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Entrepreneurial success can mean different things to different people, but it always involves dealing with the challenges of building and growing a business.
What are those challenges? How do you leapfrog them?
Yuri Elkaim build a $217 million health coaching empire and in this episode he’ll share some key lessons he’s learned in his entrepreneurial journey and what strategies you can adopt to achieve your own entrepreneurial success.
What You’ll Discover About Entreprenurial Success:
* The biggest mistake smart people make when looking for entrepreneurial success
* Why low barriers to entry causes people to struggle in achieving entrepreneurial success
* How the right kind of debt can help you achieve entrepreneurial success sooner
* The mindsets needed for entrepreneurial success
* And MUCH more
Guest: Yuri Elkaim
Healthpreneur® CEO and NYT Best-Selling Author, Yuri Elkaim
Yuri Elkaim is a New York Times bestselling author, former professional athlete, business strategist, and the founder and CEO of Healthpreneur®.
His journey into health and business was inevitable. After dealing with a host of health issues as a teenager, he eventually lost all of his hair at 17 years old to an autoimmune condition. This, along with his passion for sports (which led him down the path of playing professional soccer in his early 20s), propelled him into the health and fitness field.
Yuri’s authentic and caring approach allowed him to build a successful online health empire that went to help more than 500,000 to better health, while providing him the platform to write 3 bestselling books and sharing his message on major media outlets like Dr. Oz and The Doctors. In 2018, he sold this health business after 13 years at the helm.
With Healthpreneur®, he and his world-class team of coaches help health professionals and coaches leverage the internet to turn their expertise into high 6- and 7-figure virtual practices that create transformative results for more people without the grind.
Healthpreneur®’s mission is to help health entrepreneurs make their dreams happen in the service of others and eventually leave a legacy where every man, woman, and child has the opportunity to become the best version of themselves so that they can wake up each day with purpose, contribute through meaningful work that feels like play, and live freely and abundantly.
Related Resources:
Mind Floss is available at fine book sellers everywhere
Contact Yuri and connect with him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.
Yuri’s latest book: Mind Floss
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How to Achieve Faster Entrepreneurial Success with Yuri Elkaim
Welcome to Business Confidential. Now the weekly podcast for smart executives, managers and entrepreneurs looking to improve their business performance. And bottom line. I’m your host, Hanna Hasl-Kelchner, and I’ve got a great guest for you today.
He’s Yuri Elkaim, a New York Times bestselling author, former professional athlete, business strategist and the founder and CEO of Healthpreneur, where he helps health entrepreneurs, coaches and practitioners start and scale online businesses that create more income and freedom, as well as better results for their clients.
Yes, Healthpreneur is that $217 million health coaching empire I mentioned at the top of the program, and I’m betting there are more than a few startups and business owners listening right now who’d love to achieve that level of success. So, let’s get started. Welcome to Business Confidential now, Yuri.
Thanks for having me, Hanna. Nice to be here.
It’s great to have you. I’ve read that you started your business with next to no following. Is that true?
Yeah. I mean, Healthpreneur was started in 2016, 2017, and I was actually transitioning from my previous business, which I was on the verge of selling in that period of time, which was online in the health and fitness space. But I was just kind of done speaking about health and nutrition and fitness for 13 plus years. So, when we started Healthpreneur, there was no Instagram, there is no YouTube, there is no podcast, there is no following, there is no email list.
There was nothing. I mean, I had a little bit of a reputation in a good way for my previous business, but for the most part I was starting the business from scratch. We grew that to a very substantial level very quickly based on a lot of the lessons I learned from many, many years of failures and obviously some wins along the way. Yeah, we started Healthpreneur with pretty much nothing other than an idea and skills, and that’s how it started.
That’s impressive. You mentioned that you built it by learning and actually building on your failures. Right now, people see this massive success and they think it happened overnight, which obviously isn’t true. Tell us about some of these lessons learned that you’ve built into this process.
Yeah, So I started online in 2005. I was working one on one as a trainer, nutritionist, burnt out for way too long, and I came online thinking I was just going to write an e-book and live the laptop lifestyle. That never happened. And I was kind of delusional thinking that it would, although I mean, it’s possible. But I struggled for three years all by myself because I was all by myself.
What I mean by that was I was too stubborn to recognize that I needed coaching and mentorship, and I thought I could figure things out all by myself, even though I’d never done the things I wanted to figure out. So, my first three years online, I made less than poverty line income. It was kind of like crawling through molasses. So that was one of the biggest lessons that took me a long time to learn.
I think I’m a very slow learner, to be honest with you, Hanna, because I’ve made mistakes where I had learned from other people’s lessons and journey, I could have moved a little bit quicker. So, 2010 hired my first coach and I haven’t looked back since. I mean, in the past 11 years I’ve invested more than $1.1 million in coaching and mentorships and masterminds because I just realized if I can surround myself with other people who’ve done what I want to do, I will get there faster and I don’t have all the answers.
So, I find that to be a very common mistake a lot of entrepreneurs make is that for whatever reason, we’ll drop six figures on a college education for a degree that basically renders us useless in the marketplace. And then when it comes to building a business, especially online, we feel that we can do things for free, like we can just somehow magically build this great business without investing in proper coaching mentorship skills.
And I think it’s one of the biggest reasons why most and when I say most, I mean like legitimately most 90 plus percent of people who start a business online don’t succeed is because the barrier to entry is so low. And that means anyone can call themselves a coach, anyone can have an online business. And that’s a problem very much like in real estate, I think it’s 95% of realtors make less than 5000 hours per year as realtors.
And that’s because the barrier to entry is so low and it means that you have a very large percentage of people who are just very average at building a business and they struggle unnecessarily. So, I think that’s one of the biggest problems I see. If you can avoid them as they move a lot faster, it’s a lot less frustration.
It makes a lot of sense learning from other people’s mistakes, which is actually one reason I do this program, because there are people such as yourself that are accomplished, that have learned lessons along the way. And if we can share those, it helps the collective group, because I am a firm believer that it’s the small and mid-sized businesses that are really the backbone of the economy.
The big boys, they get all the glory and the headlines, but the biggest employers are the smaller and mid-sized companies. So, thank you for sharing that about coaching. You make an interesting point about the proper coaching. Coaching has a low barrier to entry as well. So, there are a lot of people that can call themselves coaches. In your experience. What criteria did you use to identify the proper coach? What should people be looking for?
Well, in my experience, two things that I had found to be very helpful were, number one, has this person achieved what I want to achieve? Second is have they helped other people like me or somewhat like me? I see similar results. And I guess the third piece is do their values resonate with mine? So as an example, I don’t really associate with let’s go to Vegas and get bottle service and VIP and have the bling bling and fly in private jets.
But that’s not my vibe. That’s not what I feel is what I want to align with. Whereas many of the coaches that I have hired are very down to earth, although they’re very wealthy and they’ve done very well, they’re very down to earth, they’re family people, they’re very relational as opposed to materialistic. And not that there’s anything wrong with material stuff. I mean, I’ve got a family, I’ve got four boys. I live a pretty simple life. I have some nice things. But for the most part, I want to align with people who share those values and obviously share the values of, yeah, we want to make a lot of money.
But we also were here as business owners, as entrepreneurs, not because of the money, it’s because we truly enjoy the craft of what it is we do and we feel fulfilled by the impact we make in the world and by being able to share our gifts. And I want to align with people like that. So, for me it’s like, do you have a track record of results? Have you helped other people do the same and do we share the same values? And I think those are three really good criteria, at least for me, in helping me find the right mentors to learn from.
I think those are great criteria, especially aligning with the values because you want to be able to talk to somebody that you can basically do an open kimono and share the things that you’re afraid of. There’s quite a bit of trust that’s involved. It might mean sharing financial information, which is very personal to a lot of people. They don’t necessarily go flaunting their balance sheet or the zeros that may be on the balance sheet. It’s embarrassing.
So, you want to be able to have someone that you can trust, that you can feel is on your side that understands what you’re going through. Now, at one point off the hot mic, you said that there are four unpopular mindsets needed for entrepreneurial success, and I’m not sure whether finding the right coach is one of them, but there’s some more there. So, help us out here. What are these mindsets? How are they hurting us? Why do we need to get over it?
Yeah, so the first one and this could tie into the coaching piece, but maybe indirectly is it’s okay to use debt if you’re investing in skills. And I see this because a lot of people need coaching and skills before they have the money to pay for the things that they want. So, they’re like if you’re in the fitness space, like I was, you have a client consult and the person’s like, what? I’m going to get in shape first and then I’m going to come hire you.
I’m like, okay, that’s never going to happen. That’s why you’re here in the first place. And I see that a lot now with business owners. Whatever level of business they’re at, the goal is coaching and mentorship and skill development. So, you’re always going to be investing in new skills or new things that you don’t currently know, which means they’re outside of your current pay grade. And so, for instance, if you’re just starting off, you have to learn the skills of marketing and sales, like you have to invest in learning those skills.
There’s no way around it. And if you’re not willing to invest in those skills, you will always be stuck at a very low level. Okay, So if you don’t have the money to invest in those skills, then take out a credit card and invest in those skills. Because if you invest $500.00, $1000.00, $5 to $10000.00, those skills will be with you forever. So, if someone were to invest $100,000.00 in traditional education and they get into the workforce, a lot of times we’re not really equipped with skills that are going to give us a livable salary to even pay back a lot of the student loans that come from that.
But if you could invest a fraction of that in learning the skill, for instance, of how to acquire clients with sales marketing as an example. Do you write yourself a lottery ticket for the rest of your life? That’s a skill that will serve you. If you talk to any successful entrepreneur, they will tell you one of the most important things to be able to learn is learn how to sell. Learn how to move people to action, influence, persuade.
So, I think this mindset of I need a briefcase of cash in order to move forward is very faulty thinking. And I think if you believe in yourself, you should be okay taking on debt as an entrepreneur because you’re not buying a pair of shoes, you’re investing in yourself, you’re investing in your business and it is way more valuable than investing in the stock market or mutual funds. They mean the return, if you’re lucky, is 10%.
You invest in yourself and build these skills; the return is 1,000,000% or who knows what it is. But I think that’s one of the biggest mindsets is moving forward before you’re ready is in some cases, if you don’t have the cash on hand, you have to develop the skills to build the capacity to earn the money.
So, I would say that’s one of the biggest mindsets that I see and have seen holding people back. Another big one I see kind of tied in with that as well. We talked about the coaching, so if you want faster results, just hire someone who’s been there before. It’s going to move you 5 to 10 times faster than you would ever achieve on your own. So again, the fallacy there is thinking you can do things on your own and figuring things out along the way. It just very rarely happens.
I mean, I don’t know any professional athletes who got to the top by themselves. I don’t know any health professionals, at least that I’ve worked with who became chiropractors, naturopaths, etc. by watching YouTube videos for free on YouTube. They went to school, they hired, they had mentors, etc. So, if you want to get where you want to go, work with people who’ve been there who can teach you and show you the ropes.
I think the third kind of along those lines is, again, as we evolve in business, is the bigger the dream, better the team or not necessarily the bigger, but the better. You can only go so far by yourself. So, let’s say you’re growing your business, and I’d say at about a quarter of $1,000,000.00 revenue and again, this depends on the business model. You alone can no longer really push that forward. At some level. You need an executive assistant; you need someone to help eventually in project management or operations.
You’re going to want to bring on people to support on the customer or client service side. And then on the enrollment or sales side and the marketing side eventually. So, if you have big goals in your business, it’s okay to recognize that like at some point you need help. Like you need other people on the boat to row with you.
And I think that one of the things that I’ve noticed is in some cases I’ll just use coaching and consulting as an example, because that’s kind of the world that I live in. A lot of them build these very profitable businesses like they’re like 85 to 90% profit and they’re doing half a million dollars a year and that’s great, but they’re doing everything themselves. So, there’s a mindset shift that happens where it’s like, Dude, you got to trade some of your profit for freedom because you could be 90% profit for the rest of your life, but you won’t be living very long because you’re working 20 hours a day.
So, getting to a point where it’s okay to trade some of the profit for building a great team around you who are going to help buy back your time. Because I think as entrepreneurs, not only do we want to contribute, not only do we want to grow, but I think most of us got into business because we value, first and foremost, our freedom. And if freedom is not, I don’t want to ever work again necessarily.
It’s being able to do what it is you want when you want, having the freedom of choice. And that’s very hard to do if you’re the sole operator of your business. So that third mindset of being okay, not just looking for help outside in terms of a mentor but bringing people into your team to help you move forward faster. And let’s say the fourth mindset is again, tying this back into investing yourself in your business.
I fundamentally believe that if you’re running a business, you should learn how to acquire clients at scale through paid traffic. And what I mean by that is be willing to spend or invest in your business or invest to acquire clients. A lot of people that we work with come to us. That’s 95% of the time they’re coming in and we help them with acquisition and on delivery. And the biggest reason they come to us is because they don’t have a predictable way of getting clients.
And the most common thing they rely on is word of mouth or referrals or posting dancing videos on TikTok or posting videos on Instagram. And that’s not really a business. Like, it’s okay if you enjoy doing that stuff. But I feel that if you can, again, going back to skill acquisition, if you can learn which all of this is learnable, if you can learn how to pay a dollar and acquire a client that gives you five in return, why would you not do that forever?
And that’s basically going back to your initial question, when we built Healthpreneur with zero following, that’s how we did it is I had the skill set from my previous business and having done this for years of knowing how to go out and give Facebook in this case a dollar and in return I’d get five, seven, eight or nine or 10 of return in the form of client payments.
And that’s a skill that we help our clients with every single day now. And it’s a skill that is very learnable. It’s not as complicated as it might seem to be, and people see that as risky. So, they don’t want to invest in client acquisition in the form of advertising, for instance, because they feel that they might waste their money. But the biggest thing to recognize is that successful people understand that money is cheap and time is expensive.
So, what you could accomplish with acquiring clients, with paid traffic, you could accomplish that in a fraction of the time it would take you to grow your business organically. And I’m all for content marketing. I’m all for organic growth. That’s how I built my first business to multiple seven figures.
But it took us seven years to crack $1,000,000.00. It took us less than seven months to do that when we started Healthpreneur. And when we look at the goal of the business, I mean, when it comes to at least getting our message out is the social platforms of today are all pay to play platforms and.
Platform that is maybe giving organic traction is TikTok, which is very quickly changing. And obviously LinkedIn, which probably has a decent organic opportunity right now, but Facebook, Instagram, everything else is pay to play. So, if you post something online, no one sees it, that’s just the way it is. Obscurity will kill our business. So how do we get out of obscurity?
How do we be seen by more people is we have to make a barter with these platforms to say, Hey, Facebook, I’ll give you 20 bucks and you’ll show my thing to more people, or I’ll give you $100.00 or $1,000.00 and I’ll show my stuff to more people. And that’s the game we all have to learn how to play if we want to be seen and if we want to grow at a rate that is relatively quicker than taking years and years of grind and sweat equity.
So, I think again, the mindset of I’m just going to do this for free, I’m going to use my time and sweat equity to build this thing, You’re going to be at it for five, seven, 10 years versus how do I invest in a skill that I can turn around and use this to acquire clients and grow my business in a couple of months in a fraction of the time that would take me otherwise.
And again, I think it comes down to the fear of what if this doesn’t work? The fear of what if I go into debt? What if I can’t pay off these credit card bills from ad spend or whatever else it might be? And I think if we can look at that as what is the worst case scenario, because when I started my business in 2005, I started with nothing.
And when I hired my first coach, I was in a worse position. I was $55,000.00 in debt from some dumb decisions I made to do trade shows of all things back in the day. And then I invested more money to hire my coach than I had made in my previous year in business. But the difference was that I believed in myself. I believed that I would make it work. And I think when we take that same mentality of, I spent a couple thousand dollars in ads, it doesn’t quite work here right away.
What’s the word? Am I going to live on the street? Probably not. I’ll figure out a way to make this happen versus do I really want to spend the next five years trying to build my following and play this hole like post a million times a day game?
So I think this whole mindset of hopefully I mean, this whole conversation really comes down to having the wherewithal or at least the resourcefulness, to be willing to invest in yourself, whether that’s your team, whether it’s mentorship, whether it’s skills, whether it’s learning a strategy to acquire clients using paid traffic. I think those are four simple mindset shifts that can really help us grow and grow our business much more exponentially.
Well said, Yuri. I really like those points that it all comes down to a certain level of fear. And even if somebody doesn’t do all four of these things at once, just starting somewhere, having some success, like with the paid traffic or a coach that can really help them say, all right, this is the sequence, this is the order in which you need to do things.
Helping them prioritize as to what is the most important thing given where they are at that moment in their business can be immensely helpful because we all have things that we like to do and things we put off and probably some of the stuff we put off is really the got to do instead of the nice to do but there are some folks that say, well, it’s all about the hustle. You’ve got to have the hustle, Hanna. So, what do you say to those people?
I think, listen, I mean, there’s a time to put in the work, but you can’t hustle forever. And I think that what a lot of people don’t realize is that they have a job or they’ve bought themselves a job. So a job is trading time for money, self-employed is buying a franchise or a business in which you still trade time for money. This is a very common thing in the health professional world where if you’re a chiropractor and you buy a clinic and you have to be in a clinic, you bought yourself a job. It’s the same as the guy who buys the ice cream franchise, who’s the same guy who’s serving the ice cream.
That’s hustle. It’s okay to hustle, but hustle and build on doing the right things. If you’re going to hustle, look at how do you build systems and how to use leverage. So if you’re going to hustle, it’s going to be for a short amount of time relative to the life in your life. Look at like, okay, I’m going to hustle for the next couple of days or a couple of weeks. How can I build systems and assets that can work independently of my effort so that if I’m not present, I can still grow the business?
If I’m not present, I can still make money. If I’m not present, my clients still get results. I think it’s a much, much better use of our time if we’re hustling on building stuff like that, as opposed to hustling those things that disappear after 24 hours, or if we’re simply trading time for money or clients or customers or whatever it is. So hustle is fine. I think there’s a time and place for it, for sure, but it definitely can’t be forever because if it is, you’ll burn out 100%.
You’ll definitely burn out. But if you focus that effort in the right places, you’re actually building value. And the more that something can run without you, the more you also have something to sell in the future. So, all really great, great things to keep in mind.
Thank you, Yuri. This has really been an enlightening conversation about how to achieve more entrepreneurial success. I appreciate you and the important work you do in helping people improve their health and for sharing your story and the business lessons learned on your own business journey. I think that’s been really, really, really valuable.
So, if you’re listening and you’d like to know more about Yuri Elkaim, his book A MindFloss. We didn’t even get to that. And his Healthpreneur organization. That information, as well as a transcript of this interview, can be found in the show notes at BusinessConfidentialRadio.com.
Thanks so much for listening. Please be sure to tell your friends about the show and leave a positive review. We’ll be back next Thursday with another episode of Business Confidential. Now, so until then, have a great day and an even better tomorrow.
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