy is, you know, start off with a
higher ticket coaching program, work with those that are willing
to make the investments, build up, fill up your cup as the
business owner, and then give away everything else for free to
the point where those people that you serve for free at some
point down the road in the future are able and willing to
step up and work with you. And that's that coaching model
is on a one-on-one basis with those people that are paying
that that higher ticket for the coaching or is that like in a
group setting? It doesn't matter.
I mean, whatever, whatever the coach or expert wants to do, you
know, a lot of people start off in one-on-one until they start
to amass a certain client base, you know, 10/15/20 people and
they're like, you know what? I, I don't know if I can keep
sustaining this. And then they're open, they're
more open to a group model. And the cool thing about a group
is, I mean, it's just so much better.
And there's, there's you can still do, you can have aspects
of one-on-one in a group coaching model.
But the whole idea, the whole thinking of like I have to spend
one hour with every single one of my clients once a week, It's
so I don't even know where they came from.
It gets so outdated. It's, it's wasteful.
Like I think you could spend 15 minutes with a client once a
month. And outside of that, they have a
curriculum that they follow. They have a community of like
minded people that are connected to and you can offer group
coaching calls throughout the week and they'll get amazing
results and they'll actually, you'll like you as the expert as
a coach, you'll start to recognize that you're not as
important as you thought you were because they're getting
support from everyone else. Like in our coaching program, we
offer up to five coaching calls a day and I do 3 calls a week.
And I've, I've realized I'm like, I don't like, I'm not as
important as I once thought I was.
And that's good because I've been able to privatize my
knowledge into a curriculum that people follow.
We have an amazing team of coaches.
But again, it doesn't, it didn't start out that way.
It started off with me and I did one group Q&A call a week and
then we started to build on that as we wanted to better serve our
clients. But for a lot of our clients,
many of them start off one-on-one, which is cool, and
then they evolve into group when they're ready.
And so your practice, I'm trying to understand the the framework
here. So you are teaching them how to
implement this, this framework, this system in which they are
coaching, they're able to scale that they're able to to
replicate that in a one-on-one or group basis.
And then you're basically offering a mirror image of that
from an entrepreneurial standpoint with your coaching
practice, roughly. Is that accurate?
Yeah. Like we only teach when we
personally master. So the acquisition model that we
use is what we teach our clients.
How we coach our clients is exactly how we help them coach
their clients. And a lot of our clients benefit
from simply being in the container and environments to
see how we do things. So they can literally model that
in their coaching business. And obviously, you know, we're,
you know, we're much further ahead than a lot of our clients.
So they don't have to do everything.
But, you know, whether it's, you know, how we run our group
calls, like how do you run a call with 50 clients at the same
time and everyone feels they get personal attention, Like there's
a way that we do that and our clients are on those calls and
they can start to model that for their clients.
And so we're very, very big believers in only ever teaching
what we've mastered. You know, we spent a lot of
money on advertising and a lot of stuff we do.
We tell our clients like just because you see some of our
stuff online doesn't mean you have to copy it.
Like you don't know if we're testing that or if that's a
winner. And so we'll test things, we'll
spend 50, sixty, $100,000 testing things only to recognize
that we would never do it again. We'll never recommend it.
And I find that, you know, our clients appreciate that because
we become the testing grounds and anything we recommend to
them, they have more reassurance around having that being battle
tested as opposed to, hey, guys, like what Meta or Facebook would
will do if you're advertising is they'll say, hey, you should try
this new feature. And then you're like, OK, but
what they're really asking you to do is become a Guinea pig
that they can collect data from at your expense.
And I've not found that to be very useful on the on the meta
advertising side of things. So instead of us doing that to
our clients, we're like, no, let us test it.
Let us figure things out. If we find something that works,
we're going to beta test it with a small group of clients.
If it works for them, then we'll roll it out to everyone else.
What's been the biggest, I guess worthwhile protocol for
acquisition and marketing? Is it more so paid advertising?
Is it more so just the organic? It's kind of a loaded question
because we can go 1,000,000 miles deep on this.
But like with with your type of client pool in the health space,
like are they finding more benefit from content creation or
from paid advertising or where, where, where are they seeing the
most benefit there bang for their buck?
Like if I'm being honest, and you probably see this too, like
the best clients are going to come from long form contents,
right? Podcasts, long form YouTube.
The challenge though, is it takes so long, right to to build
that up. So our clients are busy
practitioners or they're, they've maybe they've been at
the content game for a bit and they're not quite where they
want to be. So our whole model, or at least
part of our model is called a perfect client pipeline.
And it's essentially social media ads.
So Instagram, Facebook that we run to an Evergreen webinar from
the webinar, we invite people to a free or paid consult.
And then from that call, if there's a mutual fit, we talk
about what that, you know, coaching offer would look like.
That's the model that we run. It's, you know, what we've done
from from day one. And what's what's cool about it
is because I've been in this space for 20 years, my previous
business gave me the opportunity to test so many different
business models. We did everything under the sun
and it's given me a lot of a lot of hindsight to say like, I
would never touch that. I would never recommend that
again within the context of where someone's coming in at.
And like, you know, some of the stuff I shared about the, the
low price courses earlier. So for us, it's we understand
that our clients, they don't have three years to build a
following and then warming them up and eventually maybe get some
clients from that. And although I do think in the
long run this type of stuff is the most important, like I'm,
I'm not delusional in thinking that content is not the most
important. I believe it is.
My whole first business was built on the back of content,
but it took seven years to make my first $1,000,000.
When I started Healthpreneur with the model that we teach, it
took me 7 weeks. And part of that was because I
had obviously built the skills over the years to my first
business, but second was we just had a much faster vehicle.
I could set up some ads, put some money behind it, and I was
guaranteed visibility. And because I was decent,
obviously what I did, I also was able to get more conversions
relatively quickly. And that's what we help our
clients do. We help them go from literally
unknown, obscure to having old prospects raise their hands to
watch their training to be like, man, this makes a lot of sense.
Like I would be interested in in speaking and potentially working
with you. And that's the model we teach.
That's what we've done now with thousands of clients.
We still run it. And for people that are like,
oh, webinars are dead, Long form's dead.
No, it's not. It's people will watch stuff
that they are very interested in.
And I mean, otherwise TV wouldn't exist.
Yeah, everybody who, you know, recommended Game of Thrones to
me a couple years ago. I watched seven seasons in a
month. And I'm like, dude, I should
send you an invoice for the amount of time I lost in my
life, you know? So it's like when it's a must,
people find a way and when it's like, oh, it's too long.
They're just not that committed to wanting to do anything.
So that's the model that we initially installed into our
clients businesses. But as they start getting
traction with that, we then start to help them out with the
organic and the contents. Because especially today, it's
not so much of just paid traffic, it's this whole
ecosystem. People see an ad, they type you
into Google, they find you on Instagram, they poke around,
they're looking around. All of that makes a big
difference. And so we help our clients
really build this ecosystem over time where they can start to
become more prolific content creators while also having a
system that's working 90% on autopilot for them to bring
leads and clients in while they're able to do that at the
same time. I'm a I'm a junkie for software
applications. I don't know what I I just go
down the rabbit hole and software.
So like what, what are you using for your webinars for your, are
you using Kajav or your click phones?
Like how do you typically structure this?
Is that like a system that you put everybody through that's
using the same software so it's easily communicated what the
best protocol is, or how do you structure that?
Yeah, we, I mean, our focus is more on the psychology and the
technology and the technology. It's funny because a lot of
people get hung up with the tech.
I'm like, dude, the tech is the least important piece of this
whole thing. Totally agree.
But right. Like we'll, we'll, so we, we
kind of take a lot of the tech off our clients plates and we
build everything for them inside of Entreport.
So they have like A1 size fits all CRM that can grow with their
business. It's it's also what we use.
So we know it well and you know, we don't use any fancy like
webinar automation stuff. We when we first started, we
used to use and I think it was like webinar jam or easy
webinar, stuff like that. And I just found that, you know,
I just thought one day I thought to myself, what if we just put a
video player on the thank you page instead of having people
like believe they're on some live webinar replay.
And we had some issues tech wise with the platforms were, you
know, leads weren't being collected properly and the pages
were loading. And I was like, you know what,
this is not fun. And we just simplified it.
We just, I'm also going back to first principle thinking I'm
like, can we simplify this? Like what?
Like what if we just did this? And so now it's a very simple
set up, right? There's no fancy software from a
webinar automation perspective. It's a couple of pages are
builds. We've got the video on, you
know, the one page that shows the webinar.
There's a replay through e-mail automation.
And it's, it's fairly tech light.
And it's nice because, you know, once that's set up, it's not
about the attack. It's really about the the
psychology of understanding your audience and helping them move,
you know, influencing them in the right direction.
So that's yeah, that's pretty much our our quote UN quote tech
stack. No, it makes total sense, man.
And I feel like when it comes to paid advertising, if you're
using paid advertising to push people to an Evergreen webinar
and then that's leading to, you know, consultation call that you
can then upsell them on the coaching.
Like a lot of people are confused as to how to analyse
that ad spend to see what their break even point is, how long
they should potentially be in the red, if at all.
Like how do you go about educating people on them?
Yeah. So I would say, I mean, we're
very good at two things. One is helping our clients
become very good at sales in an ethical fashion, because if
you're talking to someone on the phone or on Zoom for two to five
or more $1000, you got to be able to sell.
And we are very good at helping them become better at that in a
way that feels good. The second thing we're
exceptional at is Facebook advertising.
We have been what, 84 months? So we have 84 months in a row of
positive real ads in the 1st 30 days.
So we look at real ads in terms of cash collected.
So if we spend a dollar, we make more than a dollar every month
for the past 84 months in a row. And you know we spend north of
right now personally, like in our business, we spend north of
about $350,000 a month in ads. And everything we do in our
advertising is what we teach our clients.
And the cool thing is our clients don't need to become
media buyers. Yeah, it and it's nice that
compared to five years ago, for instance, it's actually easier
to advertise on Meta because they've consolidated a lot of
audiences. They got rid of a lot of very
specific targeting. So going big and broad now is
the best and just having a really good messaging is the
most important. So we show our clients how to
set up their campaigns very simply and we should we give
them a very specific, we call it a six step pruning process
whereby they actually start their ads at scale.
So the method we teach is called the reverse scaling method.
So we, we essentially help them start their ads at scale so they
don't have to take forever to scale up to a certain level.
And then they prune away ads that are not performing well at
very specific KPIs in the journey.
So what that allows them to do is they minimize wastage and
they're looking at various metrics, whether it's cost per
click, cost per lead, etcetera, at various stages of ad spend.
And so they can very quickly tell if an ad is performing or
not. And therefore they're not
wasting money on ads waiting a week or two for them to perform
or not and you know, hoping for the best.
So with our process, our clients see an average of 314% real ads
and I mean like 5 to 10 minutes a day to manage their accounts.
So it's not like they have to become professional media
buyers. Media buyers is actually fairly
simple. The messaging and creative is
where the real genius lies. And that's another area we spend
a lot of time with our clients on.
You know, we've got an amazing team of copywriters.
We're just exceptional provided feedback and we've got, you
know, some great frameworks that we help our clients with.
But that's, that's one of those things that takes a bit of time,
right? Like really find your voice,
understanding how to articulate your message.
And that's very, very important. Yeah, the communication
component is paramount. I feel like there's so many,
especially with everything being online now, people look at other
people that are generating content in the health space and
they try to emulate them and you can't really do that.
Like the whole, I've never really subscribed to the fake it
till you make it philosophy. Like I've always just tried to
figure out my own voice and double down on that because if
you start comparing yours to others like this just a slippery
slope. Yeah, 100%.
Well this is super intriguing, man.
I can literally sit and talk about the nuts and bolts
invisibly all day long. If someone's interested in
jumping on this, maybe they've got their own.
They've own their own practice, their own service, their own
thing, and they're wanting to take it to the next level.
What does that look like for them?
Like how do they get in contact with you?
What's what does that price point look like?
Like if they want to take the next steps, what does that
entail? Yeah, the easiest honestly, is
just to hit me up on Instagram. I'm at health printer on
Instagram and just send me at the end just saying, hey, I saw
you on on Robert's show and it was, you know, a good
conversation and, you know, we can hook you up with some free,
free resources, you know, at the minimum.
And that's probably the best place if you want to just binge
our content. We've got hundreds of videos
that are very tactical and no BS on YouTube.
So if again, you search health printer, you'll see all of our
stuff. And yeah, I mean, we've got,
depending on where you're at in business, if you're just
starting it out or further along, we have anything from,
you know, 2K up to like 160 K depending on, you know, what
you're looking for. So yeah.
Awesome man. Well, I will definitely link out
make it easy for people to find you.
I might be, you know, knock on your door myself because like,
like I said, I always talk business and always want to
learn more. So this is this is exciting
stuff. I love talking business.
Yeah, it's fine, man. It's it's a lot of fun.
It is indeed. What's, what's the next big
thing for you, man? I, I know you're not planning on
selling the company and wanting to just grow that as big you
can. Is there anything in the in the
upcoming pipeline that just got you excited?
Yeah. I mean, we have our big events
in Scottsdale in September. So it's called Health Burner
Live and it's typically a client only events, but we open up
about 25 spots to people that are in our space who are
interested in kind of like being the soup for three days and just
kind of seeing what this is all about.
So that's September 20th to 22nd in Scottsdale.
It's really, it's a special event.
It's I've been to a lot of events in my time and it's kind
of like an unconference. It's very different from a lot
of conferences that, you know, people may have been to have
been to in the past, but that's that's coming up for us in
September. So yeah, that's what we're
gearing up for. Very cool, man.
Scottsdale's a cool place. I've got to know that.
That'll be an awesome conference.
Yeah, yeah, it's, it's nice. We do a camelback hike, so up
the mountain there in the morning.
It's we do a lot of cool stuff. Very cool, I'll link out to that
too. Is there like a spot online for
the conference where people can go and check that out as well if
they want to be one of the 25? Yeah, from our, I think the URL
is they can probably just get it from our Instagram page.
I think it might be linked up there.
I'll have to double check. But worst case, just hit us up
on Instagram and be like, I'm interested in the events.
So we will, you know, provide the link.
Awesome. Well, I'll link out to
everything that I can find. Yuri, I really appreciate the
time, Appreciate the insight and let's definitely keep in touch,
man. We'll keep the conversation
going. Yeah.
Thanks so much for having me, Robert.
You bet. Take care, brother.
You too.