I'm asking on behalf of a relative who mentioned she wants to start her own weight loss consulting business. She has strong credentials but wants to start without using social media. I told her that I'm guessing networking is more difficult when you have a topic that is sensitive and she agreed. She has tried to connect with others such as personal trainers but they seem to offer their own consulting services for weight loss as well. Do you have any suggestions I could pass along for her?
For your friend to be successful as a weight loss consultant I would suggest she needs three things:
1. Her own unique weight loss system that she can sell as a monthly service (recurring revenue). It should go beyond the obvious such as diet and exercise or at least provide a new angle on incorporating them. Her system needs to add enough value that people will continue to pay for it.
2. A case study of someone (could be your friend herself) that has lost a lot of weight in a relatively short amount of time using her system. This case study will form an important part of her marketing efforts.
3. As the weight loss market is so competitive, she needs a niche. For example, a weight loss system for stay at home mums. That way she avoids competing with personal trainers who probably don’t have much access to niche markets such as stay at home mums.
Having her own system gives customers a reason to use her as a consultant, having an impressive case study provides credibility to her system and having a niche gives her a specific audience to market to.
There are three markets people make a lot of money in (health, wealth and relationships). The good news is that her business is in one of these markets. The bad news is that these markets are saturated and incredibly competitive online so I would suggest she avoids online marketing activities, for now, such as SEO, PPC, etc. Social media might work for her if she has a unique system and can prove results.
First, she needs proof of concept and to see if people will pay for her consulting. I would recommend she incorporates my three suggestions above and markets offline to friends or find a niche group of people and speak to them at networking events.
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Rob Stephens
robstephens.com
Start with her network to gather successful case studies that she'll do for free. Once she can prove she has a program that works, she can ask her network to introduce her to people that would be interested. that's when she can try to sell her services.
Here is a story.
"The story goes that the ruler or India was so pleased with one of his palace wise men, who had invented the game of chess, that he offered this wise man a reward of his own choosing.
The wise man, who was also a wise mathematician, told his Master that he would like just one grain of rice on the first square of the chess board, double that number of grains of rice on the second square, and so on: double the number of grains of rice on each of the next 62 squares on the chess board.
This seemed to the ruler to be a modest request, so he called for his servants to bring the rice. How surprised he was to find that the rice quickly covered the chess board, then filled the palace! Let's stop here, and see just how many grains of rice this is.
The number of grains of rice on the last square can be written as "2 to the 63th power", which looks like this:
263
This means:
2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2
. . . or "2 times itself 63 times".
Which can be written as approximately: 18,446,744,070,000,000,000 (I can't write this more accurately as I have only 10 spaces on my TI-34 calculator!)
A grain of rice is approximately .2 inches long. Converting .2 inches to feet (divide by 12 inches to a foot) and then dividing that number by 5,280 feet in one mile, we get the length of the grains of rice, placed end-to-end, to be approximately 60,000,000,000,000 miles. How far is that? Alpha Centauri, the nearest star, is located 25,000,000,000,000 miles from Earth. Placed end to end, these grains of rice would reach farther than from the Earth, across space to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, and back to Earth again!"
Credit: http://mathforum.org/sanders/geometry/GP11Fable.html
Happy cusotmers are the rice. Network is the chessboard.
https://ewomennetwork.com - starting point I suggest to my clients selling women centric products/services.
Once she masters utilizing EWN, likely she'll have more clients than she could ever handle.
How to go about this effectively takes a bit of explanation.
If she finds EWN a good match, she can book a call with me + I'll go through how I do this.
Same techniques can be loosely applied to other similar venues too...
Meetup.com
Chamber of commerce mixers
Expos + Converences
CoWork offices
