Wellness Practitioners: Creative Ways to Support Your Community During Times of Financial Distress
So here's the good news — we're more than halfway through the raging Hellscape that is 2020! Huzzah!
And it would be a real love-and-gaslight lie to say something like, "All these challenges have simply created amazing opportunities to be more creative with our work!"
The truth is, a lot of people are struggling financially. Many people aren't struggling right now, but feel the pressure of impending Recession knocking on their door, which causes hella anxiety.
And, unfortunately, the majority of business owners can't rely on our government for assistance. I mean, [only 5% of small businesses (SMBs) received the PPP loan], which was specifically designed to support SMBs payroll accounts for two months of the pandemic.
Cool, if you're in that 5%, but even if you are ... what happens after that two months is up?
At this point, we've got at least another year of pandemic pandemonium on our hands.
But I wanna keep this post upbeat and snappy, so I'm gonna stop right there. Good news and creative ideas only, for the next thousand words.
If you're reading this with a heavy Doom and Gloom™ cloud over your head, I absolutely get it. The last 150 days have been a veritable shit-show of epic proportions. Makes November of 2016 look like a pastel-hued fairytale time! There's a lot to be worried about.
And I humbly request that you hang that bad boi up for like, the next 3 minutes as I lay out some ✨ solutions ✨ for navigating through this time of unrest and anxiety if you're a wellness practitioner and small business owner.
As a fellow skeptic (although I like to call myself an optimistic skeptic, most of the time) I notice that when I can suspend my narrow-eyed disbelief for the tiniest blink of time, my brain creates a little more spaciousness for hope, creativity, and magic.
Onwards!
The proposals below specifically pertain to wellness practitioners — but if you're an entrepreneur in another category (bird grooming! grimoire-making! personalized spell-crafter!) you can still apply these ideas and frameworks to your business.
You'll just have to be a little craftier with it 😈
For Wellness Practitioners
So if you're a wellness practitioner, there are two things you're likely thinking about:
How do I support myself financially?
How do I support my community through my work?
You might lean more towards one question than the other. Maybe thoughts of your bank account balance are all-consuming. Maybe you feel guilty thinking about your own personal resource, and instead are bending over backward to give away as much support as you can.
Seems to me that we'd want to fall somewhere in between these two extremes. In an intuitive business, we acknowledge that we (the business owner) must be supported and well-resourced to be supportive and give resources to the community.
These actions don't have to be chronological (the "classic" earn millions by clawing your way to the top then "giving back" a la Jeff Bezos isn't exactly the move).
You can be supported financially and support your community simultaneously. For real! It's possible!
There are infinite ways that we can think about giving support to our community whilst also supporting ourselves.
Today I'd like to present a few options for getting paid for your work that makes it more:
accessible,
affordable,
inclusive,
desirable, and ...
helpful
to your community.
Case Study: Holistic Nutritionist
Let's use the example of someone who's a holistic nutritionist. Why? Because online schools pump out thousands of health coaches and holistic nutritionists every year with lots of info about macronutrients, but ZERO help with how to run a business successfully 🙃
Also, I worked as a nutritionist and trainer for many years in my youth, even while I was working in tech! This was my first business venture as a wee baby entrepreneur who was too scared to claim the title of entrepreneur. [Horrifying fun fact: I didn't even have a website for my work because I was mortified that it would be too "sales-y". DON'T MAKE MY MISTAKES!]
Let's say holistic nutritionist breaks down their services like this:
1:1 6-week health coaching program — $3,000
60-min 1:1 one-off nutrition tune-up check ins — $175
4-week custom meal plan creation — $500
So let's take these offerings and see if we can make them more cost-accessible.
Suggestion #1: Payment Plans 🎊
We love a payment plan! Payment plans break down the cost of what you offer into smaller payments. This helps users who may not have the funds to pay-in-full upfront spread the cost of your work out over time.
This also helps you get paid without devaluing your work. Love that for you.
Apply it
Break this $3k payment into a 2-month plan ($1,500 per month), 3-month plan ($1k per month) or 6-month plan ($500 per month)
👉 Heads up — having people continue to pay for something after they've completed the program doesn't always feel good from the user's perspective. (You've probably had that feeling of, "Ugh, I'm still paying for this*?"*) Your user's highest moment of pleasure is going to be during and directly after they've worked with you. Just something to note before you start giving out 24-month payment plans
Suggestion #2: Subscription Offerings
User spending has changed dramatically since COVID-19 — in ways that you might not expect. The demand for subscription offerings in the last 3 months has increased 3x ... which has a LOT of implications!
Users might want to budget and track their spending monthly — subscriptions make it easier to do that long term
Subscriptions are generally more affordable upfront (similar to a payment plan, but there's no end-date or payoff date)
With limited time and attention, subscription offerings let users get a taste of what they need when they need it, as opposed to delivering a full course of content or value that's overwhelming. Think: appetizer vs. pasta course 🍝
Apply It
Take your $3k six-week program and turn it into a year long subscription ($250/month). Deliver the bulk of the content in the first three months, then continue to send out check-ins, exercises, and offer an alumni community for accountability and on-going support.
Take your 1:1 nutrition one-off appointments and make them a quarterly subscription. Users will be more likely to see long-term results when they have an ongoing support system and relationship with you. You can also lower the price of these sessions because you don't have to factor in customer acquisition costs (expensive!).
OMG, meal plan creation is MEANT FOR SUBSCRIPTION!!!! Truly destined. Pick a niche and deliver meal plans customized to that group (Paleo? Keto? Vegan? Only eat p-foods? Pick your poison). Make it a monthly subscription for a more affordable rate, like $40 a month. It's way easier to get 80 people to join at $40/month and sending them all similar meal plans than convincing four new people every month to pay you $400 for meal plans that you have to make from scratch. That's a guaranteed $1600 in your pocket for a few hours of work every month when you run it on a subscription.
Suggestion #3: Income Share Agreement ⚖️
Income Share Agreements are extremely cool if you work with people on aspects that impact their earning ability.
For example, if you're a career coach, you'd be a great candidate for an Income Share Agreement.
If you're a business witch — BOOM — Income Share Agreement.
An ISA essentially works like this — the student or client defers payment until they land a job (typically you've coached or educated them to get to this role), and then they pay back their monthly payments based on their income.
It's an extremely fair way to run a coaching business, especially when there are quantitative goals like a certain salary or income.
It doesn't work as well for qualitative coaching, like health coaching or breathwork or meditation ... for obvious reasons 🤣
While I wouldn't recommend ISA for a holistic nutritionist, you could instead offer something like a self-selecting sliding-scale payment with the option to pay-it-forward after someone has worked with you.
How would that work? Perhaps your client pays a little less to work with you — say, $100 per hour instead of $175 — and you follow up with them after their session to see if they'd like to pay it forward to make more sliding scale appointments available by paying the remaining $75 (or more!).
There are many ways to run a sliding scale, but I recommend having multiple tiers:
Tier 1 is the actual market price of the offering — what it costs to make it, pay yourself fairly, and keep your business running
Tier 2 is a discounted rate — usually the "wholesale" rate, which means that your user got the product at cost
Tier 3 is a deeply discounted rate — equivalent to a scholarship or financial aid
Conclusion
Alright, amichi, that's enough for you to chew on for a while.
Big takeaway? It's extremely possible for you to take care of your business and yourself and your community. This doesn't have to be Sophie's Choice, my dudes.
And we should be thinking about ways to make our work as equitable as possible — classism and its effect on pricing makes a major impact on that.
As long as we stay creative, excited, and inspired by new ways of doing business, we're working intuitively. When you use your intuition, you're working with more information. More information is always good 🙃