A Business That Made a Profit and a Difference

Sarah is the owner of a wellness center in the San Francisco Bay Area. When she approached me for coaching, she had a great location for her center, and several excellent personnel including massage therapists, a chiropractor, and spa service providers.

Sarah had a great opportunity on her hands but it wasn’t going anywhere. She was barely breaking even after covering her overhead expenses, and she was wondering if she would need to take a “real job” to pay the bills. A woman passionate about making a difference in people’s lives with her business, Sarah simply needed some guidance on how to approach marketing. I really wanted to help her achieve her goals so we got right to work.

The Problem

The first problem that we faced was that Sarah did not have a core value proposition for her wellness center. Sure, a wellness center sounds great but who were her target clientele and what were the specific benefits to them? She was unclear about her business’s positioning and therefore unable to articulate it. Her uncertainty was preventing her passion from being evident to others.

The second major problem was that Sarah did not have a solid plan in place for marketing her business. She haphazardly tried out a bunch of marketing strategies and found that some worked and some didn’t. She was wasting her valuable time, energy, and money on things that didn’t work.

Before coaching, Sarah had tried strategies such as:

• Taking out advertisements in newspapers
• Asking friends and family members for referrals
• Creating a website
• Sending out flyers
• Getting listed in local directories
• Asking members to tell their friends

Some of these strategies had potential, but Sarah wasn’t sure how to use them as effectively as possible, and she therefore got minimal results.

The Core Value

No matter what strategy Sarah tried, she would not get the results she wanted without first getting clear on the core value of her business.

We went through a process of examining:

• What key attributes defined her target clientele
• What her center had to offer that other wellness centers did not
• What her personal and business mission was
• What features her clientele needed
• How to visually convey her message in the interior of her center and on her website

In speaking with Sarah, I realized that she was driven by improving the quality of life for those who improve other’s quality of life. She was also most interested in creating services specifically for women, and she was dedicated to environmental causes.

Sarah and her staff were talented at helping clients feel nurtured. Because of these and other factors, her target market became women who provided professional services such as counseling, social work, teachers, and people who ran environmentally friendly businesses. Her programs and packages centered around the theme of nurturing yourself to help you best help others.

She used environmentally friendly products in the remodel of her facility, and all of her paper products were recycled. She gave each new member a water bottle (made from recycled plastic) so that they would not use disposable water bottles. The bottle had her center’s new logo and her colors were rich, soothing green tones.

Suddenly Sarah had not only a niche market but also a core message. Her business was memorable. Her clientele greatly enjoyed meeting one another because they had a lot in common, and the wellness center felt like a social retreat. People came not just for the service but for the social networking at the organic café.

The Marketing Strategies

As you can see, just nailing down the core message did wonders for Sarah’s business. She was then ready to get out and market. We used three primary marketing strategies:
Speaking, internet marketing, and joint ventures.

Sarah and I created a speaking program around self care for the service professional. She brought soothing music and one of her massage therapists with her. She gave out coupons for a free 30-minute massage and discount coupons for other services. Each had a time-limit to create a sense of urgency, and several involved added incentives for bringing a friend. Sarah gave these workshops to local businesses and professional associations, and they were a huge success.

Internet marketing was appealing to Sarah because she had two young children and liked to work while they were asleep at night. First we created the content and navigation for a website that conveyed her core message. Then we keyword optimized it and created 10 other methods to drive traffic to her site, such as article marketing and blogging.

We then created a mailing list and great bonuses for people who signed up so Sarah could keep in touch with her prospects. Within 9 months, Sarah’s website started appearing on pages 1 and 2 on Google for her search terms and she was getting a steady flow of new clients from the website.

The third strategy that Sarah and I used was joint venture partnerships. A joint venture partnership is a mutually beneficial business relationship in which both parties offer benefit to one another, such as referrals. She selected several local businesses that served a similar target market. She offered her partners gift certificates for spa services in exchange for referrals. Male joint venture partners received gift baskets to give to women in their lives.

The Changes

After three months of coaching Sarah and I evaluated her progress. In this short time she had:

• Created her niche and target market.
• Developed her competitive advantage and core value proposition.
• Redid her company logo and tagline.
• Revamped her website to make it more effective from a marketing perspective and reflect the look and feel of center.
• Written 3 brochures and distributed them to joint venture partners.
• Redesigned the interior of her center and begun the remodel with environmentally friendly products.
• Initiated 4 joint venture partnerships that generated new client referrals.
• Keyword-optimized her website and begun pay-per-click Google ads.
• Set up her keep-in-touch marketing campaign.
• Developed a speaking engagement and came up with a list of where to give the talk.

Within 1 year, Sarah hired 10 employees and began considering whether to open a second center. Most importantly, she created a wonderful lifestyle for herself. It afforded her the flexibility to spend a lot of time with her children and nurture her own wellness.

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