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March 25, 2026
by David Goodale

From Zero Audience to a Thriving Business: Essential Tips for Online Coaches

(Slightly edited from video transcript for greater readability)

Meet the Speakers

David Goodale:

Hello, David here with another episode of the podcast. I have to tell you, the internet and, particularly, modern video platforms lend themselves so well to online learning, not just to communicate, but to build a relationship with your audience, even though you're not physically there in person. Now, this has led to a tremendous rise in online practitioners and coaches. Today I am talking to Laura Wood of the Wellness Business Hub. Laura and the team at the WHB have a tremendous amount of expertise in the area of helping coaches and online practitioners grow their businesses, and they've done it for over 15 years. I wanted to pick Laura's brain to find out about the biggest mistakes that online coaches make when they're growing their business. Now, this could be a pretty wide-ranging discussion. I don't know exactly where we're going to go today, but I'm excited for the conversation. Laura, thanks for joining.

Laura Wood:

Thanks for having me.

David Goodale:

Wonderful. I'm just going to jump right in. To start with, I think the Wellness Business Hub tends to work with established coaches or wellness or health practitioners, but I want to rewind it back just a little bit and take it from the beginning. Now, this might be an annoying question, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Okay. If someone has knowledge to share, but no audience, what's the best way to get started?

Laura Wood:

Oh, that is a big question. Okay.

David Goodale:

I knew it was, I'm starting right there.

Laura Wood:

If you have knowledge to share but no audience, start by figuring out your ideal client and the painful problem you can solve for them. People pay to solve painful problems, not for general advice. That's always the first step.

David Goodale:

Well, that makes sense. That kind of leads to another question for me. Yeah. Is there maybe a way of thinking about yourself that allows someone to understand their own core value, or said more simply? How does someone know if they have value to provide to someone else?

Laura Wood:

That's a really good question. Okay. I think first and foremost, we, as humans in general, tend to make it okay. We make things that we don't understand more valuable than things that we do understand. Where I think brilliant practitioners and coaches struggle the most is in realizing the value of the knowledge that they have. First and foremost, it's okay. What problem have you solved for yourself? Generally speaking, most successful practitioners or coaches get into the business, into the industry, because they have personal experience. Something happened to them, or a loved one, or a friend, that triggered their love and drive and passion for helping people solve a specific problem. First and foremost, what problems have you solved for yourself? If that doesn't resonate, then what problems have you solved for friends, family, acquaintances, and you really have to sit down and brainstorm sometimes, because again, you sometimes don't see the value in the solution you provided to them. It's just normal. Somebody is struggling with digestion, and they're having a really hard time with certain foods or this, that, and the other, and you're like, oh, no problem. You know what? This supplement, this supplement, this supplement. Oh, and I probably would avoid this food and this food and introduce this food to you. That's just normal knowledge that's every day. You don't value it the way that somebody else who doesn't have that knowledge is going to value it. I think that would be where I would start here.

David Goodale:

Well, that makes sense. That's kind of how I fell into payments myself. It's not like I grew up dreaming of being a payments guy, but it just happened. But that's how I think businesses happen. Exactly. You fall into it, and then people realize you can help them out, and it happens a number of times, and maybe they see a trend and they realize, hey, I can help some other people out. Yes. Maybe then I'll ask, let's say you're a business owner, you're a practitioner, or a coach. You've started helping some people out, but you're early on in the, in the process. Where do people who have started, but they're early on in their journey, where can they, or where do you typically see people, see people perhaps go wrong somehow?

Laura Wood:

Oh my gosh, many places. *laugh*, how much time do we have? Let's go *laugh*. First and foremost, okay. I think the first place they tend to go wrong is just getting started. They've helped some people; they have some proof of concept. They're like, okay, I can do this. I want to actually have a business, online on the internet, help people this way. They tend to prioritize tools and tactics over the overarching strategy. Things like, which marketing platform am I going to use? It feels like a monumental, super-important decision. we know, having been in business this long, that a marketing platform, you're going to pick one. When you're new, it seems like a very big deal. I see clients we work with who, when we onboard them into our programs, we'll kind of chit-chat a little bit, and they'll talk about spending six to eight months researching CRMs and marketing platforms to decide which one is the best and which one is not.

Laura Wood:

Right? You didn't need to waste that time. We could've just told you, and it really doesn't matter. It's just a tool. Right? I think that the tool is the one thing or the tactic. That's another thing, especially online. Oh my gosh. Like right now, we live in this economy obviously of online excitement, attention, influencers, people talking about this, that, and the other. It's really easy to start scrolling. If you are looking to start an online business, your social media feed will become almost like an echo chamber of all of these things that you should be doing and all of this learning and this, that, and the other. You'll be kind of shiny object syndrome to a specific tactic.

Laura Wood:

If you have this one webinar funnel, you will be wildly successful. If you have this one website, you'll be wildly successful if you have this one tool. They think that's it. If they have the one thing, then that's just going to create the business. Where, again, once you've been in it for a minute, you know that a business is, it's the same fundamental things. No matter what you're doing online or offline, you need an offer. You need a way to deliver that offer. You need an audience; you need their attention. You need marketing, you need to sell. No one thing is going to make or break that. I think that holds so many people back at the beginning, is just the obsession over the one thing instead of the overarching, okay, what is the strategy? What is the model? Then how do I learn, and who do I learn from in order to implement this for myself?

David Goodale:

That's really interesting. I know exactly what you mean. Even if they did spend a year researching the world's greatest CRM, and they really made the right decision, yeah. They could probably do with a customer or two *laugh* maybe. That should probably be the priority. Then I'm going to talk about that next up. I want to talk about growing an established business. Now, my internet knowledge is super outdated, but I think it's fair to say that marketing principles that worked a hundred years ago, for the most part, still work today. Mm-Hmm *affirmative*. Obviously, not literally verbatim, but a lot of the psychology is the same way. Just something came to me that I wanted to ask you, which is about your existing audience. When I was learning about internet marketing, it would've been like early two thousand, it was talking about email lists and your existing customers. I want to ask today, how important are your existing clients or your existing audience in terms of getting new clients? Even if you don't necessarily have a huge audience, is it still something important that you should be using somehow?

Laura Wood:

I think it's massively important. I think for a couple of different reasons, I think you hit the nail on the head when you said the basic core principles don't change, and they really haven't. Yes, the tactics and the strategies change, of course, but the core principles don't. For us, like in the wellness business, one of our core values is client success. That is, we put that at number one for the entire company, whether you're client-facing or not. If you work with us, your number one core value is client success. The reason for that is meaningful.

David Goodale:

Sorry to interrupt. Can you describe what client success is, Laura? I was just curious what that means for sure.

Laura Wood:

Are we delivering what we promise to our clients in a way that will contribute to their success? Whatever they deem that to be. If we are bringing a client into a program, a service, or selling them a product, are we delivering in full integrity what we promise we're going to deliver? I think that ties right into what you just said. How important is your current list? If you become great at marketing and sales and you can convert clients, but you have zero experience in delivery, and you're not able to actually get them results or do the thing you promised, you're very quickly going to have a problem. Word of mouth in terms of even just like your own confidence. No practitioner, no coach goes into this industry just wanting to disappoint people.

Laura Wood:

If you truly can't deliver, that shakes you, and then the marketing and sales go out the window. I think, from that lens, what you just asked, the current audience is extremely important. Then also from the lens of will have people in your audience forever who never shop with you, who never buy from you, who never enroll with you. That's a hundred percent okay. The goal is not to convert a hundred percent of your audience, but if you are providing value, and they're following you, paying attention to you, and learning from you. They're commenting on your posts, they're sharing you, and they're referring you to family and friends. Maybe even if they've never spent a dime with you, then positive influence changes things dramatically for you as well, especially when you're kind of newly established. Every 10 impressions is a really big deal for growing the brand and growing your business.

David Goodale:

That is, you just made me think of something. You made me connect two dots I'd never connected before. Back in the day, the internet web copy would be like: "ACME Inc, we make the best widgets. We are committed to success?" Nowadays, it would say: "John in the warehouse packs your order?" The internet became a lot more personal, I think, over time. Mm-Hmm *affirmative*. What you just made me realize, tell me if I'm correct, that in the area of experts, coaches, practitioners, it sounds like reputation and integrity are really important to uphold. Is that fair to say?

Laura Wood:

The most important thing? Absolutely. Yes.

David Goodale:

Okay. I thought so, because people are, when you have a coach or a practitioner, are you your own brand? Is that how you separate, like how connected is your personality, your persona to the business, and what you're offering?

Laura Wood:

it's super connected, really, like whether you want it to be or not. The reality is people buy from people. People trust people. Mm-Hmm *affirmative*. When you're working in a space where you are working with people's health, whether it's their physical health, their emotional health, or relationship health in some way, shape, or form, if you're a practitioner or a coach and you're helping to solve a painful problem for somebody, it is personal? Yes, you do become a personal brand because people need to develop that knowledge and trust before they're ever going to want to work with you in such a personal capacity. In today's world, social media is very much alive. If you, as a coach or practitioner, are being researched by somebody, so somebody finds you, and they're like, hmm, do I want to work with this person?

Laura Wood:

Hmm. Do I want to work with Laura to help me in this area of my life? Let's Google Laura. Well, what is the very first hit on Google? It's your Facebook personal page. It just is. If you don't have a ton of experience and a ton of online credentials, which most people don't have for quite a while, it's your Facebook personal page. If they hit that page and they see a whole bunch of likes, random memes, and maybe some like cat videos, and then some like odd comments *laugh*. This person doesn't seem to be what I thought they were. Whereas if they hit your page and it's like you're sharing really good advice and you're posting things relevant to the painful problem that they have, and you appear warm and professional and you're very much dialed in, they're going to think: "She seems to know what she's talking about. She's clearly having this reputation. I see people commenting, there's some, there's some trust here. I'm going to go one step deeper"?

David Goodale:

That is so interesting. It's a little, isn't there a saying? "How you do something? Is how you do everything?

Laura Wood:

Is that, yes. "How you do one thing is how you do everything?" Yeah, it totally.

David Goodale:

Track. Okay. Yep. It ties into it. I get it. Well, we've been talking a lot about social media, and I'm happy to continue that conversation, but I don't want to steer it down just to social media. I wanted to give you a little bit broader question, and there's somebody who's coming to my mind that I know. He is a coach, and he was an author, one of the earlier authors about intermittent fasting. He's fairly prominent in the health and fitness industry. I know that he's grown to a certain point, and I know there was a time, at least when I think he was stagnating a bit, mm-hmm *affirmative*. Not doing badly. I don't mean it in a bad way, but if you're established but stuck, I could probably come up with a better word than stuck. *laugh*. If you're established and you're not taking the business where it should be, first of all, how do you even know? Is it like instinctive? Or sometimes you've got clients come to you, and you can see that's not where they think they are. Are people even aware of what their problems are? I guess what I'm asking?

Laura Wood:

Oh, that's so good. People generally are not aware *laugh* of where their problems are. For us, it's really simple. We are like a fully metrics-based business. We do not make a single decision based on feelings or instinct, or just a random thought or idea. Everything is done and optimized based on metrics. If somebody comes to us, it's really easy. We start at the top. What's the audience size? Meaning what's your email list size or your follower size, or whatever it is that you are measuring your audience with? What's the actual growth? How many new people did you bring in last month? Okay, we have that metric. Next is going to be your ability to connect and use messaging to get their attention. We'll look at things like your email and open rates. What are the email open rates?

Laura Wood:

Are you actually using language that your ideal client is interested in connecting with? Cool. We can look at that. Then we're going to look at, are you running marketing events. Like, in some way, shape, or form. We need to give people a reason to take an action. For us, a lot of our clients will run workshops, free workshops where people can register, and they will have like a really great educational workshop and then a call to action to connect, book a call, and talk about whether moving forward and working one-to-one is a good fit. Then we're going to look at your marketing metrics in terms of events, in terms of people taking an action. Then it just kind of goes down the chain. If you enroll clients through conversation, great. How many conversations are you booking of those?

Laura Wood:

How many people then become a client? As we go down that kind of line, we just have like industry standard metrics that we're looking for at each point. If at any point we're not hitting it, that's the thing we're going to focus on. It's kind of like, we're not excited in the sense that we're just crunching numbers, but it's great because you get full clarity, you know exactly where the hole is. With your kind of acquaintance, your friend, it would've just been, here's this number. Is it audience growth? Do we need to invest in some paid lead gen ads? Is it that we're just not getting their attention, and we need to, like, create a few new hooks? Is it that what we need to convert a little bit better on the very last kind of line of this? Then we just go and work on that?

David Goodale:

That's so interesting. You just made me think something when I listened to you. You're just making questions come to mind, *laugh*, it's such an interesting conversation. I love it. I'm an entrepreneur, I'm a business owner, and when you have to wear a lot of hats, mm-hmm *affirmative*. If you're literally talking right now about analytics and metrics and stuff like that, mm-hmm *affirmative*. How many hats does a coach or a practitioner have to wear? Even before you answer, we both acknowledge that nobody can be an expert in everything. How do they navigate? How do you tell people how to navigate that?

Laura Wood:

Ooh, that's such a good question. Okay. I think at the beginning, when we work with coaches and practitioners, they're just kind of starting out and trying to grow. we're assuming they have the skill that is required to actually work with clients and transform lives and solve a problem. We're going to assume that skill already exists, because if it doesn't, then they're likely not ready to start a business with their training. That skill already exists. Okay, cool. In terms of the most important hats to wear, it's not what anybody ever thinks. The first two hats they have to learn to wear are marketing and sales hats. Those are the hardest hats to learn. You have to learn how to move people with your words to take action.

Laura Wood:

That's a skill. The second skill is sales. Everything in life is sales. Once you realize that it's actually quite wild. Everything coaching clients is sales. Moving people to your point of view in your personal life, in your professional life, that's sales. Getting somebody to commit to working with you, that's sales. You really, those two skills are, are the first skills. When we work with clients, for example, we do all of their tech for them. We run their meta-ads for them. We kind of do all of the background work so that they can focus on those two key skills. Once you have those two key skills, then I think it moves a little bit in kind of different directions. I think the next skill really is likely a little bit of analytics and numbers and spreadsheets, which people hate to hear.

Laura Wood:

You do have to have at least some core understanding of, of, of what's going on in your business by the numbers. I would include, like, a financial understanding as part of that. Like, if you're going to run a business at some point, you have to learn a bit of p and l, a profit and loss statement, you have to learn about net profit, and you have to learn a bit about gross profit. You have to learn all of these like words; you probably don't want to. Then if you have those hats, I feel like at that point, the next hat to wear is leadership. That's when you're growing a team, and then you have to wear the hat of actually like sitting in that leadership position and like guiding a team towards a shared goal, which is a whole new set of skills. It's like every single level, you're just unlocking a new hat you have to wear and learning the skills associated with it to get to the next new level.

David Goodale:

Well, that makes sense, because if you don't, if you ever stop learning, you're not going to grow. It's just continual learning that you're describing. That's absolutely. I think that's life, basically. Yeah.

Laura Wood:

Totally. Yeah.

David Goodale:

I have a question, and I was curious to ask you this question. I have this feeling that you probably have a lot of those be sure you don't make this mistake type conversations or conversations with clients over and over, where you see a repeated mistake that you just wish people wouldn't make. Curious if that's true, and if so, maybe you could give some advice about it.

Laura Wood:

Yeah, for sure. I think, okay, well, let's kind of start at the beginning. Mistake number one, I think anybody, practitioner coach, like human beings in general, has this need to wait until they're ready to move forward, whether it's to get their business to the next stage, whether it's to start their business, or whether it's to make that new hire. We have this like, innate desire to just hold off. That's because, like humans, we're wired to stay the same. Staying the same is safe. Doing something new is not safe. That is how our brains work. Waiting until you're ready. I can't tell you the number of conversations I have with clients who just, at the end of a cycle of whatever we're building or doing, they say, " Man, I wish I had just started this when we first talked about it six months ago.

Laura Wood:

Like, I get it now. We always think we're going to have something different in place in three months, in six months,in nine months. The reality is, if we don't change, we don't change, and then nothing changes, and we're not waiting for anything. I think that's like a high-level mistake. I think if we go high level again, honestly, the biggest mistake people make is unrealistic expectations in whatever stage of business they're in. I think this is really interesting because you can define happiness by expectations being met or unmet. If what you expect to happen happens, generally you're happy. If what you expect to happen does not happen, then you're unhappy. We see a lot of coaches and practitioners who are like super unhappy with where they're at, and they feel like they're doing a bad job and they're like ready to kind of just like, hang in the hat, give up on it when, when we meet them because they're not doing this much money a month and they don't have an audience of this big and they don't have X, Y, Z whatever.

Laura Wood:

And when you dig a little bit deeper and say, okay, well, why, why do you think you should have that? Or why do you think you should? They don't really have a good reason. They just expected it to be a certain way. They just thought it would, it would work a certain way. I think that is a really big mistake because people walk away and give up because they think they're not good enough, when realistically, they just didn't have the right expectations. Then, in terms of just like actual tactical mistakes, I would say the biggest mistake we see, especially established practitioners, make is putting the brakes on lead generation. lead generation, audience growth, whatever you do in any way, shape, or form, in order to continue enrolling clients, making sales, working with people, you need to continually build your audience.

Laura Wood:

If you are running ads via Meta, which a lot of our practitioners do, that tends to be the most cost-effective way to build an audience these days. You can't let up on that. Like that, that audience growth is the number one input into the end-of-the-day outputs for your business. I think that there's this common unknowing that's what we like to call mistakes. It's not knowing that for the entire life cycle of your business, you will need to invest in advertising, in audience growth in some way, shape, or form. The minute you stop, the sales will start slowing down, maybe not that month, but in month 2, 3, 4, and then by that point, you think everything's broken when really, it's just that you haven't been growing your audience. I think like in terms of like just like a specific case.

David Goodale:

Why would they do that? Laura *laugh*? Is that because it's too, is that because it got too, like, okay, I remember with pay-per-click, back in the day it was $2 a click and it was 20, then it was 200 mm-hmm *affirmative*. Are they stopping because they get too busy, a victim of their success? Or because it gets too expensive and there is too much competition?

Laura Wood:

I think it's neither of those, so to speak. I think the issue is, and again, coming back to, like, at the very beginning, just because you have a skillset to help someone solve a problem. It doesn't mean you have the skillset of a business owner. I just think that for a lot of practitioners and coaches, they just still, even while they're doing it, even while they're enrolling clients, they assume that they should just know what to do. That running a business isn't its own skillset. They don't really understand the overarching strategy of everything. They just knew that they needed to run ads to build an email list in the beginning, and then they didn't connect that to continuously building that list. Then the other side of it, which you kind of mentioned is cost investment, and really being able to break down, okay, if I'm spending this month, this much money a month on ads, and I'm bringing in this many clients and all my metrics line up here, and then I make this much money, at the end of the day, that is just a cost of doing business.

Laura Wood:

If you don't know that the expectation is that like that it shouldn't cost that to do business. Why does it cost that? I just want to enroll clients. I think it's just more of a, a, a knowledge gap than anything else. It's a, it it's part of the bigger knowledge gap of, knowing that a business actually requires a very specific set of skills that has nothing to do with helping people. You have to wear both hats at all times. If you don't have all the skills, that's when investing in skills, whether it's through reading, whether it's through like research, whether it's through hiring an agency, whether it's through, working with a coach, it doesn't matter, investing in the skills you need is going to prevent a lot of those high-level mistakes from happening. I think there just isn't enough knowledge around that as a normal expected thing if you are planning to start your own business.

David Goodale:

I had this competing thought going through my mind when you were speaking just now, and it's on one side, it's the importance of continuing to learn, and basically don't let your foot up off the gas. Yeah. On the other side, it's the treadmill because you don't want to be sprinting until you're 90 years old. There's some sort of balance to it. Of course, this is not even asking a question right now, *laugh*, I'm just thinking aloud right here for sure. Here's a question. How do people know if they're working hard enough?

Laura Wood:

Ooh, that's a really tough question to answer. Honestly, most of the time people are working too hard, but on the things that don't matter, *laugh*, the things that don't actually Oh, interesting. Move the needle. mm-hmm *affirmative*. Again, going back to what we first talked about, you tend to overvalue skills you don't have. If we're talking about a business on the internet, you're going to help people on the internet, which is super cool and amazing that we have the technology to do this. You're not a techie person. You are going to spend tens of hundreds of hours over the course of a year or two years, just like trying to acquire these tech skills, because you think you need them. Meanwhile, you can hire them out for very inexpensive rates for contractors to come in and help you with.

Laura Wood:

I think it's not so much like most of the people we work with, who work very hard. The way that we tie back to the key focuses is, does what you're working on have a direct tie to either acquiring leads, marketing to those leads, or turning those leads into clients, or delivering to your clients? Those are the areas that actually matter when it comes to putting in work when you're starting a business. If it ties directly into one of those things. Great. If you're out there, fiddling with your website page for seven hours a day, three days a week, and you don't actually get clients from your website, then that's a problem, and that's working too hard and things that don't move the needle, that would be kind of what we would define it as. I think

David Goodale:

That's interesting, and what you made me think is even for myself, my own business mm-hmm *affirmative*. Remember to value your own time and invest it where it matters. I was just going through, it's just a silly thing, but I was trying to, I was trying to get approval for like some Bitcoin thing, and there's all these KYC documents, and I'm going through it, and I probably have about 500 things that I could be doing right now that's more important than this. It's like, value your time. Put it where it matters. That's probably great advice. Thank you.

Laura Wood:

For that. You're welcome.

David Goodale:

I'm going to pick your brain with a question that kind of, that I draw upon from my own business. I work in a dry industry, and I'm not afraid to talk about it. Nobody's super excited about payment processing. It's like an air conditioner. If it's working, you're not thinking about it. Right. That's what, that's what you want. I'm kind of wondering how important the nature of your topic of expertise is when it comes to marketing your business? As said differently. If I could have a button on the side of my bed that I could press when I go to sleep and wake up with a six-pack, I would press that button. It'd be wonderful. A lot of people would buy that button; they'd press it. That would get lots of impressions. Okay. Yeah. Compare that to maybe you have a thing where if you eat spicy food, you get acid reflux. Now, it's topical, but it's not broadly appealing, especially if you don't have acid reflux. How do you market a business that has less broad public appeal, maybe even a narrow one? The question really is, do you have to take a very different approach, or is it surprisingly similar, no matter the nature of your content or your area of expertise?

Laura Wood:

Okay, that's such a good question. I think, well, first and foremost, the easiest way to get started, and this is what we do with all of our clients, is we create lead generation assets. What we want to do is actually not speak to everybody, because that is really hard to do, and you disappear into the crowd, and nobody cares. We want to speak directly to the people who are actively looking for support in what we do. For you, it would be people who are either needing to acquire a new merchant or have a need to acquire their first merchant or are moving or whatever. For the acid reflux, it's obviously people who suffer from that. In that scenario, we would have our clients create what we call a lead magnet. A lead magnet is a piece of content that solves a problem that is associated with the bigger problem that you solve.

Laura Wood:

We're not going to try to solve acid reflux in a simple, little PDF three-page document, but we might be able to give people who suffer from it these three quick-acting tips to help it go away faster when it strikes. We're going to create a piece of content that is really interesting to only our ideal client, and then we're going to use that piece of content to move our ideal client onto our owned assets. Our email list, our social media platforms, whether we're going to use paid meta-ads to find them, whether we're going to go into public forums, whether we're going to just personally advertise it at the beginning, it really doesn't matter. The goal is to put this piece of content out there and be like, okay, I made this thing. I'm so excited about it. If it's something that's going to be helpful for you, I'm going to give it to you for free.

Laura Wood:

Here's the page. Just pop your email address in there, hit submit, and I'm going to email it over to you right away. Right? If you're doing that, everybody who opts in is your ideal client. They have the problem that you solve, great. Now you have this little community on the internet, whether it's through your email list, through a social media platform, it doesn't matter. That thinks everything you say is really interesting. Instead of this boring topic that everyone else is like, I don't care about this, everyone you have is, tell me more. You get to build that like know, like, trust, and engage. You've already given them a quick win with that piece of content. They're already bought into you and your authority, and then you can continue working with this kind of list audience of people to move them into becoming clients, and you're like the biggest supporters, if that makes sense.

David Goodale:

It totally makes sense. That's also been my personal experience, so I can relate to what you just said there. Now, one of the things you talk about a lot is this, and I will tell you that my expertise in marketing, okay, my knowledge of marketing falls apart where we hit social media. Okay? I'm not an expert in social media, and I was going to ask, especially among practitioners and coaches, is social media, do you live and die through social media, or because you talk about the list, how do you build that business? What are the most important components that you have to be using to have a successful business in that space?

Laura Wood:

Yeah, for sure. We don't live and die by social media for one reason, which is that it's leased land. You don't own your social media profiles. Mm-Hmm *affirmative*. You can build this amazing, wonderful following of a hundred thousand people on Instagram who are all your ideal clients. Instagram can be like, actually, we don't really like what you're putting out there. We're just going to shut down your account. You literally have no control over that happening, which is terrifying. We are very strategic, and we very much teach our clients to build a list. We are always going to focus on collecting email addresses. We own the ability to contact the people mm-hmm *affirmative*. Those are on our list. First and foremost, my advice is always to focus on building something that you own.

Laura Wood:

Then we have social media, which is still super important, but that is kind of in tandem with the list. We get somebody on the list, and then we say, hey, you know what? Hang out with me, me over on Instagram, I'm on there a ton. I provide a ton of great value, and we have a really fun time, and I have this little, private channel if you want to join it or whatever the case may be. Then, we're using social media to connect to get in front of people. it's amazing because social media is free, and if you can build that community, you're able to really connect and move forward with people that way. I still think that at the end of the day, you said this at the very beginning, the strategies and the principles of business growth haven't really changed in the past 20 years. I firmly believe that we still need to build a list of people that we own, that is a business asset that we can market to, and then we can utilize the tools that now exist that make it even easier to get in front of people, like social media, kind of in tandem with that. I don't know. Does that make sense?

David Goodale:

Well, it totally makes sense because, for example, I have heard of people who have YouTube channels and they might have 2 million subscribers, and they post something that's against YouTube's terms of service for whatever it is. Mm-Hmm *affirmative*. Then they lose their entire audience, which I guess could happen to anybody. If you're your own brand and you have direct access to your clients, that can't be taken from you. Yes. That is basically building your business on concrete; you're on quicksand, potentially.

Laura Wood:

A hundred percent. Okay. A hundred percent. Yep. Great analogy.

David Goodale:

That makes sense to me. I tend to ask this question towards the end of my podcast, and it's such a broad question. You can go anywhere with this. You're allowed to take a second to think about it if you want. It's not like the world's most profound question, but I find that it gets really interesting answers. If you had a young family member who was starting a business, not necessarily in your space, it could be any type of business. I want this to be broad. If you had one piece of advice to share with a family member who is starting a business, what would you tell them?

Laura Wood:

Oh, one piece of advice. Okay, so this is coming into my head, so I'm going to go with it. I might not agree with it next week, but this is what I'm going to go with this week. *laugh*.

David Goodale:

Let's see what you have. I'm interested *laugh*.

Laura Wood:

It is that you need to know and remember every single day that you don't know what you don't know. If you don't know what you don't know, you don't even know the right questions to ask half the time. If that is true, you have two choices. You can either acquire the skills to build a business or learn how to build a business on your own through research, reading all of that good stuff, which is a massive undertaking. Or you can hire somebody who has done exactly what you want to do, and you can pay them to teach you how to do it. I always prefer the latter because I am a person who very much values time and fast action. You don't know what you don't know. If you don't know what you don't know and you've never done something before, do not expect to be able to do it right out of the gate by yourself because you don't know. Either learn it or pay somebody to teach you. That's really the only way that you're going to be successful in any way, shape, or form right out of the gate.

David Goodale:

I actually think that's really fantastic advice, and if you were to do it on your own, it's definitely going to involve two things that come to mind, which are time and suffering. Because if you don't know the right questions, you're going to bounce off the wrong answers until you land where you need to go. Yep, that is fantastic advice, Laura. Thanks. Now I'm hoping you could take a moment to tell people a little bit about yourself, where people can contact you, and the Wellness business hub.

Laura Wood:

Yeah. As we kind of talked about at the beginning, we at the Wellness Business Hub work with practitioners and coaches, and we do kind of full-stack business development. Either start right from the beginning with an idea and help you develop that through, like your niche, your lead generation, enrollment, marketing, sales, and of course, offer, which is super fun. We work really closely with clients there. We have lots of other programs and products. You can find us in many different places. Instagram is probably the most fun. The handle there is actually my business partner's handle. It's at Laurie Kennedy Inc. That is where we kind of publish a ton of free content, of course. If you want to email us, you can email support@thewb.com. We have a fantastic team that monitors that inbox and can basically help guide you with anything that you want.

David Goodale:

Laura, it has been an absolutely fantastic discussion. I really want to thank you for joining today.

Laura Wood:

You are so welcome. Thanks for having me. This was fun. I always love chatting about nerdy business things and seeing where it goes. *laugh*.

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