Moving an In-Person Business Online with Dr. Andrea Maxim

You're listening to the PT Profit podcast, episode number 92. Today I'm sitting down with Andrea Maxim and we're talking all about how to move an in person business online, or at least create an online component. Are you ready? Let's get started.

Hi, I'm Beverly Simpson, former fitness manager turned online personal training business owner and. And this podcast is where smart fitness professionals, including trainers and clinicians, discover how to increase client performance in movement, package and position their products and services and get out of their own way so that they can increase their revenue to live a life that they love without sleazy sales. Welcome to the PT Profit Podcast.

What's up coach? Thank you so much for pushing play on another episode of the PT Profit Podcast. I'm your host, Beverly Simpson and today I am super excited to bring to you my dear friend, Dr. Andrea Maxim, who is a naturopathic doctor, author and business mentor. She's the founder of the Maximized business and the creator of the Gap method. And she's the host of the Profitable Practice podcast. She graduated from school in 2012 and has since built three successful clinics from the ground up, making six, almost seven figures annually. She has built three successful clinics from the ground up and while she didn't specify she might already be at that seven figure mark, but making multiple six figures. And she loves the business side of health and wellness practice so much that she started to help her colleagues grow. And so what you're going to discover in this episode, which I'm really excited to bring to you, is just how simple business can be and how her method, her ways of, of growing a business both in person and online, it can be done very smart, simply. So without further ado, let's go ahead and roll that interview. Andrea, how are you? Thank you so much for being on the show today.

Oh my gosh, I am so excited to be here and talk with you and talk to your community. This is going to be an amazing show.

This. I'm just so pumped. It's truly a pleasure and a privilege to have you. I just love you so much. And they're going to be so excited. So for those of you who have not had a chance to, to know or meet you or know who you are, I'd love for you to just share a little bit about who you are, who you serve and how you got there.

Okay, sweet. So I started as a naturopathic doctor and like any practitioners who are listening, we graduate with all the skills of being a great doctor and not hurting anyone. But we do not graduate with any sort of business support. So we're kind of like, what I like to say popped out of the practitioner bubble. We're all like little robots of what school created us, and then we just don't know how to actually make our career happen. So I not only run three practices and have a whole team of naturopathic doctors that I've trained and duplicated myself with, but now I'm also supporting health and wellness practitioners to, you know, transition from that sort of like, birthing process into actually being successful online or in a local clinic.

Okay, I love that. You know, and it's so funny that you say that, because I hear that from personal trainers and physical therapists all the time, is that they learn to be great clinicians and then what are they supposed to do with it? No one really teaches them that nitty gritty like rubber meets the road. We're business owners now.

Yes. And it's not the school's fault. Right. The school only has so much time, and their only worry is about you being a liability to humans. They don't really have the time to support you in being successful at what it is you want to do, that impact that you want to make. And that's why I'm so thrilled that there's people like you out there also addressing this niche, also addressing this issue and being like guys, like it is possible. I'm living proof that it is possible. But you have to break yourself down a little bit and build yourself up as a new identity, which is entrepreneur, which not many of us like that idea.

Yes, it's so true. Or they don't associate to that identity. I'm not an entrepreneur. I'm a natural.

Right.

I'm a. I'm a personal trainer. Amazing. Okay, so I'd love for you to share a little bit about what are some of the biggest differences that you've noticed in terms of building a brick and mortar build business and online business.

Okay. The brick and mortar business, I. I love. And. Well, there's pros and cons to both. So what I love about the brick and mortar is the physical touch, the physical interaction, the energy exchange is live and in person. That is something that I can never get rid of. Even us as naturopaths, we could be 100% virtual. We have that capacity. But there's something about in person, human interaction, connection, relationship building, trust building that just can't be manifested online. And even just talking to a potential new patient who is a teacher while going through the pandemic. Everybody went online. And so everyone is burnt out with zoom. They're burnt out with virtual, they're burnt out with sitting in front of their computer. And. And that's not to say that it isn't still a viable model. I just love that we have that brick and mortar option. So we're very much a hybrid practice. Now. The cons, of course, is innately, there's way more overhead, there's way more expenses, the profit margins are lower because we have to pay rent, we have to pay for the hydro, we have to pay for the Internet, we have to pay for the phone, we have to pay for all these things. So, you know, there's that flip to the coin. But what I also love, like right now, I'm in my clinic space and it's like a office space away from home. And so it gets me out of my. My home, out of my safe place, out of my comfort zone. And then I can get right into work mode, you know, sort of like creating your Zen space. Now I have an office space that I can go to and execute. With regards to the online business, and I'll answer this a few ways. It depends for me on if we're talking online, like trying to get all of North America in or online. Just trying to be a big fish in a small pond online for a local business, like trying to do online traffic, getting them in for virtual calls, getting them into our online program when it's local to within maybe 10, 15 kilometers of our hubs. I find to be a lot more fun and I get a lot more feedback faster than dipping my net into a big ocean, where now I'm competing against all the other fishermen in that same big ocean. Now, competition is what you want to think of it. Everyone can put a line in the ocean. We're not even going to go there. But it does have a different energy, it does have a different feel. The perception of growth and profitability becomes bigger when you're dipping into a bigger ocean. But I also love the safety factor of dipping into a smaller pond but winning because not too many people are dipping there. They're all thinking grander scheme. So I can kind of talk about this all across the board. But online, of course, profit margins, way higher. You have to take more risk, I would say, because you're now casting this net and being like, crap, like, I hope someone sees my lure. I hope someone sees my worm. When. When you're a brick and mortar, everyone's driving by you, so you're innately there. And when you're local, there's not too much competition in your reach versus going bigger. So I can talk about this from any spectrum you want?

No, I love it. You know, I am a little curious, you know, because sometimes I hear people say things like, oh, the marketing is different for a brick and mortar than it is online. And so for those of you who don't know, Andrea and I are both messaging coaches for one of our Brandon and Sarah. So we're both really. We're both really. I was going to say new nuanced, but that's not the right word. We're both just very in tune with the power of language. And so I'm messaging standpoint. Is the marketing really different when you're trying to promote in person versus online? Because to me it doesn't.

No, it absolutely is not. In fact, what I've taken from my skills in online marketing, I'm just bringing it right into local business. We do not run any paper ads. We do not have any billboards. We don't do that because those aren't the type of people I'm aligned with. I'm not aligned with people who read the newspaper, look at billboards and take action. Those aren't. That's just not our demographic. I am 100% invested in running Facebook ads and, and testing Facebook ad marketing, but as I said, within a safety net of a smaller location. So I know the people that are going to see my ad within our demographic range are more, more likely to book in with us than when I cast my nets further out. So I found like right now we're on pace for almost a six figure growth this year. And I can attribute a lot of that to dialing in my messaging and leveraging Facebook ads to get those new leads coming in.

That's amazing. So now do you like for local business, like are you just running ads to get them to book a call, you getting them on your email list? How's that process a little different? How's that process for you?

Sure. So what we're predominantly doing, we're keeping our funnel really, really simple. So my team and I will go live a couple times a week and we will then put engagement ads spend behind those lives just so they bump up again to our demographic. We're filling up those audiences, our Facebook audiences with people who like engage, watch, whatever, and we're building up that bucket and then we're retargeting that bucket to book a call. And that call is a discovery call for our methodology that our big comprehensive program so innately that's the funnel. But as we all know on social media we get our DMs, we get our comments, we get our messages, we get people jumping off of social, going onto our website, booking online that way. So I don't have a like dialed in like, oh, this person came exactly from this ad to this place and then booked in. I don't friggin care. I just want the people coming in. But when we do it through engagement and then retargeting, we're spending maybe 50 to $100 and we're profiting every single week. So now it's just about dialing it up.

Yeah, and I love that you say that because so many people forget, right? We're talking about a synergistic process here. Not like this person that you can track this person unless you have a conversation with them. But, but it's, you know, you're gonna have people hit your website and then they go and see a Facebook ad. So it's a synergistic process. There's no way to say, oh, they listened to my podcast, it came from my podcast.

Right?

That's really, that's really awesome. So now what say to somebody who is, you know, perhaps has a brick and mortar, but feeling apprehensive about growing an online presence, like, how would you, what would you recommend to someone who is interested in adding an online component but maybe not going all in?

The first question that came to mind as you pose that is like, well, what are you going to do? What are you going to do for marketing? What are you going to do to get yourself out there? Because too often, and especially in, and I can only speak to my space, there is a sense of entitlement that I find local business owners have where they're like, well, I bought the space, I have my name on the sign outside, people are driving by me, they should just want to come in, you know, so we have to break that down and be like, look, if you're going like to friggin hustle and meet all of your neighbors and not just meet them once, you can't just hand out your brochure to people once and expect the floodgates to open. You're going to have to cultivate probably over the better part of a year a strong synergistic in person relationship with the people near you, with the restaurants, with the supplement stores, with the physiotherapists, the chiropractors. Like no one is going to refer to you just because you shook their hand one time. You have to build up those referral networks. And with regards to, like, referral networks, you have to be referring to them first before you expect anything reciprocated to you. So that might be trade shows, that might be lunch and learns, that might be presentations, that might be doing Facebook Live shares or Instagram shares. It's going to take way more time and effort and a much longer approach for marketing if you're not willing to go in online. And how I love to view Facebook is. I'm like Frigg. It's costing me $5 a day for my little minion robots to advertise my stuff to people that didn't know I existed. While I'm sleeping, while I'm doing other things, while I'm making dinner, while I'm emptying out the dishwasher. And I love when people are doing things for me that I don't have to do, you know, so that's how I use Facebook. I'm like, you do. You do my bidding and I'm going to live my life.

I love that. I love that. I love that you mentioned too, you know, and I love that you're talking about it from just a marketing perspective, because, listen, everything, everything's online now. And I think people are on board with that. But from you, you have an actual online component to your offer. So how do you position that as a brick and mortar. Brick and mortar business? Like, how. What. What are the components of your offer? How do you put that together? And what would you. Where would you recommend someone start?

Well, we just created the online course that goes with our methodology. So we have the Gap protocol. That's our methodology. Now. We've inherently intertwined patient visits with access to those online tools. For those people that just want to buy it on their own, they absolutely can. And literally, it's just a conversation, oh, I'm not ready to see you. What else can you do for me? I can't legally be treated by you. I live outside your province. What do you have? We'll sell those very rarely. But what we really started to leverage is it's kind of like the bait. And then we're like, you can get this whole program for free if you onboard with us as a patient, whether completely virtual or inside our office, or again, a hybrid approach. And that's been a great upsell offer to get people to want to book in that initial. Because now instead of you pay $300 and get access to it, now you become a patient. And we will include that inside your patient journey to Help level up your success. And that, that really sat well with me the best, energetically, as opposed to just trying to sell the course. We certainly launched it as a beta just to see if people would actually just buy it on its own. And we found people were more likely to buy it when we offered it at a really low price, which wasn't either we weren't presenting the value properly or energetically. I didn't see it being valued at a higher amount in order to get that energetic exchange, that financial exchange. So now we include it as part of our process. And it's just a sort of like the football phone, right? Come in, be our patient, you get the football phone for free, which is our program. And people love that.

Okay, so I have two questions. The first one is, you know, I'm curious as a naturopath, because I know a lot of my clinicians face this, is that they have a really. And the school teaches them to have a very individualistic approach. How were you able to really create a program that serves the masses without sacrificing that of, of individual attention or needs?

That's an amazing question. So we do not have a black and white approach with our methodology. And, and in fact, what I did was I said, okay, I know the GAT protocol. G, A T gut, adrenal, thyroid. Please, nobody steal that. That's mine. We knew. I knew. Okay, if I were to write, if I were to treat everybody in the gut phase, what are the labs I want to run? What are the supplements that I'm most likely going to use if I wanted to treat someone in the adrenal phase? What are the labs I want to run? What are the supplements I'm most likely going to want to use? Thyroid, Same thing. Maxamentals, which is our fundamental pieces. What does that look like? And so what we basically created was a checklist report card. So every. We have a one pager, and every new patient gets it. And we check off the box of all the things that apply to that individual person at each pillar of our methodology. And if it doesn't apply, we just check it off. But it's on there to show. Here's the Cadillac, here's the gold standard. Here's what we could do for you. What we communicate and choose to do is entirely up to the individual patient or client. But what that also allows me to do then is tailor it to their needs, tailor it to their budget. But then it's all, all the responsibility is on them to choose which checkboxes we check off and which ones we refuse to do. So the problem becomes and personal trainers, you get this more than anybody. They don't get the results as fast as they wanted to. They don't get the benefits as quickly as they thought they would. They feel like this is taking longer than it should be. Well, I showed you all the tests we could run. I showed you all the supplements we could do. I showed you all the protocols we could do. You opted out of them. So are you open or willing now to revisit that conversation? Because for sure, if we're doing it all based off of assumptions and you're not willing to track anything, you don't want to collect any data, you don't want to run any labs. Yeah, it's going to be like we're checking things at a billboard and hoping that we can hit the bullseye. But if you do it the way we want you to, and it's going to cost you a little bit more in the beginning, but it's going to pay off way faster than Mickey Mouse ing it. This is what it looks like. You choose. And that's why I love our approach is we lay it all out there. All the prices are right on that sheet. So everything is transparent. And we let them pick and choose what they're willing to do. But it wasn't that we held anything back. We didn't show them what was possible. They made their choice.

That is so good. That is so of that. Okay. And so now I'm also curious because this has been something that has been coming up too for a lot of my clients is do you have like a re engagement campaign or re engagement program process that you have for potential past clients that may they were brick and mortar or they maybe they were in person and now you've got this virtual component. Like do you have like a re engagement process that you carry people through?

There's no process involved, but every quarter we're running some form of a promo, some type of a master class showing up in our community Facebook group that we've created. So we're always touching base and offering people tons of value on the back end, but certainly no process for when they drop off. But we have them very dialed into a process when they onboard. So we basically got them for the full year almost guaranteed with every single new patient after a year, I would hope, if we were doing our job, that they should be feeling pretty good. They're more in tune with their body. They kind of know what wellness feels like. And I'm expecting them to fall off because you can only maintain a certain level of attention in one spot for so long. Life happens. They want to try things on their own. So cool. But we will send out maybe one email a week just to kind of be like, hey, this is what's going on seasonally. Here's a promo we're running. We'll do flash sales with our products. So we're always trying to re. Re Engage people with new or discounted or different promotions. And then every once in a while, we'll just create a whole new process. So with the pandemic, we love to do wellness checks in office, but of course, we weren't able to do that, and a lot of people were leery about coming in at the time. So we actually developed a wellness kit that we would mail out to people's homes. And. And now that's become a beautiful way to leverage a whole visit virtually where it frees up our team's time, but then we still get that visit on the back end, going through. Then what were all the results that you picked up when you did this kit at home? And patients love it. They feel like a mad scientist when they're doing it because they're doing inches. And we have a whole bunch of urine tests that they're doing for adrenals and free radicals, and they're doing oral PH testing and urine PH testing. So they're getting really interactive with their bodies. And then we have a report card for them to fill out, and then we go over what those results mean. So that kind of came just sitting in the silence, thinking about the need, thinking about how we could offer something fairly novel but very needed. And those things just happen. And then I'm never afraid to roll it out and be like, hey, I have this idea. Who's interested? Cool. Not interested. Awesome. We move on.

I love that. All right, I have two main. Two main questions, and then I swear I'll let you go. But I want to ask, and I definitely want to say, because I love it when we get to talk to people like you who have had this process, and they have their ascension model, they have their business dialed in. And I love. The reason why I love talking to you in that way is because we get so bogged down with details that we forget can be so easy. It really can just be as easy as, like, attract people with a problem, sell them the transformation with your solution. Like, it really can be that. But as you. As you've experienced, it takes time to dial that in and dial in the messaging and dial in the offer. So I'm just curious, just from a personal perspective, how long did it take you to really dial those components in?

Girl, that's a really tough question. I will answer it with this. My journey was my journey and it took me way longer than it should have, but that was the journey that I needed to do and I will. And I was actually reflecting on that just a couple days ago. So I'm so thrilled that you brought this up because I was like, why couldn't I have done this faster? I had the GAP protocol. I was working with that report card for like three years before we actually turned it into a legit, comprehensive, high end program. And the best answer I can give is it took me that long to acknowledge what my blockers were and work through them. So if I had known what my blockers were, if I had done the work, if I had unveiled those things and worked through them, if I'd let go a lot of the doubt, the worry, if I had, you know, coulda, woulda, should at this point. But that's the best answer that I can give because the knowledge, everything we've said is what people have been saying forever. Since I've come out into business, messaging, marketing, creating a signature program, it's like barfed all over the place for decades. That's just what it is, right? So that isn't new. What's new is the personal journey that you need to go through to start leveling up and being like, f this, like, I'm done scrambling, I'm done individualizing. I am done like panicking every time I see my schedule and being like, crap, I hope this works out today. And I was like, I'm just like friggin streamlining this. I'm leaning into what people are telling me to do because I was resistant, obviously. And now I'm going to extract myself from the stuff I don't like and train people to do all my consultations. For me, it was my journey. It was something I had to go through. And a lot of it was letting go of the fear and letting go of the money blocks and, and issues and just stepping into shit. I just want a better life. I just want my business to be easier and just trusting it.

And I think too, you bring up like, I feel like we could do a whole nother podcast, which we should.

We should come back on. We'll have another conversation.

Yeah, well, there's a whole nuance, you know, I see people like, growth happens in phases, right? And then people get to this place of of feeling like, okay, well, I have to let go of my one on one patience. But Garrett, I need that income. You know, there comes all this, you know, risk.

Right.

And the gate risk, that becomes a very challenging time in people's lives.

Right.

I also think too that we get to this place where we, you know, how do you navigate, like there's a difference between and it's a nuanced conversation. There is a difference between trusting the process and trying again versus, you know, the definition of insanity and just doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. That is a fine line to find.

Yeah. And if I were to answer your question a different way, I would say I stayed exactly where I wanted to in my safe place. I graduated in 2011 for eight years. My biggest personal growth, my biggest business growth, my business, my biggest transformation happened from 2019 to now. So it just took me eight years to get ready.

Yeah, I love that. I love that. Okay, last question. And it's probably a big question, so I'll. But you know, you talk a lot about your team. I think you're definitely in a place where you're at maximum impact, where you have like, okay, now I'm at a place this dialed in. I've got my messaging dialed in. I got my offer dialed in. Now we need to scale it, we're going to amplify it and I'm going to build, take myself out of the business. When side that that needs to happen? Like what come for you in terms of like, when did you start building your team?

I built it out of listening to everyone saying, stop doing the stuff you don't want to do. And I felt fought that because my identity was a practitioner. I went to school and paid six figures to sit in a chair across from somebody else and be a practitioner for them. And I hated it. In year three, I was thinking of my exit strategy and I couldn't figure out why. And it wasn't until I was like, you know what, I'm just over it. Like, what is the worst case scenario going to be if I try this and it fails? Like, if I hire someone and it doesn't work out, I can fire them and I'll go right back to what I was doing. There was no downside. I was never going to break the business. But I also had to do a huge ego shed to do that where, oh, you know, it's not all about me. It has nothing to do with me. It has nothing to do with my skills because we're all taught the Same skills for sure. I have my magic and my charisma and my personality that people are drawn to. But when it comes to the actual execution, I don't need to be the person running the labs and explaining the labs. I don't need to be the person doing the check ins. I can support people globally in a much more impactful, emotional way. When I feel more impactful and emotional as opposed to trudging through the mud every day because I feel like I'm supposed to. And I had to really just get comfortable with that. And what I will say is, once you grow a team, you show up to that team. You know, when you're running a business on your own and you're not showing up to anybody, it could fail. It could do great. You could have a crushing week, you could have a shitty week. No one's going to know because it's just you. But when you start show like hiring a team and it's your responsibility to get them busy, otherwise they're just a button, a chair. You show up to your business in a totally different way. So the more we grew, the more excited I got about helping the business scale and the more team members we onboarded, the more I realized it reconfirmed, of course, where I should be and how I should be working. But it also was just like, this is like the momentum is friggin insane. Like I want to ride this wave all day long. So it just, it's just magnetic when you start living in alignment, shedding the ego, realizing you're not a unicorn, bringing other people in, seeing them succeed because you're succeeding as a team leader and you're like, okay, let's just ride this train, let's go.

I love it. Okay, so this has been amazing. You're so brilliant. And for anyone who wants to connect with you, where should I send them?

Ndreamaximnd on Instagram is the best place. Place.

Okay, cool. And I'll make sure I'll link up all your stuff in.

Thank you, Andrea.

I love you. Thank you. You're the dream.

Love you. Bye.

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