One of the best ways to get inspired is to learn from others’ successes.
That’s why in my Elevate online training program, we spotlight one of our members during our member Access Calls.
Elevate Head Coach James Roche, Elevate Coach Joy Chudacoff, and I select and interview one Elevate member who is making great strides with the program.
Some successes are large, some small, but it’s all about taking steps forward and making progress.
Today, you’ll meet Elevate Advanced member Cate Stillman, the founder of www.YogaHealer.com. She was our spotlight during our February 2013 call.
Enjoy our quick interview with Cate below, and be sure to take notes. There are several golden nuggets you can apply to YOUR business right away!
Ali: Hey, Cate.
James: Hey, how are you doing?
Cate: Great, great to be here.
James: You’ve been someone that I’ve noticed both in the forum and asking questions for the videos and asking great questions here on the Access calls. You’ve been very active. The more I got to know you a little bit and what you’re doing with your business, I was like, “Wow! You really have taken off.” You really have a powerful business that you’re building up here.
Give a little description about the business…
Cate: My business is yogahealer.com. I guide people who love yoga on the next step of their health evolution. I do this through practical, online, vibrant health courses for yoga students and yoga teachers who are looking to take the practices off the mat and into the kitchen and into their daily habits—and even into their families, their yoga students, and their communities.
That’s more or less my target market. I’ve been teaching online for the last five years and had focused over the last, I don’t know, about 15 years more on my Ayurveda and yoga healing education than I did on my online business education.
Over the last few years, I was patching little online courses that cost $100 here or $200 there. I was kind of patching those together and learning a few things, and then a little over a year ago, I decided to, when you guys came out with Elevate, I thought, “I would really like to know what it would take to take it to the next level and to really focus on reaching a broader audience, really focusing on a global opportunity to help stimulate change in yoga communities around the planet for personal health and also for planetary wellness, which are all part of what my message is.”
James: Wow. That’s great.
Cate: Yeah, and it’s happening, which is so cool.
James: Totally! So tell us then, since you’ve joined Elevate, what have been some of these—you have a really solid foundation there, so what has happened over this past year and couple months now?
Cate: Well, a few things happened. One, I think I was really confused. I really have these different avatars (or different target clients)—the yoga students or yoga teachers or yoga teachers who are healers looking for more business information.
I had these three different avatars. Once I straightened them out through the Elevate program and got really clear on how to escort each of those through my funnel (to know who they were from a quick conversation, to point them to the free resources that would build confidence and our relationship, and steer them into a course if they wanted a deeper relationship) it all just got really clear. The funnels just got solidified, so it became much easier for people to join my courses.
A lot of the gray area disappeared with that. I changed a lot of my copy on my site. I renamed some courses. Like the Mentor’s Course became the Yoga Healer Business Course. Things like that were much more clear and straightforward.
One of the biggest things I did—the courses generally started in September and I did enrollment conversations last September. I’ve been one of those, “I’ll try anything and see what gets traction.” I do that to a fault, essentially, because I was like, “I’ve really got to do this. I mean this course is a $1,700 course. I should at least give them access to 15 minutes of me.”
What I found was even if they knew they could talk to me, often they wouldn’t talk to me, but they’d sign up because they could talk to me. But then the ones who did talk to me, it was just like you guys always say that you get to know what their needs are in their own words. It helped me speak to that, and it actually—well, it was so beautiful. Besides converting these potential students into enrolled students, which is beautiful in itself, it actually shifted what I’m teaching in the course to make it more practical and useful. That, to me, is helping.
Ali: Cate, I have a question because I look at what you do, and there are a lot of people in your industry. I hope you don’t say this, but there are a lot of broke yoga teachers. You know this, right?
Cate: Yeah!
Ali: There are a lot of people who are teaching yoga and living in their van, and I see them at Whole Foods. It’s funny. They still shop at Whole Foods. I love that because their health is most important. What do you think has been your determining factor in actually being able to charge well for this and establish the worth of what you’re offering? If you had a tip or two for people who are listening saying, “I’m in the field and I wonder how she conveyed that value to people.”
Cate: A few things come to mind. One is I definitely steered towards the end result. So next year that course, that Living Ayurveda course is $2,000. A person that goes through the course really does learn how to take care of their body as if they want all the parts to last a hundred years. They learn how to do that for their family and for their yoga students. If they’re a yoga teacher, they can go into other courses that I teach—I teach them how to make money basically teaching the same stuff to their students.
Ali: Okay.
Cate: If you take $2,000 and then you think, “What are you paying on your insurance, your health insurance? What are you getting? Is it changing the way you live? Is it changing how you’re making choices? Is it changing how you’re aging?”
Ali: I love that. Everyone just listen to what she just said. What Cate did was she came up with something to compare the cost to. In the marketing world, we call that—if you don’t have apples to apples, and you do apples to oranges. You say, “Okay.” I love what you did. “What are you spending on health insurance a year?” Guaranteed thousands of dollars, right? “What are you spending on doctor bills? What are you spending on health supplements, even?”
If you don’t have something directly to compare your value to and what you’re offering, look for something that’s similar that someone can relate to and suddenly it puts it all in perspective.
Cate: It does and the statistics are there. When the elderly, I can’t remember the word, but I think it’s become insolvent when they lose their assets, it’s due to medical reasons. I mean the statistics are there that most of our elderly become insolvent due to their medical bills.
So this $2,000 all of a sudden looks like nothing when you think about it.
Ali: Right. I remember when my dad was sick that was their health insurance per month, I think.
Cate: Yeah, I think it’s crazy. I mean the other really big thing is because most of my students are yoga teachers and saying, “You can turn around and I can show you how to make a better living with the information I’m going to teach you in this course and turning you into a life coach.” Basically a yoga lifestyle coach is part of what I’m now offering after the Living Ayurveda course to help them take these teachings to their yoga students in a way that’s a little different than teaching a Hatha yoga aerobics-type class.
Ali: Great.
James: Well, great. Cate, thank you so much for joining us and sharing this. We do this so that the members can start to see how people in their fellow community are making things happen and making things grow, and hopefully pulling out a gem of an idea from the successes that you’re having. Cate, thank you so much for this!