Ergonomics + Business: Who Really Pays You (and Why It Matters)

Find out one of the most important yet overlooked steps in growing an ergonomics consulting business: identifying your ideal client avatar. Spoiler alert—it’s not the worker in pain. It’s the HR decision-maker who signs the contract and opens the door to dozens of assessments.

Learn why focusing on B2B instead of B2C creates leverage, how to uncover your client’s true needs and objections, and why a clear marketing message makes or breaks your business. You’ll also learn why setting 90-day goals is more effective than year-long plans, and how daily action compounds into big results.

Whether you’re just starting out or ready to scale your ergonomics services, this episode will help you shift your mindset, clarify your marketing, and get closer to becoming the go-to ergonomics consultant in your city.

Are you a healthcare professional curious about how office ergonomics assessments could fit into your services? I’ve got you covered with some valuable (and free!) resources at www.ergonomicshelp.com/free-training.

Transcript

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hey there. Today in the show we are talking about ideal client avatars. We're talking marketing 1 0 1. Welcome to the Business of Ergonomics podcast. I'm your host, Darcy Jeremy. I'm a board certified professional agonist with over 15 years of experience delivering ergonomics programs to employers of all different types. In this podcast, I share what other healthcare professionals are already doing and being with ergonomics assessments and how to land those clients that you dream of. Without further ado, let's jump into this episode right now. I know it's an ergonomics podcast, but at the core of it, it's the business of ergonomics if you love ergonomics like you probably do without customers, you don't get to do ergonomics assessments. And how do you get customers marketing right? If no one knows that you exist? How are you supposed to be the go-to ergonomics consultant in your city? This episode is gonna be good if you are just considering getting into ergonomics in general via office ergonomics assessments, or you are already offering your own ergonomics services. And you are striving to get more clients, do more ergonomics assessments, become known in your city for ergonomics, have that awesome reputation and make bank. Then you gotta listen to this too, because I wanna be giving you some cornerstones to marketing things you gotta be doing on a daily basis if you are looking to grow your ergonomics business. Because this stuff, it takes time. It's not gonna happen overnight, So let's get started with our sponsor. Our sponsor today is the Ergonomics Blueprint. Hey, do you wanna learn how to do ergonomics assessments in the office? have you been thinking about starting your own side hustle forever? Hey, are you feeling burned out with being a healthcare professional? Look no further than the ergonomics blueprint. This is your go-to system from A to Z to show you exactly how to do ergonomics assessments in the office with me. A certified professional ergonomists with 20 years of experience. Not only that, you get the tools, reports. How to do this in person and online, and get a slide deck so you can start doing training presentations immediately. You get all that and monthly coaching calls with a group of people who are on fire with ergonomics. So I want you to go to ergonomics help.com/office. That's ergonomics help.com/office, and I have a free training for you to watch this will give you a really good start to getting started with ergonomics and build your expertise because if you've been thinking about this well, there is no better time to start. So go to ergonomics help.com/office because there's no better way to start and there's no better person to show you how to get the results that you're after than yours, truly than me. I have been around the ergonomics industry, for two decades now. And I am here to share some hard earned truths about the ergonomics industry and how you actually get paying customers. Yeah, that's right. I just jumped off a call with members of the ergonomics blueprint, and when you join, you're gonna get access to monthly coaching calls with me forever. So if you're stuck on a case, if you need extra help. Then this is gonna be your jam and I'm gonna be your girl to help you get to where you need to be. If you're new to this podcast, you might be wondering what qualifies me to be teaching you this stuff? You hold onto your seat.'cause I'm gonna tell you what sets me apart from anything else in this industry. So I'm gonna tell you why I'm bringing the goods when it comes to ergonomics. one of the highlights in my career is that from working with Fortune 500 clients, billable, scalable, ergonomic systems from the complete other side of the spectrum when it comes to ergonomics, working for a workers' compensation board, non-billable, and setting up participatory ergonomics processes and programs. For companies, I have seen the gamut of ergonomics and what it takes to be successful in the field. I've managed in-house compensable injuries. I've managed an in-house ergonomics program. So I can share the lingo when it comes to the ergonomics world, what works, what doesn't work, and all the ins and outs of what ergonomics is in this day, 20, 25. So let's talk about Marketing 1 0 1. And one of the biggest things that I think ergonomics professionals can do is figure out who your ideal client is. For years, I've been teaching the Accelerate Program where I help ergonomics consultants get to the next level in their businesses, and I have straight up point blank asked consultants, do you know who your ideal client is? They might say, duh, darcy. I'm not a flippant idiot. I know who my ideal client is, and then they go on to tell me the complete, wrong, ideal client. I am not saying this to be in big meaning I'm saying this, that if one person can make this mistake, then many ergonomics consultants can make this mistake, and I'm saying this outta love because I wanna see you succeed. So this person went on to say, my ideal client that I wanna work with are those people who are in pain in the office. No, it's not. if you wanna work B2B, which I am a huge fan of, and if you're listening to this podcast, you see the benefits of too. Your ideal client is the person who is making decisions in that company, and that's probably somebody in human Resources. It's not the person who's in pain, it's the person in human resources that pays for you to come in and signs the contract. let's dive in why you wanna work B2B. Why do you wanna work B2B direct to the business and not B2C? First of all. Things take time, things take resources. If you think of a leveraged approach, if you talk to someone in hr, that's a person, they have their needs, wants and desires, fears, they might not think ergonomics is gonna work for their business, that's one conversation. Let's look at the flip side. You wanna work B2C. That's direct to consumer. You're working with that injured worker, they also have their needs, wants and desires. They may think that you're charging way too much for an office ergonomics assessment. Okay? So at the end of the sales cycle, you might find that, hey, I had all these conversations with B2B and B2C direct to consumer, and I managed objections and I shared the benefits of my program, and I shared testimonials of people that I have worked with before and I got the conversation moving forward and I finally got them into the calendar and I got their information for this to move forward. Guess what? When you worked B2B, so your business to business, working with hr, that one conversation, that sales conversation led to 40 office ergonomics assessments. That one sales conversation, the highs and lows and everything involved for that consumer led to one office ergonomics assessment. So I'm not saying that you gotta say no to the consumer. What I'm saying in this process is that you have to market, spend your time marketing to those people that you really wanna work with. And if you're coming into office ergonomics assessments or ergonomics services in general, you're probably coming here for a reason. You're probably coming here because you're a bit burned out. You maybe a little bit exhausted with the way that you're working right now, and you want a way that you can make some money that's enjoyable doing something that challenges you, and that's really fun. So without being too much of a broken record, I think you should probably consider doing B2B business is putting it down right now. So in terms of. Check marks to marketing 1 0 1 is figuring out who your ideal client is. And if I haven't convinced you already that it's probably gonna be B2B, then I hope I did that. But if you're still on the fence, like you wanna work with that injured worker, that entrepreneur, then go for it. So I get the question too. If you're working B2B, does that mean you're gonna say no to people that may find your website and wanna work with you? Absolutely not. We're not saying no to any business. I will take anyone's money and I will helpfully give them the best office ergonomics, assessment, service, whatever they need that money can buy. However. My point is when we're developing marketing content and when we're looking at people to talk to and we're going through sales cycle, we wanna be focused on those folks that we can have leveraged conversations with. If I lived in a world where I had a gazillion hours in a day that I could help everybody. With ergonomics assessments, I would help everybody, but guess what? I don't. and when you're looking at building your business, the best way is to look at these little small windows of time, and I like to call these like 90 day goals. And we're not looking at a full year, we're looking at 90 days. Because if you have a goal to reach in 90 days. you can get significant results if you choose to work towards that goal instead of a random goal at the end of the year. and you can figure out who you wanna work with and how to actually get there. if you're spending your time developing content for B2B and B2C, then. You're not gonna get anywhere in three months. The reason why we wanna choose an ideal client avatar is that we have to nail down our message. And our message is based off four aspects of who your ideal client avatar is. And this is just like a fancy term for some fictional person that doesn't exist, but is like a composition of random people that you've worked with. And all your diligent sleuthing abilities. We're getting real With marketing 1 0 1, I want you to dig deep, dig down and get dirty with the needs, wants, desires, fears of your ideal client avatar. So you know how I said that you might have been burned out and you're looking for another way that's fun to make income. That's because I did a little bit of research about you. Not you specifically. But the avatar of who you might be, who would want to listen to a podcast like this? I did a little research, I jumped on some Facebook forums. I jumped on some other aspects where I thought that you might be hanging out. And you know what I did? I got my copy and paste mouse out and I copied on, I pasted phrases and things that you've said about why you might look towards ergonomics assessments. And I want you to do exactly the same. So if you are looking to B2B, you want that decision maker, that person to be totally attracted to the types of content that you put out. And that could be not only marketing content, but how you contact them in the first place. And the messaging on your brochures and what you have on your business card and what you have on your website and what you have on your LinkedIn page, what you have on your Facebook page, and the types of content you put out in general, maybe in your email or a social media post, or however you want to run your business. I do not care. I want you to succeed, but the point of you putting out content and connecting. has to fall with what your strength is and what your confidence is as an individual. Alright, so what might work for Stacey in Cincinnati may not work for John in Timbuk two. we're gonna go with that and John and Timbuk too. it depends on your expertise, what your decision maker is interested in, because your decision maker is literally being inundated with a massive amount of information right now, and you have to put out content or make connections in a way that they would. Notice that grabs their attention and gets you to click through. So getting crystal clear on the needs, wants and desires of your ideal client is marketing one-on-one, and that establishes the entire system. This isn't gonna take an overnight or a weak thing, getting real about who you serve and why you serve. If you wanna grow your business, this is gonna be like a daily thing. I've seen it before in other business workshops that you gotta spend at least 15 minutes a day drumming up business. It could be a combination of calling context, checking in with people, going to networking events, or putting up, really good post that's really useful for your ideal client avatar and not quitting being gritty with it. so I want you to start building like a portfolio or a Word document about the needs, wants and desires, their struggles, their concerns with office ergonomics assessments, and why haven't they, as a company moved forward with this. You might even wanna reach out to those decision makers in a business, those HR people, if those are who your decision makers are, and just interviewing them and seeing what their concerns are with office ergonomics assessments and why haven't they moved forward with it. And just put it into a little word document, because guess what? This is gonna be really useful not only for marketing, but for managing objections. In the sales cycle, you might be asking yourself, what is a objection and why do I have to manage it? An objection is counter to someone wanting to work with you, and it could be that they need more information or they just need to know why what you're doing is so unique. You have to identify what they're objecting about. Then. Answer that question even better if you're not in a sales cycle, is having those questions answered in a marketing or a brochure or something like that. That's magic if you're listening to this podcast right now, then I know that marketing is not your forte, and business isn't your forte, and I feel that because. I also jumped into this from having a love in ergonomics, but then realizing I had to get customers so I could do more ergonomics assessments. What I'm sharing here, it doesn't need to be perfect. You don't need to know all the steps before you get started. You just need to get started and you don't need a business degree or anything fancy like that. In fact, you could probably put the pieces together. By researching via YouTube or chat GPT or any of that stuff. if you're looking for someone to help you get through the process, then I wanna encourage you to do the ergonomics blueprint. Literally, there is no better time to do that. And if you want results, how to get started, how to get paid, then I want you to go to ergonomics help.com/office and seriously y'all when it comes to this stuff. It does take time for you to start to see results. So you have to persevere through this stuff, and you have to make a commitment to see it through for at least a 90 day cycle of consistently taking action, consistently networking, consistently posting. Consistently calling businesses up to see if you can get your foot in the door anywhere because many people wanna get paid doing ergonomics assessments, but there is a big divide between those who wanna get paid doing ergonomics assessments and those who are actually doing it, right? So I wanna encourage you to take the steps forward. Whatever that step could be for you. It could be five minutes a day. I wanna encourage you to do that. In the next episode, I'm gonna be talking about different ways that you can get started offering office ergonomics assessments to businesses, in ways that are really counterintuitive. And by counterintuitive, super awesome, and it's like ninja hacks that you gotta do. But like I said in this episode, step one is knowing who your ideal client avatar is. Boom goes the dynamite. See you in the ergonomics blueprint. So if you like what you heard in this podcast episode and you wanna learn more, you wanna learn how other healthcare professionals are already adding office ergonomic expertise to their services and practice. I have a training for you. Just go to ergonomics help.com/office now.