Quick check: As a wellness business leader, does your management style fit one of these personas? If so, you face special challenges growing your business.
1. The Dreamer
If you find yourself with a tiny budget but big ideas, thinking big but unable to focus on details, it’s possible that actually owning and managing a wellness business isn’t for you. You may be just chasing butterflies.
You may love helping people become healthy. You might make a great personal trainer, dietician, nutritionist, yoga instructor or coach. You might be very good at motivating people.
Your wellness business might have a gift for connecting people on social media. It may have a beautiful website with sleek bodies sweating (but in an attractive way) over really nice looking equipment.
But a wellness business is a business. That means knowing what your business does and being able to describe it with point-blank accuracy to a stranger in an elevator. You have to harvest and convert leads. It means sourcing funds for startup and operations, setting budgets for advertising, sales, marketing, products and services development, running the business day-to-day, hiring people, running payroll, and keeping your website and facilities up to date.
If you’re truly involved in the details you need to paying attention to, you won’t have time to dream, because you’ll be doing.
Nearly every successful wellness business sweats these details. If you notice you’re flitting from project to project, unable to focus, and feeling that it’s someone else’s job to decide what you do, you’ve got a long uphill journey ahead of you.
2. The Dollhouser
The Dollhouser likes everything to be “just right” and in its appropriate place. If you’re a perfectionist, you may be a Dollhouser. If you spend extra time fiddling with just the stuff you like doing, you may be a Dollhouser. You can’t just ignore the parts of your wellness business you don’t like.
Dollhousers can sometimes be micromanagers of both staff and contractors. They tend to lose focus of the objective, circling endlessly on relatively minor tasks and areas of the business where “good enough” still brings in the dollars.
Dollhousing tends to show up as a lot of backing and forthing about the size, shape, and color of logos, the name of your business, placement of copy on advertising circulars, the font and background color used on your business’s website, and other details that are unlikely to significantly affect sales.
Notice we said “significantly.” Ad copy can be a bit more compelling with a good layout design and tight verbiage. And sure, it’s possible that somebody out there will NOT condone doing business with a yoga studio that uses a brown tree, and not a green one, in its logo. But it’s highly unlikely that sales are going to tank because you used Calibri instead of Helvetica.
Your business is not your logo.
In fact, until it’s an established brand, your wellness business is whatever you make of your prospects and opportunities, how you treat your customers, and what people say about the experience.
If you’ve got a solid idea of who your ideal customers are, have a plan for reaching them with a resonant message, execute well on what the message implies, and follow up on how your business performed against customer or member expectations, then practically any logo will do.
Make your business’s look-and-feel stand for who you are, not the other way around.
If you have time to be obsessing more than a few days over graphics, you’re ignoring some other part of your business that needs your attention.
3. The Eternal Salesman
You’ve got a great idea! Now, if you just had a custom cloud app that tracked members’ accomplishments for the week, sent your cell phone push notifications when someone wanted to chat, and automatically sent special offers and rewards to customers’ email inboxes based on their geographic location and biometric history…
Except you don’t have that. If somebody invested ten million dollars in your dream, you might have it — in two or three years.
In the meantime, you feel like the promise of the idea ought to be worth at least half that much.
You just have to get help finding that first $5 million, and get someone to write that magic investor pitch based on… your idea.
At some point, you and your team have to do real work. Start doing it now, with your own hands, and in doing so, gradually build something others will believe in.
Then you won’t have to sell so hard.
4. The Superficialist
Also known as “wellness light.” Unlike the Dreamer, the Dollhouser, and the Eternal Salesman, you actually have something valuable.
But you have a problem selling it.
It should be easy, right? You’ve summarized your hardcore diet and workout tips in a six-page PowerPoint, and you’re very good at talking to those points in a webinar, seminar, class or group meeting. You’re wonderful one-on-one with clients, and they swear you’re all that and a bag of gluten-free, low-carb chips.
The problem: you want to sell that 6-page Powerpoint for $499.95. Or you want aspiring athletes to sign up on your website for a $3000 boot camp without any downloads about the program, no “Contact Us” form, no chat support, no testimonials… nothing.
No matter how valuable your advice is, just under a hundred dollars a page is a lot to pay for it when nobody knows what it is.
Don’t take the easy route. Spend the time articulating in every way possible how your expertise, club environment, or training / coaching methods help real people with specific needs make a lasting change in their lives. Offer proof, handle objections… have a conversation.
You don’t skimp on the parts of your business you enjoy doing. So don’t skimp on your sales and marketing effort.
5. Deer-in-the-Headlights
Occasionally we stumble across a prospective client that we can’t believe hasn’t succeeded already.
What’s stopping them?
They don’t believe they can sell. They’re afraid their idea isn’t original enough, different enough, valuable enough, even though they know it is.
If you talk to them one-on-one, they do a fantastic job of it. But put a blank web page, ad copy, or sales campaign outline in front of them and they freeze up.
They can describe to US what they do, which customers are ideal, where they are, what those prospects want, why they’ll want it, when and where they’re ready to buy. They’ve invested in staff and operations. Their message has legitimate appeal to a sufficient number of customers to earn the business a healthy return. They come across as experts in their field, but put them in front of a mic, so to speak, and all you hear is feedback.
If this is you, our best advice is to start believing what others are telling you about your business. It IS real. It matters to people. You’re the right person to make it happen, and now is the right time.
Believe in yourself, and in your ability to be a wellness leader and trailblazer.
Then give us a call. It won’t all be as hard as you think, and it will help build your faith in your business.
6. The Tech Tweaker
Like the Dollhouser, the Tech Tweaker is focused on minutiae. If this is you, go ahead and look up the spelling of “minutiae.” You know you want to. 😉
If you’re focused on tech details, that’s OK, up to a point. If your wellness product or service is dependent on technology working right, then you have a right to be so focused. If tech is a critical part of your business, it’s a necessity.
But if technology is just an enabler — and more specifically, if you could still handle things somehow if the power went out — then don’t obsess about APIs, Bitcoin, style sheets, WSDL, and JavaScript. That’s somebody else’s problem.
There are way too many tools out there, many of them free, that allow you to do in an afternoon what used to take weeks or months.
Better yet, find someone else to handle the tech, and insist on changing the passwords every so often to make sure your wellness business doesn’t get held hostage by a disgruntled software developer.
Like the Dreamer and the Dollhouser, you’ve got better and more profitable things to do than monkey around trying to get apps to connect.
7. The Zealot
You’re on a mission to make the world a healthier place, whether it wants it or not.
OK, maybe some people want your flavor of healthy. Maybe a lot of people want it.
But not the way you’re selling it.
Check your web copy. Your leadership style may be “Zealot” if you’ve got more content about the problem (for instance, the Obesity Epidemic) than the solution (your LCHF / paleo / gluten-free / anti-inflammatory diet plan).
If you find you’re spending more time explaining why people should want your product, then you’re doing missionary work, not marketing.
The world of wellness is special: pretty much everybody actually wants to be healthy. Their specific needs are different, but there are always people willing to give you money if you give them value.
Not so much if what you want to do is give them a lecture.
8. The $100 Bill
Your hot yoga for MMA studio is right for everyone, right? There isn’t a soul in the world that you’d turn away if they walked through the door.
We’ve got news: you should discourage some folks from becoming customers. In the long run, people who don’t stick with a program cost you more than it’s worth to get them. They had unrealistic expectations walking in, weren’t really that committed, didn’t like / “get” / click with what your business was about, and as a result, they’ve got mostly negative things to say about it.
Plus, just because your weight loss program is great for one type of person doesn’t mean it’s a great fit for everyone.
Deciding exactly when to turn someone away from your business is a matter of math. If you paid $10 for a web lead, one of every 10 leads converts, you’ve done a good job on selling the value of your business and the cost to sign up helps recoup a reasonable portion of your advertising costs, chances are good you’ll make back the $100 you spent getting a new customer. If your classes are $50 a session, you’ve got two bites at getting your ad money back.
The truth is, you’re not a $100 bill. Not everybody’s going to like you. And the sooner you realize that, the less you’ll waste chasing leads you can’t develop.
Know what your business is really about, and don’t be afraid to refer people across the street if another business can do a better job of keeping them happy.
