Welcome back to the profitable nutritionist podcast, my friend. This is the messy show. Just kidding, guy. No, but we are going to be talking about the messy middle today, specifically the mandatory messiness that you go through in various stages of your business journey. This is super top of mind. For me right now, I’ve been coaching a lot of my clients on this, I’ve been talking to friends about it, I’ve been talking about this in regards to different things going on in my business. And just that feeling of being in the messy middle, where you can see where you’re going, you could see how far you’ve come and you feel like you’re just in the middle, where it’s all a mess. Do you feel what that feeling is? Like? I bet you do. We’ve all been there. I’m there right now, I’m there a lot. I’m sure you are, too. And the big, big takeaway from this episode is we’re gonna always be there. It’s okay. But what does it look like? Like? What is the messy middle actually look like in various stages of your business? And how do you know if it is a problem that should be addressed, or if it’s just part of the growing pains. That’s what we’re discussing today. This is a core philosophy that I teach my students in the profitable nutritionist program, this concept of mandatory messiness. So if you’re not in the program, yet, what in the world are you waiting for? By the way, there are so much inside of the program waiting for you to be supporting you that there’s so much in there that we want to offer. And to help you through the messy middle. What are you waiting for enrollment in the program opens a few times each year to know when that next enrollment is you need to be on the waitlist. So I will just tell you, if you’re listening to this in real time, the next public enrollment will be in mid September 2024. But there might be an opening in July, just for those that are on the waitlist, hint, hint, hint, you should be on the waitlist if you’re going to join the program. So if you are ready to plug in have lifetime access to all the resources inside, let me and my team support you along with 500 plus of your genius colleagues that can tell you exactly what is working, what isn’t working in the messy middle like we’re talking about today. You want to be in the program. Okay, sign up for the waitlist at the profitable nutritionist.com/join. Enrollment is not currently open, but it will be in September, and it might be for people on the waitlist in July. So get on the waitlist. All right. Let’s talk about it. If you’re listening to this still, it’s because on some level, things are a little messy for you. Right? Just a little messy. I know it is for me. I know. It’s it’s can be messier at certain times than others. But I always feel like there’s stuff going on in my business. That is messy. And I think actually, as I said that out loud, I would add that it feels like there’s areas of my life that are messy a lot of times, and that doesn’t necessarily ever go away or mean that there’s that it even will be possible to clean up all of the messes everywhere. What the heck do I even mean by that? Well, let’s talk about it. The messy middle, and the mandatory messiness that I’m talking about business wise. And of course, we could apply this to a lot of areas of our lives. But let’s talk business right now, this messy middle. And this mandatory messiness is that feeling like you have to do a bunch of things, to get to the point where things don’t feel messy anymore. I see this a lot with clients of mine that want to join, either the profitable nutritionist program, or the mastermind, and I’m gonna talk about both of those in a minute. But either way, someone that wants to work with me, that’s like, that’s exactly what I need. I know, that’s what I need. But I’m not going to do it yet. Because I have these things like these boxes, insert here, insert ideals, ideal scenarios here, I need to check these boxes, and get these things done first, before I join either the profitable nutritious program or join the mastermind. This can look like lots of different things. But it could be like I need to get my website up. First, I need to take some clients. First, I need to figure out what my client processes I need to get some free clients. First, I need to start growing an email list. These are all things that people tell me that they want to start doing before they join the TPN program. So they’re like, Okay, I have to finish my certification program. First, I have to get my kids like into school. First, I need to do these other things in my business to make some money or get things organized first. Because they’re in the messy middle, they’re in the they’re in the mess and they want to clean up the mess before they start something new. And I understand that feeling. I also know that starting something new sometimes can help you clean up the mess. So I’m gonna talk about that as well, for my mastermind subset. Now, these are people that are making more money in their business. They oftentimes want to maybe hire a VA to come in and set up some systems and processes in their business or they want to hire another practitioner to come and help serve one on one clients so they can get some of the clients off of their plate and have more time to focus on growing their business or they want to To set up ads or funnels or have lead generation more automated before they come in to the mastermind, or they just want to have be making more money they want to be less stressed out could be lots of different things. But ultimately, the theme is I want to check these boxes first and make things less messy, so that I can then do the thing that ultimately is going to help me make it less messy. This is also going on for your clients, we can laugh about it, we have to laugh about it. I bet that if you that is your thought process, it’s getting reflected back to you by your clients by them thinking, I need to go lose some weight first, before I start working with you or I need to go like start a new diet and reduce some inflammation, I need to like go gluten free first, then I’ll come and talk to you, I need to what is it I need to be less busy. I need to get these things done in my life first, before I come back and work with you. And really, you’re thinking No, you need to be working with me. While all of these things are going on in your life, so you know how to deal with them. Because really, we think that there are these periods of time where we’ll be less overwhelmed, where things will be less chaotic, there’ll be less busy. And then we’ll really focus. And the truth is, that rarely happens, our lives usually don’t get less busy or less chaotic, and truly being able to set up systems and processes in our life and do something new. Like in our health journey, business journey, whichever that is, while life feels messy. And chaotic, is the magic because it’s going to be messy and chaotic most of the time. So we need to know how to operate in that environment, because that’s the environment that we have. So messy middle mandatory messiness, it’s happening for you. It’s happening for me, it’s happening for your clients. Let’s talk about it. The reason this is a problem is because like I just said, it implies that there is a point where things aren’t messy, like we have to get out of the messiness, so that we can take a breath, recalibrate, and then it won’t be messy ever again. And that is just not true. So for my clients that I see that, for example, think about joining the profitable nutritionist program, but they’re like, Oh, I gotta go do these other things. First, I want to get my website up. First, I want to take some clients, first, I want to figure out my process. First. They’re very overwhelmed, they waste a ton of time doing the wrong things a lot of the time, and focusing on things that aren’t really helping them make money and help our clients and their business. But they feel like they’re productive. And they think that they’re doing the right things. They’re spread way too thin. They’re getting burned out, and feeling really frustrated about the lack of progress and lack of income in their business. So finally, a lot of these people will join the TPN program after maybe months of thinking about it and thinking No, I want to do this on my own first or no, I’m gonna go finish up these other things first. Sometimes they take years thinking about it. And that’s fine for me. But I feel really bad for these people. You may be one of them. I don’t know, that’s ruminating over like I want to do this, I think I should maybe I should maybe the time is right, maybe it isn’t, and continuing to do the things that aren’t getting results. Because what happens is then people will join the program. And they start following the process that I teach that they learned inside called the repeatable revenue process. And they realize holy cow, I didn’t need to be doing any of that stuff. First, I was wasting my time for some of them years doing stuff I didn’t need to be doing, then they simplify it dramatically start making money. Very messily, I might add years it feels messy in the beginning. But they start making money and start seeing a lot of progress right away, then that messiness quickly turns into a much more polished and organized process as they keep going. And as they keep following the steps that I teach and just moving forward, despite the messiness because there’s no escaping the messy beginning and the messy, middle, it’s mandatory. That’s why I’m calling it mandatory messiness. Now, what isn’t mandatory is prolonging this period of time. So let me be very clear about this. In TPN, you learn how to do this pretty fabulously alright, you shorten the messy period, for all of these new things that you’re learning how to do, where you’re figuring out your marketing, and your sales process, and your client delivery processes and all of the things that you need to figure out in the beginning that feel very messy and feel very chaotic. You don’t need to figure out how to do that on your own. We teach you a process and the program, you follow the process. Yes, it feels messy as it feels like oh my gosh, I don’t know exactly what I’m doing. But I’m gonna do it anyway. I’m going to trust it. And you do. And then you do figure it out. And it’s great. And then that part isn’t messy anymore.
So we shorten the messiness of that, but I’m not gonna lie to you. What happens is that the next thing you learn feels messy, because we’re doing things we’ve never done before. If you’ve never had a six figure business before, it’s gonna feel messy because you’ve never done that before. So of course, it feels messy. You don’t know how it’s for you. You’re figuring it out? No. Are there ways to make it less messy and processes you can follow and frameworks and can you learn from those that have gone before you? Absolutely. That’s why I’m here. Happy to help you do that. But I would never ever, ever lie to you and say that it isn’t still going to feel messy because of course it does. Now, I also want to say messy as I’m defining it right now does not mean sloppy, or unprofessional, or like you’re half assing, your stuff that is not the kind of messy I’m talking about. So client facing this isn’t messy. Okay, it means in your mind, it isn’t all figured out yet. And that’s the part that feels messy, it’s imperfect. A lot of times it’s unfinished, and it just feels messy behind the scenes, it feels messy to you. And it is mandatory, my friend. For it to be that way, at least for a period of time. It’s just not an option. I want to tell you a little bit about the beginning of my business journey and holistic nutrition in 2015. And how this was really messy. I didn’t want it to be messy, though. Let me tell you, I’ve resisted the messiness. I wanted everything to be perfect. I wanted a perfect professional website, I wanted a blog, that looks great, that was pinned perfectly on Pinterest and pinnable and shared everywhere. I wanted everything that was going out to potential clients or clients to be in writing, and to be automated. So for me, and honestly, if just total transparency, that’s because I didn’t want to be put on the spot about anything I didn’t know the answer to. Sounds ridiculous when I say it. But I know that that really was a huge part of it. I was like, I don’t know for sure, if I really know what I’m talking about. So I want to think about it in advance. I want it to all be in writing. And I want to not be put on the spot by humans in real conversations as much as possible. So I agonized over my website, and blog posts, and all of that for months at a time. I mean, it would take me probably a month to write a blog post, I can’t even remember. But I remember thinking that was a very, very, very big undertaking, because I was unwilling for anything to be messy for me. Not saying it had to look messy, outward facing. But for me behind the scenes, I wanted everything to be perfect. I wanted to know exactly what was going to connect to what, six years down the road on this website. And I wasn’t willing to push publish until I knew the big picture, and then the even bigger picture. And that’s where the overwhelm comes in. And that’s what I’m talking about with the messiness. I think the messiness is just like, I just gotta get this done. And I’ll figure out some of these details of how it’s all going to connect later. There’s a lot to be said, for just hitting publish. But I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to know exactly what email sequence was going to hook to what lead magnet and then what was going to happen and what were the tags and where was the website page that was going to lead to it? And how are people finding it on Pinterest. And did that connect to that to that to that it in 2015, there weren’t a lot of like a lot of the tools that are available now to make some of those things, pretty simple didn’t exist. So not only did I want it to be perfect and polished, and I wanted to know exactly how everything was going to work years from now, so that I could set it up, quote unquote, the right way, the first time, there was a lot of workarounds with a lot of different software’s and things not talking to each other. And it caused a lot of headaches. And it caused me to waste a lot of time. So I felt like I was working all the time, although, and I was working, but I wasn’t producing results necessarily. And I was really stressing myself out and overwhelmed with trying to anticipate how I was going to solve problems I didn’t even have yet. I guess that’s probably the best way to say so that was a lot of unnecessary overwhelm. And it was a lot of unnecessary work for myself. Because ultimately what happened is by the time I worked with some clients, and I brought them through my process, and through my courses, and I had some actual conversations with real people, I realized that I had set up systems and processes automated on the internet, that were really serving them that weren’t really answering the questions that they were asking and ended up redoing all of it anyway. So don’t fool yourself like I did for a very, very long time. That it shouldn’t be messy that we can outsmart the messiness and just plan everything perfectly. In the beginning. mean You sure can do that. But you might be wasting a lot of time and probably redoing it. If you even get to the point where you ever hit publish, which a lot of people don’t. Just so heavy, even if I as I’m saying this and remembering those days, I’m like, oh, man, that was a lot, a lot harder than it needed to be. I don’t want you to do that. I don’t want you to constantly be redoing email sequences and webpages and things that don’t need to be redone. I want you to go help people.
I want you to talk to real humans, in person and online, everywhere in the world, and talk to them about what their problems are and tell them if you can help them or not. And if you can’t help them, just tell them that and if you can help them then by all means Please tell them that as well. That’s what I really want you to do. That’s what I wish someone had been telling me to do, it would have saved me a ton of time. So for some of my students that come into the TPM program, they are most concerned about their client processes. All right, so let’s talk about the mandatory messiness. And the messy middle of not having your client processes figured out yet, this is something that we do go through in the process that I teach in the program and figuring out how are you going to serve your clients? What is this going to look like? What are the deliverables the the components, whether it’s lab testing, or it is weekly one on one calls with you or you do Voxer support? Or if you have chat support in a software like practice better, or something like that? We have lots of variations for how we can support our clients, do they get meal plans? Do they get done for you exercise plans do they get? What do they get? What do they get? How do you help them get the results was the process? And how do you ensure that they get great results and keep working through the process? Because you also have to have a process for getting your people through your process. So a lot, right. So I see students come into TBN, often, and feel very messy about what they’re going to actually do with these clients. And that prevents them from wanting to market and sell. Because, um, either consciously or unconsciously they’re thinking, but I don’t really know how I’m going to help these people think I have an idea. I think I have some ideas, but I don’t know if it works for sure. Or they’re coming out of a certification program. And they have someone else’s process that they learned in their certification, but they haven’t tested it yet. Or they think I have done this process. But everybody isn’t like me, will it work for other people? Or fill in the blank? Right? There could be any number of ways that your brain will tell you, we don’t know for sure if this process is going to work? And the truth is you don’t think you don’t. But nobody talks about this. So we are going to talk about it right now we talk about this a lot inside my coaching calls. And inside the program, we have to talk about it, how do you figure out what your client process is going to be and how you are going to support your clients to make sure that they get the results that they came for. Because I think it is just a lie that we can’t guarantee that people will get results, we can guarantee. And we can’t like as I say that I’ve done podcasts about this before, we can’t guarantee that they’re going to do the things that they’re going to get the results. But we can guarantee that we are going to set up every opportunity for success for those clients to do the things and to get the results. And there is a lot that’s in our control. I don’t think it’s useful at all to dwell on or think about people that don’t want to get the results or they aren’t going to put in the work or that aren’t going to follow through. None of that is useful. We want to think about the people that do and that are and they’re here, and how we’re going to support those people and create processes to ensure that they get the results they came for. So with that in mind, we have to think about this analogy of riding a bike I love like this, just to me, I think is the best way to explain it. I love thinking about your client process this way. And we could really apply this to any area of your business, but specifically in working with your clients. There’s like the elephant in the room thinking that other people have a process that they just know, or they learned and that you haven’t learned it yet. Like how come everybody else has a claim process? And how do they know what to do and how come I don’t know? Well guess what they didn’t know either. But they took their best guess. And they tried it out. And it felt very messy. In the beginning when they did that just like riding a bike. Riding bikes, the best example here, because when you first get on a bike, you are wobbling all over the place. And you do not know how to balance and you don’t know how to pedal while at the same time watching the ground for obstacles, while also kind of looking up and around and making sure you don’t get hit by a car. And then where do your hands go. And you got to figure out the steering. And you’re you’re trying to think of so many different moving parts literally at the same time while you’re learning how to ride a bike. And it’s very foreign. And it is not working. It’s clunky, and you fall over and you wobble a lot. And that’s what all of this is like. That’s what the messy middle feels like. And the mandatory messiness is when you’re wobbling on the bike. So what a lot of people want to do is they want to watch videos about riding a bike, not really about riding a bike, but about their business, right. They want to listen to podcasts, and they want to read books, and they want to watch YouTube videos and they want to take courses and they want to go get more advanced certifications and they want to, to hear other people talk about how to ride a bike. They want to hear other people tell them what riding a bike is like and they want to listen to podcasts about bike riding, what that feels like. And all of that just still gets you to the point where you have to get on the bike and you have to wobble because you can’t learn about riding bike until you’re actually pedaling and like feeling that super unbalanced feeling and then getting your balance. That’s what the messiness is, that’s what it is. It’s that wobbly on the bike. Oh my gosh, I’m pedaling and it feels like I’m gonna fall over any second. but I’m still gonna keep going. That’s what you do in the profitable nutritionist program. By the way, we have an entire framework for how to quickly move through that really unbalanced feeling and keep pedaling anyway. Because quickly, you get to the point where you can hold on to the handlebars pedal at the same time, way faster than you thought you could, you can look at the ground, you can look up and around you and make sure you’re not going to get hit by somebody. And you can do it pretty unconsciously when in the beginning, it felt so hard, but it doesn’t feel like that forever. Best news of the day, it doesn’t always feel like that your client process that you don’t even feel like you have right now. It’s gonna be so dialed and so innate. And you’re gonna have to think about it after you’ve done it for a while just like riding a bike. So we have to get past the messiness feeling, the messy middle, where we’re like, oh my gosh, this is terrible. I’m so wobbly. I’m second guessing all of my life choices right now. We have to get past that. Keep going. Keep pedaling, so that that stuff feels like it’s just old hat, right. And that is what happens. So you’re gonna do this inside the TPM program, by the way, is I think is the best place to do. Come on, and shameless plug we would love to help you do it. But we don’t want you to be overthinking your decisions. We don’t want you to be overthinking this messiness, and the feeling and thinking that is a reason to stop it because your brain will be screaming at you that this feels very imperfect. This feels unprofessional. We don’t know exactly what we’re doing, oh my gosh, slow down. Sometimes heating, that warning is good, but a lot of times it isn’t. So we want you to get quickly to the version of your business where you’re pedaling, and you feel really balanced and it is just cruising along. Alright. Let’s talk about another example though. Maybe you would like to hear another storytime about some very, very messy middle some mandatory messiness. I do have taught on a webinar several times. This story, like it’s, it’s part of what I teach about setting up your offers correctly and pricing them correctly. In the beginning of your business, and the story that I tell is about the first thing that I sold as a holistic nutritionist, which was an online course called paleo boss, babe, can we please laugh about Paleo boss Babe and the name and all of it. Talk about imperfect talk about messy it was it was but it really wasn’t because everything in Paleo Boss Baby was pre recorded. It was it took six months to create and to launch and the marketing for paleo boss babe, was it. It wasn’t messy. Here’s what it was. It wasn’t messy. It wasn’t great. And it didn’t land and it didn’t sell anywhere near like what my business partner at the time, her name is Amy. She and I had created this course together. And what we thought was going to happen when we launched this course was like we would instantly be on the beach with umbrella drinks, like with our feet up forever. Just like this is amazing. Everybody needs paleo. Everybody needs paleo boss, babe, they’re all going to buy it, and we are going to instantly be retired. So when we launched paleo boss, babe, after literally six months of creation, and recording and editing and building out a whole launch and all of the components of it. We ended up making about $5,000 off of that launch, and we thought it was the most dismal failure on the entire planet. We had to lick our wounds for weeks afterwards. We never launched paleo boss babe again, it just died. And we went and did other things. Why do I tell you this? Because here’s what happened. We do in
retrospect is all very clear. But at the time, like I said, we were licking our wounds. And we were very confused. And it was all that we were wounded. Okay, we were wounded by the failure of paleo bass bait, which now like I said, in retrospect, I can see what’s not a failure at all. How did we make $5,000 with this course, like, that’s amazing to me. Because I know that we hadn’t had a ton of conversations with potential clients to know what kind of problems that they had, and how they were describing that problem and making sure that we were providing the solution to those problems inside the course and that we were messaging that properly. We didn’t really know well, I don’t think we did a great job of that. But apparently we did $5,000 worth of a decent job of that. So that’s great. Kudos to us. We thought again, that this was a dismal failure. But I can see, in retrospect, it was like pretty amazing that we did even that amount, because we were trying to outsmart the messiness. For six months, we built up this course, so that we had everything recorded in advance. Nobody was going to be putting us on the spot with questions we didn’t know the answers to we didn’t want to have that messiness, of not knowing the process that we were going to bring our clients through. We took a lot of time, and we laid out all of the modules and all of the lessons and everything that everybody needed to know in this course and get all of the information on how to be a paleo boss babe. What did that even mean? I basically they learned how to eat well, okay, how to eat nutrient dense food and actually digest that food. That’s pretty much what it was. Why did we call it paleo boss, babe? I mean questions for another day. But the point is, we didn’t want to be in the messiness of figuring out this process with a bunch of clients one on one or in groups, neither of us had worked with very many clients at this point when we made this course. So we wanted to outsmart that messiness, we didn’t really know what the process would be like. So we took our best guess. And we recorded everything. And we just figured if we give them all of the information possible, then that’s great. Without taking into consideration the fact that people already have this information, but they don’t implement it, and that’s what really they want to pay for is the support and implementation. But we didn’t know that because we hadn’t done the tipping on the bike, we hadn’t been pedaling and wobbling and figuring that out. We were trying to outsmart the messiness. Then we launched this program with pre written emails, and with a bunch of pre written copy. And I don’t even know I think we might have done a webinar. I can’t really remember the the different components of this launch, but it was all done in advance. And it was truly us trying to outsmart the messiness of not knowing what the heck we were doing. So at the end of the day, we didn’t want it to feel messy for us, or for anyone externally, which I think is great. As a business owner, of course, you don’t want it to look messy to people that are watching. But our tolerance of messiness on the back end was so low, that we wasted a ton of time on websites and sales pages and email sequences and things that just ultimately did not pay off. Because we were trying to avoid that messiness. Now, I want to be clear, I do all of those things now. And I help my clients do all of those things as well. But from a place of curiosity, and experimentation, and embracing the messiness and knowing that it’s going to be imperfect, and then systematically evaluating the components of it that worked well. And what didn’t work well, and tweaking and repeating that differently the next time so that we get a better result, not just completely abandoning everything, like we did with the Paleo boss, babe that just died. We’re just like, that was terrible, quit, go do something else. That’s what we want to do. We don’t want it to be messy. So we want to quit, we think, Oh, my gosh, that was awful. We have to have a new niche, we have to have a new offer, we have to do a new course, we have to do a new certification, we need more letters behind our name, whatever it is, that your brain is using to negotiate with you to get out of the messiness. And try to make it perfect somehow be onto yourself, okay? What I want you to do is just to expect and anticipate and love the messy middle. For everything new that you do in your business, it’s gonna feel messy, we’re doing a new thing. It’s going to feel like oh, my gosh, I don’t have all of this figured out yet. I don’t know exactly how it’s going to work. I don’t know if this is the most efficient way to do it for the next five years. I know for sure. That’s what my brain really goes to. It’s like, I don’t know, are we doing it? Are we doing this? Right? Are we setting it up right now? Or are we going to have to redo this later? Because if we’re gonna have to redo it later anyway, we should just really perfect it now. So we don’t have to redo it. Now, is that wise? Yes, of course it is. That makes a lot of sense. But if you’re onto yourself and realize that that makes you slow down, it makes you overthink everything. And it makes you much less efficient in the long term, because you are being perfectionistic, then you gotta be on to yourself about it, like I am with, to be honest with myself and like i Okay, self brain. I know, I know, I know, we would love to never have to do redo anything again. And we would love to know how this is all going to work out five years from now. And it’s gonna be messy. Sometimes this is just one of those times where it feels imperfect. And it kind of feels like unsure. But it’s not a reason to stop. It’s supposed to be I’ve never done this exact thing before. And this is just what it feels like. And that’s okay. And a lot of the times, I realize that just giving myself permission to let it feel messy and make that not be a problem unlocks the knowledge of how to make it more efficient and how to just move forward because really done is better than perfect. Perfect never happens. We know this, but it’s hard in the moment to decipher where it is useful to consider that and where it isn’t. So hopefully some of that lands hopefully you can take the part that you need to hear and run with it. Ultimately, I just want you to love the messiness phase, the how is this all going to work question because we always will have that when we’re doing something new and buy something new. I just mean like you’re at a new level of growth. You’re at a new, a new area that you’ve never been before. Either learning new skills or maybe making more money, maybe helping more people spending your time differently could be so many different things. But if you’re in uncharted territory, it’s kind of fun. And it’s kind of great to embrace this, like, I just don’t know how this is all gonna work. My gosh, it’s kind of messy here, I’m in the messy middle. Love this part, it’s a good reframe. It’s kind of where you’re the scientist, and you put on your lab coat. And you’re testing different hypotheses, and you’re testing different ideas, just curious and, and testing it all out. It’s where you’re figuring out the best ways to do things for your unique processes and for your goals and for the way that your brain works the best. And this is where your vision of your dream business gets to come to life, because you’re allowing it to be messy in your brain, and you’re allowing yourself to not have all the answers right now for forever. That’s okay. So just don’t stress. And I say this as much for me as for you. And like I’ve said, just very honestly, my brain loves to go to the is this going to work for the next five years place? So it’s a reminder for me, as I say this to you, believe me, but do not stress about setting up systems and processes that you’re going to scale with years from now. Right now? Yes, it is good to think about those things. Yes, it is good to plan ahead. And to be aware of things that may need tweaking in the future that may need to change in the future as your business grows, that’s great. But it’s really perfectionistic and is not going to be useful for you and your precious bandwidth to solve problems now that you don’t even have yet be aware that they could be coming keep an eye on it. Yep, for sure. But let it come together, let it be just feeling a little bit messy right now in the name of getting to that point where you get to solve those problems. So my fellow type a planner, this is hard. Like I said, this is just as much for me as it is for you. But we have to come to terms with this now. Or we waste a whole lot of time and energy trying to help plan the inevitable truth, which is that we just don’t know what we don’t know, until we get there. And we do it a little bit messily. And that’s okay, it’s fun, it’s fun to be a little bit messy in the background of your business. Now in the process that I bring my students through in the profitable nutrition program, we do this messiness together, and we make the foundational decisions that you need to make to get started through the lens of what is going to make you the best at marketing, and selling and delivering the best results to your clients. We keep it really simple, what is going to make you the best, what is your ideal business model? And what where do you need to work here, what’s gonna be the best use of your time here for those decisions? Okay, we go through this together, I have a framework I bring you through and a process that we do that we go through how to establish your offer, what to include in the offer, how to price your offer, how to organically market it to your most ideal clients. So you have the most amount of referrals coming in, that are just flooding in the door, and then how to sell to those people that are already waving their hand at you saying oh, my gosh, I’m interested in I’m interested, how do you sell to them in a way that they are ecstatic to pay you? They get started immediately. They don’t have objections. They’re not saying, Okay, this sounds great. But I’ll have to get back to you. None of that, right. So you get really good at marketing, and selling by following the process I teach in the program, but it includes mandatory messiness. So my my message for you here is yes, there are ways to make it less messy, but it still is going to feel messy when you’ve never done it before. Okay, you don’t have to figure out all of the messiness on your own. But just know that it will feel like that it will feel imperfect, just like riding the bike, when you don’t know how to balance on the bike yet. All right. But the good news is, you follow this process, you keep on moving in your business, and with some sales under your belt, and some clients that you’ve been working with, then you start to refine those client delivery processes and
the systems for how to do that a little bit more efficiently. But you’re doing it using data from actual experience, instead of what I did with paleo boss, babe, which was, I think that this is how it’s going to work, I’m going to build out an entire system with tons of software and automations, for something I think might work, but I haven’t tested it yet. That’s terrible. Don’t do that. Don’t do that terrible, worse, terrible, bad use of your time. I don’t want that for you. But what happens when you are going through and systematically evaluating those first few clients and those first few sales conversations and your marketing efforts as you go, is that you’re able to see what is working and do more of that. Instead of doing more of what isn’t working, and then find yourself months or years down the road with a business that isn’t providing the results that you want. That’s what I don’t want for you. What I do want for you, is for you to have a simple business that fuels your life, but isn’t your entire life where clients are banging down your door, you’re getting referrals left and right, have no idea where they’re even coming from, but people are talking about you and that’s a beautiful thing because they’re getting results. And those referrals are just popping in. And when you do this, you get better and better at articulating the pain points of your people and talking about the problems that they have where they have a feeling like oh my gosh, she knows this better than I do. Like she had understands that she knew exactly what I was gonna say, just reading my mind, holy cow. Yes, that’s exactly what we want. And we want you to be really good at talking about the solution that you offer to your people and how you simply help them. Like, I guess what I’m saying there is explaining your process in the simplest way that they actually understand, instead of trying to teach them every single thing that you that you are possibly going to teach them, and having them be really overwhelmed. We don’t want that. Why don’t you very simply explain your process, so that they leave feeling like this is so simple and doable, oh, my gosh, and I can get these results. This is amazing. You want them to know exactly what those results are. And then it just becomes second nature. The more you do this, the easier it is. And it’s just, it’s not something you think about it’s like riding the bike while also drinking your water bottle and watching for cars. And doing all of the things multitasking at the same time. In the beginning, it was so hard to just pedal, but it gets to the point where it’s just second nature, and you can do all of it at once without even thinking right? That means when and if you need to get into writing those marketing emails or email sequences or doing launches or, you know, tidying up your website, that copy practically writes itself, you know exactly what to say to your people. You’re not staring at a blank web page, wondering, oh, my gosh, what do I even put on here? No, you know exactly what I put on there. Because you’ve been delivering the messaging. Already, you know what’s working. In this situation, your sales conversations are more of a formality at this point, because people are already coming to you ready to get started, they know that they know they’re sold already, they want to get started now. And then your clients are super motivated, and they’re resourceful. They’re blowing your mind and their own minds with the results that they’re getting, your processes are getting even tighter and more dialed in. Because you are, you’re allowing them to come together by actually experimenting with what’s working, and you’re being curious about it, and you’re not worried so much about the exact perfect process. Instead, you’re just trusting yourself to make it a little bit better each time. And that’s exactly what happens, then the process gets a little better each time and your clients go tell people Oh, my gosh, this is amazing. And those referrals keep coming. All right. But it’s messy. In all of these areas. In the beginning, it’s mandatory for it to be that way, when you haven’t done it when it isn’t second nature yet to do any of these things, it’s going to feel messy to you. And the problem is, most business owners don’t anticipate the messy middle, they don’t anticipate this mandatory period where it feels messy, and their brain is screaming at them, oh my gosh, it’s not sustainable. You can’t keep going in your business like this, this is so inefficient, you should quit. It’s too hard. You can never take on enough clients at this rate. Look at how much time we’re spending on each of these clients, the math doesn’t pencil out, we should we should go for a different niche, we should change our offer should make a course called paleo pasta.
Whatever it is, your brain will negotiate with you on this if you’re not anticipating this messy, middle, and the mandatory period of messiness that is coming. So don’t do it. Don’t listen, don’t quit, you’re just in the messy middle when your brain is having those thoughts. Okay, like I said, it’s like riding a bike, it’s the wobbly point, it’s not useful to think, oh, my gosh, bikes are terrible, this bike doesn’t work, I think, I think this bike is broken, I should go get a new bike, I should never bike again, oh, you got to just keep figuring it out, you got to keep going in your business is the same way that things that are hard and require a lot of focus right now will not feel like that forever. So keep going. I see this specifically in stages, like around stage four that I talked about in business growth, which as I define it is after you’ve made 10k in your business, so you’re at the 10,000 I see this usually like between 10 and $20,000, maybe 10 to $30,000. So you’ve worked with enough clients that you’ve made that amount of money, you’re, you’re really trying to figure out your client processes and some of the automations. And some of the ways you could streamline it. But you haven’t done quite enough of the delivery of those processes yet, whether that’s your marketing processes, your selling processes or your client delivery, you haven’t done it quite enough times yet to really figure out how it could be more efficient, and where you could streamline and so you’re still like in the wobbly bike phase a little bit, you’re going a little bit faster, you’re not falling over as often. But it’s definitely not second nature yet to just jump on and ride the bike. So at that point, I just want to say if that’s you just know, I see you It’s Okay, keep going keep riding the bike. If you’re not in the DPN program come in TBN we can help make it a lot smoother for you. But don’t stop. Because this is where your brain is going to say we can’t we can’t you just it’s not sustainable. Oh my gosh, everything that’s happened so far is a fluke. This is not sustainable. We there’s no way that we can make enough money and that we can work with enough clients because look at how much time we’re spending for each of the clients. No, we’ll just keep going. Just keep going. I promise it will get so much more efficient, and it will get more consistent and you’ll get so much better at it if you just keep going. But you’re in the messy middle. There’s there’s a different flavor of that at each stage, but I see it really, really prevalent in that stage four area that after you’ve made $10,000. So you are working with clients and your schedule starts to get a little bit busier. Or you’re working with a group of clients, like maybe you have a group program, and your schedule is getting busier. And you’re starting to feel a little bit of that pinch of Oh, my gosh, I could see how this could really fill up and take over my entire life. It won’t, you are in control, it’s okay, we won’t let that happen. And you have to to just keep in mind that it’s not going to take you this much time forever to do these things. You’re just still new at doing the things. Okay. So we want to get we want to at this stage be curious about solidifying what the processes are that could have room for improvement in efficiency and what can be delegated? And what can be systematized and what that can look like so that we can work towards automating them. So just don’t get me wrong. Because I’ve I feel like I kind of may be giving the impression so far in this episode, that you’re never going to focus on automations or scaling your business or the scalability of it. No, that’s not the case at all. I just don’t want in the beginning of your business, for you to be focusing on that stuff at the expense of actually having a business because I know I definitely did that. It’s quite the opposite, though, I do want you to put considerable time and attention into decisions about the scalability of your business long term, once you have those foundational foundational skills in place, so when you’re cruising along on your bike without tipping over every 10 feet, then we definitely want to be looking at how do we make this better? How do we take what’s working right now and make it better make it more efficient, make it even better delivery to the client while lightening the load on your end. And there are lots of ways that we do that specifically, in the mastermind. This is what I work with my more advanced clients on. So when you’ve made at least $50,000 in your business, you are ready to start thinking longer term. And that is when I would invite you to think about the mastermind. The focus of the mastermind is streamlining and scaling. So we spend a lot of time and attention on building out the marketing and client delivery processes together in the mastermind container and how to make those like I said more efficient, and able to get your clients better results with less of you, that looks different for different business offers and different business types. So you want to get your unique processes figured out and polished up in the beginning so that you can then scale your business. But how you do it is you’ll either be packaging up those unique processes and philosophies and things that are working well in your business into a scalable offer, like a group program, or a membership or a course or a live retreat, something like that, where you deliver this process and this transformation to many people at once. That is one way to scale your business to reach more people without more of your time. Or for some of my mastermind students, their business model is still serving clients one on one. But what they do is they bring on other practitioners, too, and hire them to deliver the one on one support to those clients and have a whole process for for doing that. So that it’s actually scalable in the sense that they can bring on a lot more clients, but they are not personally delivering the support to all those one on one clients. Both of those business models scale really well. But just uh, you know, inside the mastermind, we do talk a lot about the process for hiring and training contractors for tech stuff in your business for admin for client support, and we call that fulfillment. So if you were bringing on other practitioners to help support your clients, how do you do that? How do you vet those people? How do you train them in your philosophies and in delivering your processes? And if you don’t have that your processes anywhere except housed in your brain? How do you systematize that? And how do you do it? That is the kind of stuff that we talked about, and that I teach clients in the mastermind. So all of this is a very, very valuable skill as you grow your business. It’s all the stuff that a lot of our type a perfectionist brains want to think about right away in the beginning. I know mine shared it. So I wanted to talk about both ends of the spectrum in this episode about embracing the messy middle like thinking about, yeah, the stuff that you want to do in your business someday. But if you’re in the beginning, you really don’t need to worry about it. You don’t need to be worrying about automations and systematizing and software’s and all of the stuff that’s going to support your big business someday. It doesn’t have to be your focus right now. And in fact, it probably is holding you back from helping people and getting to that point where you have a bigger business that’s ready to scale if you’re doing that, I know for sure it cost me a lot of time and money in the beginning to be trying to to outsmart the messy middle and just get to the perfect version, the automated systematized processes version way too soon, I wasted so much time and I ended up redoing all of that stuff anyway. So if you are in the beginning of your business, know that and if you are further along in your business, know that you probably are at a time him where we should be talking about, how do you do this? Are you going to be delegating things in your business? In which case you need to hire people? How do you find people to hire? What do you hire for first? What are the processes behind that? How do you interview? How do you do test projects? Oh, my gosh, so much to know. Yes, there is. That’s what we do in the mastermind, we also have a lot of discussion. And I have a process that I teach in the mastermind as well, for selling one to many. So just like your delivery of your one on one processes will change over time so that you can serve more people. So that as you’re selling, you probably won’t be doing one on one sales calls for very long, if that’s the way that your business is currently set up, we need to figure out how to sell one to many, what does that look like. So all of these things can be systematized and should be eventually, but just don’t be scared of the messy middle in the beginning. And the beginning of any of these stages, where it feels like you just don’t have it all figured out. That is what it feels like when it’s messy. And that part isn’t mandatory, to get to the part where it feels easy. And it feels like you get it and you know how everything connects and what the strategy is and where you’re heading. And just about that time, where you feel like you really have it all handled, then you get into territory where you’re doing something new again, and it all feels like the messy middle. But nothing has gone wrong, okay, nothing is going wrong, you’ll always be in the messy middle in some regard. And it’s okay. So, to clear this up, if you have any questions about the two things I talked about today, which is the messy middle in the beginning of your business up to when you’ve made about $50,000, which is the foundational, messy middle. And that’s what I work on in the profitable nutritionist program with my clients, everything that’s going to come up in your brain and in your business during that period of time, and how we make it easier, better simpler for you and for your clients. So you can quickly move past the messy middle in all of those areas, right get out of the messiness, even though it is going to feel that way. And we’ll get into the next area of messiness, which is where you are streamlining and scaling your business. And that is after you’ve made about $50,000, then we are and these are not hard numbers. But this is where I’ve seen kind of our the sweet spots and where people are making big decisions. So that’s my that’s my my line. After you’ve made about $50,000 in your wellness business, then you would be a candidate for the mastermind and for making decisions about streamlining and scaling your business. And that is when you’ll be in the mandatory messiness of new uncharted territory where you are looking at, do I hire more people?
Do I systematize? Some of the stuff I’m already doing with software’s or with automations? Do I need to just be eliminating a lot of this stuff? Are there decisions I’m going to be making now that impact my business three years from now that I need to be aware of? And like what does that all look like? So then we start thinking longer term. And that’s what we do in the mastermind. So those are the difference between the two, I do get some people asking questions about what are the differences between both of those programs. And really, it’s about the strategy that we are working on, because of where your business is at. So there are things that we talked about in the mastermind that you just do not need to worry about at all in the beginning of your business. And that that is why we have two different containers. Because if I was coaching on hiring and bookkeeping at a higher level and a lot of the stuff that we do in the mastermind, but I was talking about that to beginning business owners in the TPM program, it would completely overwhelm them. And I don’t want that so anyway, there’s there’s just a different flavor of mandatory messiness and the messy middle at each stage of the game, but that’s okay, because it’s supposed to be there, nothing has gone wrong. So if you take nothing else out of this episode, just just know this, it’s supposed to feel like it’s messy for you. It shouldn’t be messy for others. No, I’m not saying be unprofessional, look unprofessional, don’t show up to clients, or on a video with Bedhead and a messy room behind you on a zoom call. Nothing like that. That’s not the messiness that I’m talking about. The mandatory messiness I’m talking about is where you feel like I just don’t have all the answers. The mandatory messiness is you behind the scenes, just not having every single process completely figured out. And, and being okay with that, and trusting yourself that you will figure it out, and that you’re still providing a great experience for them. You’re leaving lots of room for tweaking and pivoting and evaluation and you’re remaining curious and you’re staying flexible and really open minded to what ideas might come up that you haven’t even thought of yet. That’s the mandatory messiness. Okay. We talk a lot about that in both programs, both the profitable nutritionist and in the mastermind. So if you’re not in either one of those programs, you absolutely should be, you will feel so much reassurance being around other business owners that They’re right there, in the messiness with you. And really normalizing that, and also helping you move through it faster, because that’s what we do. Okay, what else did I want to tell you? In terms of mandatory messiness, I had a couple of notes prepared, I think that we, you know, I just, I think we covered it, really that’s it. Don’t try to escape it, don’t try to help plan it, it’s not going to work anyway, it’s just going to stress you out. So be okay with it be feeling messy to you. And that’s alright. Because pretty soon the things that are messy today are going to feel really, really well rehearsed and super, like, like old hat. It’s like, oh, that’s not even messy anymore. I know exactly how to do that I have systems and processes that support it could do it in my sleep. And there’ll be something else that’ll feel messy in its place. But that means you’re doing this crazy business thing, which is great. Same thing for your clients, the things that are really messy to them in the beginning, they get really good at as they work with you. And as you support them. So normalizing to them that of course, it should feel messy for them in the beginning when they’re doing something brand new. And they’re figuring out the best way for their brain to approach this new skill or this new habit or a new lifestyle or whatever. It is just really normalized that it should feel like the messy middle when we’re doing something new. And that’s okay. And it also won’t feel like this new messy thing forever. It’s totally fine. All right. So the first step getting there is just embracing the messiness do that decide that you love the messy, imperfect, unclear parts of your business, they’re not a problem at all. And we’ll just keep talking about them over the next few weeks, so you have a lot of messiness to look forward to in the coming episodes. Just know that there’s more of it coming your way. I’m ready to talk to you about some of the messy things in my business. And some of the messy things that I’ve seen with some of my clients recently, we’re gonna really dive into it. So I will be back in the coming weeks with some of that. And in the meantime, you have a wonderful week, my friend
