The Health Coaching Career Blueprint: From Certification to Cash Flow

Taking the leap into health coaching as a business owner can feel overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. In this special Career Week webinar replay from July 31, 2025, business and marketing strategist Hailey Rowe will walk you through what it really takes to turn your certification into a thriving, profitable career.

From building authentic client relationships to implementing a simple system for cash flow, Hailey will break down the business side of health coaching into clear, manageable steps. You’ll learn how to attract your first (or next) clients without feeling salesy, grow your visibility without burning out, and create a business that aligns with your lifestyle and purpose.

Whether you’re just starting out or looking to gain momentum, this session will leave you feeling confident, inspired, and equipped to take your next step.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why launching a coaching business doesn’t have to be complicated or scary
• Hailey’s 4-step process to simplify client attraction and generate income
• Examples of relationship-building strategies that lead to real results like email list growth, partnership opportunities, and booked calls
• How to build a business that reflects your values, strengths, and goals

Watch the Replay

The Health Coaching Career Blueprint: From Certification to Cash Flow, With Hailey Rowe:

Transcript

Dr. Sandi: Hello, everybody. Welcome. I’m really excited to have you at our webinar. This is going to be wonderful, and we’re doing this in conjunction with… This week is what we’re calling Career Week. It’s a commonly asked question. Will there be opportunities to make a living as a health coach? We’re going to address those issues and share some tips, some strategies, some ways that you can be very, very successful in this absolutely growing field. Every day almost I see some announcement about not only the effectiveness of health coaching but also the growth of health coaching. So, we’re happy to have you.

And if you are new to our FMCA community, I know we have some people here who have just enrolled, and people in our alumni program have joined us and current students. So, I’m going to turn it over to our very special guest today, and I will let her introduce herself. But she is a big supporter of FMCA and health coaching in general and how to make it work as a health and wellness coach. So, I’m going to turn it over to Hailey Rowe. Take it away. And I’m going to go off camera.

Hailey: All right. Well, thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here, and I’d love to hear in the chat a little bit more about where you guys are in your journey. So, feel free to share just kind of are you already certified and you’ve been trying to grow your business for the last X amount of time or you’re thinking about getting certified, but the concept of running your own business is a little daunting to you. I’d just love to know. And we’ll get into our talk today and I’ll introduce myself in just a second.

But I definitely want to highlight that I do believe in health coaching. I’ve hired my own coaches. Even in college, I did nutrition coaching and personal training for staff and faculty, but I was always more… I majored in entrepreneurship and then I started working in business development and marketing for wellness startups, which kind of combined my passion for business and wellness. And I always, kind of, liked being on that side a little bit more.

But what we’re going to be talking about today is The Health Coaching Career Blueprint and how you can go from getting your certification to actually making an income as a wellness professional. So, for today’s talk, I have some action steps for you that we’re going to be going through. And if you guys want to have your own copy of the action steps, if you go to haileyrowe.com/fmca, it’ll just open to a Google Doc that has a summary of what we’re going to go through and the action steps you can take.

So, before we get into the talk, I’ll share a little bit just quickly about my story because many of you I’m sure might be able to relate. So, back when I was in high school actually, I was an old soul and I started selling fitness DVDs, of all things, and knew that I liked sales, I liked wellness, but I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life, of course. And I ended up getting my bachelor’s degree in entrepreneurship and then kind of coaching on the side. And I got some life coaching certifications. I got one in habit change and human behavior. And then in 2017, I told myself, you know what, I’m not ready yet. This was after I graduated college. I’m not ready to have my own business. I need more certifications. I need to learn more. I need to grow more before I could do my own thing. And the truth is no one’s ever ready. You just have to kind of dive in.

And in the beginning… So, back when I started coaching full-time back in 2017, I would spend so much time on content creation because I thought all I had to do was just post more and that’s how I’m going to get clients. And I would spend, like, 13 hours a week sometimes creating content. And I know that because I time myself. I use a little timer app. And I also was hoping clients would find me instead of taking the initiative. So, I just didn’t have a strategy or an approach. And I knew if I was going to be a full-time coach, that I needed more structure and more predictability in my business. And working in the startup world really helped me learn marketing, sales, copywriting, all of that, but I also invested in mentors. I really did try a lot of trial and error until I got the basics down. And I finally was able to make this a career, and it has been since 2017.

But it’s been a journey. And the one thing that I would share with you is that, in order to make it work, you have to be consistent with marketing. And in order to be consistent with marketing, you have to know what to focus on, right? And so today we’re going to be talking about the four steps to client attraction or what I call the four steps to cash flow that you can use when you graduate your certification so you’re not spinning your wheels. You’re not stressed out with launches that are things that you don’t want to be doing. Like, if you’re not into social media marketing and you want to take a different approach, the approach I’m going to share with you today is flexible, meaning you can apply it to whichever marketing channel or platform or thing you want to do.

So, before we get into that, really quick, my name is Hailey Rowe. I’m on Instagram @hailey_rowe and I work with functional health coaches, wellness professionals who want to be able to book clients, have more time back, meaning they don’t want to just guess what they’re supposed to do for marketing, but they want a plan in place and they want to make an impact helping clients and doing what they love because I think that’s the real reason why many of you get into this. And then you realize, “Oh, my gosh, I also have to become an entrepreneur.” And it is possible to learn these skills, so we’ll go through that.

But the other thing is I’m grateful to have had Sandra on my podcast. I have a podcast called Health Coach Nation and have been named as one of the top 25 coaches in Chicago and a bunch of other things that have happened throughout the years that I’m very grateful for as far as recognition. And it wouldn’t be possible if I didn’t take the step, put myself out there. And I want to encourage all of you to do the same because it is a really rewarding career if you can really get into coaching and do it full time.

So, the agenda today is to talk about why starting a health coaching business isn’t as scary as you think. We’re going to talk about how to simplify client attraction with my four steps to cash flow. And then I’m also going to include or show some real examples of conversations and relationships that can be built with your marketing that can lead to email subscribers, discovery call bookings and partnership opportunities because all of those things lead to more clients.

Okay, so why is starting a health coaching business not as scary as you think? Well, what a lot of people think when it comes to starting a business is that they need to have the perfect website. They need to have a very complex email funnel. They need to be on their phones on social media 24/7. They need a business degree. They need marketing expertise. And I will say you do need to start learning about sales and marketing to make this your full-time career. But you really don’t need an extremely fancy website, a really complicated funnel, to go study business for four years. You really don’t need that.

What you need is to be able to have a way to communicate what you do and how you can help people. You need something maybe simple that explains what you do. It could be a simple… My first clients came from me having a PDF that explained what I did and offered a free call. So, you don’t need a fancy website for it to work out in the beginning. And you can always reinvest in having a website as you start to work with some clients.

But what you really do need for the business as well would be conversations and relationship-building skills, which you guys are building anyways in your coaching certification program. You do need to have a system, which is why we’re going to talk about the four steps of client attraction. And you need coaching skills. If you’re good at coaching others, a lot of running your business is going to be coaching yourself by asking yourself solution-oriented questions, evaluating the things you’re doing for marketing and sales and asking what could I do better, what could I tweak, things like that. And you really do need a willingness to learn because there is a lot to learn.

But if you have these traits and you’re willing to start messy, meaning I don’t need the perfection of a website, I don’t need everything to be automated in the beginning, you can get started and you can make your first $10K without having any of those fancy things. So, many of you, like I said, are already learning business skills by learning health coaching. You’re learning deep listening. You’re learning how to ask quality questions. You’re creating protocols for your clients and you’re helping them achieve transformation. And in business, marketing is a lot of listening to what people want to hear from you, what kind of challenges they have, what kind of goals they have in making content or making offers that help with those types of things. It’s a lot of sales conversation. So, if you’re good at asking good questions and diving deeper and coaching someone through their limiting beliefs or their maybe objections or things like that, you’re going to do well.

And if you’re creating protocols for your clients in your business, it’s going to be very similar where you’re going to have to create what I call a business protocol for yourself. And one of the things that I recommend is setting… We’ll maybe go through some examples later, but setting, “Here are my weekly targets for marketing and how many posts I’m going to do, how many newsletters I’m going to send, or how many collaboration pitches I’m going to send,” things like that. So, creating a system for yourself to follow so that we have something to evaluate and keep refining.

And of course, you’re going to need to be able to deliver your service, which FMCA gives you how you can onboard a client and probably some resources you can give them and things like that. So, you have a lot of what it takes. And every coach is going to start somewhere, and I know it can be daunting, but one of my clients, Danielle, she was a holistic health coach. And before we started working together, she had not a lot of experience, meaning she’d worked with a couple sporadic clients here and there and was underselling, like undercharging. And she, through our work together, was able to transition to having a three-month package or program that was high-ticket. And she booked several clients with that. She also started to lead workshops as one of her favorite ways to market because we found out what ways did she want to stick with for a sustainable marketing plan. And she was able to lead workshops for Google, for Expedia, for companies, as well as do some online virtual Zoom challenges and workshops. So, it can be possible.

So, now let’s talk about what are these four steps to cashflow. And feel free to put in the chat just on the topic of it being scary to start a coaching business, what are you scared of? Feel free to share in the chat, like scared of people judging you. Are you scared of not knowing the steps? What’s kind of freaking you out about it? And maybe during the Q&A, we can coach more on that.

But let’s go through the tactical part now. So, what are the four steps to cashflow? Well, in any marketing channel or approach that you pick, you’re going to move someone through four steps to go from being a stranger to being a client. So, the four steps are connect, engage, pre-offer and sell. So, what I mean by that with connect is we first need to find what platform or local place in your community or online place are you going to be visible to your target audience? And we want to decide that based on where we think they hang out. So, we do want to think about who do you want to work with as a health coach and where do those people hang out? And we’ll go more deep into that in a second.

But the second step is to engage people. So, this is where we ask an intentional question and we want to get clear and hear what is useful for our audience? What do they want to see from us? What do they want? If they have a certain tangible pain point or goal they want help with. And once we know that information, we can then move to the third stage, which is a pre-offer. And a pre-offer is something where you give free value upfront to then be able to invite to your sales phase. So, you give a lead magnet, which could be something where someone gives their email exchange for like a free guide or something like that, or you give a free training like I’m doing right now. You could do this for your audience and that can be your pre-offer. And then from there, you will say, if you want to go deeper on this or if you want support with the implementation of all this, then you lead to your sales phase, which is, do you want to connect for a discovery call? Or if you have a sales page, it could be that.

But for many of you doing like maybe a six month or a three-month type of health coaching package or program, you’d probably have a call with somebody first, see if they’re fit. And that’s what we call the sales phase. So, again, you could do these four steps on Instagram. You could do them on LinkedIn. You could do them locally like by doing local workshops and local partnerships. So, there’s not a one-size-fits-all, but at the end of the day, for someone who doesn’t know you to become a client, they have to move through these four steps.

So, let’s start with the connecting phase in more detail and talk about how can you actually start to implement or start connecting with your target audience. So, the first step, of course, is to decide who do you want to work with? Like, do you want to work with people who struggle with their weight? Do you want to work with people who have autoimmune condition? Do you want to work with lawyers because they’re stressed and that is a target audience you’re passionate about? Whatever it is, you want to decide that. And if you are stuck on that, I do help with that or we can coach on it in the Q&A.

But once you know that, we have to decide, “Okay, where will we connect with these people?” And I think a lot of people jump to I need to be on all the platforms at all the same time or they see a shiny object, like they see an ad on social media like that they need to do Facebook ads right now. And instead, what I want to encourage you to do is ask yourself when you’ve had practice clients or when you have gotten clients in the past, if any, or even if you’ve gotten people to ask, like even if your friends and family have asked you, “Hey, how do you stay so fit?” or “How do you…” whatever they’ve asked you, we want to pick up on what have people been interested in and what has worked in the past. Because if you tell me, “Hey, I got all my practice clients from doing a Facebook post or from word of mouth in my family and friends,” well, many of you will say, “Oh, well, we can’t scale that. We can’t do anything with that. It’s just was a fluke.” But I will argue that if you mostly have been word of mouth, you could start a referral program and you can connect with more people by saying, “Hey, I have a new referral program. When you refer someone for a free call and they sign up for a service, you’ll be able to get X,Y,Z, XYZ incentive, a bonus, a commission, free sessions with you.” I don’t know but it could be a referral program. So, that could be your first way of connecting with more people.

But the point is ask yourself: what has worked in the past? Where can you be consistent? Meaning, if you hate social media, maybe we start with local marketing. Or if you hate Instagram but you like LinkedIn because it’s a lower-maintenance platform, maybe we start there, right? So, what can you see yourself being consistent with? What are your strengths? If you love writing or you love being on video, we should take that into account. So, some of my clients, we pick a podcast strategy where they’re being on a lot of podcasts to get out there because they love talking to people and that’s their strength. So, those are things to consider.

And just to give you, kind of, examples of where you could find your ideal clients, if you’re feeling stuck hearing these prompts and you’re not coming up with anything, one option would be local. So, example, you guys are all health coaches. Could you partner with a chiropractor? Could you partner with an acupuncturist? Could you connect with a med spa? And you do the inner health and beauty, and they do the outer health and beauty. But local is one option.

Online directories and social media is another option. So, there’s tons of directories out there. I actually have a list. If you guys go to haileyrowe.com/resourcelist, I have a list of directories where coaches can list themselves, where people go to search for a coach, things like that. There’s podcasts you could be on. There’s conferences locally or online that you could speak at. Same thing with events. You could go to networking groups. Or like I said, you could start a referral program with your network and let people know about it. And the thing with connecting, since this is kind of the first step where people are getting to know you, if you’re ever doing any personal connections, meaning you are connecting with your LinkedIn followers or connections or your Instagram followers or something like that, we want to keep it short. We want to keep it invitational, meaning we’re not trying to slam our link down their throat or anything like that. And we don’t want to cram our entire life story into one message.

So, just to give you an example of what we call a value-first approach, it’s typically pretty simple to start connecting with people. This picture is an example of what I sent to somebody who was a connection on LinkedIn, meaning we were… Kind of like Facebook friends, you have Facebook friends. It’s like on LinkedIn, you have connections, right? So, this was one of my connections. And I said, “Hey, I’d love to connect. I work with many in the coaching field and it’s always great to meet others in the industry.” She responded. And then when we engage in step two, I’ll show you how you can ask an intentional question to find more information out about the person you’re talking to. But for the connection part, we’re just trying to show people we exist and connect with them on a personal level.

Now, here’s another example if you want to connect with people. Let’s say you want to do collaborations and partnerships. This was actually a message I got from someone on LinkedIn who reached out to me and he said, “I hope you’re well. I came across your profile, saw we had a few mutual connections. I enjoy connecting with like-minded business owners and thought I would reach out to connect. I look forward to chatting further.” So, the thing about this message is what I like about it is he found that we had mutual connections, we had something in common. And he said that, you know, he wanted to further connect. And what I was able to do was look at his profile, see that we had some crossovers, see that we both have podcasts and say, “Oh, my gosh, we both have podcasts. We both work with business owners. Would it make sense to do a podcast swap?” And we did. And three messages, it was like already a collaboration.

So, it’s not as daunting as you think. These are just normal human conversations you can have with people you meet on social media. And ideally, if you have something in common with them, like you have mutual connections or you guys are from the same town or something like that, that’s even better. And the step two that we have to move to after you connect with your target audience is we have to engage with them further because nobody is going to just want to work with you after one touch point with you usually, unless they already know what they’re looking for, they Googled you, they found you and they’re ready to go. Most of the time, they’ll need to engage with you first.

So, how do we do that? Well, not only with our posts and nurturing and maybe sending emails to our email lists and things like that, but we also have to be social on social media. So, step two, engaging with your audience is all about being curious about how you can be useful to someone. And we do that with an intentional question. So, this is all about service. This is all about finding out, do they have a goal or struggle or something they’d want me to post about or something they may want to freebie about that allows me to invite them into my world but also gives them value and builds trust? So, the engage stage is where we lead with curiosity. And one thing I’m going to encourage you guys to do both in your posts and when you’re having private conversations with people is to test different intentional questions. So, what I mean by that is it’s a question that allows you to gain insight about their frustrations, goals, challenges, or what they’d find useful. And we don’t want to make the question so deep that a stranger wouldn’t want to share it with you. So, in other words, we don’t want to ask, what’s your biggest food insecurity or are you looking to drop 20 pounds? Nothing like that. We want it to be something more inviting to get somebody to respond to you who doesn’t know you that well.

So, here’s an example of a message that one of my clients was sharing with her new Instagram followers. So, anytime she had an Instagram follower or people in her network that were already connected, she would say, “Hey, great to connect. I’d love to hear more about you. I’m a health coach. When it comes to topics like…” and then her areas of expertise: perimenopause and strength training and a couple other things. “Do you have any questions or challenges in these areas? I hope to make my posts as useful as possible.”

So, we’re trying to find out what does this person want or need or is curious about getting help with. And when they respond to you, you can either make content that will appease what they’re looking for and share that with them. You can invite them to your email freebie or free talk you’re giving or something like that if it’s related to what they’re sharing. But the point is to further the relationship and be able to give value of some kind.

Now, the other option with an intentional question can be as simple as, you know, “Tell me more about yourself and what are you up to these days.” It could be something as simple as that to learn more about what they care about, what they’re focused on, things like that. And then with the collaboration, as I mentioned before, I had that person who reached out and said we have mutual connections and I’d love to connect. I looked at his profile and said, “Maybe we could explore podcasting together.” And so my intentional question was more so, would you be open to exploring collaboration? Would you be open to exploring a podcast swap? And he said yes.

So, the approach can either be direct to client or direct to collab partners. And if you’re reaching out to potential collab partners, you want to ask, you know, “Would you be open to collaborating?” or something along those lines and why you want to collaborate with them. I noticed we both have an overlapping audience or we share the same mission but deliver it in different ways or whatever that might be. So, the thing that a lot of people think is, “Well, I don’t want to… There’s this fear of visibility. I don’t want to be a burden. I don’t want to annoy people.” And the thing that I share is when you’re permission-based, when you ask intentional questions, when you are sharing value in your social media approach, being social on social media actually makes you more memorable. And I know this is kind of silly, but I took a screenshot of this. Somebody was happy that I shared a freebie with them and had gotten in touch with them. So, they said, “I’m so touched that you messaged me. Thank you so much.” I shared this because I think a lot of people think the opposite and the truth is there might be somebody looking for what you do. And if they don’t know you exist, they’re just going to keep looking, keep struggling to find someone, things like that.

So, step three of turning our strangers into clients is we want to offer a pre-offer. So, this is where we found out what it is that they struggle with or what they want. And now we can maybe offer a freebie of some kind to help them start solving the problem or achieving their goal. And the reason why I like pre-offers, and honestly, you could swap this word out with a lead magnet, freebie, whatever you want to call it. But it’s a permission-based way to take a person who doesn’t know you to suddenly knowing you, trusting you, liking your work, getting value from your work.

So, one of the things that you can think about when it comes to what makes a good pre-offer or freebie is you want it to be a slice of the cake, the cake being your program, your system, your solutions that you provide clients. You don’t want it to be the whole entire cake, right? So, example, this training I’m giving to you today is four steps to client attraction. It’s not going through your whole content plan, your whole niche, your whole offer creation, mindset blocks. We’re focused just on, “Here’s something you can do for marketing.” But my whole program focuses on all those things I just mentioned, right? But I don’t give that in my pre-offer because that would be way too overwhelming, way too many steps and not as focused. So, you want your freebie to give a tangible quick win or solve a quick problem if you can or get them started on the journey to something aligned with their goals or pain point.

So, I’m going to show you an example of some titles that you could consider for a freebie or free class or free guide you make or something like that where you could use it as your freebie or pre-offer. So, the first one is like, let’s say you were a fertility coach or you specialize in helping people with getting pregnant. So, your freebie could be something like Three Ways to Boost Fertility Naturally Without IVF. So, notice how the title here is Boost Fertility Naturally. Why? Because that’s what your people probably want. And they probably want some ways to jumpstart that opportunity without IVF first. I’m not positive about that, but I would assume that if you were in that niche, that’s probably something they’re struggling with. So, that could be an example.

Another one could be, let’s say you help people with pain, chronic pain, back pain, neck pain. So, your freebie might be The Dusk Tension Tamer: Three Solutions for Back and Neck Pain Relief or let’s say you’re an overeating coach or you help people with binge eating or feeling like they are out of control around food. Maybe your freebie would be The Five Minute Trick to Stop Nighttime Overeating. And notice how these are not, you know, how to stop overeating forever. It’s kind of like a step they can take. The five-minute trick they could use tonight at dinner to stop nighttime overeating. Maybe it’s a breathing exercise that gets them settled down or maybe it’s journal prompts that help them plan for their meal and not overeat or whatever it might be. But the point here is it’s something bite-sized. They could probably digest it and do the freebie within like 30 minutes or less. It’s not a 200-page ebook and it’s focused on a micro win or a micro problem.

So, how do you deliver a pre-offer or a freebie? Well, for those of you who are not tech savvy, don’t have an email lead magnet set up, don’t have an email list, it’s okay. You can still get started with a pre-offer and it could be as simple as offering a free call that has some kind of theme. So, just like I showed you these titles, you could offer, “Hey, I have a free 20 minute stop nighttime overeating session that I’m offering. Would you be interested in that? Something like that.” So, it could be a free call. It could be a live Zoom session like a training you’re giving or workshop you’re giving. If you have any products associated with your business, it could be a sample of that, a small piece of it or sample of your program, but you’d want to still focus it on a key goal or outcome. It could be a guide or a worksheet or a checklist that helps somebody achieve a certain thing, or it could be… If you guys want to have a Facebook group where you nurture and you give a lot of tips and you go live and you do stuff in there regularly, it could be as simple as saying, join my free Facebook group and you can request in the welcome questions of your Facebook group their email address if they want to get your newsletters or things like that. So, it doesn’t have to be complicated. It could be something where they opt into your email list. That’s totally fine. But if you’re just starting out, I wouldn’t let that delay you in getting your first clients and getting your first interactions with people. And you can go with the call option if you need to do that.

So, other ways to promote your pre-offer. What happens once you have a pre-offer? Well, you’re going to want to share it in relevant posts. If you’re doing a post on social media where you could tie in your pre-offer invite, that’s great. You can share it in your Instagram stories. You could talk to the camera and say, “Hey, I got this new freebie. It’s to sharing blah, blah, blah. Message me if you’d like a copy,” you could share it in forums. So, if there is a Reddit post or something where somebody’s asking a question about, “I’m really stuck with back pain. What should I do?” You can mention, “Hey, I have a free back pain guide. Message me if you’d like it or feel free to get in touch.” Or I’m on Instagram at blank, blank, whatever your username is. But also, you can share it when it’s relevant, when you’re having conversations with people that we talked about earlier. So, when we talked about connecting with your audience and engaging with them with an intentional question, if they reply to you and they say, yeah, actually one of the things I am wanting to see content on or I’m struggling with is blank and it’s related to your freebie, you can mention it there.

So, the goal here is to have a great pre-offer because it leads to easier sales. Why? Because it allows people to see, “Oh, this person has my back. They can help me.” And these are screenshots from clients who’ve had good pre-offers. One of them got five strategy calls within two days. Another one got a lot of visitors on their website signing up for their master class because their freebie was a master class. So, there’s different approaches. And another one of my clients just did the group thing we talked about, Facebook group. And that was where she was sending everyone and gathering emails as they joined and got 60 people in her Facebook group.

So, with that, what happens next? Many of you are probably wondering, “Okay, I gave a freebie and somebody liked it, but where do we go from there?” So, once somebody gets your freebie, you have a couple options. You can either, if it is something where they give you their email address in exchange for the free guide or free gift or whatever, you can then send follow-up emails that invite to your sales process. So, yes, we did the freebie, but now I want to invite you to this opportunity to get customized support and here’s why and here’s the benefits and all that kind of stuff. So, it could look like that or it could look like an invite to a call. So, let’s say you sent your freebie to somebody who was struggling and they struggle with back pain, you gave them your back pain guide and now you’re saying, “How did it go and would it makes sense to connect deeper? Are you looking for customized support with this?” We could connect for my free discovery call if so, or health assessment or whatever it might look like.

So, that’s kind of the transition is you either have follow-up nurturing emails that start to invite to your sales process. You have a personal invite if it was a one-on-one conversation, or you could do something like having a webinar or a live training or something that’s more official where you’re going to give a talk and then you’re going to share your offer and how it works and how they can book a call with you. And the thing that I think a lot of people get tripped up on is they think selling has to be pushing or convincing or saying, “Hey, you need to go to my website and buy.” But what we need to do is ask. It’s more of an invitation. So, I always say be a normal human and say, “How did the free guide go for you? Not sure if this resonates, but I do offer free discovery calls to share how we could customize a plan for you. Would it make sense to do something like that?” Questions instead of, “You need to book this call, here’s the link,” right?

Now, last thing is going back to that referral program I mentioned at the beginning, because I do really think it’s a low-hanging fruit for many of you who are starting out. You don’t have a big audience, but maybe your practice clients have been in your network, friends, family, coworkers, things like that. Having this referral program might be a good way to start. So, something along the lines to pass clients, sending them something like this could initiate more sales for you. So, the message is, “Hi, name, hope all is well. Not sure if this resonates, but I’m looking to connect with more powerhouse women like yourself who want to whatever the goals you help with are. And I’m providing my freebies and content to more people. Do you know someone who might find it useful to have a free and either share your pre-offer like my free back pain guide or whatever it is or a free call with you or your Instagram account? Join my Instagram account or my Facebook group or whatever.”

And then you can mention your referral incentive if you want to have one. So, if you do know someone and they do enroll in a service later on after their call with me, you’ll get XYZ. Let me know if there’s any ways I can support you as well. If it was a message to another person who maybe is a business owner or something like that, you could include that. You don’t have to include that. You can personalize all of this and make it your own language. But the point is maybe that’s a good place to start for many of you. So, just to share what happens when you do invite to the sales phase and you don’t see it as I have to convince or I have to slam a link in the first message down somebody’s throat and you’ve moved through the four steps of client attraction, these are screenshots from my clients. Some of them have booked many discovery calls from their approach with their pre-offers. One made their first 10K net, things like that.

So, just to recap, the four steps of client attraction are connect, engage, pre-offer, and sell. And what I want to ask you guys is what questions do you have and where do you feel like you’re going to struggle with implementing this or figuring out your niche or whatever step you’re stuck on. And the thing I want to also encourage because many times we go to a workshop, we get super excited, we learn, learn, learn, learn, learn, but then we never really implement. And so I want to invite you to step into entrepreneur mode, which is not entrepreneur mode, which is basically I’m going to keep learning, I’m going to keep consuming, I’m going to keep posting and hoping people find me and you end up burning out. But I want to encourage you to actually make a plan for yourself. Use the worksheet I gave you at the beginning of this to take the steps listed on there. Stop consuming more information and start implementing before you allow yourself to consume more information. And if you want more help with this, if you do want to go more on a personal level, there’s two free things I have for you. One would be if you do want to book a free call with me, you can. And if you book within seven days, you’ll get a bonus little checklist. It’s a get clients checklist. And you can do that at haileyrowe.com. But also, if you just wanted to dive deeper on the concept of pre-offers and how to make a pre-offer and how do you get it out there and what ways do you promote it, more kind of on the steps two and three of the client attraction thing we talked about today, you can go deeper on that. If you want to get my freebie, it’s my From Crickets to Clients class and series. And it’s going to take you through how to make your freebie and use it to convert more sales. So, that’s available at haileyrowe.com/liveevent.

And now I want to open it to questions because this is meant to be kind of like an opportunity for you to see, you know, what would it be like being a health coach? How do I get more clients? How do I face my fears that maybe you have that are stopping you? Things like that.

Dr. Sandi: Thank you. That was so good, Hailey, and we do have a few questions. And I know we will have more that come in. But the first one, you can see in the Q&A, and that is from Ilana about a platform that you would communicate the most on. Then she has a follow-up. In other words, finding people more open to DMs on Instagram.

Hailey: Yeah, great question.

Dr. Sandi: Versus in LinkedIn, versus TikTok, versus Facebook.

Hailey: Great question. Okay. So, each social media platform kind of has different benefits and things you can do on it. And the one that I find is the most universal and best for messaging personally and actually networking and building relationships is LinkedIn because people expect… It’s a networking platform. People are on there to connect and build relationships and message with people. So, using that with my clients, we usually use it for collaboration messages. If you want to be on podcasts, there’s a way to reach out to podcast hosts on there. If you want to reach out to your potential clients and learn more about what kind of content do they want to see on your LinkedIn page, there’s a way you could do that.

So, I like that one for messaging specifically. It’s not to say that Instagram… Instagram works really well to send your followers a welcome message when they follow you, and it’s worked really well to promote your freebies in your posts and say like, “If you want my freebie, comment this word or message me,” and start conversations that way or through your stories, kind of inviting people to connect with you through your stories. So, all of them can work for DMs and messaging, but LinkedIn, I like to prioritize for that. Instagram is kind of more educational and nurturing people. TikTok is great for getting in front of new audiences because TikTok, if you make videos on there, it pushes it out to more new people naturally compared to other platforms, meaning for whatever reason, it helps you get more non-followers seeing you compared to like Instagram. It’s a little harder to do that. You can still do it. It’s just easier on TikTok. So, that’s what I would suggest.

And Facebook, for the private messages, it doesn’t work as well for that. It works more for engaging in groups. You could be a guest in a live stream in a Facebook group that your audience is in, or you can comment on posts in Facebook groups and provide value on those and be visible through that and have, kind of, a public profile if people clicked on your profile. But that’s kind of how I’d rank them with LinkedIn most likely first.

Dr. Sandi: Sounds good. And then from Kathleen, “Is your pre-offer the same as the freebie that you’re sending to a new follower?”

Hailey: Yep, I use those words interchangeably. I call it a pre-offer because it’s kind of like the free step before your paid offer. But a freebie is just something that gives a quick win or value upfront and delivers it either through an email opt-in form where they give you their email and you send it to them or even… I mean, you can do freebies in other ways, but that’s how I typically recommend doing it.

Dr. Sandi: Okay. And then Sandra wants to know: “Any examples on leveraging YouTube and is that an effective channel?”

Hailey: YouTube is a search engine kind of like Google. So, the cool thing about YouTube is if you get really good at naming your videos, like what your audience would be searching, so for example, “how to get rid of gout without medication” or something like that, you have a better chance on YouTube at coming up and people organically discovering you. And the cool thing about that, too, is that those people are actually searching for what you do, and they’re going to be warmer leads because they were actually looking. They typed into YouTube that they were looking for that. So, YouTube’s more of what I call a long-term strategy, meaning you have to be consistent with it, you have to do videos regularly, you have to name them cleverly and with what your audience might be searching, but it’s a great platform for being able to be discovered naturally by your target audience.

Dr. Sandi: All right. And let’s see, Sheetal: “What platform do you use to keep track of leads, appointments, follow-ups, etc.?”

Hailey: Oh, yeah. So, this is a very good question. I use Kartra for my email list, but to keep track of leads and discovery calls, two things. So, I use Calendly.com, which allows people to book a call with me. And honestly, this may not sound the most sophisticated, but we track all the calls booked in a spreadsheet and I’m able to keep track in there of when they booked and where we left off and all the things. So, Calendly keeps track of my appointments. The spreadsheet keeps track of warm leads. As far as follow-ups go, like with social media conversations and all of that, I typically will use Trello. I created a little Trello board for myself and it’s free. They have a paid version, but most likely you can just use the free version. And I created a board that has different columns. It’s like a project management tool and you can say, “Need to follow up with these people. These people said no.” You can kind of have different columns where you organize your leads.

But the thing I will also just share that’s kind of a hack is once you message people, their history with you is in your message inbox. And sometimes periodically, instead of driving myself crazy with like, “Oh, I got to track every single person I’ve ever talked to on social media,” I do keep track of people who are more interested, people who wanted me to follow up with them or something. But every once in a while, I’ll just go through my old inbox and kind of scroll through and just do some follow-ups. And that can be a nice way to just… If you don’t want to track every single human being ever, that’s an option.

Dr. Sandi: Sounds great. Yeah, that’s a great idea. I love Trello, by the way. I use it for personal things as well. Year after year, my Thanksgiving menu and recipes connected to that. So, Ilana wants to know: “Can you please explain how practice clients work? How many do you suggest we have and how long do you usually work with each one?”

Hailey: Yeah, so the practice client concept… Usually, if you’re a coach… And I don’t know, maybe Sandra, you know more about this than I do but typically, when you do a coaching certification like FMCA or whatever it is, they have a phase of the program where you can work with clients for free to get practice hours. And sometimes you need a certain amount of practice hours to get certified. So, I’m very familiar with that because many of my clients who’ve come to me, they’ve either finished working with their practice clients and now they’re ready for paid clients, or they feel they need more practice and experience and they want to offer some free sessions with practice clients.

And so, what we’ll typically do is offer something like three free sessions, one hour each or something like that, in exchange for a testimonial at the end. So, there’s no kind of rules about, “Oh, it needs to be a certain amount or whatever.” And honestly, if you are certified and you’re ready to go, you don’t need to do practice clients. You can just start working with paid clients. But it’s an option for people who maybe want more experience and want to get some maybe testimonials and things like that.
Dr. Sandi: Yeah, many of our students, as they’re preparing to graduate, they will have clients that they are working with and they’re not charging a fee. And if they’re electing to go through the National Board for Health and Wellness Coaching to become board certified, the board requires 50 hours that they must log. And so many people will coach on a pro bono basis to gather those hours. And I usually recommend that they have a time that’s very clear in their agreement that as of such-and-such a date, there will be a charge. And so many people do elect to renew and continue on a paid basis, or they may stop seeing that coach who was not charging them. And then another issue may pop up in their life, and they may hear from that person even a year or two years later, “Hey, I’d like to engage your services on a paid basis.”

Hailey: Nice. Yep. And then Edgar asked: “Which platform do you use for a specific protocol for a clientele and follow-up objectives?” Okay. So, yeah, same thing. Trello is a really good one. I use that with myself and a lot of clients. A Google spreadsheet can also work. But the other thing to ask yourself is, what are you going to be able to stick to? So, if you’re not a spreadsheet person and you want to just start by using your phone notes in your iPhone like the little notes feature thing, is it that fancy? No. But will you have it top of mind and available at all times on your phone? Sometimes that’s the best way to start before you go into something more sophisticated.

Dr. Sandi: I wanted to comment on something you mentioned earlier, and that is local connections. And I thought back to when I was working as a health psychologist. I did a lot of collaborations. One in particular that stood out, she was a plastic surgeon. And I didn’t really know her at first but got to know her. And as a result of that collaboration, we were doing events together. And she had a storefront office, and she invited me as well as, I think, a yoga teacher. And we each had our little segment to do a presentation. So, it was a nice evening where she had beverages and snacks, and then I was able to talk about what I do, had my business cards there, had a free workshop that I had a flyer about. At that time, there was no internet or social media to speak of, but it was just making those local connections.

And at another time, the Chamber of Commerce… Most communities have a local Chamber of Commerce. There’s people who are involved in business in the community. So, sometimes that can be a good way, or just the old-fashioned networking events. But I always like to tell people, even telling everybody what you do, somebody who is part of the parent-teacher organization at your child’s school, for example, and then they’ll say, “Oh, do you have a card?” So, you just never know where those connections will be made.

Hailey: Right, totally.

Dr. Sandi: Okay, another question came in. Let’s see. How long do you think it might take to become a certified health coach? Well, I can answer that. Our program is a year, and then you can start gathering those hours if you want to pursue National Board Certification. In the latter part of your program, your time with us as soon as you… There’s a Practical Skills Assessment. And as soon as you are through that process, then you are ready to begin coaching. So, it really depends on you how long you choose to gather your hours. Some people do it quickly and take that exam right away, and others may extend that time. And then there’s another one. She wants to work to become a longevity coach. Can you comment on that?

Hailey: Love that. Yeah. So, I think the thing with longevity is to think about what kind of goals… Why do they want longevity? So, in other words, rather than just saying, “I’m a longevity coach and I hope you live longer,” you want to connect it to something. So that what? They can keep up with their grandkids, so that they can be able to do the types of activities they love like working out and all that kind of…like, they’re into certain sports or things like that. But I love the idea, and I do think that there’s a whole… You would do really well collaborating with some of the podcasts about biohacking and conferences. There’s longevity conferences these days. I know one of them is called RAADfest like R-A-A-D. So, yeah, I do think there’s a market for that.

Dr. Sandi: Absolutely. Okay, and then Edgar has a follow-up question regarding experience with… I’m not quite sure what you’re referring to. Can you address that regarding that particular market?

Hailey: I’m not sure I know what that is either. Yeah, I’m sorry. Edgar, if you want to say what that is.

Dr. Sandi: Maybe explain it in another question. And then once the strategy discuss is applied, how long does it take to build up the practice?

Hailey: So, it can be anywhere from… Like, I’ve had clients send out that referral message I showed you, and they got a client within six weeks. But then I’ve had other clients who maybe it takes three months because they’re building their… They don’t have an offer yet. They haven’t even set up any of the legal stuff. They kind of need to do some of the foundational stuff. So, what I would suggest is know that it’ll take the amount of… Like, the number of offers you make minus the no’s you get equal your results. So, the sooner you can start getting out there, meeting people, sharing what you do, offering your freebie, making offers to help people, and meet many people, the faster you’re going to be able to grow.

Dr. Sandi: Absolutely. I totally agree with that. Okay, HIPAA forms. How do you address that as an independent coach? Okay. Well, Mary, first of all, if you are working as a health coach and you are not working under a license, in other words, you are not a licensed medical doctor, licensed clinical psychologist, you are not legally bound by HIPAA because as someone who is not a licensed provider, you do not hold anybody’s medical records. So, you don’t have to have people fill out forms for HIPAA because you are not a licensed provider. But you do follow safeguards regarding confidentiality, and you have a client agreement. And as a student of FMCA, you have templates that we provide that show you how you have an agreement. And in that client agreement, you would state that sessions are confidential. But legally, you are not bound by the HIPAA laws. And then Edgar, that is referring to the Latin American market.

Hailey: Okay, yeah. So, I actually have a client right now who helps with gut health, and weight loss, and things like that. And she is a Latina, and that’s her niche and she helps that community. So, I think you were asking if it’s a good market, and it’s definitely a potential market for sure. Actually, one thing I can add to that is, when you’re trying to decide on a good market, you want to think about, first of all, can you find them? So, are they findable? Can you search them on social media? Are there organizations that have those people? Are there Facebook groups that have those people? You want to consider, do they have purchasing power? So, I will tell you one market that’s really tough is teenagers, because their parents are going to be involved, and there’s hoops to jump through, and they don’t care about their health yet. So, you want to make sure there’s some purchasing power. And then you want to make sure they have a key pain point or goal that’s big enough that they would want to get help. And the last thing would be, are they a growing market, or is it something that’s trending and not going to last? So, those are kind of the criteria to consider if something’s a good market or not.

Dr. Sandi: Okay, we are going to take a few more… Regarding HIPAA compliance, I would check the… Because things are constantly changing, Zoom, for example, has a HIPAA-compliant platform, and so you would make sure that you are maintaining that confidentiality. But I would just that you do your own due diligence regarding these various devices and ways of keeping records. There are programs that are developed just for health coaches that are HIPAA-compliant. Okay, let’s see. Sonya is a holistic chef and wants to combine health coaching. Yes, we have graduates who do that. And let’s see, if you are culinary coaching, will those hours count towards board certification? So, if they are coaching, if you are doing a demo of a recipe, then that would not be, because that person is not engaging you for health coaching. But if they are a culinary client and you are engaging in health coaching, then yes, that would qualify.

All right, and then there’s a couple more, and then we will end because we are running out of time. This has been incredible. But how would a health coach answer the question, “What does it look like to work with you?”

Hailey: Yeah, so typically at that point, you’d want to say, “I’d love to go through how it works and what it looks like. Would you be available this time or this time for a free health discovery call? On this call, we’ll talk about your goals, your challenges, and see if it’s a fit to work together.” And then you actually have a call with them where you set the stage for the call, and you share, like, “We’re going to go through some questions, we’re going to talk about my process,” etc., etc. And then you would listen and go through…see if they’re a fit for what you offer and then share your offer.

And the way that I like to share your offer is to start with either a framework or a system or phases that your health coaching is centered around—like, kind of like a backbone—so they can grasp what is health coaching and then go more into the benefits and the features, meaning it’s this many sessions. It’s this kind of support in between sessions, that kind of stuff. But what I see a lot of health coaches do is they just say, “Oh, it’s this many sessions and this much money,” and that’s all they say, instead of connecting what is health coaching, what are the benefits of health coaching, what’s a framework that you could take someone through that allows them to really see that their dream outcomes are possible and achievable. So, just be sure to include some kind of process or framework aside from just the features.
Dr. Sandi: Absolutely. And then last question, if you target, market is geriatrics, dementia counseling, what would you say is the best method to reach that market?

Hailey: Yeah. So, for that, I definitely would say partnership and collabs. So, thinking about who works with those types of patients, what are brands that cater to that type of group? And when I say brands, I mean, there could be recipe books for those people. There could be certain supplement brands. There could be doctors that work with that type of group. There could be many different things. But I would make a list of that, and then I would start to reach out to those kinds of people and talk about why it’d be beneficial to collaborate and how you help their audience.

Dr. Sandi: Absolutely. We just talked about that in my office hours, and we have one graduate who is doing really well with that type of audience. And she goes around to her local senior centers, assisted living communities. Those people are very, very interested in her work, and she’s gotten a lot of clients that way.

Hailey: Nice.

Dr. Sandi: Well, I can’t thank you enough. This has been awesome. We have learned so much, and thank you for being with us and all of the wisdom that you shared. And I hope that people are feeling confident now, that those scary questions that they talked about or that’s in their minds, that they can focus their first starting with the idea that it is possible to have a successful business, to have a successful career as a health and wellness coach. SO, thank you again. Thank you, everybody, for being here.

Hailey: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Dr. Sandi: We will send you a copy of this. If you’ve registered for the presentation, you will get that. So, thank you so much. Thank you again, Hailey.

Hailey: Thank you. Bye-bye.

Dr. Sandi: Bye now.