February 20, 2017

How to start a nutrition business with a signature one-on-one program (+ free workbook!)

February 20, 2017/ Ashley Srokosz

If you're reading this, chances are good that you're either in school to become a nutritionist of some sort (dietician, holistic nutritionist, holistic health coach, etc) OR you've already graduated and are ready to start working with clients ... but you have no idea how to start a nutrition business!

Our schools teach us how to be amazing stewards of health for our potential clients, they just don't teach us how to actually organize our appointments, programs, websites, marketing, and everything else that goes into running a successful nutrition business.

Learning how to start a nutrition business that's successful is well beyond the scope of a single blog post, but we can definitely cover the easiest and quickest way for you to start making money as a nutritionist: one-on-one clients.

December 19, 2016

How to organize your business (+ free spreadsheets and planners)

December 19, 2016/ Ashley Srokosz

It's coming towards the end of the year, so naturally all you can see all over social media is "plan this" and "plan that". Plan your launch. Plan your programs. As a Type-A personality, I'm all about the planning, but I'm also trying to listen to my instincts more. The pull inside me. The last two weeks I've felt a pull to physically clear out my office of all the crap and clutter so that I could clear out my mind, too (= 3 garbage bags full of shredded paper!🗑). I realized that I have tons of free tools on my website to help you organize your business, but they're spread out all over the place, so I wanted to get them all organized into one post.

The tools that I'm sharing today all seem a little ... unnecessary. They don't have anything to do with actually taking clients and generating income, but really, they do.

You see, when you first start your holistic health business, you might have learned about the one-on-one client model. You work with a client, they pay you an hourly rate. So when you were in school or preparing for your business, you could calculate what you could potentially make by figuring you'd work 40 hours a week times whatever you charged per hour.

But then you started your business and realized you were doing more admin-type stuff than anything else: emails, bookkeeping, social media. On average, you'll probably be spending 80% of your time on marketing and admin, and 20% actually seeing clients.

The point of the tools below are to help you get organized with the 80% crap that is taking up the majority of your time.

When you can streamline that part, you can free up more time to:

- take clients one-on-one
- create a group program so you can get paid more per hour
- develop an online program
- work your network marketing biz to create residual income

THOSE are the only things that actually make you money. Not social media, not emails, not writing blog posts ... but they are necessary evils to keep people lined up and ready to work with you.

Get organized with your marketing (and other busy work) and you'll have more time for people to pay you. It's a simple as that.

Here are my 4 favourite FREE ways to help you organize your business:

December 05, 2016

Running a business as an introvert

December 05, 2016/ Ashley Srokosz

Let me just start off this post by sharing something that most people don't know about me until you become real life, in-person friends with me: I'm an introvert. A *huge* introvert. That usually comes as a surprise to most people. You all see me doing Facebook Live videos, essential oil classes, or keynote presentations. Public speaking usually doesn't phase me. While I have no problem acting like an extrovert, I'm far from it.

For the longest time I never saw myself as an introvert. I thought introverts were just overly shy, and most people think the same thing. That's why no one thinks I'm an introvert when they meet me. When I'm out in public, I know how to be "on". I'm high energy, talking a ton, bopping from person to person.

And then I get home and crash. Sometimes I crash hard, like now. I'm writing this after spending the last 3 weeks pretty much feeling like I had a cold off and on, until an actual cold hit me on Thursday and has yet to release me from it's viral-filled tentacles 4 days later.

You see, I've spent the last 2 months talking and being around a lot of people. There are seasons in my business that call for it, and it's the end of that season. There's been flying to a convention and being surrounded by 30,000 people for 4 straight days (and let me tell you, flying triggers panic in me all by itself), followed by launching a new website, going on trips with my extroverted husband for his birthday (which means running around a new city from morning until late at night), going to an all-day TEDx talk, meeting new people at business summits, teaching more frequent than average oils classes, and mentoring my ever-growing essential oils team.

All of this while my husband travelled to 4 different cities over 4 different weeks on multi-day trips for his business in the last 2 months, leaving me to solo parent our 4-year-old son whom I adore but he's super high energy and needs attention, which can be exhausting.

It's all a bit too much for this introvert.

October 25, 2016

How to host a webinar for free (+ free video tech training)

October 25, 2016/ Ashley Srokosz

Ahh, running a webinar. Is there any phrase that strikes more fear into the beginner entrepreneurs heart than presenting, and possibly even pitching something paid, to a live crowd of people? Not only that, but having to figure out the technology as you go is enough to turn some of you off this amazing list building tool forever. And then there's the cost, which for some platforms is upwards of $50 to $100 US a month. Seriously, that's outrageous, especially when I'm going to teach you how to host a webinar for free 😜.

There are several reasons why you might want to host a webinar, like:

- you want to grow your email list fast
- you want to launch your in-person programs or services
- you want to launch an online program
- you want to partner with someone else, pitch their program, and collect affiliate sales

I didn't start doing webinars in my nutrition business until I was ready to sell online programs, and even then I only used them as part of my launch process. For example, when I was launching my 8-week Mama Mojo program, I did a few different webinars about how to get rid of menopause and PMS symptoms. My course was going to teach them how to balance their hormones by eating whole foods, doing gentle detoxes, and a few other lifestyle changes.

I had a launch goal of $10,000, and my course was $497, so I would have to sell 20 spots to get to my goal ...

October 12, 2016

Behind the scenes of a $10,000 online course launch

October 12, 2016/ Ashley Srokosz

I've been asked over and over again about how I launch my online programs, so today I'm spilling the beans behind the $10,036.80 launch of my Brand, Build, Blog course (BBB: A branding & blogging course for holistic biz owners) to an email list of just 400 people. This course has since sold another $4,049.59, since it's an evergreen course and is available year round (numbers up to date as of Oct 11, 2016), bringing it's 8-month total to $14,086.39.

I'm going to break down the timeline of the course creation, launch timeline and sales, plus my secret weapon to creating this profitable online course.

I've often been asked how I come up with my ideas for online courses, and to tell you the truth, the idea for them usually comes to me fully formed in my head ... but only after years of developing my own personal skills and knowledge in the area that I'm going to teach and being able to break large concepts down into easy to understand steps.

For example, in 2014 I launched Mama Mojo, an 8-week online course for busy moms who want more energy, balanced hormones, and to calm their digestive systems. While the idea of the course hit me like a lightning bolt, it was based on my 6-month program that I took one-on-one nutrition clients through for 5 years before that. I guess you can say it was 5 years in the making. I knew the 6-month program worked, so I just translated it into an online version. That course went onto sell $11,114.90 with 2 launches spaced 6 months apart.

For BBB, I had been doing one-on-one Biz Strategy Sessions where people kept asking me about their websites. They didn't know how to design them, they needed help with the copy, and just generally wanted to know how to use SquareSpace better. This is where I started feeling that there was a need for this sort of information so I wouldn't have to waste my time repeating myself over and over again.

So, back in 2014 before I launched Mama Mojo (at least an entire year before BBB landed in my brain), I invested in a branding course that was the base of my $20,000 re-brand. A year after that, I invested in a different course that taught me branding AND website development. 4 months before the course idea came to me in late 2015, I had invested in a copywriting course. All of these courses taught valuable and needed lessons in a general sense, but nothing that was geared just towards holistic health practitioners.

There were no copy templates just for us, and unless a fellow holistic practitioner was really interested in design and web development like I was, it would be hard for most nutritionists or essential oil advocates to take the same courses and translate them into a finished profitable website. I knew there was a need, and so I took the best, most actionable concepts that I had learned from those 3 courses, added my own personal spin and experience with them after developing my own website on SquareSpace, and voila, Brand, Build, Blog was born in my head.

Then I just had to get it into a form for others to learn from and formally launch it. No biggie 😳.

Here's the timeline so you can follow along my course creation journey: