In this interview with Laurie Mallon, your pizza-loving health coach, we talk about what she does to get clients and this amazing tip on hanging out where your clients really help.

Tune in to learn where her clients are, and her tips to be healthy entrepreneurs.

Listen to the Episode below:

In this episode, you'll hear about:

Laurie Mallon and why she chose to be in health & wellness industry
Her tips to being a success in business
Where to find your clients
Laurie's "Ditch Your Diet" Program for busy fempreneurs

Ladies to be a successful Fempreneur you must first be a fit Fempreneur, so if there's no you, there's no business right?

Today we are so fortunate to have a business bay with us and she is Laurie Mallon.

Laurie is your pizza-loving living health coach, she helps you stop counting and start living. She coaches ladies like yourself to have the life that you have dreamed of. Who doesn't want to look good and feel good at the same time?

So Laurie, welcome to Fempreneur Secrets!

So let's start off with asking you the most important question, why health?

Laurie:

I had a career before this in Software Engineering and when I got married about five years ago and I moved, I relocated to be with my active duty husband. We lived somewhere where software engineering jobs were not as common as they had been where I lived before, and I realized it was a good time for me to start a second career, and health and fitness had always been a really important hobby to me.

I'd always been interested in fitness and lifting weights and being athletic. This just seemed like a really natural fit for me to put together programs and help other women who were not really sure how to lose weight or what to do with weights in the gym or what exercises to do, so this was a really natural fit for me to go into.

Huda:

So you mentioned that you were a Software Engineer or developer?

Laurie:

I was a tester.

Huda:

That's nice. So that is in itself something that is very interesting. And then when you move into fitness, what role did you pick for yourself?

Laurie:

That's a good question. I really liked being kind of a director and kind of giving people overall plans for fitness and just giving them a lot of guidance and mapping out a strategy for them to follow.

Huda:

So how has it been so far for you and your business creating strategies for people who want to improve on their health? What were the key strategies that you helped them with?

Laurie:

Well, I help them move away from obsessively counting and being more mindful. So it's really incorporating a mind-body connection in and around their food and their movement, which I think is why it's largely overlooked in most health and fitness programs. A lot of them tend to focus on what foods not to eat and how much to eat and what exercises to do and how much to work out, it's not giving a lot of consideration to the way we're eating and what are our habits around eating and are they healthy?

Huda:

So, in your personal life, was there an event that took place — besides relocating — was there any other incidences in your life that made you realize that this is it, where you know that this is the industry I'm going to pick and this is the business I'm going to do and this is the group of people that are going to impact.

Laurie:

When I was pregnant, I had been really athletic before I got pregnant and I gained 40 pounds and I'm tiny, I'm about five one and this 40 pounds just looked crazy on me. One of the things they don't tell you is when you have a baby you can look just as pregnant a month later as you did when you went into the hospital.

And this 40 pounds, I had a really hard time losing it. I had a lot of struggles trying to get back into being athletic, which was hard for me because I'd been so active before that, so I struggled to get back into exercise, I struggled with what to eat because I was nursing and I was afraid I would lose my supply if I was focused on weight loss and cutting calories or anything like that.

And I just went through a couple of years of struggling with my weight, struggling with my health. We had some fertility issues, when my son was about 18 months old, I had a series of miscarriages and we went to a fertility doctor and we tried two rounds and it didn't work.

I just felt like I knew something was off inside me and I just felt I wasn't taking care of myself the way that I knew I was supposed to. And I didn't know if that had anything to do with my infertility, but I knew that regardless I needed to take time and put the energy back into feeling like myself again and just focusing on my own health.

So I spent a good six to eight months just getting back to mindful eating and activity that I enjoyed. I took up yoga, I got back into running and it was just an experience of being able to regulate my weight and my health by just listening to my body.

So I had a point where I just felt something was off and I needed to pay attention to me and it was just a matter of focusing on my own, what my body knew it I needed and I just needed to listen.

Huda:

I think a lot of women entrepreneurs actually going through health-related issues, they don't want to own up to it because they think that pushing themselves for their career or for the business is far more important than taking care of their health. It's always something that you put to the side.

So what are your biggest tips for women entrepreneurs who are struggling in their health?

Laurie:

Prioritize yourself care. Always be checking in with your body to see how you're feeling, are stressed? Are you tired? What's your energy level? Are you constantly getting sick?

If you're feeling like you're always run down and you're always just anxious, your body's going to let you know when you need to pay attention to it. But it might be subtle signals, so you really need to tune in and spent a good time just checking in with your body, what's going on.

So pick up a meditation practice, a yoga practice, really setting boundaries around your time because your time and your energy are your two most precious resources, you don't get those back.

So you really need to set boundaries on plans and not overextending yourself and what people expect you to do, and it's okay to say no when people are asking too much of you and just making sure you're not trying to do too much and be everywhere for everyone.

Huda:

That's really good advice. I will hold onto that as well. So this is actually a good point which leads us to the next point, about your journey as an entrepreneur, as a woman entrepreneur.

So let's talk about that, and we know that being an entrepreneur is a very challenging journey, so for your case, are you a solopreneuer or do you have a team working with you?

Laurie:

Yes ma'am, just me.

Huda:

(Laughs) All right. So that makes it even more challenging, right?

Laurie:

Yes, absolutely.

Huda:

So what's your secret to success to be where you are right now?

Laurie:

Prioritizing and outsourcing. Making sure that I'm doing the things that I do best and letting everything else be done by somebody else who does that better than I do.

In the very beginning, I would do everything myself, and even the stuff I wasn't good at, and things like any kind of design, I am not creative, I don't have an eye for design or my website, I know I tried to DIY my own website and finally I just said, okay, I gotta outsource this, this cannot be something I do.

So basically sticking to what I know I'm good at and letting other professionals handle the other stuff and outsourcing that to them.

Huda:

Could you give me an example of the day to day operation, things that you outsource?

Laurie:

One of the fallacies of QA is you can never find your own mistakes, which is why programmers don't test, right? Because they can't see their own mistakes.

Ask somebody to put their set of eyeballs on any content that goes out, I wrote an ebook and I had to have it proofread by three different people just to make sure everything was caught.

Huda:

Share with us about your clientele and how you get to reach your clients?

Laurie:

I get my clients mostly on social media. My marketing strategies, I have some online and I do some in person, so I do some workshops locally.

Online, it's mostly just being where I know my clients hang out and offering support and advice. If I see somebody struggling with something that I can help with, I'll give them a few tips and let them know that if this is something that they want more help with, they're welcome to contact me.

Then usually the follow up is where we'll have a zoom conversation, we'll do a face to face and we'll get to see if we're a good fit, and then we'll talk about whether or not we want to work together.

Huda:

What kind of activities do you do to market yourself out and how much time do you spend doing it?

Laurie:

It's probably at least 50% of my time, either posting content or engaging potential clients, just trying to engage people that I think might be a good fit to work together if I see that they're struggling with something that I know I can help with.

Huda:

Do you have any tips that you can share with our listeners about the strategies that you have utilized for your business related to marketing or maybe branding that can help them in their business as well?

Laurie:

I think the biggest tip that I can share is: be visible in your business, share your story, be a human being. People want to work with you, they don't want to work with a brand, they don't want to work with a faceless company.

People hire me because I provide a service, but the business is me, they need to know my story, they need to know I've been where they are, that I understand what it's like to go through it, and putting a face and a voice to my brand has made a huge difference in my business, and having clients feel comfortable working with me.

What I do is kind of personal work, it's extremely sensitive, so people need to feel like they can talk to me, trust me, that I get it. So really being visible and being a person in my business has made a big difference.

Oh, well first I'd have to say my husband, he is my biggest supporter, I don't know if he completely understands what I do an how I do it, but he's completely supportive and he knows that this really makes me happy. My other pillars are probably other people, my ... what's the word? I don't want to say colleagues, that's not right, but the people who do what I do, other health coaches who understand the difficulties in working with people online and running an online business the fact that it can be isolating and just exhilarating and awesome and lonely.

Huda:

Yes, definitely entrepreneurship is a very lonely journey and it's really nice to have some form of support. So other than that, let's talk about your Ditch Your Diet. So could you share a bit about what this is all about?

Laurie:

Sure! Ditch Your Diet is a program to help women end their obsession with counting calories, points, carbs, what have you, and their obsession with the scale. We move away from using weight as the main metric of health and more understanding of mindful eating practice and awareness around emotional eating.

So getting to the why we're eating less than what we're eating and focusing on balancing, honouring your body's need for nutrition with eating foods for an experience that we enjoy.

There are so many other ways to measure your health other than your weight because we know that you can be at a healthy weight but still be very unhealthy, have a very high body fat percentage. If you smoke, you could be at a healthy weight that you smoke, that's not healthy. Their blood pressure is healthy, their A1C is healthy. So there are a lot of other factors, a lot of other metrics that can be used to measure health other than just weight

Huda:

I think I will stop weighing myself and start focusing more on looking at what I'm eating.

Laurie:

I'm a firm believer in bio-individuality, which means you do what works best for you. So if you are not a breakfast person, don't force yourself to eat it.

You do what works for you as long as you're eating, you're making mindful choices and you're eating foods because you want to eat them and you're not eating them out for emotional reasons or out of boredom and it's working for you, you do that.

Huda:

So how can our listeners get in touch with you if they are interested to find out more about your Ditch Your Diet program?

Laurie:

They can find me at my website lauriemallon.com, and I'm also on Instagram @Laurie Mallon CHC

Huda:

We have pretty much covered up all the things that we wanted to learn from you, and it has been a really insightful session. Thank you for taking the time off to actually speak with us and share your expertise with the rest of the listeners.

If you want to learn more about Laurie, go to Fempreneursecrets.com and find out more over there.

What do you think?

I'd love to know what you think of this episode. Do you plan on leaving your full-time job soon to start your business? If so, where are you now in that plan? Share with me in the comments below!

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