[Podcast] Get Consistent Health & Wellness Clients (Lauren Armes)

If you love to transform the lives of your clients, you'll particularly enjoy this episode. Lauren Armes is the creator of Beyond Seven business coaching for wellness experts. She's also the founder of WellToDo, which was acquired by Fitt Insider in 2022.

In this episode, Lauren shares lessons she's learned as a startup founder and global traveler, marketing mistakes to avoid, and strategies for getting consistent clients.

Key Takeaways

• Embrace multiculturalism. Living and traveling to larger cities can provide a “permission slip” for reaching broader, more diverse audiences while increasing your creativity.
• Learning from adjacent industries. Take inspiration from successful businesses that take a path similar to yours, adopting and adapting ideas to your business.
• Curiosity is a business catalyst. Fuel your business journey by being inquisitive, and uncovering opportunities and pathways that are a few questions away.
• Recognize limitations and opportunities within current personal circumstances. Life-changing events like parenthood can lead to major business decisions, such as selling your company. Use awareness and humility to make the best choices for you.
• Lead with a free training, not a free consultation. Prospects don’t trust you enough to get value from a call before they’ve had the chance to learn from your expertise.
• Create your signature expert methodology. Name the process you use to help your clients get results at a premium level, while avoiding pigeonholing yourself as a commoditized coach.
• Freely give the “what” and “why,” charge for the “how”. Show prospects you understand their situation and paint the possible future for them. Sell the implementation of your process as they achieve their desired result.
• Value the inputs and outputs of your offer appropriately. The time and effort you’ve put into your abilities should not be discounted when pricing your programs. Combine that with the outcomes your clients are seeking to determine a profitable price.
• Seed your program’s renewal about 70% to completion. Increase repeat purchases from coaching clients by discussing continuing opportunities well before the end of your term.
• Delay creating courses until you’ve reached financial stability. Your highest revenue will initially come from 1:1 coaching, and will be needed to successfully pursue course creation, which is a completely different business model to master.
• Ask for testimonials during a final feedback session. Allow clients to provide anonymous answers to before, during, and after questions that you can craft into client-getting testimonials.

Resources Mentioned

• Lauren Armes on Instagram
• Lauren Armes on LinkedIn
• The Booked-Out Wellness Expert
• Wagamama

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Transcript

Who is Lauren Armes

Bob: Lauren, thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Leadpages podcast.

Lauren: Thank you, Bob. It is such a pleasure to be here.

Bob: I'm really excited about the conversation we're about to have. You and I have just met each other, but you've been working with Leadpages for a bit, but more importantly, you've been working with wellness coaches and experts for the last several years.

We're going to get into some really fun stories of yours, as well as the nitty-gritty of how to get more consistent clients for those types of experts.

But first and foremost, I like to ask our guests what is one way in which you love to transform the lives of the people that you work with?

Lauren: Great first question. Definitely opens up a conversation. I'm really passionate about helping wellness experts, in particular, because what I feel about those particular types of experts is that they come to the work that they do from such a place of true passion and desire to transform the lives of their clients. Yet have an enormous expectation upon themselves of also knowing how to navigate the business side of things. That's an enormous weight of responsibility to be an expert in your field, but also be an expert in getting clients, marketing yourself, being visible, building a brand. I take great pleasure in being able to empower them with the skills that they need to have that ripple effect. So I guess I love being able to transform lives because so many more lives are being transformed as a result of that. And that's a really nice feeling.

Bob: That's awesome. I'm married to one of those people, so I get the passion and the energy and the lack of marketing training that they get. So I'm really excited that you're serving that need for them now.

For those astute listeners, they're going to pick up this lovely Australian accent that you have, but you don't live in Australia anymore. So talk to us a little bit about your own physical transformation from Australia to the UK. How did that come about?

Lauren: Yeah, I mean, it's not super profound, Bob, I'll be honest. Us Aussies like to travel, so I found myself with a one-way ticket to the UK for no other reason other than London is a great spot to travel from and to see Europe, you know, it's a bit of an epicenter for just experiencing new culture and just new experiences generally.

So early 20s, mid 20s, I decided to come to the UK on a two-year visa with absolutely no intention to stay any longer than that, certainly, or at least not because of the weather. And I often get asked, as an Aussie in London, why do you live in this climate as it's drizzling outside, masquerading as summer. I came here because I just saw a wealth of opportunity to expand my mind, to expand my understanding of the world.

I actually, at the time, had no intention of starting a business. That sort of came later. And I actually think it was a result of what I just described, being in a city where possibilities are endless, where I had the great pleasure of being privy to the world of entrepreneurship on a whole new level, just through community events and meeting great people, meeting interesting people, doing interesting things.

For that reason, consequently, I started my own business and am still here ten years later. So it's been a wonderful journey and I now really do call the UK home, despite maintaining the Aussie accent. Maybe not to the degree that I had when I arrived, but certainly the twang is still there.

Bob: Yeah. I imagine your friends back in Brisbane are not too keen on how you sound these days.

Lauren: They call me out often.

Bob: Well, and London is an amazing place. I have a lovely history there as well. And obviously I'm enjoying this opportunity to rock my Wagamama shirt on your behalf.

Lauren: Noted.

Marketing Lessons from Moving to London

Bob: I am wondering about London itself, and I don't want this to turn into a food rave because of the shirt I'm wearing or anything like that, but are there any business lessons that you've picked up as you moved into London?

You mentioned a few things about its cosmopolitan nature, but as you look out into the business world and then the metaphor of what London is as this epicenter and cosmopolitan place, can you take a business lesson from the, I guess, approach towards how it is geographically to what a wellness expert can take on for themselves?

Lauren: Yeah, I mean, the wonderful thing about London is its multiculturalism, its celebration of all types of people and all walks of life.

I'm a small-town girl from Australia. I did not grow up witnessing that kind of diversity, you know, I think it's a big permission slip being in a city like this. A big permission slip to do work that you love, to be financially rewarded for that.

It's a permission slip to really do work that lights you up, get paid to do that work and to have fun doing it as well.

It's interesting because the reason that I suppose I forayed into the wellness industry specifically, is because for me, growing up in Australia, health and wellness was more of an ingrained way of life. Being an outdoorsy, sport, passionate country. For me, growing up in a small town where my father grew vegetables in the garden, organic food was pretty standard for us growing up. Then coming to a city like London, where wellness was almost this branded affair, it was almost this community in its own right, bringing people together to share a common passion for health, prioritizing health, prioritizing movement, prioritizing healthy food.

I suddenly noticed that it was an industry where I'd never really considered it an industry before. And it was for that reason that in the early days of thinking about what type of business I wanted to start or run or found, I recognized within myself a passion for wellness.

I'd never actually used that label before and so being in this city where people do gravitate towards each other because of common interests was actually my permission slip to build a business based on something that I am truly passionate about.

Birthing the WellToDo Business

Bob: That's really cool. Let's talk about that now, with the founding of WellToDo, we'll talk a little bit about the end of WellToDo as far as your role in a minute. But how did this passion of identity turn into like, I'm going to actually start this WellToDo business? What was it and why did it become the central focus of your business life?

Lauren: Yeah, well, like I said, I was personally passionate about it and there was definitely a culture emerging within the UK market and particularly London. So we had things, know, cold-pressed juice bars opening, and the SoulCycle kind of variation, that was the UK version of that opening. So indoor spin studios, all the things that we now consider to be quite mainstream, but were at the time, seven, eight years ago now, very new and very exciting and very revolutionary.

Yoga studios, hot yoga studios, meditation, all of these things that were a little alternative were coming into the mainstream. And so I suppose like many entrepreneurs who know they want to start a business but don't know what type of business, I started exploring my area of passion and WellToDo actually began as a know, very simply, it was me writing about the wellness industry specifically in London. So the brand initially was WellToDo London, and I used my passion for and skill in writing to sort of masquerade as a journalist and alongside my corporate 9-5 job, just start writing about different things that I was noticing different trends.

It was very much positioned as a lifestyle blog, helping people to discover new cool trends and things to engage in, to help them fulfill their own personal passion for wellness. It was like a what's hot, what's new, what's trending in London in the world of wellness.

Through those conversations I was mainly speaking to founders and other business people behind those businesses. And more and more what I became curious about was why they had decided to start a business in this space. My questions became less about how are you helping people to live a healthy lifestyle and rather how are you building a business in wellness?

A couple of years in, I suppose, and I was sort of still one foot in my corporate job and one foot in this sort of side hustle at that time, I decided that if I was going to turn this into a business, it needed to have a clear vision behind it. And so it became a media platform to help its audience understand the business of wellness.

I kind of coined this phrase in my mind, the business of wellness. What is the business of wellness? And that enabled me to start to develop an event side of the business. We ended up building out an annual conference called the Business of Wellness Summit. We launched the podcast which was the Business of Wellness podcast.

The business was then built upon this desire to inform industry professionals, to inform entrepreneurs wanting to build a business in the wellness space. What were the trends, what were the brands doing interesting and dynamic things? Who's investing in this space and create this epicenter of the industry for people to go to for inspiration and also key information that would help them to make better business decisions in the future.

Bob: I love that. Did you yourself work with a business coach or did you kind of learn from some type of virtual mentor from afar to bridge that gap from initial publishing person to event and bigger brand lead?

Lauren: I was really fortunate in that I had seen a bit of a blueprint in a completely different industry.

I took a lot of inspiration from a very, very successful media outlet known as the Business of Fashion. So within the fashion industry it is the absolute media tycoon of insight and information, finger on the pulse for what's happening live breaking news and I just loved everything about what they were doing. So that was certainly my inspiration for the content side of the business.

As I saw them launch a conference I thought to myself, well, why not? That makes sense. And I've always taken the approach of standing on the shoulders of giants, whether that is a paid mentorship or just like you described from afar, looking for inspiration from others who have built the type of business that you want to build.

In my case, in those early days when I was completely bootstrapped and really just trying to figure out how to make money with this idea, it was so helpful to look at something in an adjacent industry and replicate aspects of that that I thought would also be useful to professionals and entrepreneurs in the wellness industry.

So yeah, that was sort of my gateway to finding a business model that would allow me to explore this area of passion in a way that would also be commercially viable as well.

Bob: Fantastic. Curiosity, it seems to be your middle name. So I think that's really important as a person who can learn from a lot of different resources. So that's great.

How to Know It’s Time to Sell a Business

So you had the successful brand of WellToDo London. It grew and exploded, etc. What made you decide to sell it? How did that transition come about?

Lauren: Yeah, so for quite a few years now, Bob, I have also been working with wellness experts. I suppose it became my side hustle from my main business, WellToDo. And that's typical of my personality, always having new ideas, always wanting to be exploring something new and being in that kind of visionary creative space.

Like most founders, you reach a point where you have to be honest with yourself about how far you have the ability to take a business or a brand. And I think those two things collided.

My desire to explore the business coaching side of what I do more and with more focus, and at the same time realizing that WellToDo as a business and a brand needed more. It needed significant investment, it needed a team who have experience to build a media brand. And I suppose I just felt that I had run my course with it and I was able to remove a little bit of the emotion from that decision and recognize that it had potential that I no longer, I suppose, had the passion and the energy to fulfill and the skills to fulfill as well.

The third sort of contributor to that decision was for me entering motherhood. So two years ago I had my first child, my little boy, Locky. And that changes things as well. You are suddenly forced to make pretty drastic decisions about how you spend your time and what's going to be a priority. And I was trying to juggle two businesses, actually three at the time. We had a recruitment business that sadly did not survive the pandemic. So running three businesses, about to have a child, and having to actually just have a difficult conversation with myself, with my husband with whom I run these businesses and just do what was best for both us and also the brand.

Bob: Yeah, child is a startup in its own right, right?

Lauren: Very much so, a full-time job.

Bob: Lots of focus, lots of capital goes into developing that as well.

Lauren: Yeah.

Growing a Family and Entrepreneurship

Bob: I'd love to just ask quickly before we get into the wellness expert client acquisition types of strategies that you have, how has that transition of family life changed the way that you operate your business or change the way you see yourself as an.

Lauren: You know? And just to conclude, the chapter with was, you know, acquired by one of our largest competitors in the US, Fitt Insider, who have continued the brand. And that's been a really lovely thing to watch. They have carried the brand on and are building the legacy of that brand.

It's given me a great deal of peace and gratitude to see that evolution of the brand.

To your point, Bob, a lot of emotional and mental space to focus on the life that I want to create in this new chapter of becoming a parent. That has had its challenges, but I find it incredibly rewarding. You can learn so much about entrepreneurship from parenting.

And I saw this advice recently from a guy who I really admire in the coaching space. He said, stop reading entrepreneurial books and start reading parenting books if you want to get good at running a business. Because there's so much of it that's about checking your ego and being more detached from the process and allowing the uncertainty and lack of control in so many situations that you face as an entrepreneur to be part of the joy of building a business.

So, yeah, it's certainly been a juggle.

I think one thing that I recognized about myself and I really owned about myself is that I love work and so I want to be an entrepreneur and a mother. And what's brilliant about the life that I feel I have purposefully created is my husband Jamie and I share those values and we very much share the parenting journey.

We are unapologetic about the support that we get in terms of just outsourcing life admin and things that take up time in your life. And being open for me, being really open to getting support so that I don't have to pretend that I need to be some kind of superhero or super mum to achieve it all that I recognize I can't do it all. Unless I get support, unless I have a strong village and team around me, then I won't be able to realize all of those goals and dreams that I have for my life.

How Travel Improves Business

Bob: Very cool. Now, you mentioned earlier your love of travel and you had the chance to travel all over Southeast Asia, other places, et cetera, when you were a little bit in your younger days. I hope you still get to travel now, but can you share perhaps a business advantage that you feel that you have because of these peripatetic tendencies that you have of traveling everywhere?

Lauren: That's such a good question, and it's such a funny, timely question because I actually haven't traveled for about three years. I know. I mean, we've done a little bit of driving into Europe, but on Monday I'm about to get on a plane to Bali for the first time in three years and I feel quite nervous and nostalgic about it because like you say, I did do a lot of travel in my youth.

I think I recognize that there's a season for all of that. And I'm so glad that I utilized my 20s to travel as much as I could to take the risks that I took to start a business when I had very little real responsibility in my life. And I've just embraced, know, the season of both, obviously the Pandemic and Australia's borders being closed, and it just being a total nightmare to even try and go near Australia. That it was just a time for me to recalibrate, to consolidate a lot of my life, to sell the WellToDo business.

It feels quite timely when you ask that question that on Monday I'm about to go back, know, Southeast Asia and experience some of what I really love about travel. And I think it's going to be a nice opportunity to get into a little bit of creativity.

I mean, travel inspires so much creativity, doesn't it? And it just takes you out of your every day and allows you to see things with a fresh perspective. And I'm actually really looking forward to experiencing that again.

Bob: Great. Well, Bali is a great place to do it. Yeah. I hope you get to Ubud and get to spend some time in the center as well. As if you have a chance. There's a little town called Amed up in the northeast corner, which is a fun place to do a little scuba diving.

Lauren: Oh, amazing. Yeah. Well into that. Yeah.

The Problem with Free Conversations

Bob: Perfect. All right, let's shift gears now into some of the entrepreneurial strategies you have for helping wellness experts get consistent clients.

First off is, if you're teaching people like I'm married to, they didn't learn a lot about marketing in the pursuit of their passion of their business. So is there an online marketing myth that you find wellness experts tend to believe in that you try to demystify as quickly as possible for them?

Lauren: Yeah. Oh God, there are so many. And I think that's the first one is, and I touched on it before is that this expectation that you have that you should know how to get clients and therefore constantly beating yourself up about the fact that you're putting this amazing work out into the world or aren't, whatever. Or you don't know how to do it, that you somehow should. That somehow should come naturally.

Specifically, one of the things that I find quite commonplace with experts within the wellness industry is that they tend to default to offering a free conversation.

So the primary marketing tool is, hey, I'd love to have a free conversation with you about your struggles, about your symptoms, about where you're at. Book a call with me and we'll go from there.

The problem with that and I heard this great analogy once from a mentor of mine, a guy, an Australian marketeer, a guy called Taki Moore. And Taki shares this story, or this analogy rather, about a complete stranger who walks up to you in the street holding a black box with a hole in it with just enough space for you to put your hand inside, but not enough space for you to see what's inside.

He says offering somebody a free discovery call with you, a complimentary call, is like you walking up to someone and asking them to stick their hand in a box and saying like, there's something amazing inside.

The person is going to naturally be skeptical of that, right? They're going to be worried about the worst case scenario, like what's inside, like Taki jokes, they're thinking there might be like spiders or dog poo inside. So it's unlikely they're going to take you up on that.

Even though from your perspective it feels like a really generous proposition, what you need to understand, and what we help our clients to understand is the journey that your client goes on to get to know and trust you and see you as an expert that not only has the skills and expertise that can help you, but that also helps you to identify.

Another misconception is that your clients actually know that they have the problem that you can solve. And offering them a free call to talk about their symptoms assumes that they know and understand what's wrong with them. And again, because health practitioners and wellness experts tend to know so much about the symptoms that they solve, they assume that their potential clients or prospects also understand those symptoms.

The reality is that most people that discover you for the first time as a wellness expert have no idea that they even have those symptoms or they don't consider them to be symptoms, they just experience them as their normal everyday life. So there's very much this demystifying or debunking these assumptions and helping experts within this space to recognize the importance of communicating what those symptoms are, how to recognize them within yourself, and then create a system of nurturing and educating potential clients and audience and community before they are ever going to want to put their hand in that hypothetical black box and jump on a call with you.

Bob: That's cool. So I'm assuming you're not saying don't ever talk to people on a call. It's just there should be some things before that.

Lauren: Exactly.

Bob: What should be the things before that?

Lauren: Yeah. No, exactly. So it doesn't change the goal. Of course you want someone to book a call with you, but it's almost like you want to turn that black box into an invisible or sorry, a transparent box so that they can actually see what's inside and then therefore be excited about and see the purpose behind having a conversation or a discovery call with you.

Sharing Value During Your Lead Generation Funnel

Bob: Got it. So I of course, am part of a company called Leadpages as you are a user of that focuses on lead generation. So I'm assuming that lead generation is one of those things that you teach people to do through the purpose of perhaps lead magnets. Is there any particular type of way you are getting people to have that introduction where there is that email transaction.

Lauren: Yeah. The part that comes before that, Bob, is teaching our clients to create a framework for their expertise that we call their signature expert methodology. So let's say, what does your wife do? What's her area of expertise?

Bob: She's an executive coach with leadership for senior leaders and C-suite executives.

Lauren: Yeah. Amazing. So I'm going to assume that she has an array of learning and qualifications and skills and tools in her toolkit that make the way that she coaches executives really unique. I am going to guess that she has really unique perspectives on leadership and how to become a great leader.

And so we would work with somebody like your wife to help her to create a signature methodology that she becomes known for. And she might already have this, but just as an example, that unique framework and I'll give for your listeners as an example, there are extremely well-known industry leaders across wellness. Like, I don't know, Bob, if you've ever heard of Wim Hof or the Wim Hof method is a perfect example of know, conscious breathing, cold water therapy, and mindset work are combined in a really unique framework and branded as the Wim Hof method.

When our clients come to us, we help them to shape this unique framework and this unique methodology that they can visually articulate to their clients. And so then when it comes to lead generation, your lead magnet is designed to help to communicate this methodology, why it's so unique, the symptoms or pain points that it helps to address, it's your process for getting results.

If you can explain what it does and why it does that and then the how of that process is what you teach in your programs, then it becomes this really natural journey for your client to engage in that initial piece of expertise. We usually recommend a short free training as opposed to maybe a PDF guide, something that actually allows you to showcase your expertise and teach some of that framework.

Then from there, the natural next step would be an invitation to jump on a call with you and talk about how that process might actually help you in your unique circumstance. And that would be lead generation specifically for working with one-to-one clients. So it might differ if you're selling an online course or a membership or something.

We typically start with supporting our clients to work with their clients in a one to one capacity.

Giving the Right Amount While Attracting New Clients

Bob: So with that idea of a small training you, mentioned earlier, this curse of generosity that a lot of wellness experts have, how do you get them to keep it concise and not try to over-deliver, to the point of what a previous guest of mine a couple of weeks ago said is the false sense of completion when they're working with these folks so that they do want more from the expert.

Lauren: Yeah, that's such a good point because it's true. In that spirit of generosity, it's easy to give away too much.

In saying that, I tend to take the approach that most people don't give away enough because they're afraid of giving away too much. This idea of giving away too much is a difficult one to actually measure. And so I would rather my clients, in their context of giving away too much, were to run that risk almost than to hold back and not share their expertise.

The way that I help our clients to distinguish what they should include in their free training is to focus on the “what” and “why” and then leave the “how” and the very personalized elements of how to their paid service or proposition that they sell.

In terms of delivering a training, for example, the framework that we would give to our clients is focus on what the mistakes are that your prospect is currently making in their life, or what they currently believe is true about themselves and their problems that is not normal or can change. So that's the what.

Then the why is why what you teach is going to change their life, why it's important for them to understand that these symptoms are not normal. And just those two subject areas, if you're an expert in the health and wellness space, can create so much connection, it can create so much empathy, it can create a fertile ground upon which someone feels ready and also sees possibility within themselves for change.

Frankly, if you're suffering from anxiety or bloating and IBS symptoms, or you want to lose weight and you don't know how, there's a plethora of information on the internet about how. You can go out and find the information about how.

I think most people, when they are looking for a transformation within their health or within that realm of well-being, are actually looking for someone to hold their hand and support them with the implementation of that information and specifically somebody who they see as credible, qualified, and trustworthy.

Your free training is an opportunity for you to show that you understand who they are, what they need, and what their life is going to look like when they finally have the tools to transform it. And none of that is about the how. It's simply about connecting with the pain point, the struggle, and then the possibility.

Bob: Love that. So in essence, there's a lot of awareness that you're getting the expert to be able to get that potential client to see in themselves so that they want that implementation and perhaps accountability help with it.

Lauren: Yeah, 100%.

Growing Beyond One-Off Sessions

Bob: Cool. So can you provide an example, perhaps of a successful client through one of your programs where they went from essentially, what's, one-off sessions to more of a packaging version of what they offer as a service?

Lauren: Yeah, perfect example.

The first person who springs to mind is a client of mine, Alice. And Alice is a prime example of someone with multiple qualifications, multiple areas of expertise, who felt constantly like a round peg in a square hole trying to force herself into the pigeonhole of: I'm a nutritionist or I'm a Reiki healer. And she had all of these skill sets. So a women's health expert, a nutritionist, a qualified Reiki healer, massage therapist, wanting to bring all of those things together to provide a transformation.

Instead, she felt limited. Instead, she was offering one-off nutrition consultations and actually relying quite heavily on working in the public health sector, which in the UK is a great place to get experience, but it's extremely limiting and renowned for being not necessarily remunerated in the fairest possible way.

She was at a point where she was ready to start working in a more private capacity, working with her own clients. Her challenge was, okay, well, how do I bring all of these skills together in a way that is seamless, offers a unique transformation?

We worked together to formulate this blueprint, which Alice ended up calling the High Vibrational Living Method, or HVL method. Okay, so really marketable, very suited to a premium female high-performance avatar or client profile. Built this beautiful brand and program around it, which she wanted to deliver over six months.

So, again, working very closely with the client with a commitment of six months to achieve that.

Alice and I caught up the other day and she has just been able to catapult her business. She's able to work with clients that she loves working with, get them exceptional results. She feels clearer than ever that in her own mind, her expertise makes sense and therefore, it's so much easier for her to speak about it in a really unique way.

Fundamentally, it's enabled her to kind of cut through the noise and not just feel like another nutritionist or another women's health expert. Because she has a very specific type of client that she helps in a very specific way, that she can talk about in a really clear way. And ultimately, that's enabling her to deliver amazing results for her clients.

It's one of many stories of clients that we've really helped to get that clarity and yeah, therefore just focus on being in their zone of genius, which is transforming the lives of their clients.

How to Price Your Coaching Profitably

Bob: That's awesome.

Now, I imagine some of the conversations that she's had with you and in your programs have also involved pricing, as I imagine lots of your wellness experts are needing this kind of advice, but also some direction and maybe some mindset work around pricing. Do you have a tip or two that those listening, whether they're in wellness or they're in other service fields, can take on for how to price more effectively and profitably for themselves?

Lauren: Yeah, you know what? I think that it's sometimes worth as a service provider comparing the way in which you price your service to the way in which a product-based business would price its product in respect of a product based business would consider all its raw materials, all of the manufacturing costs, all of the staff costs.

When you're one person delivering a service, it can often feel like those aren't considerations. And so I often draw the parallel for my clients between the raw materials that might go into a physical product, say you're selling a bottle of vitamins, the cost of the container that they go into, the cost of the ingredients inside of that vitamin pill.

I draw the comparison to the qualifications that you have spent time and energy and resource gaining. And sometimes for clients that I work with, that is years of their life. It's thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars spent on university-level qualifications or diplomas or online courses, ongoing professional development and to start thinking about all of those as factoring into the price that you charge.

It's that ten years of study and experience that enables you to get a result for someone in 1 hour. So you're not charging for the 1 hour, you're charging for the ten years that it took to enable you to achieve that transformation with your client in that 1 hour.

I actually posted to that effect on Instagram the other day and it really got people thinking to stop thinking just about the transaction of time that you spend with your client face to face and think about everything that has gone into being able to deliver that level of expertise and that transformation.

That flips a switch in people's minds and gives them permission to charge for more than just that client-facing time and consider all of the other things and factors and costs and outgoings that have gone into being able to deliver that.

That's the mindset shift that I think has the most significant impact on raising prices. And from there, I think there's a lack of transparency amongst wellness practitioners about what is being charged. Given my bird's eye view, having worked with hundreds of industry professionals in this space, I give my clients a table that provides direction. Like if you have this many years of experience, this is a good place to start in terms of pricing.

All of that shifts as well when you stop charging by the session and start to charge for a program and for the transformation that you provide in that program as well, that's cool.

Getting a Client to Buy Another Package

Bob: Now, I know you teach about this in some of your programs. I just want a little sneak peek, if we can get it, which is once you have that person as a client for that initial package, obviously it's really good for these types of experts to plan for that second and third sale or perhaps ongoing kinds of revenue from the clients that they work with. Any tips that you have there when it comes to those that have a successful first package to get the same person to buy from them again?

Lauren: Yes. My biggest tip on that would be not to wait until the program is complete, because at that point your client feels like they have concluded their experience.

The most important thing for you as a coach or as a guide for this individual is to show them a future. And you need to show them the future whilst they're still in the experience.

So for me, it's about timing and to think about if your program is on a scale of one to 100, at that 80% or even 70% mark of completion, that's when it's time to start sowing the seeds for what's coming next.

Otherwise, what happens is your client gets to the end of the program and they say, Bob, thanks so much for that. I've learned so much. I now need some time to go out and implement that. And that may well be true, but typically there is an opportunity for you to continue to support them and nurture them. And if that's the case, it's about having that conversation at that 70% mark instead of at the point of completion when your client is in a different mindset and kind of ready psychologically to conclude that relationship.

When Should You Create a Course?

Bob: You've spoken a little bit about one-on-one services and packaging them in a more productive way. There's a lot of talk as you hear, and I'm sure you even share, about creating courses around your expertise.

When is a person ready for the online course version of what they do? Is there a point that you have where you let them know, like, yep, it's ready, or is there something else that might hold people back for that?

Lauren: Yeah, great question, and I'm really passionate about this, particularly for health and wellness practitioners, and I think that it's nuanced specifically for them.

I often shine a spotlight on this because what I feel is that there are a lot of marketing gurus peddling this dream of passive income and just launch an online course and it'll be great and it'll sell on autopilot and all of those things. And I'm not dismissing the possibility of that.

What I do emphasize for our clients is the importance of that foundational experience that comes through working with clients one-on-one. Importantly, it's also the service that you can charge the highest price for working one to one.

It enables you to build a financial foundation upon which at a later date, it's worth exploring online courses.

The third part of this is that working one-on-one gives you a really clear sense of those repetitive challenges that come up time and time again for a client that end up being the framework for an online course because you see those consistent challenges or questions that come up through working with clients in a one to one capacity that end up translating really nicely into a self-study or online course format.

What often happens, and having launched multiple online courses myself, is that there's an underestimation of the level of a) work and time and effort and resource that goes into not only creating an online course, but also launching it and then also sustaining the sales of that online course because it requires considerable additional lead generation.

And then b) to that point on lead generation. It's a volume game. So if you're just starting out and you don't yet have an established community and audience, sure, you can certainly fast-track things with paid traffic and paid ad strategy.

That in itself, as I'm sure you know, is science and an art that requires probably a full-time member of your team. I look quite honestly at our team and what it has taken for us to deliver and sustain sales of an online course. I'm very transparent about that with our clients so that they can know and anticipate what's required of them to deliver a successful online course.

For that reason, since most people come to our consistent clients program as a newbie trying to just get consistent income, get consistent clients, it's about keeping it simple. Let's start with one-to-one delivery. Let's build your authority as a leader and expert in your field of expertise. Let's get that experience and understanding of your clients’ challenges so that you can translate that into an online course structure and online course material.

Let's get the financial foundations and the business model down so that launching an online course does not feel like a massive strain on you emotionally, mentally, and financially as well.

Once you reach that stage and we help our higher level clients in our mastermind to launch online courses, it's just much more fun because you're not doing it from a state of panic. And I have to sell this online course, otherwise my business is going to fail because that's not a nice place to run a business from.

Bob: Certainly not a wellness business when your own personal energy is in the toilet because it doesn't attract very good clients when that happens.

Lauren: Yeah, the ultimate irony, and I see this all the time, burnt-out wellness experts. It just is not a vibe.

How to Gather Effective Testimonials

Bob: No. My final question for you, Lauren, is around this area is around testimonials. So for wellness experts, testimonials are critically important. Sometimes it's difficult to get testimonials out of clients because they don't speak like the marketing minds know our effective sales copy.

Lauren: Right.

Bob: So are you teaching testimonial gathering in your coursework? Is there any tips that you have for how wellness experts can keep an eye on that side of marketing as well?

Lauren: If I didn't know better, Bob, I would feel like you have taken our online course and know exactly what we teach. If it wasn't in Leadpages, I'd think you'd be like snooping around the back end of our course.

It's a really important part because referral business is so powerful and you can talk about how great your program is and how good you are at solving a problem, but nobody says it better than the clients for whom you have provided that transformation already.

The biggest obstacle, in fact, for wellness experts is that when someone has lost a whole ton of weight, or has overcome severe anxiety, or has had issues with their relationship with themselves or somebody else, they can often feel a little self-conscious about sharing that transformation in a public way.

For that reason, I think a lot of health practitioners feel self-conscious about asking for the testimonial. And they often also, on the flip side of that, think that if they provided an amazing transformation, then those clients will willingly want to provide a testimonial or feedback. And that often doesn't happen. It's not because that didn't happen, it's not because the client didn't get an amazing experience. It's just that they don't understand the power of testimonials in your business. They aren't a marketing expert and are busy with their own lives and so don't rarely get around to it.

The framework that I recommend to our clients is that at the end of your time working with a client, you actually set up a call with them, set up a Zoom call with them, where it's positioned as an opportunity for feedback and any final questions from the client's perspective so that it feels valuable to them.

In communicating the kind of agenda for that catch-up, that you also suggest that at the end it would be really nice if they're open to it to gather a little bit of feedback to use as a testimonial.

And in communicating that what I emphasize is communicating to that client that there's an option to remain anonymous. And by that I mean if we use your testimonial, we could remove your name and have it as an anonymous piece of feedback, but it would still be really helpful.

When you alleviate all of that worry or concern or self-consciousness from a client's mind, they are much more likely to take you up on the offer or say yes to the request. As a result, you get that feedback as a starting point.

Then I think it's just about having a clear framework for those questions. And very simply, the questions that I recommend you ask are: where were you before we started working together? What did you love about the transformation that we created together? And what is now possible because of that transformation?

Then the fourth question, which is a really nice one to tack on to the end, is if somebody is listening to this or watching this or reading this, and they are thinking about working with me and they're not sure what would you say to them.

With those four questions and that system of giving people permission to be anonymous if they want to, and also pinning them down on a structured call, you are guaranteed to get great client testimonials.

Bob: Solid gold on all of that. And I have not been snooping around your business. I again, am just married to your ideal avatar, amazing challenges that she faces. And I've been coaching coaches for 20 years as well, so I get this. And I'm really glad of what you shared because these are really critical questions and I think that it's beautiful how to frame that up.

Continue Learning from Lauren Armes

Lauren, thanks so much for joining me today. Is there a place that you would like our listeners to go to, to learn a little bit more from you on getting consistent clients so that they can impact more people with less effort?

Lauren: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, my website is a great place to start, which is LaurenArmes.co, as opposed to that one was taken, unfortunately, and also Instagram. Come and connect with me @LaurenArmes on Instagram. Send me a DM, let me know what's resonating with you about the content.

There's a link in my bio there, and perhaps, Bob, you can share this with your audience as well for a free mini course that I teach, which helps you to understand what are the exact steps that you need to take to become booked out in your business as a wellness expert and build a really profitable online business in the wellness industry.

Bob: Fantastic. I did lie just now because I did have one more question I meant to ask earlier. You are an Aussie living in England, and this show is coming out right about the time that potentially Australia and the UK are going to be going against each other. Or actually England, not the UK, England and Australia are potentially facing off in the Women's World Cup.

How are you going to root? What's the side that you're going to go for?

Lauren: Oh, I'm an Aussie 100% at heart, and as much as I love the UK and specifically England, my heart will also always be in the Aussie camp. So, yeah, go the Matildas.

Bob: Awesome. And maybe the home team can pull out a nice upset. Very cool.

All right, well, thanks so much, Lauren, again for being here and for being such a great user of Leadpages. The pages you create and your team are making are amazing and it was really a privilege to talk to you today.

Lauren: Thanks, Bob. Appreciate it.

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