Introduction
[00:00:00] Detective Ev: Well, hello my friends. Welcome back to another episode of the Health Detective Podcast by Functional Diagnostic Nutrition. My name is Evan Transue, aka Detective Ev. I will be your host for today’s show on banking and marketing for your FDN/Health Coaching Biz.
This will be one of those episodes where we are focusing on our friends who are either about to become practitioners, probably becoming practitioners, or who already are practitioners. We are talking about the business side of things, and I love getting to talk business. It is a side passion of mine for sure.
I find business to be really interesting. There are so many cool aspects about it. And if you don’t like business, I’m kind of like, did you really study it or what parts did you study? Because I don’t know how you couldn’t like this. There’s gotta be a part for everyone.
There’s so much to it when you say, business. Do you mean sales? Do you mean marketing? Do you mean organization? Do you mean structure, I don’t know, branding? There’s, I feel, something for everyone. So, maybe you should revisit that if you think you’re not a businessperson or don’t like business.
Today what we’re going to be doing is, I don’t want to say it’s a continuation cause it’s really not. But it is conceptually similar to an episode I did several months ago where we talked about several tips that could help get your business up and ready for success prior to you even graduating the FDN course.
Banking and Marketing: Apply to Your Unique Situation
Today is more of a pretty solid, simple framework and plan, in a sense, that people can use in order to get themselves to a decent level and making a full-time income with this.
Now, of course, it’s going to be more complex than just listening to a podcast. There is execution, there is brainstorming, and these are ideas, but you need to actually apply your own unique situation to the ideas. All of that, just something to keep in mind.
However, I felt particularly inspired to do this recently because of the success we’re having at an in-person business that I co-own. I was like, all right, we gotta talk to the FDNs about this.
If you don’t know or you’re listening for the first time, I own a business in person called Bucks County Light Therapy, and it is a light therapy studio. We do red-light therapy, we have specialty tanning beds, we have vitamin D lamps, infrared sauna, pretty cool stuff. But we also do functional lab testing.
Originally, when it started out, I would take some clients here and there just so we could offer it. But that very quickly became something where I was like, all right, with everything else I do in my life, very overwhelming. I’ve stated this a million times on the podcast. I love FDN, I love doing what I do. I had never felt myself particularly called to do like a 40, 50-hour week as a functional health coach, I wanted other things in the mix.
I do love running labs. I love helping people with it. It’s just never going to be a full-time thing for me. Whereas many of our practitioners and graduates are like, dude, that’s all I want to do full-time. Fair enough.
FDN Provides a Good Opportunity
What we’re doing right now at the business is my girlfriend’s going through FDN and she’s about to graduate. One of my best friends is going through and about to graduate. And his girlfriend is going through, although she started a little later than those two. She’ll be graduating a bit later, probably about April of 2023. But they’re both on track to graduate in late March or even early April, that’s my girlfriend and my best friend, to be clear.
What’s cool is they want to do this more full-time. I don’t think it’s a permanent thing in their lives necessarily. But we’re all kind of working together right now on unique opportunities. That’s kind of beside the point for this podcast. What we all saw together was that FDN could be a great vehicle to get us as a group to the next level in our goals and can really be a good opportunity during the economy and everything that’s going on.
So, whatever that’s worth, you guys, when you’ve heard my other podcasts where I’m saying FDN is a great opportunity, even with the troubling times, at least you know even if I’m wrong, I’m consistently wrong. It’s not something that I’m not applying to my own life and my own friends and family members. I’m saying this is a good thing to do and I believe in it wholeheartedly, and I am pursuing opportunities in this space myself right now. Take that for what you will.
Banking and Marketing: The Goal of Six Figures ASAP
What we’re going to be doing at the light therapy studio, is now we’re going to be able to offer a lot of FDN work because we will have them graduated. Basically, they are going to be their own business owners, but they will be independent contractors for the light therapy studio. Pretty cool. Not something that you need to have success in your business.
The way that we are approaching it in this business is so similar to how you would do it purely online, and it’s going to include a lot of the stuff that I’m talking about today. But again, we’ve been having success with certain things that we’ve been experimenting with there. So, I wanted to share them with you guys.
First thing I want to jump into, and these might seem slightly disconnected. That’s why it could have kind of went in the category of a continuation of the best business tips to apply before you actually graduate FDN, but it’s not supposed to be that. It’s more like you need to have these things covered to get you to the level that you want to go.
Let’s always just assume that that goal should be six figures ASAP. You want to be making a hundred thousand dollars a year ASAP. You do not need to work 40 hours a week as an FDN to do that, you really do not. All right? It is not that hard. You do not need to be the best FDN in the world to do it. You need to have graduated the course and apply some relatively simple principles.
If that is out of your consciousness or paradigm at this moment, I’m sorry, because that kind of sucks and I feel bad.
Banking and Marketing: Many FDNs Have Done It
But you have to understand, and maybe you won’t believe me on this, humor the idea that perhaps it is your own limiting beliefs and mindset that is leading you to believe that as opposed to something being wrong or incomplete with the FDN philosophy or the economy or the government or anything like that.
The reason I say this is because there are tons of FDNs, some of which are freshly graduated, many of which graduated during the pandemic, that are already doing well over six figures.
We have had people, the most extreme success story that I know of right now, and you guys have heard her on this podcast before. She’s 31 right now, 31 years old, that is it. In the beginning of the pandemic, because she lives in Canada, the lockdowns were so extreme it shut down her in-person stuff that she was doing, and she had $0 of income that she was making in the beginning of the pandemic.
When I interviewed her just a couple of months ago for a special that we did for FDN Insider (That’s fdntraining.com/insider, by the way, if you want some exclusive content that we do not share anywhere else. It’s really high-level stuff and very to the point. You don’t get my ramblings and stuff. There are other people on there as well.) But when we interviewed her for that, I mean this woman was approaching $100,000 a month, not a year, a month. And in the beginning of the pandemic, she was making $0.
Is this to imply a get rich quick thing? No, absolutely not, that’s crazy.
Banking and Marketing: The Internet Provides So Much Value
Depending on how old you are listening to this, you need to, again, really shift the paradigm and the consciousness, especially when it comes to the age of the internet.
Every time that anyone has made money in a system that allowed for some type of trade, as long as human beings have existed and used that system where it’s bartering or we trade something for a currency, you had to provide someone with value. You did that by giving them services or products that were meaningful or useful. That’s how you got the currency in exchange.
Earl Nightingale talked about that in his audio/book called The Strangest Secret. You get money by providing people with services and products that are needed and useful or meaningful. Okay? That’s what you have to do. Maybe this is your first-time hearing this, I hope it’s not. But the reason that you are hearing stories about people going from zero to hero on the internet is because the internet connects you with a ton of people. The internet allows for products that can be made one time and resold, and still give just as much value on day 100 as it did on day one because it’s new to that customer that bought it on day 100.
So, if the formula is providing people with meaningful products that are needed and useful, something similar to that, the internet’s fantastic because it allows you to provide that value to a lot of people at a rapid pace if you choose to do so.
Banking and Marketing: Take Advantage of the Internet
I have friends that are not even remotely in the FDN space or anything like that. They are barely 30 years old, and they are doing $200,000 to $250,000 a month. This is what’s possible with the internet.
Now, these people are hardworking, willing to learn, willing to get mentored. But the fact of the matter is there is no time in history that someone, no matter how hardworking or great they were, could go from zero to $100,000 plus a month in less than three years. That is made possible and brought to you by the internet. So, congratulations, it’s here. It doesn’t seem like it’s going anywhere. You might want to get on that and use that thing.
Recently, although the success we’ve had was not matching these crazy numbers, we had a lot of success at the business. I told you that this inspired me to create this podcast today. One of the things that happened is we’ve been screwing around with Facebook ads and funnels. I had been getting educated on these things for the last two years. I actually did some stuff with Facebook ads over six years ago and was learning about ads then.
Now the algorithms completely changed. It’s become much simpler in a certain sense. But it’s more expensive now, that was the difference. I used to be able to reach a thousand people for like $5 on Facebook ads. It was ridiculous, it was so cheap, and many entrepreneurs talked about this. I didn’t put as much effort into it as I should have at the time. It was stupid how cheap it was. I would still consider it quite affordable considering what it gives you. So, don’t miss out on that opportunity.
Banking and Marketing: Facebook Ads
What we did was we put some preliminary money into testing a variety of ads, and we put about $300 in, $315 to be exact. What that did so far, because we’re actually still getting some people from this, it allowed us to get over 20 people in the door at our business. This does not count the other emails and phone numbers that we got from these people. Over 20 people physically came into the business, and over seven have already signed up as members.
Now at our studio, memberships range from as low as $137 a month, all the way up until $217. You do the math, cause that’s a monthly membership mind you. And there’s something in business, if you don’t know what this is, it’s lifetime value of the customer. You can’t really predict that that easily when your business is just starting out. But you will be able to pick this up over a year or two years, three years, it’s something to track.
What that basically means, the lifetime value of a customer, is on average, what your average customer is worth to you over the lifetime of them buying stuff. Obviously, if you have a product that just goes on indefinitely, like a gym, I guess this might be a little tougher. I’m sure there’s some way to calculate it, but again, I’m no business guru. I just have a decent grasp of these things and I constantly learn about it, so I’m getting better by the day, hopefully.
But the lifetime value of the customer needs to be considered here because we have a monthly membership. So, we put in $315 into ads.
Banking and Marketing: Get a Good Business Bank Account
This was less than four weeks ago at the time of recording this. We received already over $800 back, and that does not count for anyone else that will sign up. It doesn’t account for the people that will renew the membership, and it also doesn’t account for how they might move up higher in our value ladder and eventually buy our FDN programs.
Now, I’ll talk about the value ladder in a second. It’s actually a huge part of this podcast today. The lifetime value of these customers seriously could be over $5,000 to $10,000, easily. That’s not that hard to comprehend, and we only spent $300. That’s pretty cool.
That’s what happens when you start to learn about this stuff and use the internet to your advantage. There are many people that can do way more, incredibly more impressive numbers than what I just listed. So, stay tuned, check it out.
First thing, again, this one might seem a little bit disconnected, but follow me on this. You gotta get a good business bank account. What I recommend, none of the stuff I’m going to mention today is something I’m affiliated with. I hope that they give it to me eventually, but I’m not affiliated with it. FDN isn’t affiliated with it. I’m just giving you stuff that I like. The business account that I like right now is Novo Banking. Novo is freaking fantastic. Novo is an online business banking platform. It is a hundred percent free, which is amazing.
Banking and Marketing: Reserve Accounts
The coolest feature, cause it does a lot of things. I mean, you can go watch a YouTube video on it if you want to know everything. But one of the things that I love that it does is it has reserve accounts. When you deposit a check or receive an invoice payment into your bank account, you can have up to five reserve accounts already set up for Novo.
What that could look like is one reserve account, might be 10%, 15%, 20% for taxes, depending on how much you’re able to write off each year. So, you have that. By the way, a little tip, always better to estimate more for taxes and give yourself a nice little check at the end of the year rather than underestimate, and you’re scrambling a little bit. No one likes that, that is not fun. I totally haven’t done something like that. Learn from me, right?
So, you could have one for taxes, then you could have one for profit. There’s a method called the Profit First Method. It talks about, I’m oversimplifying it, but it’s basically how to make any business profitable from day one by simply putting something away, even if it’s just 1% of sales, just automatically having that discipline to put 1% away.
You could have 10% in another reserve for maybe tithing, if that’s something that you do. That doesn’t mean at a church necessarily. It could mean you’re giving away to anything. Maybe just like to donate to a non-profit, that’s fine. 10% could be for yourself. Maybe you follow that rule where you try to save some of your income for yourself as an emergency fund, whatever it might be. There are many different ways that you can play with this.
Banking and Marketing: Stripe and QuickBooks
This isn’t a financial plan. I’m just saying that Novo for free allows you to deposit this stuff in. It’s an actual business bank account, and you can have up to those five reserve accounts. In addition, it also integrates with a lot of the major platforms that you would want it to integrate with.
You have Stripe, so you can invoice directly on there. You can send out invoices to your customers and pull that in. They also integrate with QuickBooks. What’s cool about QuickBooks, if you don’t know what it is, that is an easy way to collect receipts and other things and track sales so that you could kind of get a good estimate on where you’re at total for the year.
This is also a great way to track things that you’re probably ignoring, right? If you go out with another FDN practitioner and you’re strategizing on business, whoop, little tax write-off for you. Oh, and you drove to that meeting to talk about business, okay, cool. Well, in the United States of America, it’s like, what? I think it’s 58 cents a mile right now, is reimbursable for you driving to that meeting. That’s cool.
Conferences, depending on which ones you go to and how you participate in them, can be tax deductible and the travel to them as well. Just saying there’s a lot of things there. So, you can integrate it with QuickBooks and easily track that. Then it’s all kind of nicely integrated into your Novo account.
Banking and Marketing: A Money System is Necessary
Novo also makes it easy to send money out to other bank accounts; and it also makes it easy to receive money from bank accounts. Let’s say you need to put some money in from your personal bank account cause you’re just starting off things, you could do that simply.
What I also love about this is if you divide that money into these separate reserve accounts, you can set up individual reserve accounts to pay certain things. Maybe you need your business to make certain payments for, I don’t know, marketing platforms you have, email platforms, whatever. You can actually set up the reserve accounts to pay automatically to those things.
You might have, 25% a month from the money that is brought in, goes to a specific reserve account, which pays monthly payments towards the things that you use platform wise. Really interesting. So, set that up before anything else.
The reason that’s the first thing today is because we could talk about strategies to make money, if you don’t have a system in place for what to do with that money when it comes in, trust me, that’s going to hurt you.
I’m not saying this in a way of not being grateful, what I do business-wise or what anyone else does businesswise. I’m saying this from personal experience because a lot of people come into FDN and have very limiting beliefs. I mean, this is just people in general, this has nothing to do with FDN, I suppose.
Limiting beliefs, you tell them six figures and even with all the inflation, even with everything else going on, somehow six figures to them is still this unattainable number, so high, and their whole life’s going to change.
Does Money Drastically Change Quality of Life?
Okay. The quality of your life might change to some degree. There was a study done by, he actually won a Nobel Prize for this, his name’s Daniel Kahneman, he’s an economist. He showed, this was several years back to be clear, but he did show that a single person making $72,000 a year, you can convert this across all countries and it still works depending on what their currency is.
Just to be clear, that means you actually make the conversion, and you adjust for their thing. I don’t know what it would be for the British pound, but it’s like 72,000 USD would be whatever that is in British pounds. It wouldn’t be 72,000 British pounds.
But he did that, and he found that happiness actually did increase up until that point. Then after that it was a pretty marginal and negligible difference what money did to happiness. I think the basic theory there is, it’s $72,000 for a single person. You’re probably not behind on your bills or at the very least, you’re getting outta that paycheck to paycheck run.
You can go out to dinner without stressing too much. You can buy yourself a little bit nicer clothing than the stuff that you might find at a store, whatever. Maybe it’s some basic stuff being that where you’re not feeling like you’re a paycheck to paycheck scrambling every month to try to get things together.
So yes, after $72,000, fine, we can say that maybe there’s a little bit of a difference. But I promise you $100,000 is not that much money.
Is $100,000 a Lot of Money?
Remember the reason I’m saying this, one, it’s genuine, I really believe this. But it’s also to get the idea out of your head that you think $100,000 it’s like so unattainable. “I can’t even do it.” Not only should you not be thinking of it that way, you should realize it’s not enough money. It’s not a lot of money.
You could spend $100,000 so easily it would make your head spin. If you gave me all of the $100,000 that someone can make in a year in one check, I could drive five minutes down the road to the BMW dealership and drop this all on one car. And that business will sell hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of those each month, probably thousands. I don’t know how many hundred thousand dollars BMWs they sell in a month. That’s how easy it is to spend a hundred thousand.
You might say, well, I don’t want a BMW. I don’t need a luxury car. Fair enough. I’m just saying that there are so many things in this world that you could blow the entire year worth of money that you’re saying is so much, you could blow that in a few hours period and never think twice about it.
So, we need to get out of our heads that this is so much money. No, just because, statistically, a lot of people don’t make it, does not mean it’s a lot of money.
Banking and Marketing: Money is Easy to Spend
There are very few people that have a six pack. We know how attainable that is as FDNs. There are very few people that don’t have a chronic disease. We know how attainable that is as an FDN. Just because something is common doesn’t mean that it’s okay. Right? We talk about that all the time with symptoms.
Anyway, get the bank account set up because when that money starts coming in, if you don’t have places for it to go, I promise it’s just going to go out the window. I learned this the hard way. I’m very transparent about this stuff.
For the longest time I was only making like $30,000, $40,000 a year. Partially, that was my own fault because I had great jobs even at 18, 19 years old that would’ve allowed me to hit the six-figure mark pretty quickly. But I was dedicated to doing the things that I wanted to do.
I knew I could get to a place doing the things that I wanted to do, where I could still live comfortably. I knew if I got to that point, then I could just stack onto that over time. Finally, I was able to get there in the last two years. That was after quite a few years of putting in legitimate effort into this, to be honest. But you know, you get to that six-figure mark, that’s awesome.
What happened is I had pretty lazy habits at the $30,000, $40,000 mark. I found, magically, you can triple the income and somehow those lazy habits still maintain. Just as easily and readily as you spent that $30,000, you can spend $100,000. And you’re left saying, huh, where did that all go? I wonder.
Banking and Marketing: LLCs, EINs, and SS#s
Please set it up now. Novo’s an easy way to do this. It’s completely free and it allows you to go into those reserve accounts so that you can automate where the money is going.
Because if you don’t tell your money where to go, I promise you it’s going to leave you. It is going to leave you. It wants to be commanded. It is a very submissive partner. It wants you to tell it what to do. And if you don’t, man, it’ll run you ragged. So, make sure you get Novo.
Get that done and set it up now because it is a business account, you’re either setting it up through your social security number or an EIN, that’s an employee identification number. If you have an LLC or something similar, that’s where you would be using an EIN. If you do not have an LLC or anything like that, which you don’t need, although I’d recommend it, you can do it through your social security number. That’s how business works if you’re not aware of that yet.
Number two, something that I just started using two months ago, but I love this platform, is called Pipeline Pro. Now, there are many people in the marketing space that I can already imagine are probably saying, oh, well, don’t use that, use something else. I’m not an expert in it, but I will say I was very happy with the platform for what I was given.
Banking and Marketing: Sales Pipeline Dashboard
For $37, one-time fee, Pipeline Pro gave me access to a website builder, a funnel builder, which is pretty much the same thing, to be clear in their place.
I have unlimited contacts that I can store. I have form builders, well, form builders comes with a monthly subscription, sorry. I’m trying to think of what comes with it without the monthly subscription. Basically, that I can just take in all these contacts, all these leads, build the websites, build the funnels for $37, one-time fee. It’s unlimited funnels too, so I can have hundreds of these in there, all doing different things if I really wanted to. Unlimited domain connections. Really, really, really cool stuff.
Then we ended up paying the $97 a month for their marketing because it allows for the email. I’m pretty sure it allows for the text, although we use the text through something else because we already had that set up. Maybe it’s a little more for the text, but it definitely allows for email, unlimited emails, unlimited contacts, and then you can have the form builders and lead generators.
I may have misspoken there. When I say lead generator, I mean we can actually now go out and collect names and leads from the forms that we are building or with the forms that we have. And I love it. Pipeline Pro.
Check it out. $37 one-time fee. It’s a no-brainer to me to have gotten it and tried it. Then they’re smart, because they end up selling you the $97 a month thing. I’m still happy with it cause it’s way cheaper than anything else I’ve seen on the market.
Banking and Marketing: Store Contacts, Leads, and Notes
It also integrates with WordPress, by the way. So, if you have a WordPress website, you can transfer that over. And if you are using ClickFunnels, which I probably assume most of you aren’t, but if someone’s listening and hears that, you can transfer ClickFunnel stuff over to their funnel builder with the click of a few buttons. So, Pipeline Pro, get that.
You need to store the contacts and leads that you are bringing in. There are notes there. There are tasks that you can set up, they’re called opportunities. Opportunities and tasks are a little different, but a task can kind of be within an opportunity, I guess.
When you get a contact, when you talk to someone, this is how you do business. You need to be making notes about what you and that person said. You have to do this. If you’re saying, well, I don’t talk to enough people that I need to do that. Well then, I can guarantee you’re not making that much money. Because if you are making enough money, you would’ve needed to talk to a lot of people. And to talk to a lot of people effectively, you would’ve needed to keep notes. Pipeline Pro will allow you to store these contacts and do that.
This is how this goes in our business right now. So, we’ll give you the backend transparency thing. Right now, we have an offer. It gets sent out on the Facebook ad. We target certain people. People fill out that offer. They give us their first, last name, and then they give us the phone number and they give us the email. These are all required. They get something for free because of this, and we get their contact.
Banking and Marketing: The World of Online Marketing
Now we text them, we give them calls, we email them, and we’re updating notes along the way. If they don’t answer us, we update the task. If they do answer us, we also update the task just in a different way, and they move along through our pipeline depending on what stage that they’re at.
So, for that thing we have an initial contact stage, meaning that we’ve reached out to them, but they haven’t necessarily reached out yet. Two is active conversation. That means they have responded at least one time to our outreach. Whether or not they’re answering us right now is irrelevant. That means they’ve responded one time to our outreach.
Three is an active customer, and four is a former customer or I guess you could call it Four-B would be a lost lead. Right? Just didn’t answer, told us they never wanted to see our face again, whatever it might be. We haven’t had anyone do that yet, but it could happen.
When you are using something like Pipeline Pro, you’re going to get introduced to the world of online marketing and marketing in general very quickly. I wanted to put in this today, this podcast, the idea of a value ladder. And if you guys didn’t listen to anything else I said in almost 30 minutes of podcasting today, you gotta remember this part and you gotta start setting this out.
Banking and Marketing: The Dating Process in Business
Pease take a piece of paper, or if you’re on your phone, just put it in the notes section on your phone and jot these things down so that you can start thinking about it. Because what you write down, what you focus on, your mind will start to think about and all of a sudden, these brilliant ideas come into your head outta nowhere.
So, a value ladder is an idea in marketing, Russell Brunson with ClickFunnels really popularized this. You basically are going up. It’s a value ladder, I’d say, but it almost looks like from the side like a 2D view of a value staircase. Imagine that that’s kind of what we’re looking at here. At the bottom of the staircase, you are providing the person with value. And to be fair, we’re providing them with value throughout the entire staircase.
But in the beginning, you are providing them with more value than is justified because you don’t know them, and they don’t know you. You gotta build some trust here. Russell Brunson always equates this to like asking someone on the first date. You wouldn’t ask on the first date or first interaction even, with meeting someone for them to marry you. Maybe one in a million you hear those stories and they do work out, but it’s not going to work out usually.
Similarly, marriage in the business equivalency sense and an FDN equivalency sense, would be your high-end coaching. This could be $5,000, $6,000, $7,000 packages. We have FDN that charges $10,000 and above for their packages because of how credible they are, how long they’ve been doing it, and what they offer in their services. That’s your high-end stuff and it could be different.
Banking and Marketing: Give Value on That First Date
You could do this any way that you want. But for an average FDN, a typical FDN, the high end of your value ladder is going to be that one-on-one coaching. Now that’s your marriage. So, you know, you can’t ask for that on the first day. You gotta do other things first.
The value ladder, remember we’re thinking of like a staircase from a 2D perspective, the first thing is going to be something usually for free or so stupidly cheap it’s not even funny. You’ve probably seen this before. If you’ve ever been told to download a free eBook, take a free quiz, get a quote/unquote “free book” all you have to do is pay shipping and handling, you have entered someone’s value ladder.
Most likely, intentionally, they know what they’re doing. I doubt that it was unintentional, but most likely, intentionally, they knew what they were doing, and they put you in their value ladder. They are giving you something for free. They met you; they liked you; they asked you out on the first date, and they’re paying for the date to show you that they have something of value to offer you. If they don’t, then you’re just going to back off.
But they are encouraged, this is a great way to do business, right? They are encouraged and you are encouraged to do this if you choose to do so. You have to give value on that first date. This isn’t something where you rip people off. We don’t encourage that whatsoever. You give value on the first date.
Banking and Marketing: Lead Magnet Example
Wow. You know, this person, they got a good job, and they’re really moral. Wow. We’re the same religion or spiritual beliefs. Okay. We have the same way of handling finances. I like that. This person has a great network. They’re really positive. Wow. This is a person of value. I would like to be around them a little more. So that’s the free thing.
I will again use our value ladder right now that we’re working on. We at least know the steps of it, it’s not fully developed. There are a few parts that we’re missing but it’s going really well at the light therapy studio, so I’ll share that with you. Our bottom of our value ladder, that lead magnet, if you will, the thing that is quite literally in the name, lead magnet. You are trying to get leads and you’re trying to hook them in like a magnet would, right?
So, you gotta pull them into the magnet. How do you do that? Well, the only ethical way to do that is to give them value first. What we do with the light therapy studio is we give them a free session, completely free. They can use any of our services that they want.
We have infrared sauna; they can use that for free. They can also use our lay down red light for free. They can use our vitamin D lamps for free. We have the brain tap meditation that Dr. Patrick Porter guy, shout out to him. He’s been on the podcast. They can use that for free and they can use our specialty tanning bed for free. Now why would we do that? Well, one, I believe in my service.
Banking and Marketing: Value Ladder 2nd Rung
I’m thinking, okay, well if they do this and they see the facility and they like who we have working there on that day, yeah, that’s going to be great. Why would they not stay? And if they don’t stay even after all that, well, then I didn’t want to force them into something cause now I’m going to have an unhappy customer. Sure, they’re paying me money, but they’re pissed off and they’re miserable every time they come in. That’s not cool. This is also a great way to weed out people who you do and don’t want to work with. So, we give that free session.
Awesome. Now we’re basically looking at four steps on that 2D staircase, right? Look at four total, and the first is going to be your lead magnet. This can be an infinite staircase to some degree, but the four is going to be a good base place to start. So, first is that lead magnet, usually something for free.
The second thing is going to be something that is usually within a decent price range, maybe, and I’m using rough numbers here, maybe as low as $47, maybe as high as $297.
For us, even though this is also a continuity program, because there’s more advanced stuff with these value ladders where you try to figure out a way that you can provide value to people long term and keep them on a membership. So, our second step of the value ladder is also our continuity program, and it’s our membership to the light therapy studio.
Banking and Marketing: Value Ladder 3rd Rung
You come in and get some red light. You come in and you get the specialty tanning lamp or the specialty tanning bed, or the vitamin D lamps or the infrared sauna. Those memberships, again, can be anywhere from $137 to $200 a month. So that’s the second level. It’s affordable. No contracts, no upfront costs. You can cancel at any time, but chances are you’re probably going to stick around for a while.
We do know in our metrics so far that people do, typically, if they sign up for one month, they almost always stay for at least 2, 3, 4. Pretty cool. That’s the second level of the value ladder.
The third one for us is what we’re working on right now, and that could be a type of course. We’re working on a course. So, we will do a course on a specific niche. I’m not really going to mention what it is here, it’s not important. And I don’t need any of you guys copying me. Although Picasso did say, good artist copy, great artist steal. But I’m not going to give you the opportunity to steal from me yet.
That third option will be a course, and it will be a higher-level course that will probably range from $497 to $997. We’re trying to figure out what we can do with that. Cause it’s mostly targeted to the consumer and $997 can be a little bit of a hike for a consumer to buy something like what we’re selling. We might do $497, we’ll see.
Banking and Marketing: Value Ladder Top Rung
Then the top step of our value staircase is FDN coaching. That’s a $4,500, $5,000 package. At that point, we’ve already went through a lot of other stuff, right? It doesn’t necessarily mean someone took every step of the value ladder, but almost certainly what they have done is kind of stepped on a couple of them, right?
They probably got something for free. Maybe they’ve been a member at our place for two months and they, wow, these people are really nice. They’re operating with integrity, they’re honest. Okay. Yeah. What is that lab testing stuff that you guys offer? And now you’re not heading up a cold lead and asking them to spend $5,000.
You’re not meeting someone for the first time and asking them for marriage. You’ve went on many dates, you’ve been dating for a while, actually, it’s going really well. And now you can pop the question. Quite frankly, they might show that interest first, if you’re good at dating, that is. So that’s the value ladder.
Then what you can do for your FDN business is get really creative with this. That’s the best part. This is why I was saying in the beginning, if you don’t like business there should be something for everyone. There’s so many opportunities and outlets to get creative here.
For me, to figure this stuff out and test these different things. Right now we’re doing free sessions. I’m thinking about offering a free week. Because especially red-light therapy, for those of you that are familiar with it, a lot of people do feel something off the first session. But man, if you come to three in a week, you’re definitely going to notice something if in no other way, you’re going to notice it in complexion.
Banking and Marketing: It’s Only Valuable to Those Who Care
I’m like, I might as well just give even more value first because then they’re going to reward that value. They’re going to buy something because they see how well it works and they think it’s a fair price and then they’re going to buy it. Awesome. Cool way to do business, right? Giving before you take, being ethical.
I like this stuff. For you with your FDN business, it could be a lot of different things. Let’s say your niche was something with thyroid, that’s a common one. I don’t mean to be too generic here, but the generic aspect of it might actually be helpful because a lot of you might be already thinking about doing some type of niche in the thyroid category.
Okay, so what would I do with that? What could be a good lead magnet? And you want to think about this on your own, but I’ll give you some hints here. If I am searching online for resolutions to my thyroid issues, because this is another part of this, right? The value ladder is only valuable to someone who cares about what you’re offering.
The 90-year-old person that has never, especially a guy, that has never cared about their health, is checked out, wants to drink beer and eat candy for the rest of their time here on this earth, I could offer everything I offer for $0, and they would still never come in and use the membership. They would never do the FDN stuff because it’s not valuable to them.
Banking and Marketing: Speak Their Language
So, when we’re making these offers in the value ladder, we need to be thinking in terms of the person. Who am I offering it to? What would they find valuable? The stereotypical profile of someone who deals with a thyroid condition probably be, I don’t know, 30, 40-year-old woman, right? Maybe has kids, first pregnancy or second pregnancy. Kind of did it to her where she was already not feeling great before, but after that pregnancy was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s. Really common thing.
I could make the free gift something like a PDF or an eBook or a guide or whatever, but it’s a free download. It could be 10 ways to address your thyroid naturally.
Hear me out on this because you might already be thinking if you’re an FDN in training or already graduated, wait a second, Evan, we don’t treat anything specifically. Yes, you are correct. But remember we’re thinking from their perspective. They don’t know that we don’t treat things specifically, nor do they care. They just want to feel better.
So, what have they been told? They’ve been told by their doctor that they have Hashimoto’s, they’ve been told that that’s a thyroid problem. We need to speak their language. They think it’s a thyroid problem, so let’s talk to them.
In that guide I would provide them with 10 valuable tips, like actually something valuable. There are some people who have taken advantage of this. What I have found they’re doing is they do have a value ladder, but none of it’s really legit until you get to the higher end. Yes, of course, your higher end package that cost $5,000 should have more value in it than a $197 course, obviously. Why would it not be more valuable?
Banking and Marketing: Traffic That You Own
It’s also not that the $197 thing should have no value in it, and you’re just talking in circles to confuse the person. That’s really not cool either, man. That’s manipulative, that’s wrong. So, in this 10-step guide, it’s free. Remember, for free, you don’t have to give away everything, but you should give them some tips.
One of those tips could be the concept that it’s rarely the thyroid is the issue. Did you know it could be stemming from the gut? Did you know it could be stemming from this? You could teach them something within that guide. And now you’ve raised credibility, you’ve gotten an email. That’s the most important thing, right? You’ve got a contact now because that’s traffic that you own.
Russell Brunson talks about this in his book, DotCom Secrets. He talks about it many places, but DotCom Secrets is a great book. And you can get it for free cause it’s the bottom of his value ladder. You could get that book for free probably just by searching for it, you’ll just have to pay the shipping and handling.
But now it’s traffic that you own. You still keep that even if Facebook shuts down, if they close your Instagram account, if YouTube somehow becomes obsolete. I’m not saying any of those things are practical or going to happen. I’m just saying that you own this now because you can transfer an email to anywhere you want and you can store that data as a CSV file on Excel on your computer, even if you lost an email marketing account. You own that now.
Awesome, mission complete. You have taken the first step or successfully gotten the person to take the first step on your value staircase ladder thing.
Banking and Marketing: Email Marketing
The next part is going to be a little trickier. It’s going to involve email marketing, and of course we’ll try to bring someone on here soon that can talk about this stuff. I don’t want to just tease you guys completely.
You will have to have conversations in here to get them to the next step, most likely. But if you provide enough value, you might be able to make that next step pretty quickly.
Again, what did I say? We have 20 something people that came in physically into the location. About seven of them got memberships. So, even if I rounded it all the way up to 28, and I know it’s not 28 people yet, which is a good thing in this case, it’s between 21 and 28. That means that we had a 25% to 33% closing rate. That is fantastic as Reed Davis would say himself. I am very happy about this. And that’s cool.
Now we have some data. Now we know how many people from that initial thing, the lead magnet, go up to the next thing. Because we don’t hard sell there either. You could really get into some sales tactics. We don’t hard sell because it’s a membership.
The last thing you want is a bunch of clients coming in that are miserable or people leaving terrible reviews. Even if I know it’s going to help them, I need to make sure that they’re committed on their own. So, we don’t hard sell at all.
Banking and Marketing: Providing Value and Making Sales
That means naturally people come in for the free session. There are no secrets there, it is free. We’re not going to do some crazy sales tactics on you. You can do whatever you want. You could use all the stuff for free in one day. You could come back four different times and use four different services. We don’t care. Naturally, this amount of people will automatically go to that.
Then what you’ll find is that as you do that lead magnet and you provide value to people, which this should, if it wasn’t already the moral thing to do, this should encourage you to provide as much value as possible, right? Because now they can say, wow, that person knows a lot about this stuff. I wonder if they offer anything else.
Cause this will probably get them to some place, but it’s not going to get them to where they need to go. No one’s ever been cured of anything or fixed of anything by taking a 10-step guide, I would assume. Now they want to know what the next thing is.
Maybe it’s like a small course or a group coaching program. It could be a variety of things. Then, that worked for them pretty well. Cool. Now let’s say 28 people take us up on the lead magnet. Twenty-five percent buy the smaller thing, a percentage of that will buy the course, and a smaller percentage of that will then buy the higher end stuff. That’s how many people we need to be filtering in.
What’s cool is we’re providing value, we’re helping people along the way, we’re making money along the way, and we are spending more time at the top eventually, because the rest of this can be pretty much automated.
Banking and Marketing: Get Things Going
We are spending more time at the top doing the stuff that we actually want to do and charging an appropriate amount for it. And people are paying it with a smile on their face because they are your people. So, think about your value ladder.
What is the lead magnet? What is going to be like your mid-low tier thing? What is going to be your mid-high tier thing, and what is going to be your top tier? Most likely it’s going to be FDN coaching. But when I say most likely, it could be speaking for you. It could be a really high-ticket group course where maybe you work with like five people at a time, I don’t know. There are really no limits on this.
It could be something where you fly out to the person’s house and do a whole revamp of their house for them. You get them the right products, you get them the right foods, you tell them how to shop. There are people out there that will pay for these things, guys. It exists and you could charge an extraordinarily high amount for that. But I’m just saying that could be the top end of your ladder. There’s really no limit to where this goes.
Remember, you can always add steps as you go along here. You want to just basically start with four to get things going. I know some of this, I hope it wasn’t too all over, I think it was relatively organized. But I think anyone listening that listens to me regularly can tell it was a bit off the cuff.
Conclusion
I kind of jotted down the bullet points that I wanted to get in today. I knew where I wanted to start, I knew where I wanted to finish. I said, all right, let’s do this and see where it goes. Amazingly, I had no problem talking for almost 43 minutes here. I hope that you guys learned something today.
If you have any questions, you can always reach out to us directly. Best way to do this nowadays is just to go on Instagram at fdntraining. Shoot us a DM. We do not use chatbots, we have real humans there. And if you said that you wanted to talk to me specifically, you’re actually able to do that.
I have access and there is a woman named Jo that manages it mostly. But if she saw that something was for me, she would just shoot me a message and say, hey Ev, can you get to this one? And I would happily answer any questions that you guys might have about setting up Novo, getting Pipeline Pro, or building your value ladder.
And what’s cool about all of this is, this is all stuff that you can do before you even start the FDN course, let alone before you graduate to set you up for success. I hope you guys have a great rest of your week. I am looking forward to talking to you guys again soon. But until then, take care.
You can always visit us at functionaldiagnosticnutrition.com.
To hire an FDN Practitioner, go to fdnthrive.com.
For a FREE Health Review, go to fdnthrive.com/match/.
