00:04
Andrea Nordling
Welcome to The Profitable Nutritionist podcast, where your host and fellow nutritional therapy practitioner Andrea Nordling teaches you how to grow a sustainable, impactful, and consistently profitable health and wellness practice by following her proven formula. If I were starting my holistic nutrition practice from scratch today, right now, there are three things that I would do completely differently from the way I did it back in 2015 when I actually started my nutrition practice. And here’s why this matters to you. I actually did start over. When I transitioned from nutrition coaching into business coaching in 2019, I started everything over again. Okay? I went from an email list full of people that were interested in holistic nutrition and hormones and adrenal fatigue and all of the things that I was talking about to literally zero people interested in business strategy. Okay?
00:54
Andrea Nordling
I had to build from ground zero all over again. And what I learned from growing an online business both ways. The simple, hard, well, first the hard, complicated way, and then the simple, doable way could save you a lot of time and effort and energy in the following years. So that is why I am sharing these insights on this video. So before we dive in, I want to be really clear about something. If the thought of online marketing and tech stuff makes you want to run away screaming, don’t worry. I have plenty of successful clients who build really successful, thriving businesses with nothing but word of mouth referrals, which is actually the best. We’ll talk about that in a minute. Those people have no website. They, they definitely don’t have social media, they don’t have any tech stuff, bells, whistles, automations, complications at all.
01:36
Andrea Nordling
And it still works. And that is because the fundamentals of business have not changed for thousands of years, which is this. You help people, you get them results, and then they go tell their friends. That still works better than anything else. But if you’re like me and you do want to leverage this really cool thing called the Internet that we have available for us these days, I’m going to show you exactly how to do that without making it super complicated, without stressing yourself out and your future clients and overwhelming your entire calendar. Because that’s exactly what I would do if I was starting over again. And to say that I overcomplicated things in the beginning when I did start my practice in 2015, is an understatement, which I’m about to explain. Before we get into the strategies, let’s talk about systems.
02:18
Andrea Nordling
And let me give you a little bit of a foundation of what a successful business is built on, in my opinion. And everything that I’m saying Obviously is in my opinion, but my opinion is based on what has worked for me, what hasn’t worked for me, and how I’ve made all of the mistakes in the past. And believe me, there have been a lot of them. And also what I have seen be successful and unsuccessful for thousands of health and wellness practitioners in my various programs since 2019. So I actually think I have a pretty good pulse on this. And I think you’re going to get a lot out of what I’m sharing. But like I said before, we jump into that, what is the strategy here? Well, here’s the strategy for business.
02:55
Andrea Nordling
Tell real humans online and in person that you can help them, that actually help them to get incredible results. And then they can’t help but tell their world about it. Their friends, their family, their network of people that you don’t even know that you don’t have access to are now going to hear about how incredible those results were that they got. And they’re going to come and buy from you. But they come to you already pre sold, very warm, ready to go. That’s a really scalable, sustainable, profitable business, my friend. So that’s what we need to do. Okay?
03:25
Andrea Nordling
And I just want to say that every mistake that I’ve made in my business and every mistake that I see people make in their businesses trying to automate or fast track or shortcut some part of that process and try to make it better or faster or something, when in reality it can be simple and sometimes we try to go fast, too fast again. This is what I had to learn the hard way. And I will explain to you exactly what I mean. So mistake number one that I made, and I’m going to tell you about this mistake and then tell you exactly what I would do differently if starting my business again right now was that I made everything so complicated in my holistic nutrition practice. And I mean everything. I had multiple offers at multiple different price points.
04:08
Andrea Nordling
There were tiers, there was unlocking things. There were online courses, there were memberships, there were one ones, there was one off workshops, there were group programs. There was literally everything. And it was so confusing. It was so confusing to me. And believe me, it was so confusing for a potential client. I often say this, but I just always think of it and I have to bring it up. I was like the watch salesman that opened up my trench coat and I was like, what do you want? I have one of everything. It was like that. It definitely was like that. It was so complicated. So to sell all of these different offers and all of these different tiers of access. And just, oh my goodness, it was a lot to sell that there were very complicated and complex offers, funnels in my business.
04:52
Andrea Nordling
There were different freebies that you could opt in for on my website to be. Then it would put you into an automated email sequence that would sell you like five different things. Because if you were on my website, you might like opt into a few different things and then you would being sold like five different things through these automated emails. And it was a lot. Okay, it wasn’t great. A great user experience, I’m sure. Now here’s the best news. I actually had clients, I made sales, I helped a lot of people. But it was super complicated. Super complicated for me to set up, to manage and then very complicated for these poor humans that just wanted my help that were having to jump through all of the hoops online.
05:31
Andrea Nordling
So I say that because I have made the mistake and I see people make this mistake so often, which is trying to complicate the tech side of their business. And really it’s not necessary. And it actually makes things go slower. This is what I meant before when I said that these mistakes and the things that I would have changed if I was starting over, the reason I would change it is because they actually slow down progress. But the reason we do them in the first place is because we think that it’s going to be a shortcut. We think, oh, okay, if I can just automate the selling through these funnels online, then I’m not going to have to sell as much. I’m going to be able to reach more people, I’m going to be able to help more people.
06:07
Andrea Nordling
And so we tried to shortcut certain aspects of our business by making other things much more complex. It comes from a good place, it makes logical sense, but the in practicality and the application of it actually slows things down. So this is a huge example of it. If I was starting my business over again right now instead of when I did this in 2015, I would not make things so complicated. I would make it so simple and I would make it so easy instead, which means I would have one clear offer and it would be very premium priced from day one. And that’s because it is so much easier to sell expensive things than to sell cheap things. We’re going to come back to that in a second.
06:45
Andrea Nordling
I would not try to have entry level pricing, I would not try to have different tiers, and I would not try to appeal to multiple demographics and multiple different levels of interest I guess is kind of why we try to do that. Because we think, well, if they can’t afford this, then we’re going to have this. And then if they can’t afford that, we’re going to have this. And it all comes from a good place. Totally get it. I have a lot of resources on pricing and on how to price and structure an offer. In fact, I will link a video below in the description here that you should watch next if that is something that you need to work on. But I’m not going to go down that rabbit hole right now.
07:18
Andrea Nordling
I’m just going say that it is so much easier to sell a $5,000 client, for example than it is to sell 24 people a $197 product. And I see this a lot. I see people trying to use like entry level pricing, for example, trying to sell a one off session, okay, and they’ll say $197 for a one time session. We’ll do an intake for 90 minutes and I’ll give you recommendations and I’ll tell you what to do afterwards. And it’s seems logical. It does.
07:50
Andrea Nordling
It seems like a good idea to have a business structure that way where people can pay a little, they can get to know you, they can understand your process, they can get some value from it and then if they want to work with you longer, they will extend that or they will sign up for a package for the long term. I understand the concept and I also know that it is much more difficult to execute that and do it 24 times. For example, for this math to make $5,000. Because 24 times 197 is $5,000.
08:18
Andrea Nordling
So to make $5,000 in your business you could do that 24 times, have 24 people say yeah, I do want to do a one off session with you and I want to learn more about what you do and I’m going to pay a little bit for it and you’re going to spend some time with me and I’m going to get value. 24 people taking you up on that offer is much more difficult than one person saying yes, I want to work with you for six months and here’s $5,000 night and day, different. And again, there’s nuances to that and what to include for each client and in the offer.
08:48
Andrea Nordling
So I’m not going into that into this video, but know that in the description there’s going to be a link to a video where I go into a lot of detail about that all that to say I would have one clear offer if I was starting over in my nutrition practice right now. I would also have one simple tech system that I would use. And again, a lot of my clients don’t have any tech whatsoever. And they make a lot of money in their practice, especially when they’re starting out, they’re talking to humans, they’re saying the words, I can help you, then they actually help the humans. And it doesn’t take a website to do that. Just like a hundred years ago it didn’t.
09:19
Andrea Nordling
And it doesn’t take a social media marketing or expertise or going viral on Instagram to do that, just like it did in a hundred years ago. It just takes getting out there and getting started and talking to the humans and actually helping the humans. So all that to say you can do it without having any tech set up. And some people do that. But I kind of love this online marketing space. I kind of love the fact that in this day and age, we can work with anyone on the planet. Like our perfect ideal client can find us from across the world and we can help them and add value to their life and give them the transformation that they’ve been desperately hoping for that is available. It just blows my mind. I love it so much.
10:00
Andrea Nordling
So I would definitely want to have an online component to my practice if I was starting my nutrition practice again. And I did want that in 2015 as well, which is why I had all of the complicated systems and I had all of the funnels and I had a podcast and I did webinars and I had courses and memberships and there was so much going on that it was not manageable. And so I wouldn’t do that to myself again because while I was trying to figure out the kind of clients I wanted to work with and my exact process that I was bringing those clients through and the experience that I wanted them to have. While I was trying to figure out all the basics of my offer and pricing and all of that, I.
10:36
Andrea Nordling
I was also adding so much stress to my own plate because I was trying to navigate really complicated tech systems that were like a different language to me. It was like learning Chinese at the same time trying to start my business. And that was very overwhelming unnecessarily. So, so I wouldn’t do that to myself again. I would be kind to myself and I would have one simple system. I will also link up a resource to the best system in my opinion, for that I’ve used in my business and that I also recommend to all my clients, which is Kajabi, that this is not a sponsored video or anything like that. But I just love the Kajabi platform. So I have a partner link that I’ll put in the description.
11:12
Andrea Nordling
Kajabi is where you can host your website and your marketing email database and send marketing emails. And it’s where you also can support your clients and you can host courses someday and you can have landing pages. You can do all sorts of stuff in one platform that you learn how to use one time, and then everything just talks to each other and it works. So there are many different platforms like that. Kajabi is my favorite. Again, I’ll link it up below in the description. But that’s what I would do because in the beginning of my practice in 2015, I had so many different softwares and they weren’t playing nice in the pool together and they weren’t talking to each other and things were breaking, but I thought that they were working.
11:47
Andrea Nordling
So, for example, somebody would sign up for something on my website and I would assume that they got added to my email list and were being delivered the valuable emails I was sending every week. But then sometimes that was broken and that connection wasn’t working because the website was separate than the email service provider and they weren’t talking. And I was none the wiser. And I was losing a lot of leads. So I spent a lot of time doing tech triage and troubleshooting when I didn’t need to be. So I wouldn’t do that to myself again. I would have one system, I would have one clear offer, and I would just start simple. I would let it get complicated later. I could scale it later. I could make it bigger and better and more professional and more polished later. But I wouldn’t start there.
12:27
Andrea Nordling
Okay, I would have things be manual in the beginning. I would get scrappy. I would validate my offer. I would really get in there with my clients first. And then I would worry about the fun online component and all the bells and whistles later, after I had made some money, I had the resources in my business to hire help to do some of that tech stuff. That was taking a lot of time and a lot of effort that I didn’t need to be spending all of it on. But I would be scrappy. I was scrappy. I mean, honestly, I actually did this because when I restarted my online business in 2019 and I closed my holistic nutrition practice and I opened what is now the Profitable Nutritionist, which was business coaching and strategy for holistic nutritionists and health coaches. I did start from scratch.
13:09
Andrea Nordling
I didn’t have an email database anymore. I didn’t have a website anymore. I didn’t have anything anymore. I didn’t have an offer. I started it all from scratch and this is exactly what I did. I started on Kajabi. I had one call to action for people to get onto my email list. Instead of having all these complicated funnels and all of the crazy like blog posts that leads to this opt in that leads to this automated sequence that sold them an online course or membership. All of those things that I had set up in my nutrition practice, I didn’t do any of it. Had one call to action on just a few basic webpages and it made me a lot of money. In reality, I made the first $40,000 in the profitable nutrition what is now the profitable nutritionist.
13:48
Andrea Nordling
It was then called build a profitable practice. But all that to say I made the first 40k in that business with just a hundred people or so on my email list and reaching out to people manually to get them on the email list in the first place because there was zero people on the list at first and it grew from there. So personal outreach, direct conversations, no fancy funnels, just getting in there and talking to people and saying the words I can help you. Okay, that’s how that started. Obviously these are all concepts that I talk about elsewhere. So I could find myself going down rabbit holes in this video. But I’m not going to do that. I’m going to stay on track. That is the big thing I would change.
14:22
Andrea Nordling
I would make it very simple if I was starting my nutrition business from scratch right now. The second thing that I would definitely change if I was starting my nutrition practice from scratch right now is I would not rely exclusively one means of marketing communication. And this is in congruence with what I teach about not relying on social media platforms. However, I have also been guilty of relying on email marketing platforms and that has come back to bite me recently as well. So what the heck do I mean by that? Well, for the longest time in my business actually I’ll take you through the timeline here. In case you’re unaware, I do have a video with my entire business story, so we will also link that up in the description.
15:05
Andrea Nordling
If you would like to see the how did I get here and what was my nutrition business like back in the day? I can give you all of the answers that in the video that is my business story. But the condensed version is this in 2015 when I opened my nutritional therapy practitioner practice and I officially turned on my open sign like, yep, I am ready for business. I used email marketing primarily so meaning I was communicating with my audience through emails. They signed up for something on my website that got them onto my email list on my email database. And then I was sending out marketing emails, some of them automated, some of them broadcast that I was sending every single week. And that’s how I communicated primarily with potential clients and existing clients for that matter.
15:46
Andrea Nordling
I also was active on all of the social medias from 2015 to late 2020 before I completely quit social media. So that was really sporadic. I wasn’t that good at it. I certainly wasn’t very consistent, but there was some of that as well. Then in late 2020 and into 2021, I radically changed my marketing and I deactivated all of my social media platforms, personal and professional, nuclear, self destructed all of those and only relied on, well, not only, but primarily relied on email marketing from that point forward. And the way that has come to bite me here in May of 2025 and for the last year plus is that having one platform where you have the majority of your marketing is happening aside from referrals.
16:37
Andrea Nordling
I will give the caveat, aside from referrals, if that’s the one way that you’re getting most of your business, I think that stands the test of time. And I don’t think that does change. But if it is a digital platform, I think, yeah, or brick and mortar, it doesn’t matter. Aside from referrals, I think if you’re relying one channel where most of your leads are coming in for potential clients, that is problematic. And if there’s only one way that you’re communicating with clients, that’s also problematic. Which is exactly what was happening when I was relying very heavily on email marketing and email communications.
17:10
Andrea Nordling
So the problem with that is that the way that we handle our emails these days has changed a lot, especially in the last year and a half, because emails are email filtering within our email service providers like Gmail and Yahoo, and wherever else you’re having your email come in is getting very sophisticated and it’s able to pre filter the emails into promotions folders, spam folders, et cetera, which is great as the user experience, except if we’re not ever checking the promotions folders, then we don’t know that some of the emails we might actually want to be seeing are getting filtered there and we’re never seeing them.
17:43
Andrea Nordling
And that is definitely the case with marketing emails that I’ve sent over the last year and a half, and continuing to try to figure out how to be nimble with the changes in filtering so that people can still see our emails. Because people are constantly saying, I never see your emails anymore. Oh, my gosh, I used to always look for your emails. Every single Friday, I would look for my Friday broadcast email, and now I don’t see those anymore. And it’s because they’re getting filtered to the promotions folder. And if you’re not diligent at looking at that, and who is? I’m certainly not. Then you wouldn’t see that and you wouldn’t get the emails anymore. So having reliance solely on email marketing as a means of communicating with your audience like I have for a while, it was great.
18:24
Andrea Nordling
It was great when people saw the emails, and it is not so great right now when people aren’t seeing emails. So we got to be nimble about this. We have to be flexible. We have to change with the times. Market is changing, times are changing. And so my new approach. Should I be starting my nutrition practice again right now? Is that I wouldn’t rely on any one marketing channel exclusively. Even email marketing. I wouldn’t. Which is hard for me to say because I do love me some email correspondence. I love consistently sending value to my audience every single week in multiple emails that I send out. But also I could just see, I can very clearly see the data is that people aren’t necessarily seeing those emails anymore.
19:02
Andrea Nordling
And I think I have a really interesting perspective on this and an interesting take because I have so many years of data in what emails perform really well to my email list, what types of emails, what specific emails. Sometimes we send the same email more than once and we can see that it consistently gets this amount of opens and clicks and engagement. And now that has changed. So some of that is because of how deliverability and opens is reported back. But it’s changed. It’s changed. And I can see that because I’ve sent the same emails over and over again. I’ve sent the same cadence of emails, and it’s apples to apples, just very different. So I wouldn’t rely on that exclusively.
19:41
Andrea Nordling
If I was starting my online holistic nutrition business again from scratch right now, I would be aware of the need to diversify a little bit more. So I would still build an email list. I want to be clear, I would still build an email list. I think it is the most valuable asset that you have in your online business is your email list, because Nobody can take it away from you, nobody can censor it. It is yours. It is a way that you can then communicate with people who have basically raised their hand and said, I am interested in what you are talking about. I would like your help. I think I need some of this. And that is a really valuable list to have. So I do think that it is still something I would prioritize.
20:18
Andrea Nordling
It just wouldn’t be the only thing I would prioritize. I’ll tell you something else I would add in a second and you might be wondering, as I say this, how do you get around the promotions folder issue? And the answer to that is, wouldn’t we all love to know? Wouldn’t we all love to know? I’m right there with you trying to figure it out. I’ll tell you, some of the things that are working a little bit better these days are not putting a lot of hyperlinks in the emails. Basically anything that makes your email look like it’s more of an email that you would send to a friend rather than a marketing or overtly promotional email is going to increase the likelihood that it goes to somebody’s primary inbox instead of a promotions folder.
20:54
Andrea Nordling
So instead of saying click this link and go buy this thing, you may say something along the lines of, if you’re interested in this, hit reply and tell me, I’ll send you the link or something there about. So a little less direct call to action is what we’re experimenting with now, which seems to be working better. I think that this is just an experimentation all the way around. We don’t know, we don’t know a year from now what technology is going to be doing. We just got to know that nothing works forever in exactly the same way. And monitoring the data is how we figure out, oh, what’s working, what isn’t working anymore. Okay, again, rabbit hole. I could totally go down if you are interested in that. Let me know in the comments.
21:36
Andrea Nordling
And I can definitely do future videos just on email deliverability in general. But let’s get back to the point of this video is what would I do? I would not rely exclusively one channel, so I wouldn’t rely ever exclusively on a social media channel for getting leads because that can disappear overnight. You have no control over those platforms. Who sees your stuff when an algorithm changes, et cetera. I wouldn’t rely exclusively on email marketing because deliverability and changes in that tech is also a factor and can be kind of fickle. But what I would do is have an email list And I would communicate with that email list and I would even do one one reach outs to people from the email list.
22:17
Andrea Nordling
So when somebody subscribes and gives you their email address and says, hey, I’m kind of interested in this, I want your help, you absolutely can one one email them from your business Gmail account, for example, and strike up a conversation, say how can I help you? What do you need more of? How can I support you? And that type of a communication will likely land in their primary inbox because that is a different type of an email. And Gmail and Yahoo and Icloud and all of those email service providers understand that a one one email is different and goes to a primary inbox. So I’m just saying when you have an email database and you have people’s contact information, you can contact them, which is a beautiful thing and I’ll leave it at that for now.
22:59
Andrea Nordling
Start actual conversations with people and help them and actually help them because there is an actual person behind every single subscriber in your email database that wants your help, that needs your help, that you can help, which is pretty incredible. So help them, even if it’s one one. So the bigger strategy here, and what I said I would change if I were starting my business again, is I would start creating long form content right away in my business. And as I say that, I want to just laugh because this goes against everything that I teach to my clients, everything I teach in my programs. Kind of, not really, but kind of because I think that people get too way too attached to trying to become an influencer and trying to master making content. And so I say don’t do that, don’t do that.
23:45
Andrea Nordling
But I’m changing my tune a little bit and here’s why I think that there is so much value in your brain and my brain that is created by, from making long form content. And when I say long form content, I mean a video like this where I am just talking to you and I’m explaining my philosophies and my experiences and I’m giving you value. And I’m saying here’s what you can take from this should you choose to. Here’s my experience, here’s how it could help you. And I’m recording this video. This is long form content. Another example of long form content is a long form blog post or a podcast episode.
24:20
Andrea Nordling
This is all long form content where you really have the opportunity in a long form to give your nuanced opinion and your, you know, Detail your process or your philosophies and make bold claims about how you feel about certain things. You can do that in long form and you can support your argument and you can really get your point across. It is important to do that because it makes you so much better with your messaging. So as people are hearing me say this, and there might be people that, but have heard me talk about this before and it was like, is she telling us to make long form content now? Oh my gosh, what’s happening? Here’s, here’s the little caveat to it. I don’t think you ever need to publish this content. Okay?
25:01
Andrea Nordling
I’m not saying that I suggest that a beginning business owner starts their nutrition business and day one starts recording YouTube videos and launches a YouTube channel or anything of the sort. I don’t think that. But I think that if you started recording videos like this just talking about your process and just talking about the type of people that you help and how you help solve certain problems of theirs, and if you did it in a format like this, where you made yourself sit down and have an outline and have some sort of formulation of what you were going to talk about, and you recorded videos like that, probably you’d get to the point pretty quickly where you could use those as marketing content that went out to the world.
25:42
Andrea Nordling
But even if you didn’t, I think you would still be so much further ahead in figuring out how to talk the problems that your easiest clients have, that your ideal clients have, and the solution that you offer, and how it’s different than other solutions that they have ever tried before, and how the results that they hope to get are actually attainable for them, and what are those results and what can they expect?
26:04
Andrea Nordling
And if you talk about the problem and solutions and results over and over again and you do it in long form like this, whether anybody ever sees that content or not, you will get so much better at having conversations in real life with real humans and describing what you do and how you help solve the problems that they have and help them get the results that they want to get, because you will have practiced that. So this is a change, this is something, this is a change that I haven’t talked a lot about before because I have just recently really decided that I think that this is super valuable to do. I think it is so valuable right now that I’m sitting here and recording this video. Even though it’s not perfect, it’s not overly produced, it’s never going to be.
26:46
Andrea Nordling
I’M going to ship it out anyway because I know that it will help someone. Okay. And I think that the more I do this, the better it will get. Actually, I know that is the case because I have seen this in so many other areas of my business. And so although I don’t think that you have to be a content creator to be a profitable business owner, right now here, 2025, I know for sure you don’t need to be. I also know that if you created content in a long form forum, like audio podcast episodes, or what’s just easiest is just turn on video and record a video like this.
27:18
Andrea Nordling
If you did that, you would get so good so fast at talking about what you do and who you help and how you help them that it would just come so much more naturally. So my suggestion is to create the content so that you get more comfortable with your messaging and delivering your messaging. But I also think you would quickly get started so much. It would become such a, like an easy skill to just do that. You could then create long form content, which is great marketing for your business. It will make you clearer in talking and networking situations.
27:50
Andrea Nordling
It would definitely have the downstream effect of having you create better email marketing if you’re an email marketer, because you’ve practiced these concepts and you’ve articulated your thoughts and you’ve distilled them down into a framework or a format or an outline where you can teach it better to people and you explain it better to people and you could explain your unique approach that you know is hard to do in a short social media post, for example. So I think that would be really useful. That’s what I would do if I was starting over from scratch again right now, right here in 2025, I would start making myself record a long form piece of content every single week.
28:29
Andrea Nordling
And then my hope would be that it would start to get better and I would actually be able to use it in my marketing and people could actually see it, if not the actual video content. It’s so possible right now for you to take the transcript of a video and upload it into AI with the right prompts, like maybe some of the prompts that you get inside the profitable nutritionist program Shameless Plug. But you could do that. You could upload those video transcripts if you were creating long form content and you could put it into ChatGPT with some good prompts and you could get excellent social media posts, blog posts, articles, value emails to send your email list. You could do that. What used to take so much time.
29:05
Andrea Nordling
And what I would never, ever suggest people spending time on in the beginning of their business could now be condensed down to just maybe an hour a week. And so I do think that it is worthwhile to start moving in that direction, kind of changing my tune there. But that’s because technology has definitely changed and made that more attainable. So that’s the second thing I would do. The third thing that I would do if I was starting my nutrition business over in 2025 and I was not doing what I did in 2015, would be that I would focus on to think lists instead of creating to do lists. What does that mean?
29:42
Andrea Nordling
Well, let me take you back to 2015 when I 2015 through, let’s say 2021, let’s be real, which is creating a lot of to do lists, endless tasks, create webinar, funnel fix, website page that isn’t working. Post on social media consistently. Never really got very good at that one. Learn this new tech platform that we’re going to be using. Learn this one. Fuse them together. All of the things that I was doing made me feel very busy. It took up a ton of my time. It felt so productive. But I wasn’t making the amount of money that I could have been and helping the amount of people that I could have been had I kept things really simple. Which is why I’ve already told you I would simplify, simplify. But back in those days, I didn’t know that simple would have been better.
30:23
Andrea Nordling
And I didn’t have this data and this experience to draw on to make that conclusion. So I was instead staying really busy and I had very long to do lists. So many things to do all the time, every single week. I was so, so busy. And that felt very productive. Like I said, I think we, a lot of people watching this, we could probably agree that feels really productive, like to be busy, like to be productive. It’s very familiar feeling. However, when I redid my business in this was a process. But 2019 into 2020, let’s say 2021, started to get more efficient and a lot simpler. And I really reimagined all of those stressful things from my nutrition business days. And I was like, how do I make this simpler?
31:06
Andrea Nordling
How can I make this a better experience for me, but also a better experience for everybody that interacts with my business. What would that look like? And I had to ask myself different questions and I started to create a list of what do I want to think? Like a to think list. What do I need to believe for this to be true rather than always defaulting to my to do list. Because I very quickly realized, maybe not as quickly as I should have. It took a while. Yeah, I scratched that. I didn’t quickly realize. It took a while, but I eventually realized that if I believed that people were resourceful, that people really wanted to get the results that I wanted to help them with, I really believed that it could be simple and that things could actually work and that it was possible.
31:48
Andrea Nordling
And if I believed that my offer was irresistible and I believed that things could actually be sustainable for the long term, then I would create that. That’s what I would make. I would make sustainable things. I would make a better offer. I would attract clients that were resourceful. If I was believing that those things were true, that I would make them true. So this is a concept that I teach to all of my clients. But I am always talking about the four beliefs that you need to have to be successful in your business. You need to have a high belief in yourself. You need to have a high belief in your people, the people that you’re here to help, and their resourcefulness and their capability and their willingness to invest in themselves.
32:22
Andrea Nordling
You have to have a high belief in your offer and the process that you bring people through and how effective that is. And in general, you have to have a high belief in your business and what’s possible for your business and where you’re headed. And if you are lacking belief in any of those areas, it’ll show up in the results that you’re getting or lack thereof in your business. So it’s really important to look at what you’re thinking and what you’re believing and maybe have a to do list or to believe list or pardon me, a to think list rather than just a to do list. Super important.
32:52
Andrea Nordling
And why this works is because most business problems are really mindset problems, most things that are catastrophes that this overwhelming thing that we can’t figure out in our business is actually not believing in ourself, our offer, our people and their capabilities and their resourcefulness or our business success long term. And when we’re not believing in those things, we can make problems that don’t need to be problems. Because actually business is pretty simple. You tell people the words I can help you, then you actually help them. That’s what we do, right? We make it complicated though, because of the mind drama that comes up. But when we change our thoughts, then the strategies and how to execute to actually get the results we want becomes Pretty obvious and can be pretty simple.
33:34
Andrea Nordling
So that’s theme of what I would do if I was restarting my business again is I would keep it simple. I would keep it simple in terms of the strategy, and I would keep it simple in terms of my mindset, and I would really keep it simple in terms of the tech in my business. So how do you actually do that, though? I know if I was watching this video right now, I’d say that all sounds great. Thank you for those opinions. But how do I actually do it? And I do have a proven process for how to do this and how to actually go from overwhelmed to simple and not make these same mistakes that I have made and that I’ve seen many others make before. So how do you do it?
34:12
Andrea Nordling
Here’s how it works in stage one, and I’m bringing you through the process that I teach inside the profitable nutritionist program. But I’m going to detail, like, the stages that we go through and why it makes sense and why it really simplifies things. Okay. So I think that this will help you understand what I’m talking about on a deeper level. So in stage one, you make the foundational decisions in your business. If your business is a little bit more established right now, go back to the beginning and think of what this process was like and kind of audit it for yourself. If you are in the beginning of your business right now, this will make sense because you’re right here, right now, which means there’s some decisions you need to make. Do you have a niche? Do you not have a niche?
34:43
Andrea Nordling
Well, we need to make that decision confidently and move forward. What are you going to offer to your people? I suggest that you have one premium offer, and I teach a concept called the Easy yes offer formula. This is where I bring you through very specific exercises to create your offer, your premium offer that’s actually going to help your business be profitable and really help your people. And we do that through the Easy yes offer formula. But ultimately, it’s deciding on your offer. You have to decide, what am I selling, what is it priced at, and what are they getting inside this offer? You need to design your initial client process. If you’ve never done this before, you’ve never brought clients through your offer because you’re just making it for the first time. You have to get really clear on what is the process.
35:25
Andrea Nordling
How are you going to ensure that they get incredible results? How are you going to help measure that? How are you going to set them up for success? Well, we’re going to have to get your client process figured out. So we do that all in stage one. We also set up your work hours, some boundaries around your time, learn how to be good at time management. These are all decisions that are made at the beginning. And once you make these decisions, your brain is now free to get serious about executing on it. But first we have to make the decisions. You know this to be true for you, but you also know that this is the case for your clients or future clients if you’re not working with clients yet. That we love as humans, I say we like the collective.
36:00
Andrea Nordling
We, we love to research. We love to be confused and be exploring our options and not actually be decisive because that is a very comfortable place to be exploring all the options and researching, you know, potential ideas. And I don’t know, for example, maybe vacillating on different niche ideas for like six months I’ve seen people do this or maybe even longer or going back and forth on, should I work with one one clients or should I do an online course? Back and forth and back and forth. We love to be in that research, like thinking it through stage. Our brains love it because we don’t actually have to take action. This is called passive action versus massive action. Passive action is the researching, it’s the, oh, I’m just seeing what the options are.
36:50
Andrea Nordling
And we can tell ourselves that this is very productive and that we’re such prudent business owners because we are doing market research or whatever that is. But bottom line is it doesn’t actually have you getting out there and taking the massive action, which is what needs to happen. So that’s what happens in stage two. Stage one, we go quickly, make the decisions, and there’s really not that many things that you need to make decisions on to get your business up and running. Start making money, start helping people. But we make those decisions in stage one. Then in stage two, you’re going to take the massive action, roll up the sleeves and you’re going to go validate your offer and make your first sale. Okay, this is where you are actually going to say the words to people.
37:24
Andrea Nordling
I can help you and you actually start helping them. Yes. I have an entire process that I teach in my program for how to do that. How do you initiate sales conversations like this that don’t feel sales and they feel natural. They feel like they are in service to the people that need your help, not you trying to get people to do something? Because that’s gross. That is not what we’re doing as a Business owner. We are providing solutions to people that already want the solution. So how do you do that? How do you find those people? How do they find you? What do those conversations sound like? How do you actually get the ball rolling here? That is exactly what you learn how to do in stage two. Okay. I don’t teach fancy funnels, I don’t teach anything tech related here.
38:00
Andrea Nordling
This is just talking to the real humans that already want your help, that are already in your orbit and getting the process going. Then in stage three, you make the process a little bit better. Okay. This is where you refine your messaging a little bit based on actual conversations that you had actual data. And you think about, okay, what went well in some of these conversations? When I said X, people were like, oh, tell me more about that. And they leaned in and they got really interested versus when I said it this way, their eyes glazed over and I could tell that they completely shut down and the conversation derailed. We could tell when this happens. We know when this happens.
38:37
Andrea Nordling
So you have to have some conversations and you will definitely have some cringy conversations, but you figure out what happened that got cringy and then we, you know, evaluate from there and make it better. This is what stage three is all about. It is about actually mastering sales conversations, getting a lot better at that. Having a sales process. If you’ve never had one one sales conversations before, you won’t know how to do that unless you get a process. Okay. Unless you have a framework and you actually have an idea about, oh yeah, we say this at this point and then this and then that.
39:09
Andrea Nordling
Of course, that’s what we’re doing in stage three is we’re actually using some data points from conversations that you’re having and we’re making it better and turning it into a process that you can rinse and repeat and rinse and repeat. We are also building that referral engine here in stage three, where people are talking about what you do and how you help them and they are sending more clients your way. So that momentum is building here in stage three, which brings us to stage four. And that’s when we start to implement repeatable systems and really grow. This is where people hit consistent six figures in their practice because this is where the tech and the automation comes in.
39:42
Andrea Nordling
I really don’t suggest that it happens before that you make things complicated, which is kind of why I wanted to record this video in the first place. Really want to tell people, don’t make things so complicated in the beginning. Get, just get out There start helping people. Let it be scrappy, let it be messy, let it feel really imperfect. And that’s okay, because you’re going to end up changing the entire process of everything that you do. Your marketing process, your sales process, your client delivery process, your backend systems, all of that will change as you figure out how to be more efficient and how to be more effective. So don’t try to make a perfect system in the beginning. You’re just going to change it anyway.
40:14
Andrea Nordling
But stage four, by the way, is when we start to change that stuff and it is when we start to put in some of these tools that can really help save a ton of time and make things more sustainable and more scalable in your business. Let’s talk about AI for a second. There are so many tools available right now that can help you save so much time in your business. This is when we start really putting those to the test and to work for you. It’s like being able to have an entire team of employees that you don’t have to pay for sick days that don’t actually, you’re not actually paying for in the way that you would with employees in your business. Super exciting.
40:49
Andrea Nordling
These are conversations that I’m having with my clients these days and tools that we’re using and different processes that we’re putting in place that were not even possible two years ago. They weren’t even a thing. We weren’t, not that weren’t talking about it, they didn’t even exist. Kind of exciting, some things about it that are scary, but also we can lean in and say that it’s exciting. All right, so let’s land this plane. Stage 5 is after you have implemented some repeatable systems, things are chugging along in your business and now it’s really time to scale. This is a super fun part, in my opinion.
41:18
Andrea Nordling
This is where we do get to leverage the Internet more and technology more and more to get more people to be interested in the way that you help them and then to help more people through a more scalable offer or scalable delivery of your one one offer. If you are a one one practitioner, that’s a video for another day on how we actually scale these businesses. But all that to say, if I was starting my nutrition practice right now, I wouldn’t be so worried about what it looks like at stage five and what the scaling looks like. And if I was going to have an online course empire or if I was going to be hiring a team of support coaches and overseeing them and these are things that people are asking me all the time, should I do this, should I do that?
41:58
Andrea Nordling
And really, their. Their business is just at the beginning. They don’t need to worry about that yet. So if that’s you and you’re thinking, oh, my gosh, how do I scale my business? Someday I will just tell you that I will love to have that conversation with you and to support you and help you do that when the time comes. But don’t worry about that right now, because it’s just time to get started and have sales conversations and tell people the words, I can help you and get out there and try it. Most people fail at scaling their business not because it’s actually hard to do that, but because they try to implement advanced strategies way before they’ve mastered the basics.
42:27
Andrea Nordling
And that’s why it’s really important to think of your business in what stage it’s in and what you need to be focusing on in that stage so you can build on top of it later. And I don’t say this like I’m preaching from the pulpit, like this is what you should do. But I. But I. And I have this all figured out. I say this because I totally did the opposite in my nutrition practice, and I tried to go to stage five right away, and that’s how I ended up with such a mess in my business and why it was so unsustainable and why it was not as profitable as it could have been. Yet I was working literally all the time as I made it way too complicated instead of simple.
43:00
Andrea Nordling
I was way reliant on a bunch of tech platforms that weren’t playing nicely with each other. And I was taking so much time and so much bandwidth trying to manage that, which I didn’t need to be doing. And I had a million offers. It was so hard instead of simple. But I didn’t know how to get to the point where it could be simple, and I didn’t know how to do that in a natural progression. So I say that as somebody who has made all of those mistakes and knows that there is a much better way. Here is the better way. It’s a very simple process. And this is always true for you. It’s always true for your clients as well. This is how our brains work.
43:34
Andrea Nordling
We need to make decisions, decide step one, then we need to take imperfect action on the strategies for that decision. And it’s going to be imperfect, and it’s not gonna feel right, and it’s not gonna feel like it’s super. Professional and polished. And our brains are gonna have a lot of resistance to that. But we have to do it. We have to take action before we’re ready. That’s why we call it imperfect action. And then step three is that we evaluate that action. What went well, what didn’t go well, what are we going to do differently? But instead of going back and making a different decision, when things don’t go the way we want it to, we go back to taking different imperfect action and we revisit the imperfect action evaluate cycle instead of going back to the beginning, which is the decide phase.
44:16
Andrea Nordling
And remember, that is where our brains really love to stay. Our brains love to hang out in. We’re still. We’re confused. We’re still trying to figure out what decision to make of the course. We love that land where we don’t actually have to take action and don’t have to put ourselves out there or risk anything. So knowing that and knowing that, your clients have human brains too and they’re trying to do the same thing, just remember this is a very simple process. Decide, take imperfect action and then evaluate. But don’t go back to the decide stage too early. The only failure here is quitting. If you just keep taking imperfect action and evaluating, you’ll get to the right actions that get you the results you want. All right, so there you have it.
44:55
Andrea Nordling
These are the three things I would do differently if starting my business over again in 2025. I would not over complicate it. Like I said, I wouldn’t have multiple offers, multiple price points, different tiers, complex systems, lots of tech stuff that broke all the time. I would start creating long form content way before I felt ready. Nobody ever has to see it, but I would still start creating it because I would know that is going to set me up for immense success later in my career and in my business. And it might be sooner than I think, but still just know that it could be later. So I would do that right away. And thirdly, I would focus way more on my mindset and less on tactics and strategies and taking the next best course for xyz Little thing.
45:35
Andrea Nordling
I would look at where my mindset is at and what is my on my to think list. What do I need to believe more in? Do it. Am I really low on belief in myself, in my people, in my offer, my process that I bring my people through or in my business as a whole? Wherever I was lacking there, I would start working on my belief in that area before trying to figure out a tactic to fix it. And I know that then the tactic or strategy would reveal itself and it would fix much faster. So those are the things that I would change if I was starting over from scratch. But I say all of that with the caveat that the fundamentals haven’t changed and business actually can be really simple.
46:10
Andrea Nordling
You help people, you get them incredible results and then they go tell their friends and we rinse and we repeat. My friend, if you want the complete step by step system for building a profitable practice and executing all of this in an easy doable sequence from your first client to consistent six figures and beyond, you’ve got to join us inside the TPN program. It’ll show you exactly what to focus on at each stage so you are not trying to do everything at once. And then you’ll have professional support and guidance from real human coaches every step of the way as well. Enroll now. Or you can even book a short sales call to get your Questions answered@theprofitablenutritionist.com join.
46:47
Andrea Nordling
The link is also linked up in the description below this episode along with all of the other stuff I talked about, but I’ll say it one more time. Theprofitablenutritionist.com Join Happy Action taking this week my friend. My friend, if you’re serious about building a profitable wellness business and you’re listening to this podcast right now, so I’m pretty sure that you are, but you want to create a business that doesn’t burn you out and it doesn’t rely on you dancing on social media for goodness sake, then the very next best step for you is for sure joining the profitable nutritionist program.
47:19
Andrea Nordling
Inside the program you get the proven step by step process that helps you consistently attract the exact amount of clients that you want every single month while you simplify your business so that you can grow to six figures and beyond on your terms in a business that you love, then yes, we help and support you to do that every step of the way. Enrollment in the program is open right now, so go to theprofitablenutritionist.com join and get yourself in to the full program. Now there’s also an option on that page for you to book a free sales call if you would like to talk through this decision and just make sure that it’s the next best step for you.
47:53
Andrea Nordling
But again, all of the details of the program, including the link to book a call if you would like, are available at theprofitablenutritionist.com join I’ll see you inside.
