Streamline Your Systems for Predictable Profits

In this episode, I chat with Joanna Sapir, a business strategist for holistic practitioners. Joanna shares her 20-year journey from being a high school teacher to opening her own strength and conditioning gym, and eventually transitioning into helping other wellness professionals streamline their sales process and grow their businesses.

Listen to the Episode

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

She helps her clients ditch the session-selling model that’s popular in the health and wellness space, and instead, helps them design strategic programs that address their clients’ specific goals and problems, using her signature Client Champion Formula.

The CCF focuses on identifying ideal clients, designing specific journeys for them, and implementing a sales system that filters out the wrong people and enrolls enthusiastic and committed clients.

Key Takeaways:

1. Ditch the session model of selling your services! Create programs that address clients’ specific goals and problems and provide an identifiable transformation
2. Really hone in on your ideal clients so you can attract them (while repelling everyone else!)
3. Implement a repeatable sales system that makes it easy to enroll committed clients who are as committed to their journey as you are

Notable Quotes:

• “You need to learn a sales process to make sure somebody is a great fit for your services and then to enroll them in what they actually need.”
• “When you feel like your courage is being tested, that’s actually the sign that that’s your growth edge.”
• “Don’t sell digitally. Sell by having conversations with people and making sure they’re a great fit for your services.”

Episode Transcript

Welcome everyone. I am here today with Joanna Sapir, who is a business strategist for holistic practitioners.

Joanna specializes in helping practitioners set up repeatable systems and processes in their business to serve their clients more powerfully, enroll committed long-term clients, and create steady income and cash flow.

She’s been a teacher and a trainer for more than 20 years. She’s also a USA Masters National Champion in Olympic style weightlifting, and she’s the host of the Business Revolution for Practitioners Podcast.

Welcome Joanna.

Hi, it’s great to be here, Laurie. I’m excited because I help newer coaches really get set up, implement their tech stack, and systems in the beginning, but you’re really like the next level.

You are the person that helps other wellness professionals move their business to the next phase and really streamline the sales process to grow with their business. What I would like to do is begin with your backstory. Take us on a little journey here, where you started and how you became a coach for other health and wellness practitioners.

Yeah, sure. I started my own brick and mortar strength and conditioning gym in 2008, and I had zero experience in business whatsoever. Had no business understanding, no business plan, nothing.

I had been a public high school teacher for the previous 10 years, and teacher educator very much identified as a teacher, not as a business person. I opened this thing because I had moved to a new county and was like, this service is needed. It’s what I had been doing.

It had changed my life. I knew how to teach it, and I was like, people need this. It actually started on the land where I lived, and then I thought, it’s going to be winter and the rain is going to be coming, and why don’t I rent a place? I went totally official and officially started a business with no clue what I was doing.

What was crazy about it was that people started showing up. It was paying its own bills within the first month. It was paying the rent and whatever other expenses I had.

I wish I could tell you how much it was paying me. I don’t recall. I was so not thinking long-term.

I just was throwing this thing together, and people were showing up for the service. Only a few months into that, it was in the first year. It just broke down.

I was like, oh my goodness, this is too much work. I was having to show up to teach all the classes. I had one day a week that was off, and I just knew that I just wasn’t sustainable.

It was too much. Furthermore, I had left a career because I had already faced burnout. I was like, I do not want to do that to myself again.

That’s when I decided, okay, I’m going to learn how to run a business. I’m going to learn how to do this in a way where this is sustainable and profitable and gives me the lifestyle I want, as well as the income I want, and where people are being served. I set about doing that and decided in the course of that journey that I would build that business to be sellable, which means I really learned how to build a business that was really systematized and streamlined and could run without me.

I did sell it in 2017. My work now, I just saw a total need for it, and it brings together all my skills of teaching, and my business background now, and business systems. And I saw such a need in the community that I was a client in, and am a client in still.

I work with body workers, and I work with acupuncture and naturopath. I get all those services for myself, and I get to work with these amazing practitioners, and nine times out of 10, they are great at what they do in terms of the actual service, but their businesses are not set up well. I’m not being served as well as I know I could be because of the business model, and I know that a lot of times they’re struggling, and a real common symptom is that feast or famine income, where they’re relying on sessions being booked.

And so, for example, a lot of practitioners will say, it’s summertime and there’s a slowdown. What do I do? And so that total unpredictability, well, I mean, the answer is you need business systems that either prevent that or account for that. So that’s what I teach people how to do, is to build their businesses to be sustainable and profitable and give them the lives they want and the income they want while serving their clients, even more powerfully, actually, than they maybe know.

So our whole thing is, yes, be profitable, but also be sustainable because bringing in a lot of cash one month and then nothing the next, that is not sustainable. It is stressful. You can’t predict anything.

You can’t invest in your business or yourself. You can’t make plans to grow. If you don’t know how much money your business will be bringing in, if you don’t have that kind of predictable revenue month after month.

So behind the scenes, this is what you’re doing. You’re helping them create a system to consistently, convert the lead to clients, and then have revenue consistently month after month. What I find is that most practitioners actually do have some number of leads coming in each month, even if it’s like five, even if it’s just through a local search or SEO or referrals, right? But that they don’t know how to predictably turn those leads into steady, long-term committed clients.

And so it actually starts with that business model of what are you, how are you serving people? And in the wellness practice market, who I work with, again, like body workers, acupuncturists, anyone in health and wellness, the standard is you sell sessions. That’s what you sell. You sell a session.

Therapist, you book a session. Massage, you book a session. And the fact is that not only does that not serve your business and put you on that kind of hamster wheel of that up and down, feast or famine income, but it’s actually not what serves your clients.

When I just mentioned a few minutes ago that I’ve been the client of so many wonderful practitioners that I didn’t think were serving me as well as they could have, I saw this myself over and over. And the example I like to give is that I’ve been a competitive Olympic-style weightlifter for 15 years, and I actually compete far less frequently now. And maybe we’ll never compete again, but I did compete about a year and a half ago.

And still, it’s something that I train in full-time. But when I was really competing regularly, I would see body workers. And what I wanted was somebody who was like, you’re on my team.

Like I have a coach. I have a coach for weightlifting, still same coach, 15 years, who this is somebody who like, I know how to do. I ran a gym.

I know how to do programming, but I still want somebody outside of me helping me do that, right? So my coach, he provides my program. He watches me lift. He gives me cues.

He knows when to pull me back. He knows when to push me forward, et cetera. The body work part, that’s what I’m looking for, is somebody who’s like, knows my soft tissue, knows when there’s problems, knows when it looks good, and is that person in my corner helping to prepare me for whatever my goals are.

In this case, I’m mentioning competition. That’s a really clear point, right? Like getting ready and being in the best, having the best physical condition I can for that. But selling me sessions just doesn’t do that, right? They might even like recommend like, why don’t you come in next week? But then I’d come in next week and it’d be like, so how are you feeling? I’m feeling fine.

I want you to help me make this a pathway, right? Like how are we going to get me, make sure I’m in the best shape I could be, versus this just like, how’s it going today? Or this kind of one-off kind of situation. So what I encourage wellness practitioners to do is look at who are their favorite clients, who are their best clients, and design programs that are designed to serve those clients to help them reach their actual goals or get rid of their problems. And so just another example, many people I work with, they complain that somebody will come in for a session and expect to like be fixed.

Like they don’t understand, wait, actually we need to find the root cause. Like I might be able to, let’s say it’s something physical pain. I might be able to like help ease the pain you have right now in this one session, but it’s going to come back because some kind of movement patterns you’re doing or there’s something that you’re doing that’s creating this, right? And so that’s going to take a process.

Well, the practitioner knows that, but they’re not actually designing their services to address that. And then they’re frustrated that the clients don’t understand, right? They’re coming in, they just want me to fix them. They just say go deep or whatever, deep tissue or something and address that.

Well, what if you design a process that actually educates your client as to here’s what’s going on and we need to find the root cause and we’re going to address the root cause doing this and this and this and it’s going to take six weeks or 12 weeks or whatever it is, right? And that that’s the kind of services you should be designing for folks. People who work with me are excited by that idea. And then when they work with me, they implement that.

So that actually steadies out the hamster wheel piece of the marketing. If you’re no longer selling session by session where one month, you get a whole bunch of people booking sessions and the next month it’s crickets, right? Or it’s a slowdown like summer. Instead, you’re enrolling people in this 12-week process, for example, that already steadies things out.

And then the sales part is the next important part because most folks don’t know how do I do that? How do I enroll somebody in a 12-week process, right? Especially if in my industry, the standard is that people just buy sessions. By the way, I just want to be clear. It is common in these industries for people to sell packs of sessions, like a pack of 10.

That’s not what I’m talking about here because that is this discount model. That’s like, well, pay up front and you get a discount. The 10 session pack doesn’t have a cadence to it and it doesn’t have a journey you’re taking them on.

It’s still just 10 single sessions that they use whenever they want. So it’s not what I’m talking about here. As far as sales process, you need to learn a sales process to make sure somebody is a great fit for your services and then to enroll them in what they actually need.

And what I see, Lori, is that when practitioners learn these two things, their income not only evens out, it rises and they often, it depends on what their marketing looks like right now, but they often don’t even need to do any more marketing than they already were. Maybe switch up their marketing, but once they hone in on who their ideal clients are and what the pains and the problems that they’re solving are and the goals and desires, which always takes work for all of us to look at on a regular basis and fine tune that messaging. Then they’ve got the foundation in place to convert those leads to clients into long-term services.

For anybody with a really short attention span like me who’s like, I need the summary. So we have a lot of practitioners who sell the sessions or hacks of sessions, we meet once a week. But what I’m hearing is you’re basically starting from scratch with everybody who walks in the door.

You don’t know their history. They’re not keeping up with the progress. It’s not a continuous progression from point A to point B where they are, where they want to be.

I was here a month ago. I’m here today. I may not come back for another six weeks.

It’s not a strategic process to get you from this pain point or wherever you are to the goal of eliminating this pain or eliminating these issues and getting to achieve the thing that you’re trying to achieve. I really like that you said a strategic process. I think that’s a great way to put it because any good practitioners are going to say my best clients have been coming to me for years and we have made so much progress, right? I mean, that’s great.

That’s who you want to think about is your favorite clients, the ones who have stuck around for years. What I want to propose is that the client doesn’t know that long-term outlook that you’ve been taking them on. Even if you talk about it, they didn’t enroll in that, right? They still are just enrolled in this one thing at a time and let’s see how we go and it’s pushing ahead.

And if they’re seeing results over time, fantastic. They often come back, right? Sometimes though, people don’t come back that you know need to. They didn’t see results fast enough and that kind of stuff is exactly what you solve for when you’re really defining what the container together is.

What I like about that is that you’re kind of bringing them on and like you said, you’re a team. We’re going to work on this together. This is where we want to get to.

Let me explain to you what’s happening. Here’s the thing that I’m going to do. Here’s the things that you need to do.

We’re going to do this together to get to this point and it’s going to take time. It’s going to actually work against you to be inconsistent or show up here and there and this needs to be a commitment, right? You don’t need to both be committed to this process of you’re going to do your part. You’re going to be educated about what are the things on your side that can impact what I’m doing positively or negatively and that we’re on the same bus.

We’re going to the same place. Let’s work on this together. Yes, exactly.

And there is an important energy here to defining what’s the beginning and the end and the end may not be all the problems are solved. The end may be we’re getting to this milestone. We’re going to get to this point and then we’ll reevaluate and talk about what the next point is.

But there’s still some container to find and energetically if we’re putting that all together into one journey. Let’s call it a journey or a program or container. When we put that all together in one that’s still very different than you saying all of what you just laid out Lori and having it be session by session, right? It’s still different for a client for me if I’m working with you for me to say, Okay, yes, I want to enter this container with you and be on that team with you for this journey of again I’m going to make this up at 12 weeks.

Yes, I’m in. That’s still really different than you’ve laid out what happens and we just go week to week or month to month and see how it goes. So collaboration.

We’re working together to get to from point A to point B if that’s achieving a goal whatever this milestone. We’re in this together. We’re in a container.

We’re agreeing. We’re going to be working together for this amount of time to achieve this outcome whatever it is. And the last one is consistency.

We’re both doing our part week after week showing up doing the work as a team. Yes, totally. And so again, the client is committing to that.

You’re committing to each other from the beginning, right? I just want to kind of note the ripple effects of what happens there, especially when you combine this with a great sales system that filters your people and really make sure you’re only taking clients who are committed to this process and who are going to see results. It’s not just about their commitment. They also have to have exactly the problems that you know how to address or the goals that you know how to help people reach, right? Like, so I know that you probably know this really well working with newer people.

They’re afraid to turn away any business, right? And so I do. I will say this. I do think that when people are just starting businesses, no matter what kind of service-based business you have that you should be wide open in the very beginning and just experience that.

You got to like experience all the different stuff and start collecting data. But the more you have experienced, the more you start to go, who do I love working with? Who sees the best results for my services, right? And you do start to learn or you have to, otherwise your business really will never take off. You have to start to learn how to identify who are the right people for me and then to kindly refer the others elsewhere.

So your sales process does that. And then you’re enrolling them in these, you know, containers in these committed services. And what happens with those two things together? You get a business with number one, people who are seeing great results, right? Who doesn’t want that? We all want our clients to all get the very best results possible.

It’s a positive spiral upwards, right? It’s like a snowball effect. The more people who are getting results, the more they’re talking about you, the more you’re excited and understand, I really do know what I’m doing here, right? I’m good at this. I can help these people.

So that’s just all good. I just want to note the negative side of that. The more you accept people who are not a good fit, the more you experience some kind of failure, right? And the not a good fit could be they’re not committed or they had problems that you don’t know.

They’re not in your wheelhouse. And what does that do? It makes them feel like what did I sign up for, right? This, I shouldn’t have, I shouldn’t have, this was not the right fit for me. And it makes you feel like what am I doing? I don’t know what I’m doing, like negative snowball, right? So we want the upward one.

And so you end up with a business where you are getting people results and they’re out there talking about you. You’ll see this when your business, right, starts just getting referrals and referrals and referrals from existing clients and people show up understanding, oh, you’re the one that can help me with this. I agree.

In the beginning, you work with everybody because that helps you collect data, right? You have information and then you can make decisions based on that data instead of just kicking stuff out of the air and guessing. Having that experience, working with people, finding out what you do and don’t like, what you do and don’t want to do gives you clarity. Then when you have that experience, you have that clarity, it gives you confidence.

Yeah, wow. We’re just really on the seas here. Yeah, I don’t know.

It’s just they’re just popping out to me. This takes us right into, perfectly, your client champion formula, right? When we’re talking about identifying who it is you want to work with, bringing in the right people, attracting them. How do we do this? Let’s dig into your client champion formula, which by the way, this is Joanna’s free gift for listeners.

So I’m going to have the link to find out more about this in the show notes. But Joanna, I would love for you to take us through the formula and tell us what it’s about. So the client champion formula has three parts and this is how to build a business with high quality, committed clients and create steady, predictable income.

And it’s very much, we’ve touched very much on the high level kind of parts of that. One is you need to know who the right people are for your business. Two, you need to design journeys for them, right, that actually get them results.

And three is to have a sale system that filters out the wrong people, brings the right people in and enrolls them fully committed into those services. And that’s the client champion formula, the master class that I’m offering as a free gift there goes deeper into each of those, right, and breaks down the components and what your business looks like when it has that in place. And if I might, Lori, I’ll just back up for a second to this idea of like choosing, you said client avatars.

You know, I see two different mistakes with this. Like one are the folks who never want to get specific who are like, I can help everyone, right? And I just want to say what you’ll end up with, staying with that kind of business is one where you’re burned out or just mediocre. So I see this all the time.

When I say mediocre, I mean mediocre results. Like I get people who just don’t quite get enough clients. So they’re kind of like, they’re just kind of limping along.

Like they’re doing, they’re managing somehow, but just limping along. And that’s because nobody’s particularly attracted to you because it’s so bland. It’s not clear who is the right person for you and who is the wrong person for you.

And so for those folks, if you feel like you might be in that boat where you’re like, but I want to take anyone or I can’t take anyone or I’m scared to not just take everyone, your messaging, probably your website just doesn’t make it clear. Like if I land on it, I go, this is not for me because there’s no strong attraction statement. And what I also want to point out is that means that you’re going to repel others.

You know, so just as an example, here I am saying I’m an athlete, I am. It’s unusual. I’m turning 50 next year and I’m like a competitive weightlifter and a perimenopausal woman.

Like, you know, it’s a quite an interesting combination, right? But if I land on your website and you have some service, let’s say bodywork, and if it’s just like your advertising, like a massage that just makes you feel good and relax, that’s not for me. And that’s good because if I’m not your person, that’s not for me. But if you’re just saying, oh, just relax in this broadway trying to get everybody, nobody’s really, really attracted to that except for maybe a one-timer who’s just looking for a one-time feel-good massage, which is sort of a terrible business model, right? So just want to note that, like you want your, you want to know who your people are and you want to start getting clear on it and speaking directly to them.

But the other thing that I want to say the opposite side of that that I see in the online coaching world is that so many new coaches hear people like me or people like you or any of the big gurus, anybody, anybody who teaches business is going to be talking about who’s your ideal client, any of them. And when people are new, they think, I’m supposed to pick my niche and I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what my niche.

So I think it’s going to be this and they make this stuff up out of thin air. And that is not what you want to do either. Like you don’t make up a niche.

Like your niche finds you, you see it, it emerges out of your work and your practice and your data. Don’t resist specializing and also don’t think you have to do it when it’s not clear yet. Just keep your eyes open as you work with people.

And I call it the bullseye of your target market. That’s what I call this. And it’s like, you know, you think about looking at a bullseye that you’re aiming at.

You know, you got to really be able to focus on it. Well, that focus is going to get clearer and clearer and clearer the more clients you serve. You just get clearer and clearer and clearer.

Even for somebody like you or me who has been in business for years and years, I imagine you would say the same. I’m always re-evaluating. Each year, it’s like re-evaluating that.

Are there any changes to who we know our ideal clients are, right? And you do that by looking at who have been the best ones in this last year. What’s different, right? What do we want to add to our understanding of who our ideal clients are? That’s just constant work that you do. So just want to note that.

You just keep your eyes open and pay attention and look at who you’re loving, working with and is seeing the best results from your services. I agree. When we talk a little bit about when you’re first starting out, you work with everybody.

Patterns emerge. Your own attraction to a certain type of work or a certain type of solution or a certain type of thing is going to come out. I love working with this type of client because I get a really deep satisfaction out of or I already have a lot of expertise because I’ve done training or I have a personal experience with doing this type of work.

It’s going to kind of show up. You don’t have to go digging for it. It’s going to just pop up.

I work with this type of client. I don’t know enough about this. I ended up having to do a lot of research.

It was uncomfortable. I didn’t like it. I didn’t feel like I did a good job.

I don’t think the client was overly impressed. It wasn’t a great experience all around. Let’s not do that.

Like you said, when you have that client avatar, you have that niche, you do become the expert and it becomes easier for you to help those clients because you know it. And when you have these one off, I need to solve this problem. Great.

Okay, let me go research it. It’s time consuming. You’re constantly having to go back and learn things.

And that’s a huge time and energy investment that you could be spending getting deeper into that bullseye. Okay, now I have these clients. Great.

I’ve solved this problem. What’s the next step? Now I can go deeper. Yeah, the same client.

How can I add more value or further their journey? Yes, they’re already on and people who pay you money are more likely to pay you more money. Yeah. So you’ve already solved one problem for them.

Go ahead and solve another one. Deep, not shallow. Go deeper instead of more.

I also like that you said your sales process isn’t just about selling. It’s also repelling because you don’t want the people who don’t have this issue because they’re not going to have a great experience. And those are going to be the people that complain the loudest about your work, right? In the sales process, this is a great time to do it.

Here’s what I do. If this is you, great. If this is not you, here’s who I recommend.

Please, by all means, you’re not going to hurt my feelings. This is a better fit for all of us. Let’s just, you know, let’s carways here.

So we’ll all be a lot happier. Your client champion formula. It’s just a perfect way to capture all the different moving pieces of what you’re going to be doing and how it impacts other areas because in your business, your marketing, your sales, your people, like all of these things are interrelated.

Yes, I love that. So the benefits of using that really help you streamline who you’re talking to, who you help, how you can help them. And it’s given you higher quality clients and steady, predictable income.

It’s only once you have those three pieces in place that you can actually see whether marketing is an area you need to look at because now you actually know how to convert any attention you get from marketing into predictable income, right? And into high quality clients and you can actually see the numbers. I work with many people who it turns out they came to me saying I need to do more marketing. We put in place those three things in the client champion formula.

Turns out they didn’t need that, right? They just needed to know how to convert their leads into steady, predictable income and high quality clients. But at that point, it will reveal are there more leads needed to take through the sales pipeline and enroll in these services. And so that’s where we move into marketing.

So that comes after. You know, that’s a good point that a lot of people will start with the marketing, right? It’s like, do you really want to bring in a crowd for a show that you don’t know is any good, right? The way I think about it is just the classic picture of a leaky bucket. It’s like you’re marketing, like how much energy are you spending to like turn on the faucet? I mean, marketing is a lot of energy depends on what you’re doing, right? You want to in the long run have sustainable systems, of course.

But if you’re just out there being like trying to get out in front of as many people as I can, here I am, here I am. And like you’re pouring water into a bucket and it’s just full of holes. Like that’s totally, totally a waste of your time.

You know, to me, that’s like the people who start with funnels, right? Who have no nothing on the back end. They don’t have an offer that converts. They don’t know who they’re talking to.

They don’t have any market research. They don’t have any language. You don’t have any experience.

They start with the funnel and it’s like, and then, and then, and then. The real dark side of the internet digital marketing world that has blown up around internet business is that there are so many people saying this is needed and this is needed and this is needed. The funnels are needed or, you know, a YouTube specialist says you have to have a YouTube channel and this many followers or Instagram huge, right? Instagram influencers.

So I just want to say to everybody, like, I don’t have a freaking Instagram following. I don’t use Instagram. Like you can build a totally successful business without any of that.

It starts with those three things that I’m talking about that are in the masterclass if you want to watch it. They want to watch it. I know they do because I’ve watched it.

It’s good. A lot of people do start with the social media. They pour a ton of energy, time, resources, money, et cetera, into get a following.

You’re at the end. You have so much work to do the core of your business before you start trying to like build an audience because guess what? You could build this awesomely huge audience. They don’t know what you do.

You don’t know what you do. They could be all the wrong people. Like it’s, yes, the whole influencer world has really, I think screwed people up.

Just know you can get clients and start making good money without any of that. You do not need the social media following and you do not need to have some big marketing thing. It starts with conversations and you do have to have those conversations in a particular way.

It’s not just a friendly chat and it is by no means a pitch fest where you’re like trying to push somebody into a sales thing. There are certain ways to do it where you’re simply helping people and showing them what’s missing. How to get to the goals they have if you’re the one who can help them do that.

Right. You’re not trying to lure anybody into the DMs and then pitch slap them. There’s two types of activities you do in your business.

There’s revenue generating and there’s relationship building. You do the relationship building well. The revenue generating takes care of itself.

Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, I think relationship building is revenue generating in the long run. Joanna, let’s talk about how people can work with you.

So if they’re listening, they watched your webinar, their life lesson. I need to connect with Joanna because she needs to help me. What does it look like to work with you and what is the process? Yeah, sure.

First of all, I mean, if you watch the masterclass, you’ll get info from me. You’ll be on my list and should be able to see that. I work with experienced practitioners.

So just to be clear, I don’t work with people who are just new and just getting started. I work with folks who have worked with at least some.