268. Expanding Your Offerings

Introduction:

Hello and welcome to Mentoring with Geraldine and the bite-sized podcast. How the devil are you? So over the last couple of weeks, I’ve talked about delivering those exceptional client circumstances and delivering to what’s the problem. So we’re asking our clients what the problem is.

Balancing Work and Holidays

But today I thought, well, here we are, we’re asking them what the problem is, but maybe we need to think about expanding our offerings. So we’re still in September. We’re almost finished September, which means that you may or may not, depending on what state you’re in or what country you’re in, be in the school holidays.

And so you’re probably busy right now. You might be about to go on holiday. You might be on holiday. You might be coming back from holiday, depending where you are. But in the Southern Hemisphere, there tends to be a holiday about now. So you may not be listening to this right now. You might be coming back to it.

You might, who knows what you’re doing. But that means that in these holiday times, we have to have had something that’s going to be for sale while we’re away. Otherwise, because we’re small business owners and because we rely on the one to one. We aren’t actually earning anything where zero watts were on holiday.

So if you’re anything like me in the past, then, and what still happens is before I go away, I have huge weeks of seeing clients. And so I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the month leading up to it. Organizing and making sure that everybody’s clustered into that week prior to leaving. So I have a lot of work, I have a heavy workload, and then I pack the bags for everyone and do all of the things.

It’s not so much anymore as only my husband and I going away, so it’s not like I have to pack his bag or do anything like that, he does all of that. But, you know, when you have kids, you’re packing for them, you’re packing, you’re doing everything. Here we are, possibly in your school holidays, and thinking to yourself, Ah, I really need this holiday.

Covering Costs While on Holiday

At the same time going, I haven’t got any money to pay the bills. Unless like me, you had a big week that would financially cover the next couple of weeks. What have we got in our offerings that we can expand as that one to one practitioner? So we’ve got money coming in from repeat sales of products, which is why We can have a lower return cost to our clients.

Products and Costs

You know, the first appointment cost is traditionally a bigger number. So that’s a higher price point for our clients to come in and see us on their first appointment. And we’ve got a couple of reasons for that. And that is we haven’t seen them before. So we’ve got research to do on them, on their drugs, supplements, all the rest of it.

First Appointments and Costs

Also, when we had private health covering. Um, some of the cost of an appointment, a client gets back more money from private health on a first appointment they do on subsequent appointments. So the health companies and everybody all realize that that first appointment you’re doing more for that client. There’s more out of office work at that first appointment. While you’re on holiday, there is no first appointment because there’s no follow up appointment either. So, but the follow up appointment can be at a significantly reduced rate. Because by then they’re on supplements maybe, so there is an ongoing earning from that client which makes it up because we really need to be looking at earning a minimum of 100 an hour to be able to cover costs and say, I work from home, I don’t really have any costs.

Home-Based Business Costs

Well, you’ve got a mortgage or you’ve got rent, you’ve got electricity still to pay, you’re just not paying a landlord on top of your money. So you’re still paying and people are looking at, oh, she’s working from home. It’s cheaper. Well, you still have bills to pay. At the end of the day, you still have to pay off your education as well, which is way more expensive than my education was.

Covering Expenses and Education Costs

Cost me 6,000 to become a naturopath, all up, for nutrition, naturopathy, and herbalism. So it’s going to have cost you one heck of a lot more than that, unless you, like me, trained almost 20 years ago. So we’ve got to cover those past expenses and those ongoing training expenses. Yes, this is free. A podcast is free.

 Free Content

It’s free. If you want one to ones with me because you want to talk about your client or you want to be in the Monday group, the clinical group, that costs money. These things cost money. I can’t do things for free because I still have a mortgage even after 20 years. I still have a mortgage. So we’ve got to pay our bills.

The Cost of Education

All right. I’m doing ongoing study right now. So I’m paying for that just like you are. So we do need to be thinking about this expansion of our offerings and how we can do that. Now, if you’re a nutritionist, you’ve got cookbooks, naturopaths, cookbooks, come on. We’ve got the capacity to create recipes for people or Ways of doing things for people.

So we’ve got opt-ins that we can do for free, and then we can expand that out. Have you thought about writing a book? AI can help you to write that book. As long as you’ve got the ideas and you’ve got the content, the AI can actually make it sound heaps better, which is what we need. What is it that you do on a regular basis, on a daily basis, that you could turn into a program?

Creating Programs and Systems

Because my successful programs that have worked with clients in my clinic are ones I’ve sold to them at the first appointment, and that supports their care. It actually takes one appointment away. We’re one and a half often because it’s the program is all about healthy eating, about changing their lifestyle, all the things you repeat over and over again that you don’t repeat for every client.

Um, and some clients it’s missed and other clients you’ll repeat it twice or three times. Whereas if they are learning those things within a program, it takes the heat off you to remember to say to them, if you’re using beans in a can, you have to wash them because of the salt and sugar in that water. If your laundry detergent needs to be an eco-environmental one so that we haven’t got all of the nasties in there, you shouldn’t be using a perfume, sunscreen, all of the things.

Yeah. Fake suntan. All of the things that we don’t want them doing, the additives and preservatives we don’t want them eating, these can all be turned, it’s stuff you’re doing anyway, it’s stuff you’re saying anyway. So you can put that into a program for your client so that they have that support on the side.

Short, bite-sized amounts like these podcasts. Under half an hour so that the person has time to listen or watch or read the information you’ve sent them. So that is a possibility. The programs that I’ve developed have been around food. There have been workbooks to go with them and that I would hand out at their appointment that they

Developing Workbooks

Back in the day, before I was doing everything online, I would hand out at their appointments so that they had the physical, do this, do that sort of stuff. Although you never say do this or do that because people never like to be told what to do. So it’s a suggestion. If you do this instead, or how can you support your own change? So what can we do about bringing in that and expanding our offering?

So number one, a program. to support what we do. It runs alongside what we do. You could have one for sale, but nobody’s going to buy something unless they know about it. There is, you know, people say, Oh, it’s evergreen and I’ll just get this ongoing money. No, you won’t. You still have to advertise it. If you know about this podcast, because you saw the advertising, you see the snippet from this come up every week, maybe in my group or on my social media.

 Advertising Your Offerings

I’m advertising it all the time and it’s just like a program. You can’t just think, Oh yeah, people are going to buy it. They don’t. Everything involves telling people about it. Everything involves a bit of work. You can put things on set and forget though. So that’s what we need to do. We need to make sure that we’re programming things in so that people know about them.

Expanding your offerings. What else can you offer? Could you offer group work? Could you offer a Facebook group that people pay to be in and you’re supporting them through something that is related to your niche? We all have areas we can expand into. We just have to look at our niche. Look at our clients and go, what is it I repeat?

Once you know what you repeat, then you can look at, I’m repeating it, therefore it can be turned into a group or a program or a system. And I can be then sharing that with my audience in a free way that expands your audience. If it’s all free, like this podcast is free, so it expands my audience, but who knows what the percentage.

Of the people who are listening to this have paid me actual money. There is now a private podcast on the side for those of you who want some clinical support. There’s the red flags and Clinical Tips is now available on the side of this podcast. So there is, maybe you are paying me money because you’ve joined that, that membership.

So that’s like an expansion of my offerings. I was offering it to my academy members. It is there in the academy. So academy members get it automatically. Part of the academy. What is the wording there? It’s part of the academy, but I’ve now offered it to those of you who aren’t in the academy who don’t.

Want to join that system, but you just want some more clinical support and you listen to the podcast anyway, so you think what a great way to support Geraldine and her podcast is I join up and I get these exclusive episodes. When and how can we expand our offerings is solely based on what. If you have the same people coming to see you, then chances are you can create a group.

If you have the same people coming to see you, you work in weight loss, for example, then you could go to a community center or a library and offer to them to promote what you do and create a group within that. There are lots of ways with what you do now. So you need to mind map it. You need to think about what can I do?

This is my niche. This is what I repeat. Don’t be thinking, I see all these clients for women’s health. I’ll write a book about optometry. Okay, that’s what often happens, people end up writing a book about something else. It’s that they think, oh, that’s a really good idea, but what do you do all the time?

Staying True to Your Expertise

Because what you do all the time, what you talk about all the time is the content of your book, is the content of your optin, is the content of your group, your program, whatever system it is that you’re going to undertake. So get in contact. Let’s sort this out. Okay. If you’ve enjoyed today, it’s only a short one, give us that five-star review if you haven’t already.

Wrapping Up

I’d love to receive it and get in contact Geraldine at mentoring with Geraldine dot biz. Can’t wait to hear from you. See ya. Thanks so much for joining me today. Don’t forget to rate, review, and subscribe to the