00:00
Andrea Nordling
Welcome to an Ask me anything podcast edition on the profitable Nutritionist podcast. My name is Andrea Nordling. I’m a founder of the profitable nutritionist and nutritional therapy practitioner myself. Here to answer all of your burning questions regarding growing, scaling, and optimizing your nutrition or holistic wellness business, starting with answering your questions directly. So that’s what you’re gonna get in this episode is a mashup of me doing AMA videos. Answer quick Fire answers to your questions and if you are not already there, I’m going to direct you to the profitable nutritionist email list, which is where we send out these AMA videos every single month in response to your questions. So if you’re not already getting the profitable nutritionist emails, you have to do that.
00:46
Andrea Nordling
Go to theprofitablenutritionist.com and sign up somewhere on the website to receive something via email, which means we will then send you these emails. If you would like to submit a question to be answered on a future ask me anything video or podcast episode, you can head over to theprofitablenutritionist.com ask and submit your question again. That’s theprofitablenutritionist.com ask. All right, here we go.
01:13
Andrea Nordling
I recently had someone submit this question. She said, please shed some light on how you got your first big offer clients. I’m stuck. I’ve gotten way better with my beliefs in myself, but perhaps not quite there on my offer. I’m not sure. I don’t know where to start to promote it. I don’t really do social media, but I have over a thousand LinkedIn contacts. What are your thoughts on how to best get my toe in the water of trying to sell a big offer, which is a $2,000 package. So her question basically is, how did you get your first big offer client? Here is the story. I sold quite a few different offers in my holistic nutrition practice, which I ran exclusively online from 2015 to 2019. I had some higher end programs. I had some lower end programs.
01:51
Andrea Nordling
I had some one one clients. I did memberships. I did five week reset programs. I did online courses. All of the things okay, what I didn’t do well is serve my clients one one with a big ticket offer. Until I transitioned into my business coaching practice and I vowed that I was going to make my business so much simpler. I was going to make it so much more profitable, and I was going to quit doing all of the little onesie two see things that weren’t really bringing in enough money and I was going to focus on a more premium offer that served my clients at a much higher level. So what? This is a client of mine that submitted this. So what she’s saying is, how did you start doing that? And I want to tell you that story.
02:28
Andrea Nordling
So in my holistic nutrition days, I was doing all of the things I was, like I said, creating the courses, the memberships. One of them was $19 a month. I was pouring my heart and soul into a $19 a month membership that was bringing in a few hundred bucks a month. I was burning the candle at both ends. It just doesn’t work. The math just does not pencil out for those low ticket offers unless you have a massive audience already or you have a more advanced strategy of selling those and then upselling into a higher ticket on the back end, which a lot of people don’t realize. So I did it all differently in 2019 when I had so many other practitioners and my colleagues, my nutritional therapy practitioner colleagues and other wellness professionals were like, show me how you’re getting plants.
03:05
Andrea Nordling
Show me how you do this. Which I was really good at. So I decided I’m going to teach them. The rest is history. Now I can say in 2019, that’s when the profitable nutritionist was born and I started business coaching full time. But like I said, I did it completely differently. So now I have a signature program and I have a mastermind that I sell in this business. The signature program is called the Profitable Nutritionist program. It teaches you how to start your business from scratch and scale it to $100,000 consistently per year.
03:29
Andrea Nordling
I also have the high level mastermind, which is for practitioners that are already making at least fifty k a year in their business, and that is streamlining and scaling and using this very cool thing called the Internet to bring in a very consistent multiple, six figures per year and then scaling to seven figures. So those are two offers that I have in my business. They’re the only two offers that I have, and they’re very premium. So the profitable nutritionist cost $3,000. The masterminded is a $10,000 offer. And so when I asked myself this question, I read her ask me anything question, how did you get your first big offer clients? And I was thinking through how I was going to answer this. I thought I would just tell the story and be totally honest, that I had a lot of mind drama about this.
04:05
Andrea Nordling
Both of these offers, and you will be having the same, my clients have the same ones, but we get through it and we do it. And the way that we do that is by coaching ourselves on our mindset around it. So the belief in the process that you are bringing your people through, the belief in yourself that you are resourceful and capable and that you are going to bring your clients through and get them the results that they are looking for. And then of course, the belief in your clients that they are resourceful and capable of doing the work and that they are motivated to do it and that they are going to follow your process. It’s a huge component, right.
04:37
Andrea Nordling
Also the belief in your business as a whole that it’s sustainable, that it is going to be around for the long term and that you’re making good, solid business decisions. If you have those four areas locked down and your belief is high in all of them, you’re completely unstoppable. But if it’s low in any of those areas, and for a lot of us it is especially the beginning when we don’t have the practice, we don’t have the evidence that people are buying this offer yet. Got to work on that belief for ourselves. We have a whole module inside the profitable nutritionist program that’s all about up leveling this belief and systematically creating evidence for how all of these things are true, that you are capable, that they are capable, that your business is viable and sustainable long term.
05:13
Andrea Nordling
And of course that your offer and your process is amazing. So I have a process, I teach for that. But really it feels messy when you’re doing it, especially the first time you’re selling a big offer to your clients. It gets easier as you go. So when I launched the profitable nutritionist program, it had a different name at the time, but in my mind I thought this program was going to be a $1000 offer. I started building out the process. I was recording the videos I was making, all of the assets and the coaching container for this offer, and I realized, no, this is a $2,000 offer. As my belief level came up, I’m working with clients at this point. They’re getting insane results.
05:46
Andrea Nordling
And by the time I actually published the offer, it’s a $3,000 offer by the time I launched it, which became my new baseline. But in the beginning, I wasn’t there yet. My belief wasn’t there yet. Crazy. It just took a few months of me actually bringing people through that process and creating the assets and putting it all together when I realized, oh my gosh, this is definitely a steal at $3,000, which is what I consistently hear from my clients. So I followed this process that I teach to my clients about how to uplevel your beliefs. I did the same thing when the mastermind offer was launched, which is a $10,000 offer. Never sold anything for $10,000 before. And my brain was like, there is no way. There’s no way. So I knew I had work to do. I didn’t sell it right away.
06:26
Andrea Nordling
When I was having thoughts of, there’s no way. That’s not. When I got to work selling this offer, I brought myself through the process again on UP leveling my beliefs in myself, my clients, my offer, and my business viability. And lo and behold, by the time I sold it, I felt like I was in 100% belief that it was an absolute steal at $10,000 for people to join this mastermind for six months and watch their business explode. And of course, the results have been just that. But I wasn’t born in belief of that. Even within the space of just a few months, that can change considerably.
07:00
Andrea Nordling
So my answer to this question, how do you get your first big offer clients, as you work on your belief that they’re there, that they want to pay for it, and that your process is going to be a ten x value to them, regardless of whatever it is that you’re charging, get to that point first. And then the selling of it becomes so much more fun, so much simpler. And I say easy kind of sells itself, really. But you have to get in belief yourself first before you’re going to be able to sell that to somebody else. And I think that one little thing I would give, like, a little tactical aspect of this is I knew that I could always refund people. So I’m like, I’m going to go sell my heart out. I am going to go sell this offer.
07:35
Andrea Nordling
And in the back of my mind, I knew if they’re not getting results, if something isn’t going well here, I can always refund them and fix that and try again. So I knew, regardless of what somebody paid me, regardless of what they invested in this offer, I knew, like, I had my own back and their back, that if something wasn’t working, we would figure it out and I would make it right with them. And that gave me a lot of confidence, even though I never communicated that to my people necessarily, I just knew internally that’s how I would do business. Something isn’t working, I will make it right with them. And that gave me a lot of confidence in being able to just imperfectly put it out there and figure it out, which is what we do.
08:10
Andrea Nordling
You go sell it you bring people through the process, they get amazing results. Your belief increases and you go do it again and then it increases again and again. You got this. You might be wondering the same thing. So I’m going to give my answer to that. But first, let me read the whole question. The whole question is how do you walk the fine line to charge enough with clients that are very complex cases and a lot of them can’t work because of their illness? I need to figure out a way to structure my business so that I can continue to help these people but also make enough money that the work is sustainable. All right, first of all, this is totally normal. This question comes up all the time.
08:46
Andrea Nordling
I coach clients on this all the time because a lot of complex cases can’t work. We know that this is the case. So is the answer to not charge them very much or is the answer to charge them more? Well, you get to decide. I kind of have a framework around that and I have a preference for what I think you should do, which is what I’m going to give my answer on. Okay, so the coaching I would give my clients here, is that the reason and the, this is the coaching. I do get my quite a bit. Is that the reason your people need to work with you is so that they can get to work again full time? And this is worth a lot to your people.
09:18
Andrea Nordling
But a lot of practitioners don’t want to talk about that aspect, and they really shy away from talking about money with their clients. They really shy away from talking about money. Objections and this, like, oh, I don’t want to get into that part. So they don’t ever talk about it. But here’s the deal. That objection is there. Calling it out, addressing it, coaching them on it, and having a solution to work through it doesn’t make that come up out of thin air. It’s just acknowledging the elephant that’s already in the room. So you got to lean in. You got to get more comfortable talking about money and talking to your people about why the results that they want to get when they work with you are going to make them more money. It’s going to save them money.
09:51
Andrea Nordling
It’s going to save them time and energy. And in this case, it’s actually going to make them money because instead of continuing to not be able to work and spend a lot of money trying to solve this problem, which they’re already doing, they’re working with other specialists, they’re chasing other rabbit holes. They’re doing a ton of supplementing or testing or other things that maybe aren’t getting them on the result they want, but they are spending money on those things already. Instead of that continuing to play out for the next months and years, you are offering them a solution where they actually get to solve the root cause of their problem and get back to work, which is incredible, right? So you have to have confidence that your people are resourceful and they’re going to figure it out so that they can get better.
10:26
Andrea Nordling
Which means you have to have confidence in yourself that you can help deliver that result to them. You have to have confidence in your process that it is going to deliver that result to them. You have to have confidence in your people that they are capable and that they will do the work. All of this comes down to mindset, which a lot of things in business do. So welcome. That’s okay. We’re always going to be looking at mindset, just like your clients are going to be looking at their mindset as well. And you’re going to be helping them through up leveling their belief in all of these areas as well. But to do that, you have to make enough money in your business so that you can create lower priced options in the future to serve your community better.
11:02
Andrea Nordling
So this example here’s one that comes to mind with a client that I work with. She works with parents of nonverbal, autistic kids. So a lot of times in these families, the dynamic has shifted so considerably that either one or both parents are not working or they’re not together anymore. There’s a lot of financial stress a lot of times in these households. And so we have coached on this extensively. And ultimately, she has just dialed in her process and figured out that I got to work right now with people that have the money to pay for what I’m offering. I need to charge accordingly, which is a very premium offer. And I need to make money in my business so that I have the resources to create lower priced options for this community in the future.
11:41
Andrea Nordling
But I can’t do that if I don’t have money in my business, and I can’t do that if I don’t have a process that works really well. And I have to have people to bring through that process to beta test and to continue to refine and to make it better and better. So that is what she’s done. She has a thriving business at this point. It didn’t start there, and we had to coach on this a lot in the beginning about what do I do with people that can’t pay. Here’s the answer. Some people will and some people won’t. So sell to the people that will sell to the people that are already investing a lot of money in trying to solve this problem.
12:08
Andrea Nordling
Sell to them instead of trying to bring up the whole community, everybody, and trying to make something that will work for everyone, which you’ll never be able to do anyway, and it will keep you broke. Focus on the people that already are spending money solving this problem. Have them spend it with you. Get them fantastic results, watch your business explode, and then you will have the resources later to invest in creating some of those lower priced options to continue to serve your people. Just rinse and repeat. You got this question. Is it enough to get certified as a health coach to be able to help people, or do you recommend becoming a nutritional therapist practitioner? My understanding is that as a health coach, I can only guide people to reach goals that they set for themselves.
12:47
Andrea Nordling
Whereas an NTP could actually give focused advice and protocols about nutrition. Does this end up mattering once you start working with clients? Thank you. Great, great question. So ultimately what she’s asking is getting certified as a health coach enough, or do I need a specific nutrition certification? Now my answer here is ultimately, it depends, what skill sets do you already have and how do you want to support your clients? So as a nutritional therapy practitioner and in working with hundreds and hundreds of them, and I work with clients in lots of different certifications, lots of different modalities and specific methods of supporting their clients with nutrition, they have different skill sets, they have different tools in their tool belt. And it depends how you want to work with your clients to know what tools you’re going to need.
13:30
Andrea Nordling
What do you already have and what do you want to have? So for my NTP clients or my nutritional therapist, my holistic nutritionist, there’s lots of different variations of that. Some are board certified, some aren’t, and that very state by state and country by country doesn’t matter if you’re going to work very specifically with taking people through nutrition protocols. And a lot of that involves lab testing these days, you’re going to want to have a specific accreditation certification, a lot of education around how to do that and how to support those clients. Health coaching, on the other hand, is really the mindset aspect, and it’s coaching your clients to stick to the commitments that they’ve made to themselves and actually make the transformation.
14:07
Andrea Nordling
So as you can imagine, for most of us, those go hand in hand, and for a lot of my clients, they do some of them do health coaching, just solely health coaching. They help people set goals and bring them through a process of achieving those goals. Some of them fuse that with the nutrition component and some specific lab testing and very specific nutrition protocols, and they have a lot more in depth information about the human body and what they can recommend in that way. Okay, so those are two different things, but a lot of overlap as you can imagine, which is why inside my program, the profitable nutritionist, I teach a lot of coaching skills because I think that’s just foundational to anybody that is working with clients, whether that is one one or in groups or in online courses or memberships.
14:53
Andrea Nordling
If you are serving people directly, clients directly, meaning you have a service or a product and you are delivering it to clients, you are going to have to help them to actually put into play and implement the information that you’re giving them. That’s what a coach does. So whether you call yourself a coach or not, that’s what you’re doing when you are supporting your clients with all of the mental trash that’s going to come up for them. All the procrastination, all the excuses, all of the I’m a special snowflake, it doesn’t work for me. This is too hard. This hasn’t worked in the past. I’m doing everything. It isn’t working. All of that is going to be your job, really, to help them get through and to continue moving forward. So that’s what a coach does.
15:30
Andrea Nordling
If you’re a nutritionist in any regard that works with clients, you are a coach as well. So welcome to the club. So I teach a lot of coaching resources and coaching tools and frameworks within my program because anybody that works with me that is working with clients is also a coach. But that doesn’t mean that every coach has to also be a holistic nutritionist or a nutritional therapy practitioner. You get to decide. So this is kind of a long answer, but I just wanted to split those two things up and show you that they are different things. But there’s a lot of overlap. And anybody working with clients is ultimately a coach in some way, or you would best served to consider yourself a coach and adopt some tools and learn some tools to support your clients as such.
16:08
Andrea Nordling
So if you come to the table already being kind of a coachy person, you might already have that skill set. You might be somebody that is constantly the hype person for people that you work with. Like maybe that comes really naturally for you and you don’t need a lot of those skills, or they, like I said, just comes naturally to you. But for a lot of people, it doesn’t. And they want to have those. They want to have frameworks on how to coach their clients, how to understand human psychology on a deeper level so that they can support their clients that way. Which is why I give a ton of those resources inside my business strategy that I teach in the profitable nutritionist program, because everybody needs them. We need the information and the strategies.
16:45
Andrea Nordling
We also need the support and the tools to implement it and get over our own brains, just like your clients do. So the really tactical, specific, nuanced nutritional therapy or holistic nutrition training is incredible. It changed my life. So I don’t think you can go wrong there. Anybody that’s wondering this, should I get another certification or should I get a specific certification in nutrition? I don’t think you can go wrong. Okay. If you can afford it, if you have the time, if you have the bandwidth to apply some of your brain power to learning that skill set, you cannot go wrong. Changed my life, changed my family, generations to come will benefit from the fact that I took the time to learn really specific information that I learned getting certified as a nutritional therapy practitioner. So I love that.
17:25
Andrea Nordling
But with the caveat that it is not a prerequisite to start making money as a health coach or a nutrition coach right now. So assuming that you are calling yourself the right thing and staying within your scope of practice, depending on what designation you have and what state or country you’re living in, I assume that you’re following all those rules, get to work and help the people. So don’t use it as a reason to prolong getting your business set up or prolonging the timeline before you start charging people. No, you know, enough right now. If you’re watching this video still, that means that you’re interested in having a business as a nutritionist or a health coach.
17:58
Andrea Nordling
And I know that you already have skills right now that are marketable and helpful to your people that you could charge them for and start making money today. So do that. Don’t use the, oh, I need to get a few more letters after my name first. Don’t use that as a reason to stop or to wait. That is just an excuse that your brain really wants coaching on to move forward and just take action. Start charging right now. Start helping people. You for sure can do that. I’ve had people in my program, many people in my program that have made six figures as a health coach or a nutrition coach without even being certified yet. So know that is possible. Know that you can start right now. And if you decide that you want some more in depth information that is available.
18:37
Andrea Nordling
And I don’t think you could ever go wrong with adding that to your knowledge bank. I think it’s good for you. I think it’s good for your family. I think it’s good for your clients. But those are two separate things. And being a health coach is certainly enough. That was the actual question. Is getting certified as a health coach enough? Absolutely it is. If enough means, can I go charge people for this, help them get paid and get my business up and running? Absolutely. So do that.
