Danny: Mhm. What’s interesting that I find, and I know this is typical, Chip, is that really, being a coach is almost – what’s adequate is the client knowing you’re there. It’s an accountability, it’s knowing somebody cares and is a resource. I want to make sure people don’t think this is at all like being a personal trainer where you have to stand over the person every time they do a sit up to make sure they’re doing it right. It’s being there and absolutely if people have concerns or questions and we do encourage outreach, but it’s funny, I mean, I think most of my clients it’s like, “Yeah, Danny. Thanks a lot for checking in again. I’m doing fine. If I need you, I’ll let you know.” And that’s pretty much –
Chip: And as I’m doing this, as I do the coaching, I recognize why that [inaudible] journal medical study is true, because inevitably, there are a handful of people who have difficulty getting into fat burning. Well, you’re taught as a health coach how to triage that and how to kind of get that person into fat burning. Everybody hits a plateau, especially if they’re losing a bunch of weight, everybody hits a plateau along the line, and that’s where most people who are doing it on their own just give up and quit, or they get stuck at a BMI of thirty, which is a classic plateau location I’ve seen for a couple decades now, and they just say, “Oh, this is good enough. This is the best I can do.”
Well, we are given, as health coaches, thirteen bullet points to help people through that plateau, and that’s when you have, even if you’re texting or emailing them, you’ll pick up the phone and talk to them and help them through that plateau. You’re monitoring their weight each week. You just ask them, sometimes, I mean, a week’s encounter is an email thing. How are you feeling? Any problems? What’s your weight? Boom, I’m done. They call, email back saying, “I’m 210 pounds, down two pounds, feeling great.” That’s the week’s encounter.
Danny: Not being a dentist, you know, what’s downright fun for me is somebody thanks me and I can see the results and they do, and they give me that gratification. Dentists, I’m sure, experience a very similar experience when they get somebody out of paint or they make them look more beautiful. But this is the kind of thing that boy, it really puts a spring in my step when people thank me for helping get them involved in this.
Chip: And Danny, that’s exactly why I made this part of my business plan. I mean, there’s a financial benefit, but it’s fun. I mean, you’ll see, health professionals don’t have to coach. I coach patients just because I like doing it.
So basically getting started, I mentioned the health coach kit is 199 dollars to get started. They’re simply asking for helping to cover all the materials they’re going to be giving you in your health coach kit, all the marketing materials and a year’s worth of their co-branded website. Everybody gets a co-branded website – this is Dr. Nelson’s site here – that is tailored to you, it’s personalized to you, but they update with lots of information constantly, all the time, so you don’t have to maintain it. They do that for you.
Danny: Hey, Chip? Hey, I know I don’t normally do this, I wait to keep the questions for the end, but Holly just asked, for 199 dollars, really, what’s the catch?
Chip: The catch, Holly, is that they know, and all the materials, they basically are giving to us at costs – business cards, twenty-five bucks for five hundred business cards, because they don’t want finance to be a road block to get you started. They want you to be successful because they’re going to make their money by you being a successful health coach, so they want to stay out of the way as much as possible, so they’re simply asking you to cover their cost for the materials, for the health coaching kit, and et cetera. Yeah, there really is no catch. They’re not making money off of you; they’re making money from your acquiring clients and the revenue that they’re getting from the sale of the food which they feed right back into you.
Danny: I was likewise skeptical, by the way, because I’ve been approached with franchise opportunities. They wanted thirty thousand dollars, ninety thousand dollars.
Chip: You know, I remember that. That’s because in those companies right there, they make their money from the sale of the franchise. In this one, they’re making their money from the work that you’re doing. I mean, they’re feeding you back some of their profit to do the coaching. Obviously that’s only fair.
Danny: Everyone’s goals are congruent. That’s great.
Chip: But then what ends up happening is you successfully coach somebody, they, just like I said, the dentist office has a bunch of walking billboards. Well, Take Shape for Life, you don’t see them advertise anywhere. Why? Because they don’t need to. They’re basically the profit that medifast is spending on advertising. Take Shape for Life is feeding the health coaching system and paying the health coaches to coach the clients because they’ve got the walking billboards and they’re the ones kind of promoting business and loving life as a health coach.
Basically, Danny and I would show you – people get a little bit nervous, how am I going to share the opportunity? We’re going to show you how to do that, and basically as a business coach, the business model is you would not pay us a penny, and no, that’s not a catch either, because yes, we are going to get paid, but again, the company pays us to help you be successful. The more successful you are, the more successful they are, so they pay us for it, and that’s kind of the other level of business that we’re talking about, being a business coach and a business leader.
So you would not pay us a penny, and what we would do is we would work with you. We would help you get started. I’ll show you that in a second. We would advise you regarding the best structure for your practice, how to help you determine who the point person is going to be in the practice, work with that point person, show them the tools the company provides, show you some tools that Danny and I have put together, and we’d also work with the health professionals. Even if the dentist isn’t going to be doing any health coaching – many will choose to do it like I have – they need to know a basic understanding, so we’ll work with the dentists also to kind of give them the basics of what they need to know so they can talk intelligently to the clients.
Just quickly, two slides on option two that Danny has chosen to do. What we talked about before was being a health coach, and they get paid to be coaching clients. Business coaches sponsor health coaches and support health coaches, and we would support you fully. We work in teams. If somebody’s on Danny’s team, they get the services of Danny, me, Dr. Nelson, and a couple others. We work in teams and help you out. And basically, by being a business coach, it allows me to extend my reach, give my skills by duplicating my success, by showing you the ropes you will be able to coach clients that I may never meet. There’s a limited amount of people I can help if I’m coaching them directly, but if I can empower Dr. Jones and Dr. Smith to be successful, Haley, my twenty year old daughter who is a personal trainer, she’s a health coach, and by helping Haley to be successful, she can do it. And there’s a lot of health coaches who just do it because they’re stay at home moms, they want to make some money but not have to go to an office, et cetera, et cetera. So that’s the [inaudible].
The bottom line is the question how many lives do you want to change? Gail, my nurse, she coaches three to five people a month. She does not want to make a business, her husband makes plenty of money, she doesn’t need the money, doesn’t want it, but she wants to coach a few people, so she [inaudible] habits of health and maintain the forty pounds that she lost on the program. And the bottom line is that the beauty is that there is no guilt in making money because every dollar we earn means somebody out there is getting healthy. So it all depends on how many lives you want to change.
So basically, that’s the program. So if you choose to create a third era dental practice, what can you expect the process to entail? Well, now, don’t get me wrong. A third era dental practice – Take Shape for Life does not equal third era dental practice, but I would say in my opinion, from a physician’s point of view, if you’re going to implement an oral systemic practice, which, functionally, is a third era, helping people to create health, you need a foundation of something, some program, be it this one, the Cleveland Clinic program that you [inaudible] have, that’s nice. I talked to Dan [inaudible], and he said that basically they offer some nice tools, but it’s not a meaty tool like, it’s not a human being that you can walk into the program. You need some sort of mechanism to help people create health, and in my opinion, this is the best that you could offer.
So basically, what does it look like? First step, you sign up as a health coach, you get the materials, you get the [inaudible] website. And the second step, consider trying the program yourself. We’ve got a hundred people on the call today, and the likelihood is that health professions are not immune to the obesity epidemic. The likelihood is that sixty-seven are overweight, and of the sixty-seven, thirty-three are probably obese, and all those are probably on the health path not really reaching what they want to have in the seventies, also, so consider trying the program yourself. It’s also very helpful, especially if you’re going to do health coaching, to do the program to best understand the program.
We’ll present the program to your office staff. You can’t do it; you don’t know how to yet. Eventually, you’ll know, you’ll get good at it, but we’ll present the program to your office staff and let them try the program if they want to. You may find somebody who really loves it, and that’s the person who wants to step up and do health coaching. You may find two or three people in the practice who want to do health coaching because they like it so much. And basically, we’ll coach them. You’re not expected to coach them from the beginning. They need somebody, so we would coach them. We can’t coach everybody under the sun, but we can certainly coach people of the practices we’re working with, and feel free to invite your family and friends to the program presentation. It’s a short version of what I’m doing tonight.
The next important step is to identify who’s going to be the lead person in the practice. I’m the lead in my practice just because I love it so much, but it can be anybody. I mentioned earlier it can be in the dentist office, I think, if the hygienist wants to do it, it’s a perfect person, physician to do it, for many reasons. And then we need to determine the structure. Not going to get into much of that, but basically, the two options are to have all the practice receive all the revenue and then pay the health coaches to do all the coaching. That would give you the most upfront revenue, but there tends to be burnouts in practice if you do that road.
The better long term financial model is to launch independent health coaches. All of us are independent health coaches. If you choose to do the business, you’re not going to work for Danny and me. We’re going to support you, but you’re working for yourselves in the business model, but in your practice, if you so choose, is to launch your coaches to be independent health coaches also.
Danny: I think it’s important to mention at this point, too, Chip, that where this differs from multilevel market, I think, in a very important way is the people in your structure, as you just set forth, even though they come on board after we do, if they work hard and are more successful, they will make more money than you or I will.
Chip: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. The thirty-five percent of the revenue goes to the in the trenches health coach, and about ten percent goes to the business coaching business leader system, so yeah, it’s the health coaches making the bulk of the money, and there’s lots of reasons that this is not multilevel marketing. To start with, multilevel marketing, the work ends when the product is delivered. In our case, the work begins when the product is delivered.
