26. My Business Story

Andrea Nordling 0:00
Hello, my friend, and welcome back to this week’s episode, which is going to be different than anything I’ve done so far. So it comes to my attention as it has actually been my birthday this week, and I’m doing a little self reflection. And I like to do usually on my birthday, I tend to get very introspective. And I think a lot about my goals. I think a lot about myself, I think a lot about what I’ve been accomplishing in the last year. All of those things might be familiar if you’re maybe not familiar at all. But if you’re anything like me, you get into kind of a mood and look back, look forwards all that. So I have been in that state of mind this week. And as such, I realized that I have not really from start to finish told the story of the evolution of my business. And so I thought this would be a great start to the next year to tell my story and what better format to do it then in audio format here on the podcast. So it’s all in one place. And then if this is at all interesting to you to find out from a voyeuristic standpoint, what it has looked like from the beginning to where I am now. It’ll be interesting to you. If not, that’s what we’re doing. today. I’m going to kind of tell my story. I’m in business since I was a wee wee last of 22 years old. So this story begins. My entrepreneurial story begins when I was 22. And I had just graduated from college. Well, actually, I was in the process of getting ready to graduate from college. And I had a plan. The plan was I was going to go to the FBI Academy, I was going to apply to the FBI Academy. You know, in my mind, I was going to be accepted and I would be going there but I had to wait until I was 23 years old to apply. So I had a year between when I graduated from college and when I was going to be able to apply to Quantico. So what does a girl that’s 22 and that is has a little time to kill? What does she do? Well, of course, she starts selling real estate. Actually, I had been working in a real estate company while I was in college. So I actually had quite a few jobs. When I was in college. I like to be busy, I like to have money to do all of the things that I wanted to do. And so the way to accomplish that was by having lots of jobs, and that’s what I did. So I sold Redwing boots, my entire college career, I worked at the Red Wing Shoe Store and I sold work boots, like I was gonna say like it was my job. It was my job like I like it was going to be my career for the rest of my life. I was fantastic at selling Red Wing boots, and I love to selling Red Wing boots actually bought me some Red Wing boots. So I sold boots in that job because of just the nature of that industry. I mean, that industry, I don’t know, in the Red Wing Shoe Store I worked at it wasn’t particularly busy constantly throughout the day. And Redwing boots, if you’re not familiar are very high end boots, so you don’t sell this isn’t like a Payless shoe store where you need to sell a ton of volume. So I mean, maybe I would sell eight or nine pairs of boots in a day. That was a day’s work, right. So I had a lot of time to do all of my schoolwork while I was at work at the Redwings shoe star. And that was a beautiful thing. But in addition to working and sling and boots, I was also driving the holiday and shuttle van on the weekend. And this is just a few of the things and then because

Andrea Nordling 3:32
well, full disclosure during my four year college career. I also did a little extra credit and I got my mixology degree from the Minnesota School of bartending. So, you know, I was just I was really multifaceted in these days. And I took a job at a private club. When I say that it was a yacht club, like, it sounds like I was a stripper. That’s not what I’m saying. I was working as a bartender and waitress at a members only club and was doing that on the weekends as well. So it was very busy. And I had started working in this real estate company. As I was transitioning out of college, kind of looking forward the next few months and figuring out what I was going to be doing. I decided that broadening my horizons to some selling and in an office environment would be good because up to that point, I was doing some other, you know, different kinds of gigs, like I was working in restaurants, that kind of stuff. Okay, so the reason I tell you this is because I was starting to sell real estate or I was working in the real estate office is a clerical, like as a front desk is basically what I was doing. I was doing a lot of data input, figuring out the paperwork, figuring out filing, all of that. And I quickly realized that that was not my forte and if I was going to be in that office, I was going to actually be selling houses. So at the age of 22. I got licensed to sell real estate, and that’s what I started doing. This is very important part of the story even up to this point, the rest was just eating else that probably didn’t make a lot of sense. But the reason I tell you all about my real estate career at age 22, is because so much of what I learned as a newbie real estate agent that was just a baby, a tiny, little puppy, really, that had no business selling houses what I learned in those days, when I was blissfully unaware of all of the things I didn’t know. And I just thought I could do anything. And therefore I did, ah, has served me very well in my nutrition career and in learning how to market and how to sell in that business later on, which we’ll talk about in a little while. So it all kind of fits together. So at age 22, I found myself selling houses, and who in the world trust the biggest financial decision of their life, which is someone that is 22 years old and has never even bought the house themselves. You ask? It’s a great question. I, honestly, I asked myself the

Andrea Nordling 5:54
same thing. But there were people, and they trusted me. And I did sell houses. And then I bought my own house. And then I kept getting better and better at talking about my business and about networking with other people. This was in the year 2005. So this was before, I shouldn’t say before. But this this was before, it was really easy to create a website. And you could just do it yourself. I’m sure there were people that did. But I was not sophisticated enough to do that. Nor did I have any desire, or would have even known what to put on a website. So my real estate career was all built on referrals and word of mouth, and old fashioned networking. And so I learned how to talk about my business and how to talk about what I did without sounding like a total weirdo. And at first, I’m sure I did sound like a total weirdo. And as we all do, that’s that’s what happens when you start your business and you get a feel for people and for clients and for what they’re looking for and how you can serve them. And how to organically talk about the way that you can serve them in conversation without totally alienate alienating yourself from your sphere of influence, and your family and your friends and all that just kind of a learning curve for some people, if it’s something you haven’t done before, okay, it just takes a little bit of practice and some confidence to know that the right people do want to hear about what you do. And they want to be reminded about what you do so that they can refer people to you as well. And this is what I found in the early days of my real estate career that if I was just telling people what I did, and I wasn’t making it salesy, and I wasn’t trying to sell them anything. And I wasn’t trying to, like be the watch salesman that was opening up their jacket and had like all of the things I said, What do you need? Do you need this house? Do you need this one? If it wasn’t weird, and it wasn’t like that, then it was just really easy to talk about what I did. And I was getting a lot of referrals. So people were talking about oh, my friend Andrea does this, you know, she can probably help you people were reaching out to me for lots of different referrals to loan officers and for refinances all of the things right. And that’s just kind of how our business gets organic traction. So in as we’ll talk about in our nutrition businesses, same thing happens, you may have people reach out to you for completely unrelated questions or what seems unrelated when they find out that you are a health and wellness expert at some in some way, they might ask you things that you don’t really have expertise in and you refer them to somebody else, they may just pick your brain, they may want to know what books you’re reading, they may want to know where to where else they can go to find more information, it’s totally fine. That’s part of the process it just because people are slowly coming to you trying to hire you initially doesn’t mean anything is going wrong. It means people are starting to associate you with this industry that you are in and as an expert and as a, an information source that can help them to put pieces of a puzzle together or that can help someone they know. And that’s a very good thing. That’s how all of like all of the pieces of the web, like the spider web. I don’t know what the word is. But all of the different lines of the spider web are just not all connected in the beginning. But they’re starting to get connected with all of these people that are talking about what you’re doing. So I learned how to do that in real estate in my early 20s. And I got really good at it. I got really good at talking to people that I hadn’t met before and explaining what I did in a way that wasn’t weird. I guess that that’s just the best way to say it wasn’t salesy. It wasn’t awkward for them or for me, which worked really well and that’s what people want to work with. So I had just kind of found my zone. I didn’t go to the FBI Academy I never applied because I was so busy being a newbie real estate agent and figuring out what the heck that was like and driving all around. I just remember these days as putting on so many miles in my car, showing people houses and having this recurring thought in the back of my mind that’s like oh my gosh, do they know I have no idea what I’m doing No, I don’t know what I’m doing. No, I have no idea what I’m doing. No. Okay. Do you know what I’m doing sometimes and it was like the constant, you know, this feeling this the roller coaster of confidence that one minute. It’s like I’m killing it. And the next minute, you’re just worried that everyone’s gonna find out, you have no idea what the heck you’re doing and then back up and backup. I was definitely feeling that in the beginning days of my real estate, my real estate business. So as the years

Andrea Nordling 10:26
went by, I ended up transitioning out of the real estate company that I was in, and I opened up my own brokerage in 2009. When very specifically when I was five months pregnant with my first child, I have two kids. And so I was the broker, the broker owner, which means that I was in charge of the other agents in my company and making sure that they were not getting sued or not doing anything wrong. Also that I was selling enough and there was a lot going on in those days. I’m kind of exhausted just thinking about those that pretty much the year of 2009 This is a blur. I had a baby and I birthed a business and I was very, very tired. day but I loved owning my company. I

Andrea Nordling 11:14
loved having my it was called premier Realty I love premier Realty. I love everything about it. Specifically, as I look back on it, I’m really proud of the fact that it was all referral based it was all word of mouth. There was no technology involved. We never had a website. It just, it just didn’t need it and didn’t ever slow down enough to create one. That was not my wheelhouse. It was all about just, you know, helping clients and getting referrals, helping clients getting referrals being really good at what we did there. So pretty proud of that. But it came to an end in 2012 When my husband and I decided that he was going to take a very, like a big career change in the oil and gas industry. So we ended up moving eight hours west of Minneapolis, which is the Southern Twin Cities area, it’s home for us. We moved about eight hours west to Dickinson, North Dakota to the Bakken oilfield. And in those days in 2012, it was the Wild West oil boom, very different than where we had been before. But it was so much fun. And for that reason, I closed my real estate company, we took this big move, and we ended up living in Dickinson for four years. So I did sell real estate there. When we were living in real in Dickinson I did get licensed in North Dakota and I did do some selling there, which was another exercise in marketing because now I was in a town where I didn’t know anybody. And so I didn’t have any referral sources to start with. And I Oh, starting from scratch. So I was needing to meet people, I was needing to set up my license with a new broker and learn the rules in North Dakota in a new place where all of a sudden, we were not just selling physical property, but also mineral rights, there was all sorts of new stuff going on. And actually it was pretty fun to learn kind of a new way of doing business and to hone my skills even more with networking and marketing, and organically figuring out how to get clients out there, which is pretty fun. But in that same timeframe, I was pregnant and had my second child, my son, Luke, and that was in 2013. In I’ll save you the long story about what happened when he was born. But I actually ended up on bed rest in Minnesota while we were home for the holidays. And so part of the time that I was pregnant with Luke, I was in Minnesota, and physically just was not well with that pregnancy after he was born. I did not bounce back from that pregnancy as I expected I would and health wise I just did not feel right. So I hit the interwebs as a new mom trying to figure out what was going on with me what was wrong, I stumbled upon, didn’t stumble upon I self diagnose with something wrong with my thyroid. And so I went to a doctor in Dickinson, North Dakota, which is not a booming metropolis by any means, but did have nice health care facilities and found that I had a cyst on my thyroid. Why is this relevant? Well, because this turned out to be my introduction to holistic nutrition because when I met with this doctor and had my appointment with her and found out what was going on with my thyroid, and that there actually was something that was going on. I was very unimpressed with the medical advice and care and next steps that I was given at that point, it was pretty much just like yeah, this is just happens for people. You’re good. You’re gonna be fine. We’re just gonna medicate you, you’re gonna be fine. Kind of a familiar story to many of us, I’m sure in one way or another. You can imagine what that was like. And so I was on a quest then to figure out how to fix my thyroid myself. And that is when I stumbled on an Instagram hashtag ironically now since I’m not on social media anymore, but at the point at that point I was I stumbled on a hashtag that led me to the nutritional therapy Association. And I had no idea that these resources and accreditations even existed, I was so not crunchy at this point, I can’t even tell you, I had no idea. And I was like, I found the answer. This is exactly what I have been needing for so long. And I was so so enthralled with all things nutrition. So I immediately signed up for the next certification that I could, which was in Denver, and that started in 2015. So in 2015, I started the Denver nutritional therapy practitioner certification course, which I finished in 2016. And didn’t do it. As a business. It was never my intention, it was gonna be a business, I just was not feeling well. And I wanted to feed myself better, I wanted to feed my family better, I wanted to understand on a deeper level, all of these cool nutrition things I was not learning. And the rest is history. Because by the time I got in that certification room in 2015, and I went to my first in person, workshop weekend in Denver was like, Oh, my gosh, everybody needs to know this, I have to tell everyone on the planet, what I am learning, full stop.

Andrea Nordling 16:14
Everybody needs to know how important this is, and how life changing this information is. Plus, it was physically feeling a lot better because of the changes I had been making for myself. And so the wheels were turning. And I had a decade of experience at this point in running my own business, various businesses by that point. And I couldn’t not look at my holistic nutrition certification. Now as a business opportunity. I couldn’t stop myself, I just couldn’t it was like this has to happen. I have no idea how or what it’s going to look like. But it has to happen. And so at this point, we were moving back to Minnesota. From our four years in Dickinson that was coming to a close, we were moving home. And it was just about the time I was finishing up my certification. So I was getting ready to launch this business. And I had no idea what in the world this business was going to look like. Like I said, I had no idea how to do it. I was completely clueless, but I knew I could find clients. And I knew I could figure it out. I just had no idea exactly what I was gonna do with those clients or what I was figuring out. So one of the final workshop weekends, I was collaborating with my best friend in my nutrition certification class, and my NTP bestie. Her name is Amy Talibs. Rude. If you follow rebel nutrition on any of the social medias, or anywhere you will know her well. She and I were thick as thieves. We were we stayed together during those weekends. And we were trying to figure out what the heck are we going to do for our businesses? What does this look like? And we had the idea to start a podcast. So by the time we graduated with our certification in 2016, we had launched our podcast and we, I mean, it just so hilarious. Now to think back on this actually, Amy and I should do an episode where we talk about the evolution of all this, because we were saying things like, we’re gonna do online courses. And we’re gonna have a podcast. And I don’t know how this is gonna work, because neither of us have any idea what the heck we’re doing, or how any of the technology works, or what to talk about. Or, I mean, we did we were, we had no idea we were so ill prepared for any of it. But we were saying these big words. And they made sense. And then we got to work and figured out how to do it. So we actually started the podcast. And we had ideas for our first online course. And we were working through that the podcast. And in the beginning what I think that we maybe did 10 or 15 episodes on the podcast before the podcast fizzled, because we really had no plan. We were just talking about things it was we were just so excited about all of these things that we had learned about in our certification program. And so the good food good mood podcast was our way to talk about all of these topics. And we did that. And we did it with gusto, I might add, but we really didn’t have a plan. There was no strategy, we weren’t selling anything. And so our motivation to keep going with the podcast waned after a while, because we were like, What are we getting out of this? We don’t know what we’re doing. Now, if we were doing this differently, this is before that broadcast out, we were doing this differently. Now we would have a much different strategy, but we didn’t at that point. So you live and you learn. Okay, so at this point, Amy and I both had our own practices, and then we were doing joint stuff together. And it was really fun. Because we weren’t all alone in the starting of these businesses. We both were so excited and had a lot to say. And we were learning so many new things. Again, we were both having our first website. Neither of us had done that before we were figuring out the tech piece of it. We were had been now introduced into this extremely foreign and yet intriguing world of online business where it seemed like there was this whole other world going on that we didn’t know about before. where people were reaching strangers from the internet and teaching them things and being paid to work online. And we were our minds were blown by that. So it was a lot happening. I for one was taking one on one clients at this point onesie twosie, when I didn’t have a full client load by any means, but I was taking some one on one clients, I was doing restart classes. And like I said, I was new to this online component, which I had not used in my businesses before. So I was not writing blog posts, I was sending newsletters to a tiny email list, I was trying to post on social media, which I did not love. We’ll talk about that as well, I’m sure. But I was doing the things. I was learning a lot. And it was really fun. Making a little bit of money. It was all good. Then Amy, and I decided we were going to actually create an online course. Okay, because we have been saying this, we’ve been saying these words online course we’re going to do this, I don’t think either of us had even taken an online course at that point.

Andrea Nordling 20:56
So we really had nothing to draw on as far as what to even do. But we were nothing if not persistent, and motivated. So we figured it out. We launched it online course. And we sold it, we just we did all of it. It was fantastic. So that a couple times, actually. And then we decided that we were going to vary in like very good terms, we were just going to shut down the podcast, we were going to not be working together on the course anymore. We were kind of going different directions. Amy was already starting to talk business with a lot of her content. And it was specifically helping people to build their business on social media because she is a social media whiz. So if you do not if you love social media, and you don’t follow Amy already, you need to go look her up at rebel nutrition, R E, B E, Ll. E and nutrition. She’s amazing resource for that. And she’s the social media acquaintance. So she was already doing that. I was more interested in continuing with talking about nutrition and with building out the nutrition courses and those offerings, specifically targeting adrenal fatigue, and some hormonal stuff. So basically, like we we still talked quite a bit and we stayed in touch. But we weren’t working together at this point anymore. I refined what I was teaching in the first course that we had started together again, it kind of made it really specific to adrenal fatigue, relaunched that, and a few more courses that correlated with it, and then turn that into a membership site. And so I had my membership, I had these courses that were part of the membership. And then I was working still with some one on one clients, and collaborating with some other practitioners kind of speeding through this part of it, because it’s a little cloudy about how this was all working. But at this point, I was wearing lots of hats. I even collaborated for a year, from mid 2018 to mid 2019. With an office full of other practitioners, I think that those were the days but for sure 2019. With other practitioners, where we were, we created kind of a collective that we had an office to see clients in like a brick and mortar that was in a big chiropractic complex. And so I had an office space at one point. And even though I wasn’t seeing clients there, I was exposed to a ton of other practitioners. And we did lots of networking with acupuncturist and other chiropractors, naturopaths lots and lots of various modalities and health coaches in all of the alternative health space. There’s just a lot going on in those days. And those were my people. They wanted to know how was I getting clients online? How was this all working? How was the membership site working? How do you make courses? How do you sell to people with emails, these were the questions I had, and I loved talking about it. Because I had been in business for a long time. Remember, I started as an entrepreneur when I was 22. I’ve actually never had a salaried corporate job in any way. I’ve only ever worked for myself. So to me to talk about getting clients and, you know, budgeting in your business and hiring and making financial decisions and niching or not niching selling to people all of those things had, like I had figured that out already. And it was coming really naturally to me. And I was surprised by how many questions I was getting from people that were really struggling with some of those skills that I just took for granted. So it became clear that I had something to offer to this marketplace. In terms of what I had already, like kind of the the school of hard knocks I had already been through in my real estate business was now coming in handy because I was quite successful in my holistic nutrition practice, from all the things I already knew people wanted to know. And I was ready to teach them. So in 2019, halfway through 2019, I decided that I was going to take a leap, and I was going to start teaching business strategy to other holistic nutritionist and practitioners that wanted to know and specifically I was going to teach them about membership sites and how To package their products and services into a membership, because that’s what I had done. And that was a lot of the questions I was getting were specifically related to that. So I launched a beta to a small group of people to teach that, and it took off, and then that group got bigger and bigger. And I was loving this work so much, because it just spoke to my interest. I’m just the the weirdo that reads all of the business books, I listen to business podcasts, I read biographies from people who have started businesses, I just am so interested in the psychology behind entrepreneurship, and it just intrigues me. It’s just like a personal hobby of mine. So in addition to being my job, I just find it fascinating. And I love it.

Andrea Nordling 25:43
I love talking about it, I love teaching about it, I’m sure that comes through in this podcast as well. So I was finally ready to fully embrace that. And I shut down my nutrition practice, I gave all of my members in my membership and in my courses access to everything forever, they just got permanent access. But I was no longer going to be supporting them live and continually week by week, and I went fully into business coaching. So that was the beginning of what is now the profitable nutritionist program, which has taken a few a few twists and turns along the way over the last few years. But that was when I transitioned out of my actually working with nutrition clients 2019. And those 10 people that I started working with initially in the beta group, that was the profitable practice inner circle, that inner circle grew to be a bigger circle and a bigger circle. And the more people that I taught in, the more presentations I was giving, the more webinars I was doing, the more emails I was sending my philosophies on business and marketing were getting sharper and sharper, my processes became more clear, my coaching was getting so much better. And I was able to help people strategize their goals and troubleshoot anywhere, they were getting stuck. I was enjoying it, they were enjoying it, people were making money, it was just like, I felt like I finally found my stride of what I wanted to be doing the problem. If there was a problem, I don’t know that there was a problem. But in retrospect, one issue was that most of my students were not heeding My advice to charge premium prices for their offers. So they were not making enough money. As I talked about with one of my OG students, Peg who was in this first beta group, the $25, a month that she started charging, or was not going to be paying the bills. And it’s a lot of work to run a membership site or to be selling online, we think that this is going to be passive. This is a lie, I have a lot to say about that do it. And actually, I have quite a few bad guests scheduled that are going to be coming up addressing this issue about passive income with courses and memberships and how it is anything but passive and is actually the hardest thing that you can learn how to do is to sell courses memberships. So my people were learning that the hard way, and they just weren’t charging enough for to sustain their businesses during that learning curve. And so, or some of them, were still charging for one off one on one sessions here and there. And that is just never going to make you money that wasn’t sustainable either. So I was at this point, seeing okay, how am I going to like Teach pricing in a new way? How am I going to address the mindset of not wanting to offend people, when you tell them your price? How am I going to come at this from a new angle to help my students? I was just I was learning a lot. But I was also really wanting to figure out how I could teach this differently with new tools and some new strategies, I guess, new tactics that were going to help my students and it was around this time that I don’t know how it was through a book or a podcast or something I was introduced to the Life Coach School with Berkus do her podcast somewhere along the way, and I was hooked. Now, here’s the thing. I have said this before, probably, but I’ll say it again, I had no idea what a life coach was, I thought for sure that a life coach was a punch line to a liberal arts degree joke. And I just, that’s what I thought, I had no interest in finding out what a life coach was, I thought it was just not really a thing. So imagine my surprise, when I was introduced to what a life coach was into life coaching tools. And once again, just like I had all the years before when I found the nutritional therapy Association now I had found life coaching was like, Oh my gosh, this is incredible. I feel like this was made just for me, this is exactly what I need right now.

Andrea Nordling 29:33
I want to know how my brain works. I want to know all about the predictable patterns in my thoughts and exactly how I’m getting the results I’m getting in my life and how to hack those thoughts so that I get different results. It’s like what, this is amazing. So life coaching, it turns out is actually figuring out your mindset and figuring out your patterns, how you got to where you are so that you can get somewhere new if you want to. That’s just understanding how the brain works. That’s my interpretation of what life coaching is. And it’s exactly what I needed for my business. It’s exactly what I needed to teach my students. So I was fully researching and immersed in life coaching in probably second half of 2019 into early 2020. And I was starting to use these life coaching schools or life coaching tools, rather with my students on our weekly coaching calls. And I was using them, of course, myself and everything was shifting very dramatically, I was seeing really good results in my business. And my students were having fantastic breakthroughs, it was just so much clearer, everything was working so much better. So I thought, Okay, I have to go fully in on life coaching, and I got certified through the Life Coach School, which is another year long certification, which I started in early 2020. So I was already using some of these tools, I was already kind of figuring it out on my own. But then the full immersion in the certification program, which is quite rigorous, and has several different components, but one of them is coaching, live in front of a group and then being critiqued on your coaching in that group setting that really was transformative to me, I feel like my coaching up leveled tremendously. It just from that experience during my certification of having my coaching recorded in getting feedback from my peers, and just needing to up my game in that way. Like, oh, my gosh, people are watching me, they’re helping me and I’m gonna need to implement the their, their suggestions for next time, which just was a game changer for my coaching. So my business coaching got so much better my business, obviously was reaping all of the rewards of that in 2020. And once again, Amy and I had gotten back together on one of our catch up phone calls, which we periodically do just to talk about our business and talk about all things online business, which we love. And this is another thing is it’s so fun to have people in your life. And you probably know this too, just having this core group of people that get the things that you geek out about. I know for a lot of us it is nutrition, and it is holistic health. Just like like nerdy stuff about holistic health topics, like topics like the latest, greatest newest thing. Have you heard about this? Have you heard about this? Have you done this? It’s so fun. And that’s how I feel about when Amy and I get to catch up and we get to talk about online business stuff. Same thing. It’s just like, we can talk funnels, we can talk all of the things and we totally get each other’s, we get what we’re putting what each other is putting down. And that’s so fun. So Amy and I were on one of our Kegel phone calls around this time. And we were just missing having collaboration, we were both kind of at a point in our business where we were teaching business strategy to health practitioners, but we have very different skill sets. And so Amy leans like I said earlier, very heavily into social media and into growing an audience that way. My forte is definitely organic marketing off of social media. In fact, by this point, I was sort of in mid 2020, I was already thinking, I gotta get back off of social media, I don’t like it. My business had never my holistic business or holistic nutrition business, I should say, Never was really on social media that much because I don’t enjoy it personally. So I was never consistently posting or engaging with an audience on social media, I had a business page and I had a business Instagram. And I would show up maybe once a month and do some stories. But that was just when I felt I was in the mood and I was having a good hair day. To be honest, that’s when I would prioritize maybe jumping on stories and saying something about my business, but it wasn’t consistent by any means. I

Andrea Nordling 33:35
didn’t enjoy it. And I’m sure that that bled through in everything I did on social media, because it just wasn’t, it wasn’t something I enjoyed at all personally. And I just felt like every minute that I was on my phone doing something on Facebook or Instagram, like it was. And this is no judgement if to anyone else. So if you don’t feel this way, you know you do you but to me, it felt like it was out of integrity with just how I wanted to be showing up in the world. I don’t want my kids seeing me on my phone all the time. I didn’t want to feel like I needed to be responding to people in real time, if that was the expectation. And I just it just didn’t like it. It wasn’t jiving with what I wanted to create my business. So I was already thinking about getting off social media. And that’s important because soon after that, I did delete all of my social media profiles and all that. But anyway, at this point, Amy and I were talking about our businesses, she leans really heavy heavily on the social media. So we were talking about the differences of that and we’re just we’re we’re both feeling really isolated and like oh, I missed those days when we were working together. It was so much more fun. We should do that again. What could we do? And so we decided to launch a membership program together to teach the mindset piece and the life coaching strategies that I was now proficient in coaching with to our students since we were both heavily focusing on strategy up to that point, her strategy being building on social media, my strategy being organic matter. Getting off of social media and membership sites. Oh, and then Amy also teaches how to create online courses. So we both, like we had all of the strategy covered in both of our, our wheel houses. But the mindset piece was really missing for both of us. And we knew that our students really wanted that. So that’s when we decided to do another offer together. And this was called the uplevel experience. In 2020. We ran that for about six months. And then we decided to transition out of it as our businesses were both going in different direction again, and we laughed, we like we keep trying to do this, we keep trying to figure out how to work together, and it doesn’t work forever, but it’s fun when it does. So we took those clients in the uplevel experience, and they transitioned into what is now the profitable nutritionist program, as that is where now it’s to what it has evolved into it is now about 60% mindset and 40% strategy for organic marketing and sales, but all of the building confidence and all of the mind drama that comes up along the way in our business, how to address that with just a lot of strategy strategy sprinkled in, but definitely the strategy for handling our thoughts about our businesses and our clients and our offers and our pricing. And all of that is a key component to the process I teach in that program. So that is what now I am offering if you know anything about my business, you know I talk about that program a lot. But this the uplevel experience was the first iteration of that it was the first time that I was teaching some of these mindset tools. And I was working with the model, which is the life coaching tool that I use and coach with the most. So it’s teaching the model. It was very, very cool. And Amy and I got to do that together, which was so fun. So that was the summer of 2020 and the second half of 2020. And if you remember anything about the second half of 2020, there was a lot going on during that period of time. during that particular period. Like I said, I had been thinking about withdrawing from social media totally. But around the time of the election, which was November 2020, things were getting really squirrely on social media, especially with ads accounts. And censorship was really becoming very evident, so that you that could not be denied any longer. I knew a lot of people professionally whose accounts were being shut down, left and right. Just overnight, they would wake up to no social media accounts anymore for just an innocuous post that they had made that turned out to somehow been inflammatory and got their account shut down. There was a lot of that going on. And my own ads account was deactivated after I ran an ad about growing businesses without social media. And I woke up to having no ads account on Facebook or Instagram anymore after that point. So the writing was on the wall, I had already had this inkling that I wanted to maybe just quietly shut down those accounts and just like turn my back on social media and not deal with it anymore. But it was more from prior to then it was more from just personal preference. I just didn’t want to have those loose ends in my life. I didn’t want any pressure to ever have to look at DMS or anything like that. It just was like no, I think I’m just done with that. And I was thinking I would just quietly deactivate those accounts and never talked about it. But as I saw what was happening and the current marketplace was

Andrea Nordling 38:32
just in turmoil, I think in general with I don’t know if it was the marketplace, maybe it’s not the marketplace. The What do you say the the business sphere, and the behind the scenes of the other entrepreneurs that I knew, were scrambling to try to figure out how to market off of social media. And I was like, Oh my gosh, I’m so glad that I’ve been doing this all along. And I don’t have to be panicking about this right now, I already have a very engaged email list. That’s where I’ve always been prominently, communicating with my people. That’s where they know to expect me they’re not even looking for me on social media because they know I show up in their inbox. And I’m so grateful for that. Because as other people were losing their entire audience and all of their connections to their people. I didn’t ever feel that. But I started to get bolder and bolder and more opinionated. I was always opinionated, maybe louder in my opinions about the use of social media, in our industry, business wise and why the things that we talk about, as holistic health professionals are particularly apt to be taken offline quickly and abruptly on those platforms. And all of that got very outspoken about it and decided to quite publicly deactivate my social media accounts instead of just quietly doing it and not telling anyone. It became something that I couldn’t not talk about anymore. And that is that so I have to think about it. Am I leaving anything out? I’m just kind of working from the cuff, you’re telling my story as I remember it. Yeah, got those accounts, nuclear, nuclear bombed those, and in one day deactivated all of the accounts and canceled those, which felt so great, I must say. And now I get to have the pleasure of teaching people how to do what I’ve always been better at anyway, which is organic marketing in just selling with value and selling to people that already want to buy because of the organic marketing strategies. And the reason that they’ve come to have a conversation with you in the first place. Because they already are very interested in our pre sold before you even have a sales conversation with them. Those are the best clients to work with, for sure. So yeah, I get to teach all of that, that I learned as a as a little baby at 22, thinking I was going to go be a big shot in the FBI. And I really ended up selling houses and learning how to be an entrepreneur, and talk with real humans about my business without sounding like a weirdo. So then they wanted to send other people to me, because they trusted me. And that’s a beautiful thing. And this process now has become a much more solid process. And I have had the experience of coaching hundreds and hundreds of people and walking them through it and really solidifying my ideas and the way that like my unique philosophies, the way that I teach things into a process that is tried and true at this point. So that is now the profitable nutritionist program. The rest is history. That’s where we are now in 2022. And no plans to do anything other than that anytime soon. Except, oh, well, okay,

Andrea Nordling 41:43
so the profitable nutritionists podcast, this podcast was launched in the fall of 2021. So I guess I should, I shouldn’t just skip from end of 2020 to 2020 to 2021 did happen. And we should talk about that, too. So I had launched the first version of the profitable nutritionist program, it was called something else. But it was the first version of this program. And I was waiting for the trademark of the profitable nutritionist to come through. And so that program launched in March. And that’s all I have had for sale for well over a year. That is changing now, however, but that is all I have been offering. And just working exclusively with my clients and getting that program even more robust and well oiled and getting great results for my students in there until the fall of 2021 when the next big project happened, and that was this podcast. So this podcast launched in the fall of 2021. I knew that the podcast was going to be coming for about a year and a half, I had definitely had the plan to do the podcast. But I did not let myself divert my focus off of the program until the program was selling at a certain level, I knew exactly the metrics, the you know, monetary metrics that I wanted to be at, before I diverted any focus into creating the podcast, which I knew was going to be a big project. And it was well worth it, but definitely a big project. And so I’m glad I did that, I’m glad I constrained my focus to just the program and just getting really good at selling that via email, and working with my clients and getting great processes and results for my students in the program instead of any other marketing avenues. But now that this podcast is, you know is going and I feel like we’re in a groove on creating this content too, which has been so fun, but is relatively new, because that was just at the end of 2021 Fall of 2021 that this podcast came about. So now we’re at the point we me, this company of mine is at the point where I have the next offer that I’m very excited to be able to talk about in a few months. So you’ll be hearing more about that soon. But for now, I’m gonna leave you in a bit of suspense about what that is a little cliffhanger to tease you a bit. But later this year, you are going to hear about something brand new that I am offering to my students that have learned the processes I teach in my program, and that are making money with it consistently in their practice. It’s something I’ve never offered before, never done anything like this before, actually. And it includes a live in person event. So that is all I will say about that for now. You will hear all about it if you’re on my email list to get all of the details in a few months. But that is something I’m really really looking forward to. Because I think that being together in person is like just the ultimate in business development. I think more can happen in a few days together with your people with the right people that like I said are interested in the same things that speak the same language. And that can help each other more can happen in that container than in an entire year on your own. So little cliffhanger there that’ll be coming. You need to be on my email list to hear all about it. So If you aren’t head over to build a profitable practice.com and enter your email address in any of the fields that asked for it, and then you’ll be on my email list, sign up for the free course. You’ll be on my email list. You’ll hear all about it. Yeah. So that’s it. That’s my story up until now, I’m sure I forgot all sorts of things I could, I should maybe do a separate episode that where I just address all of the things that went wrong. Like along that journey, I could I could do an entire episode of Just things I thought would happen when I started my holistic nutrition practice, and then what actually happened, and we could go through years of all of the trials and tribulations and failures, that actually turned out to be the best teachers and the best accelerators of my business over time, maybe I’ll have to put something like that together. But for this episode, I just wanted to kind of look back over my journey as an entrepreneur and give you a little bit of a peek into what that has looked like so that you have some context into, I guess, me and my experience up till now, I think I’ve talked about several facets of this in a lot of different podcast episodes and a lot of emails probably on my website, but I don’t know that I’ve ever put it all together into one chronological piece of content before so there you go, if you’re still here, God bless you. Thank you. And I will be back next week for more strategies and tools to help you grow in your business. It will be less storytime next week, but

Andrea Nordling 46:30
today was all about the storytime as I’m feeling all reflective and birthday ish. So thanks for coming on that journey with me my friend. And yeah, that’s it from want to be FBI agent to business coach. There you have it. Right. I will see you here same time next week.