How do you become a high-performing health boss and entrepreneur? What secrets can we learn from these people? Kendra Perry dives deep into what it takes to be a health coach and entrepreneur as she is interviewed by Diana Popa of the Secrets of Designing Tomorrow podcast. Kendra takes a look back at what drove her to start a business and what she learned going from startup to success. Learn and be inspired by Kendra’s journey and take your won journey towards success as well!
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Listen to the podcast here:
Secrets Of A High Performing Health Boss
If you are joining me for the first time, I’m an online business mentor and coach for health and wellness coaches and practitioners. My goal is to help you create a profitable and sustainable business online so that you can have more freedom, more flexibility and help change the world. If you are a returning reader, welcome back. We are going to switch gears a little bit for this episode. I am going to give you an interview that I did with Diana Popa of the My Design Tomorrow Podcast. In this episode, I go into a little bit of my story and my best tips to be a high-performing health boss. It’s a great interview. It’s not too long. I’m not asking for much time from you. I think you’re going to love it. I hope you enjoyed the episode. I’ll see you in the next episode where I help you become wealthy AF.
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Our special guest is Kendra Perry. She is a former multiple six figures functional health coach who turned into an online business strategist for health and wellness coaches and practitioners. She’s on a mission to stop health coaches from being broke by helping them build booming businesses they are in love with. She has had hundreds of coaches grow their practices, attract consistent clients and blow up their bank accounts. She is the creator of the ground-breaking Health Coach Accelerator method, which turns scare coaches into confident, focused and high-performing health entrepreneurs.
She’s also the Founder of the Group Program Academy, which teaches coaches to scale their income and impact with online group coaching programs. Kendra has been featured in Arianna Huffington’s Thrive Global, CEO Blog Nation and Authority Magazine for her expertise in sales. Welcome, Kendra. Thank you so much for being with me on this journey.
Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.
I’m honored. Your bio is very impressive. You turned from a health coach to helping other coaches. I love this expression, “To blow up their bank accounts.” What is your story, and how did you start on this path?
Personally, I was always meant to be an entrepreneur because I remember in high school, in the career class where everyone was choosing their career, I felt depressed because I didn’t love that 9:00 to 5:00 schedule. I felt like it was exhausting. I hated that I was always waiting for the weekend and dreading Mondays. I was like, “This is it? This is what I do, then I’m going to go find a job and keep doing this?” This was in the early 2000s. Entrepreneurship wasn’t talked about and wasn’t offered as an option.
Anyone who’s trying to build a business needs the proper mindset, dedication, and consistency.
I went to university. I didn’t have much direction. I flailed around. I did graduate and do pretty well, but I didn’t care. I’m mostly was just there to have a good time, party and meet people. I ended up in forestry, which is like a seasonal job. I’ve worked hard in the summer and took the winters off. That appealed to me because I liked the outdoors, but it was grueling work when you’re doing it. When I was about 25, I moved to the small town that I live in. It’s a tiny little mountain town in British Columbia. I’ve been a skier my whole life. I used to compete in high school. I moved here essentially to do a ski season.
One day at the ski hill, this guy came up to me and he’s like, “You’re a great skier. I’m a photographer. Do you want to be in photos and movies?” I was like, “Yeah. That sounds cool.” I started shooting with him and any photographer who would take me at that time. I started having this dream of like, “I could be a professional skier. I could travel the world with this glamorous lifestyle. I’m getting paid to go to all these exotic locations.” That’s what I focused on that winter. At the end of the winter, I had a crash, hurt my knee and ended up needing reconstructive knee surgery. I needed to be required a pretty long rehab.
Unfortunately, that ended that dream for me. This was also problematic for my summer job because you need a good knee to bushwhack around the bush. I was lost. A lot of my identity in my whole life had been tied up into being a skier. I couldn’t work. I ended up on medical unemployment. I had no idea what to do. Unfortunately, that surgery also triggered what I think were some underlying health issues that I’d probably had for some time.
I partied pretty hard, did a lot of drugs and drank a lot. I’d put my body under a lot of stress. After the surgery, I started experiencing severe insomnia and chronic fatigue. It was such a hard time in my life. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was like, “How can I stay in this town where there’s not much job opportunity, not have to move to a city and make good money in doing something I love? I didn’t want to do something I hated.”
One day, I was listening to a podcast and the guy who was being interviewed was talking about his health coaching certification program and suddenly, I had this a-ha moment. I was like, “I could have this online business and use this to heal myself. I’ll kill 2 birds with 1 stone.” That’s what I did. I ended up taking the certification program and starting a health coaching business, which was difficult because I had no idea what I was doing. At that point in my life, I could essentially write in a Word document and turn on the computer. I wasn’t super tech-literate. I went through a lot of trials and tribulations. I was very stubborn and determined to figure it out on my own, which I don’t think served me well. In the beginning, it took me a lot longer to get to a sustainable business than it would have. I hired a mentor or asked for help.
I did eventually get there about three years later and got to my first six figures. I had my first $10,000 a month and started making that consistently. I had a lot of my colleagues reaching out to me. They’re like, “You’ve been so successful. How did you do it?” I started consulting on the side and I realized that I loved it. I’m super passionate about the business, tech, strategy, mindset, all of that stuff and I also realized that there’s such a huge need for it. I was seeing so many of my colleagues struggle. Honestly, that does the world a huge disservice because our world is pretty sick. A lot of people are struggling with physical, emotional, mental health issues. I truly believe that health coaches are the key to shifting the global collective consciousness. I started to see that there was a huge need there. I transitioned to doing that in 2019.
You transformed those crisis moments into something fulfilling for you. It became your growing path or growth opportunity. I know so many business owners are giving up because they don’t know how to get out of those situations, and you took advantage of that. Even if you develop your own method, three years are not so much. How did you do it? What is the secret to move from that moment where you cannot make any income to making six figures? What triggered that change?
The three things that are critical for me, and this is true for anyone trying to build a business, are that you need the proper mindset, dedication, and consistency. Those three things together are important. You’ll notice I didn’t say strategy. Strategy is obviously important, but it is the easy part. It’s the numbers, data, analyzing and trying new things. You mentioned people who get stuck and give up. I think that’s a big mindset thing because what people don’t know about business is it triggers all your insecurities. It’s this massive journey and personal development. A lot of people don’t know that and perhaps they’re not ready for it because they’re completely ignorant to it, and I was too.
I noticed what was getting triggered was high school insecurities like, “What if no one shows up to my party? What if I don’t fit in with the cool kids? What if nobody likes me?” A lot of that stuff was coming up for me. With mindset, it’s not like you just figure it out, and then you’re good. It comes up at every stage in business. It’s a process of healing and learning how to manage these things and make them work for you. The mindset for me was critical. I was committed to making it work.
At the time, I didn’t have a backup plan. I don’t live in this place where there’s all this career opportunity, and I was like, “Either I figured this out or I’m screwed.” Sometimes not having a backup plan is good, but you have to be dedicated. I’ve always been incredibly dedicated. That probably comes from my higher tutor roots. I was always a straight-A student, overachiever and athlete. Sometimes that doesn’t serve me. Sometimes that can manifest into workaholic tendencies. It’s being dedicated and connecting to something deeper.
Sales starts with communication. People need to probably sell more and not be afraid to sell.
I have this big dream of shifting collective consciousness or at least being a part of that and every business owner needs something that’s a little bit deeper than money and consistency. People confuse consistency with frequency. They are like, “I need to show up five times a day. Every day, I need to post ten times a day on social media. I need to be on stories all day. I need to do this.” That’s the frequency and not consistency. Consistency is a little bit different for everyone. It shifts as you grow your business and as you build a team because you get help. Consistency can become more frequent.
Where people go wrong is they’re not consistent, so essentially, they ghost their audience. They’re like the friend who’s like, “Let’s hang out,” all the time and call you every day, “Let’s do all these things,” and then they disappear for a month. You’re like, “What the heck?” That’s how your audience feels when you’re inconsistent. Those three pieces were a big part of my journey, but I think they can help anyone who’s trying to build a business.
You mentioned consistency and maintaining these three in our business. I know that sometimes we are struggling when we are becoming overwhelmed and maybe there are too many tasks. You have to post social media, do marketing strategy and whatever is besides this. How do we keep our wellbeing and health because you have both sides of the business and the health part?
It is definitely possible. I built a business while healing from chronic fatigue. My business was part of what helped me heal. Because I was dealing with chronic fatigue, I’ve never been able to necessarily hustle for long periods of time. I can have these quick bursts, but I always needed to rest a lot. You have to take the pressure off. Everyone is on their own journey. There is no point in building a business that destroys your health or makes you feel bad every day. It’s super important. Where entrepreneurs get tripped up is with the to-do list because it’s never-ending, but you almost have to embrace it and be like, “I’m never going to be done.” If you can cultivate that, then it’s like, “It’s just the journey.” That’s important.
The other thing that is important is getting help. In particular, new business owners are usually pretty resistant to getting help because they’re like, “I can’t hire until I make money.” The truth is you can’t afford not to hire. When you get bogged down with necessary administrative tasks that don’t make you money, that takes away from your ability to do the money-making activities, which are essentially sales and marketing. You are putting yourself out there, creating content, engaging with your audience, booking podcast interviews, collaborations or working on building your email list. If all you’re doing is managing clients, managing files, answering customer service emails, all of these admin tasks, like editing videos, scheduling your social media, that’s a problem because you need to spend a lot of time on sales and marketing. It’s the only thing you should be focusing on in the beginning.
It is pretty inexpensive to outsource these days, especially with simple tasks like scheduling social media. That’s a big one that outsource that. Imagine creating all your content and then handing it off to someone else to schedule it. How good would that feel? Even 1 or 2 hours a month that it takes to do that, it is still 1 or 2 hours a month that you could commit to doing more productive tasks or you could use it to take a break.
This makes me think about something I always say, “Business owners need to choose. Do you want to be a marketer, a leader or a combination of all of these?” When we do everything, we are no longer in the leadership position. We are not leading or guiding a team, but we are implementing everything. I think everyone has to choose which path to take in order to get fulfilled. This took me a long time to identify myself. I was trying to do everything. I got exhausted. I’m like, “I don’t want to do this. I don’t like it. I will get rid of it as much as possible.” Absolutely for me, this was the secret. Do you think there is any other secret for high-performing coaches that everyone could apply?
Something to master is communication. Communication is marketing. People get confused with what marketing is. It is obviously putting yourself out there, but it is also being able to communicate succinctly what you do, how you help people and your mission. The biggest struggle is communication because you’re essentially on different levels.
I can speak to health coaches. They go to health coaches to learn all this nerdy health coaching crap, and then they want to teach that exact same thing to their audience, but their audience isn’t trying to be a health coach. Typically, it’s too technical or academic. It doesn’t make sense. It’s too data-driven. You’re speaking to laypeople who don’t have an education in this and don’t necessarily even want to learn it.
They’re in a position where they’re like, “I’m sick. I feel like crap. I’m suffering. I need to fix this. I want to know how to fix this. I don’t need to know all the dirty details.” Communication is important, and it is important to learn how to get on the same level. Market research comes in here. Market research is this ongoing task for anyone who is new, mid-level business, and even higher-level business. It’s particularly important in the beginning, which essentially means getting to know your person like who are you serving? What problem do you help them with? What outcome can they expect? What are their dreams, desires, struggles, inside jokes and stories that they’re dealing with on a daily basis that only they or the person who has that problem would truly understand?
We can’t expect them to want to work with us or even follow us if our communication doesn’t connect with them. That communication is incredibly important. We can learn how to communicate with people by understanding them and speaking their language. When you are high-performing, it’s about messaging, communication, and deeply connecting with those people so they feel heard and seen.
If your main objective is to serve the person, to help them feel seen and heard and to find the best outcome for them even if it’s not working with you, that alone can greatly increase your sales close rate.
This reminds me of active listening, something that I learned in my leadership positions in my career because, for me, it sounds obvious or it’s something that would come naturally. You need to listen to the other person in order to know how to act, behave or what to do even. Apparently, these need to be taught sometimes. This is pretty much the same in every part of our business. I was wondering why you were explaining these? Is it also something that is essential in sales?
Absolutely. It’s great that you bring that up because, in the sales script that I teach my students, active listening is very much a part of it because people want to feel seen and heard, but if you don’t understand them, then they’re not going to feel those. When we’re talking about sales, particularly a sales conversation or a sales call, you are only doing 20% to 25% max of the talking. It’s about the prospect and them sharing their experience. You are essentially sitting there listening to determine, “Can I help this person? Is this person someone I can help?” It’s also like, “Are they ready to take this on? Are they ready to do the work because not everyone is?” We want to validate people’s experiences. Active listening is huge not only in social media marketing but also in sales conversations.
Is there anything else behind sales? Is there a framework or easy steps that you could explain to us and for our audience could apply right away?
Sales start with communication, but then people need to probably sell more and not be afraid to sell because there are a lot of negative perceptions around sales. We think of telemarketing, slimy door-to-door sales, a person who’s trying to sell you a broken vacuum or something like that. People are pretty hesitant towards selling, but it’s important and you should be selling on a regular basis. There’s a way to do this both directly and indirectly.
Directly is like, “Buy my thing,” but indirectly is to continually mention your program or product. Even in your content, if you’re teaching something, you can literally say, “This comes from Module 3 of Health Coach Accelerator where we talk about mindset,” and constantly infusing it in there so that people start to associate you with your product. It’s like an awareness thing that it always starts with this communication piece and awareness.
It depends on how you’re selling. I teach my students how to sell a high ticket using sales calls. One of the biggest hacks is not the easiest thing to implement, but it’s incredible. This simple thing alone could triple your close rate, which is detachment from the outcome because truly energy matters when it comes to sales. If you are desperate to get the sale and you’re feeling like, “I need the sell or else,” people are going to feel that. They may not know what they’re sensing, but they’re going to sense something. That’s probably why people get a lot of ghosting.
If you have the experience where people seem into everything and then they are like, “I’ll think about it,” and then they ghost you. That might be an energy thing. People sense that. We can approach sales. If you approach sales from what I call the serve first, sell second, if your main objective is to serve the person, to help them feel seen, heard and find the best outcome for them, even if it’s not working with you, that alone can greatly increase your sales close rate. People aren’t going to want to sign up for you if they feel like you desperately need them.
What are your programs? Could you tell us more about the programs and services that you are offering?
My primary offer is the Health Coach Accelerator. It’s for any coach in the health and wellness space like natural pass, licensed dieticians, health coaches, fitness coaches, even mindset, spiritual and life coaches will come through it. Essentially, it is like a foundational business program for coaches who are looking to make $10,000 per month. Anyone who’s new, maybe a little bit more seasoned, but they are not hitting that benchmark yet, they are doing $5,000k or they did $10,000K once and they weren’t able to do it again, and they want to learn how to communicate their message to their people. They want to learn how to sell high ticket programs and market without paid advertising. That is what I teach inside Health Coach Accelerator.
I also have a Group Program Academy, which teaches coaches how to launch and create their first group coaching program. I consider that second level. People should start with the one-on-one high ticket so that they truly start to understand the person to whom they want to sell because group programs require volume, you need an audience, email list and in the beginning, a lot of people don’t have that infrastructure in place. While you’re building that, I always recommend that people sell one-on-one high ticket and start with Health Coach Accelerator.
For those of you who need Kendra and who are out there struggling, don’t hesitate to contact her because she’s there to guide you every step of the way. I would like to close our interview by asking you how people can contact you?
The best way to connect with me is on Instagram. That’s where I hang out and answer all my DMs. My handle is at @KendraPerryInc. I also have my own podcast called The Wealthy Coach Podcast, where we talk about strategy, tech, mindset, tools and all the things you need to build a six-figure online coaching business. My website is KendraPerry.net.
Is there anything you would like to say to our audience, something or another tip that you would like to offer before we close?
I believe in you. Keep going. If I can do it, someone with no business background, literally flailing around, had no idea what I was doing, if I can get to where I am now, you can too. It’s about self-belief and believing in yourself. If you believe in yourself, then you can do it.
Thank you for being with me on this journey. I am honored to learn from you. I am also learning. Please keep going because I know that we need so many coaches to inspire and change our world. For those of you out there, stay connected because there is so much more to come.
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