In this post: How I went from running a thriving Health Coaching business to being a Business Mentor: It's the actions and the shifts in your underlying beliefs.
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How I Went From $35k/Year to $350/Year in Just One Year
Today I'm sharing with you how my story started as a health coach from my days in online business and advertising through being a health coach up to where I am as a business mentor today. I'll share my business, corporate, online marketing life that then led me to become a health coach, through my burnout, how I grew my health coaching business, what it was really like and where I got to eventually become a mentor for health coaches, how the hell did I get here?
So, you know, this is funny because I actually didn't plan on sharing my story with you all this week, but I did a bit of a reflection with my husband just the other day about how we forget to keep up with ourselves sometimes, and we can keep telling past stories. I shared my story often on webinars or even on blogs of what it was like to become a health coach before I had about 14 years of online marketing experience at that time. I can talk about my past and what I don't often do is talk about the present or the second part of my journey of eight full-time years as an online coach. And that makes me one of the more experienced in this industry, especially in the health coaching and coaching space. So it'll be a little fun, even for me, just to kind of riff today and share with you what happened from when I became a business coach to where I am today.
If there's one thing I could say to you all is the journey as an entrepreneur is never a beautiful straight line.
And we'll just start with, there was a transition year or two, there always is. I think you've possibly all seen those memes on Facebook where we think success looks like a straight line going forward and up, but really it's full of ups and downs and twists. It's not always easy to tell a story in a perfectly linear timeline but what I can tell you is that there was a year in there where I went from $35,000 a year to $350,000 in a year in one year. Now, what did I do? There were some real key pieces and a lot of that had to do with the money mindset work that I did, it had to do with that I'd been working it out for a couple of years. And it also was really when I tapped into why I was doing this at a deeper level and really stepped into being me, even though I think that's an ongoing journey as well.
So as I shared, I was health coaching and people were buying health coaching with me so they could get my business tips. My mentors were telling me to be a business coach for health coaches. They were like, "Look at it. You've done business your whole life. You're so passionate about health coaching and no health coaches are even understanding how to get clients like you. Why don't you teach it?"
And I was like, "No way!" I was so passionate about health coaching and still am. But deeper than that, I was really, really passionate about helping women really tap into their full potential. I hate those words. I can't get better words. I see all of us as these beautiful diamonds who have just got covered with a lot of gunk and a lot of time and a lot of ash. Over the years, we forget our brilliance. In fact, we might never have even known that brilliance. And to me, health coaching has all to do with cleaning up the diet, cleaning up the energy system, learning how to not stress — all of these pieces and the personal development that comes behind it.
As you can see, I am just as passionate today as I was then. And so you can see why when people suggested that I went and did business instead of health coaching. But I was horrified because I also blamed "business" in those days.
I thought business was like the devil. That business was the cause of my burnout. That business was the reason I was unhappy. And of course, that was not true.
There are other reasons I was burning out, which is a story for another day, but really, I almost couldn't see myself being a business coach. One thing led to another, people were getting in and asking me things.
Beginning of 2014, I thought of putting out one email to my small email list that I'd started building for health coaching and say like, "Hey, I'm just offering some mentoring for a handful of private clients." And in one email I booked out five clients because in my mind I couldn't possibly take anymore. There was an inner journey as it always, realizing I could take more. And in the coming weeks, I booked out 15 clients, which I did for a number of months. And then that was the same year that I started working on all this money mindset work, all this possibility, a lot of self-worth and self-value work, which is what I worked with all my health coaching clients on because really, it's the key.
And then that starts to open up, more and more of my practice was fully booked. I used to see 24 clients a week. I don't recommend it, but that's what happened. And it was a hard year in the end because there was a lot of clients that I accidentally booked. After all, I didn't expect so many people to keep renewing and I was taking on new clients, but it was the best apprenticeship year ever.
By October of that year, I launched my very first UPswing Mastermind and that had 20 beautiful ladies in it. There was another little mastermind that I did a few months before when I got the idea and there were three people in it. I say this because I think people expect their first program to have hundreds. But it wasn't.
Why did I decide to launch the UPswing Mastermind? Because I found that I was saying the same thing over and over and over again to one-on-one clients. I used to have notes for each of the ladies in my mastermind but I found that it's all the same. And I truly believe that you should never create a group program until you are that certain that it was all the same. And I started getting real clarity and I'm so much clearer today. But even at that time, I started getting a lot of clarity that one-on-one was not the answer for beginner health coaches, because there's so much to be taught and you can't teach all of that in the private coaching session. And yet you need coaching as well. I talked about that before, you know, it was always the beliefs underneath.
Anyway, I got this clear picture because I was so full with clients and it wasn't just a couple of clients. And I knew about that stage, like I said, it was like apprenticeship year, exactly what was needed. And I launched my first mastermind. We've now launched 11 large masterminds and four or five small ones, as well as my stage two mastermind, which is run probably about eight times now. How I made peace with becoming a business coach in those early days when I didn't want to was realizing that I was going to be teaching what I wanted to anyway.
I'm so passionate a lot of my coaching, about helping women with self-worth, with confidence, removing the gunk around their diamonds so that they can shine so they can be magnetic.
The old way of pushing to be successful is an old masculine model and it does not work and it will burn many women out. And I was determined to find a new way of working, which has been my journey. It's something I've been reflecting on, even more, in my journey and where I've got my business to today.
It's learning to work in a new way, a much more effective way. And I get to teach that in quite a unique style in my mastermind because I'm working with health coaches, women who get it, women who value their health, who value not burning out, who value high success and excellence and becoming their brightest shiny diamond. So I realized it was actually a perfect match. And I did realize, to get health coaching out there, but getting one, like my one health coaching out there, wasn't going to make the world-level impact that I knew I needed to make.
I remember I was in San Francisco in the middle of Golden Gate Park, I just dropped in and it hit me. I was like, "Oh, I get it now." I've spent my whole life in some really amazing online marketing positions, in the startup of eBay in the UK and London and digital arms of top agencies worldwide. I started to realize, that's not the devil. That is me. That is what I have. And that is a gift that I can bring to our community.
It all started to come into alignment and once it did, and once I was open to receiving, then I could start being more of service and not making everything about me.
You know, self-talks like: What if I'm not good enough? What if they don't like me? What if I don't get results? Part of this journey is from turning in to out. And that was a lot of what I made peace with moving forward. So I guess I'm sharing one of my values and beliefs along the way.
Health coaching is not a business that you can learn to build in a way that's going to burn you out. It'll be so out of integrity that you won't be out to sell. I also had to learn that there is a masculine discipline that's like throwing spaghetti at the wall and trying to copy what other people are doing in business will lead to exhaustion, which will lead to stress.
If we're wanting to enhance our feminine energy, we need to learn to have systems. We need to learn to receive support from our feminine receiving channels. We need a coach. We need a support team. I've found that I've always needed mastermind groups around me. We need things to keep us on track and not distract from shiny objects because that is actually draining us energetically, emotionally, mentally, physically. You want to be pristine in your energy as you grow your business. So this is the mastermind that I now run and that's what I do.
So there, that shift where the business went from $35k to $350k a year kept growing. And the business has been on just over a million dollars for the last three years. So we've come a long way. And I am able to break that down and share with you what I did, because I'm actually very clear on what I did, although my journey is not a straight line.
So the next piece is people say to me, "Amanda, what you've done, your business, is amazing. You've done well. But you're stuck with one program." That would be one of my top tips for entrepreneurs. We want to do everything. Some of you might say I've been in the business for like eight years now, and that's all I've done, one mastermind.
I can look you in the eye and tell you that I know it is the best program in the world for health coaches because we have mastered it. We have crafted it. We have polished that one thing.
Because I've been able to stay focused. I've been able to build a high-level team and coaching support around that. I've been able to understand what gets results. We've taken about 700 women roughly through that program now and the mastery in polishing the one thing. Although of course, I have some other ideas but the ability to say "No" is largely what has helped me get to where we are today. And this is why so much of it, our ability to clean up our energy, to clean up our mind, to clean up that thinking and discipline.
Some of you asked me, "Amanda, why don't you offer lower-priced programs so we can get in at a lower price point." I have had lower-priced programs but they're a big fat distraction for me. The highest frequency work that I'm dedicated to all of your experiences comes because they stayed laser-focused on the program that I believe in. That does suck because sometimes I can't serve everybody. But this is me. This is how I deliver. This is the program, as a result.
I've been in many masterminds. I'm pretty much always in masterminds. I believe in masterminds as the highest way of working.
If anybody has read Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich, being in a mastermind is one of his top points and who are we to argue? I've been in masterminds with some of the world's top masculine, male marketers. I've worked with female mentors and I think the biggest delight in the last couple of years is I've been in a mastermind with some of the world's top female entrepreneur groups. It was actually meant to just be a week.
That was planned back in 2016 for a group, all of us approached to be part of a group of the world's top female entrepreneurs to be part of a group invited to Necker Island with Richard Branson. And that was supposed to happen in late 2017. Now some of you may remember there was a hurricane in the Caribbean at the end of 2017 and Necker island was wiped out two weeks before we were supposed to go. That could have been looked at as a horror. There were investments involved. I was already in the US on my way, so was my husband. Time, energy, and things are being planned. And the whole thing was devastating. Richard Branson's home was wiped out and a lot of people were killed and businesses are gone. It was very tragic.
We always say in entrepreneurship: Fail forward.
What that birthed ended up being a two-year experience with these beautiful women who I would never have become so close to if it has just been a one week holiday. We ended up having five mastermind events together over the two years, two of which with Richard Branson in the end. Our partnership with the Virgin group continued to grow and did work with their charities. And we ended up doing two experiences instead of one. One of those we went to Johannesburg, South Africa and we mentored some local entrepreneurs through the Virgin group partnership. It was just so, so awesome seeing what other people are doing in different parts of the world, different economies, et cetera.
We also flew out to Richard Branson's private safari launch, and we not only saw pretty much all of the animals, it was just absolutely amazing, but personally, I also had some small, but very impactful private conversations with Richard Branson. That really fired me up on what's important for the health coaching industry and what I needed to personally do in preparation for that.
So that was a life-changing event. Then this year, finally flew out to the Caribbean. We went to Puerto Rico and then scrub island and then out to Necker, which is mostly rebuilt now. We mentored entrepreneurs out there, some of whom had lost their businesses in those hurricanes. That partnership with Virgin was a really special moment. And then also we partied. We are like 20 something people on our own private island. We did hot-tubbing in the middle of the night, dancing in our ball gowns on the tennis courts, doing yoga, journaling on the top deck in the morning. That's our version of party as heart-based, feminine entrepreneurs. It was a very expensive experience that I'm like to a separate blog post on some time.
That's my recent mastermind adventures. Now I'm reflecting on "What's next?" that's always the multi-million dollar question, isn't it? Last night over dinner, I was sharing with my husband that some visions and pieces have been dropping in for me around higher work for the health coaching industry. Some of which did drop-in, while I was in South Africa but that's not fully baked yet. And I said I think the clarity is coming now. But things take time to bake, don't they? So definitely in the coming years, there's a new evolution of my work coming, but who knows?
Entrepreneurship is always a journey and never a destination.
I heard a quote earlier this week that "Winners and losers all have the same goals." Goal setting is not the secret. It's the actions and the shifts in your underlying beliefs. It's cleaning up this diamond around your identity, around what's possible for you. And to me, winning is just really how clean can we get that diamond, how great can we feel in our own body and our own life?
We don't need to be doing all of these things that I'm sharing, what I've done. It's about, "Are you happy?"
Are you in joy? Are you at ease? And those are the qualities that I continue to chase for myself. How to work from a more feminine way, how to have more success with less effort. So that when you have a system, you're not burning out. And really rewiring and learning to receive in that way. I continue to be a student of my own work on a daily basis, I have a high commitment to that. And for now all of my love, energy and attention on that along with the practical marketing steps to get out there and define your target market, to work out your signature package and actually understand how to market yourself, get your messaging out to the world and serve clients is what I live and breathe all day, every day for all of you in my UPswing Mastermind and some free training.
So that's it. I'm sure there's a lot more I could go into, but that's the past eight years of business. If there's anything anyone wants me to go deeper into, obviously I could go in so many tangents, let me know and I can always do more blog posts for you on any parts that are of interest.
Have a beautiful day, have a beautiful weekend, take good care of yourselves. And I will talk to you soon.
Love,
Amanda xx
PS. Ready to create a purposeful package in your coaching business - and learn how to charge in a way that gets clients booked in with ease? Click this link to get instant access to the FREE training >> https://training.amandajdaley.com/packages
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