EP 91: Why Signing Clients Feels Harder Than Ever (And What To Actually Do About It)

If you're a health and fitness coach and things have felt harder lately, this episode is for you.

Dr. Kasey Jo is bringing 3 business mindset reframes straight from her most recent Growth Collective retreat, where she sat down with a room full of health and fitness business owners and actually diagnosed what's going on. She covers:

• The real reasons coaches are struggling to sign clients right now and what to do about each one
• How to tell the difference between your business actually struggling versus just perceiving it that way
• Why so many coaches avoid setting real annual goals and how fear is quietly running your business planning without you even realizing it

Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/lXd_PYrGQpI

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rather than just saying, well, things are hard right now and we just have to work harder, I don't think that's the answer. So instead. We get clinical, we say what are the actual issues at hand, and then what are we gonna do about it? Hello my friends, and welcome back to not another Mindset show. I'm your host, Dr. Casey Joe. My goal with this podcast is to take the science of mindset and behavior change and distill it down into actionable takeaways for you. Together we're gonna unpack research around motivations, self-sabotage, willpower, and so much more, and we're going to take all of that and translate it into strategies you can immediately apply to your health. Fitness, relationships, business, marketing clients, all of the things. But just to be clear, it's not all serious and sciencey around here. We're gonna have a ton of fun too, and I'm so excited to share all of this with you. All right, let's go ahead and get into the episode. My My friends, welcome back to not another mindset show. I've got like a business chitchat episode for you today, and this seems to be the pattern that every time we have a Growth Collective retreat. I immediately am like I have things that I need to bring to the podcast to talk to everybody about. For those of you who don't know what the Growth Collective is, you're like, what are you talking about? Retreats? What is this? The Growth Collective is essentially my mini mastermind business mentorship offer that I have in my business. So we've been running the Growth Collective for. Almost five years. Whoa. That's crazy. I feel like, I feel like I keep running into stuff like this where we just launched our 12th round of the health mindset coaching certification. You mean to tell me I've been running this program for six years. Like where, what, how. Crazy. Anyway, same thing goes for this, and this is the only way, the only opportunity to work with me one-on-one in any capacity in my business, and it is business mentorship. Of course. We talk about mindset a lot in the growth collective because I say this all the time, business is the biggest and best if you make it that way, mindset, exercise. That exists being a business owner, the way the number of. Situations in my head just like flashed through. But that said, we run retreats two times per year for the folks who are in the Growth Collective. So is a very small group of individuals. They're all in the health and fitness space trying to grow their health and fitness coaching businesses and I support them. And with these retreats, we have them two times per year, mid-year, end of year. And at the time that I'm recording this podcast, we just recently wrapped up our December retreat. I'm recording in January right now, and like I said, I always just leave with things that I want to talk about more. Things that I think are important because I'm sitting in this room with, we had. Six business owners and we workshopped all about what happened in 2025, what's gonna happen in 2026. And with that came a lot of really insightful conversations and breakthroughs and planning and lots of important stuff that I want to bring a few of those things to you today. So the first thing that I have here. I think this one is going to feel like it resonates for a lot of you. Those of you who are in the health and fitness coaching space, that it's felt hard out there. It's harder to sign clients, get people interested in your program than it ever has been before. And this is not me just. Trying to say, well, it's kind of sucky out there. Suck it up type of situation. Because I'll get into what we talked about at the retreat, but it is one of those things where if this is something that you're experiencing, where getting client applications, signing clients in the last couple of years has felt a lot harder, that maybe you're even having to put in twice the amount of effort. Try twice the amount of new things in order to get the minimum result that you used to be able to get with half the effort and half of the trying of new things that you're not alone in that experience. And it's something that has come up. With the members in the Growth collective, a handful of times just things don't work as well as they used to, and to which I say, okay, then we pivot. Right? but rather than just saying, well, things are hard right now and we just have to work harder, I don't think that's the answer. So instead. During the retreat, we spent probably an hour and a half to two hours mapping out what is actually making things harder. So rather than things are just so hard and it feeling so heavy, and why aren't things working the way that they used to? And fixed mindset, drama and imposter syndrome, drama, and all of that instead. We get clinical, we say what are the actual issues at hand, and then what are we gonna do about it? And I'm bringing this one up specifically. One, because I think a lot of people are going through this right now who are health and fitness business owners, two. Because there needs to be a reframe to this that rather than, I'm just gonna succumb to the sukuk, that there's actually maybe some things that I can do about this, and if I can get myself out of the funk of things, suck and into the spirit of this. A welcome challenge and if I can hang on and figure this out, then I'm gonna be the one who's here at the end of the day, whereas so many other coaches and business owners will not be. That's where we wanna get. So that was kind of the purpose of this exercise and to actually diagnose the problem at hand and recognize that, wow. There's actually a lot of things that we can do about this. It doesn't just have to suck. So I actually pulled this from my notes during the retreat, so you may or may not resonate with the specific things that the business owners that I support in the mentorship have to say. You may have some things to add to this list, but I'm gonna go ahead and assume that. You probably feel similarly since I'm taking this from a group of coaches in the moment. So I asked, okay guys, if we're gonna talk about how things have been harder. Let's not just complain about things being hard, let's figure out what's actually making them hard and then see what we can do about it. And I ask them, what are those things? What's making it harder? And here's the list that I got from them. Trends are changing away from macros being cool. So for those of you who have maybe been in the health and fitness coaching space for, I don't know, at least a few years, three to five, we'll call it. The, if it fits your macros timeline, I mean that was even before then. Like we're talking 20 15, 16, 17, 18, 19. Area, that kind of timeframe where tracking macros was cool and people were talking about it all the time and being macro coaches was the way to go about it, but now there's a shift in a lot of what people are looking for and what they think they want. A lot of people don't wanna touch a macro ever, like, don't make me take out a food scale. I don't want a macro coach, like I wanna learn intuitive eating. You know, there's, there's so much stuff and I think there's also like direct bashing of tracking macros and the detriments that can come with it as well. So that was cited as reason number one is just trends changing and so needing to pivot from there to which then we workshopped and talked about. Okay, so then what do we do when trends are changing like this? And of the obvious answer here right, is. Then we shift with the trends. And here's the thing too. All of the coaches who are in the Growth Collective, I think all of them, maybe a couple. We're not, have gone through the health mindset coaching certification, or are at the very least educated in some way on behavior change and mindset. I mean, that's how people find me in the first place, right? So all of these coaches already have a. This kind of baseline understanding of behavior change coaching and what it means to be a coach beyond just like assigning macros. I mean, I talk about this all the time. I had a whole episode on the difference between being a traditional macro coach and a behavior change coach. so you can definitely tune into that if that's a conversation you would like to have with me. so. Here's the thing though, the way that the trends are changing to me just means that's how your messaging needs to be changed. So if people aren't rah rah macro counting anymore, what are they looking for? Coaches will always be necessary. It's just a matter of changing your messaging and how you're positioning your offer. That doesn't mean you have to stop macro coaching. It might mean that you need some more skills beyond macro coaching, but like that's what we talk on this podcast all the time. So if a trend is changing, welcome to being a business owner. You have to follow the trends. And I'm not saying, please don't take this in a way where I'm saying like just go say the things that people want to hear. That's not. what I'm trying to get at, but instead, listen. Listen to your ideal clients, your prospective clients. What are they saying? What are the last three people who signed up to work with you? What kind of coaching were they looking for? How do they feel about macro coaching? And all this to say, obviously some people still want macro coaching that's not dead right. but you just may need to change the way that you talk about coaching and it may not be as simple as. I'm going to set your macros. the next one was market saturation. Just that there's so many more health and fitness coaches online than there ever was before, which is true, and it's going to continue to grow. So the solution for this that we talked about stand out, be different. Don't regurgitate what every other health and fitness coach is doing because ultimately. If you are a carbon copy of other coaches, basically the only thing that you can do to actually. Sign more clients is to decrease your prices, which is not the game that we're trying to play here. So how can you stand out? What can you do different from your branding again, to your messaging, to showing who you are? Because who you are is different than who everybody else is. And are you leaning into that? What can you do that's different from a coaching perspective? I mean, I talk about this all the time with the Health Mindset Coaching certification. There's a lot of coaches out there who claim that they're mindset coaches, but are they actually, and Health Mindset certified students get to say, Hey, other coaches are gonna tell you that they can coach you on your mindset. The thing is, they probably don't have any education and training, and I've gone through extensive training on behavior change. I'm gonna help you actually stick to it. Follow the plan. And I'm doing so with science back strategy, so you know it works. Do you like that sales pitch? That was pretty good. Right? So stand out. That's the solution, rather than complaining that there's so many more coaches. How can you be different than those other coaches? And honestly, truthfully, those of you who have been in this space for years. Yeah, there's a ton of new coaches. Offering their services in the last two to three years. But if you've been doing this for longer than them, then you already have a leg up. You've been here longer, you have more experience, use it. next reason why things are hard, bad coaches turning off perspective clients. So we've all had that right. had that right. Where you're on a sales call with someone, they seem really excited, but they're so hesitant because their last coach sucked. Yeah, that sucks because all these quote unquote bad coaches are making the good coaches lives a lot harder. And to this we talked about is calling it out. Talk about that. Talk about the fact that there's more health and fitness coaches available than ever before. Teach your audience how to use a critical eye when they are interested in hiring someone to be a conscious consumer and not just believe everything that you see or blindly trust anyone. Teach them how to discern a reliable source, a reliable coach from someone who's not as reliable. And in doing so, assuming you are a good and reliable coach, in doing so, you are. Promoting yourself kind of in between the lines. So that was something that we talked about there. I will say again, we talked about this stuff for an hour and a half to two hours and workshopped everything. So I'm really just truncating it and it's a long list and I have more to say after this. So I'm moving relatively quickly and I say this just because I'm giving one perspective, one example, but there's so many different routes you could take with this. So many different ways that you can tackle these things that are making. Everything hard right now, you know? okay. The next thing, reasons why things are hard, alternative options. GLP ones, apps chat, GPT. Yeah, things are feeling easier for clients. The key word being feeling easier and therefore why would they spend. Three to $400 a month on a coach if they can spend that on weight loss medication or just get a plan from chat GPT. Again, this is your opportunity to call those things out. great content idea for all of you. Watch now. I see this all over the place. Go into chat, g, PT, and feed it some information about a client and have it write a workout and nutrition plan and see what it comes up with. There will be plenty of holes and things that chat PT is going to miss. Make a little carousel on your Instagram. Showcase. Here's what chat GPT said, here's what's, this is good. This is fine. Yeah, I actually like this part, but all of this terrible, here's why. And start to get people to recognize and be aware of the fact that maybe AI doesn't have all the answers and there's actually some benefit to working with a real human. And again, not to just keep plugging the health mindset coaching certification, but chat GPT will never be a health mindset certified coach, and I can tell you that because. Have been working on building bots myself from a health mindset, coaching certified perspective and behavior change coaching perspective. And it's not easy because it tries to pull stuff all the time. That doesn't make any sense or have any scientific backing. So that said too, like we can get into the whole realm. I did a whole episode on AI and chat bt, so I don't need to get into it here, but there is a lot to be said for like the human component of. That. So talk about it for GLP ones. Listen, I think I saw a statistic. There was like 65% of people who get on one of these medications are off of it within a year. What happens after that? You still need to know how to change your behaviors, set up your lifestyle, and maintain any of the weight loss that you gained, weight loss that you gained, the weight loss that you achieved is probably the better word to use there. Okay. Okay. Tight funds and seeing coaching as not necessary. Absolutely. We're in a very interesting time in America right now. The way that I could just totally hard left turn and get crazy with that statement, but we're staying on track here. Casey, you have an outline for a reason. and there's a lot of uncertainty. There's a lot of economic uncertainty. People are scared, people are less willing to invest, and that is going to impact businesses everywhere. It's not just health and fitness coaching, but when it comes to things that aren't a necessity. Like health and fitness coaching, like continuing education. Hi, I'm affected too. Then people are thinking twice before investing 'cause they're not really sure what's gonna happen and like this is affecting your clients. This is part of the reason, likely why we're seeing a shift in the ability and ease to sign clients at the rate that maybe we used to. So That's what's making it hard. What do we need to do? Maybe we need to talk about how coaching is more of a necessity than people realize that your health is a necessity. Something you need to take care of, something you need to put first. I don't wanna tell you to just like slash your prices because people are scared to spend money.'cause there's always people, there's always people who have money. And want to spend that money. Okay. Keep that in mind, but also, maybe this is an opportunity to create slightly altered package options for people who are in a really tight spot or a really fearful spot to get them started. I'm, I'm not fully advocating for this, but I'm not saying it's out of the realm of possibility to do something like that, but I think more so to me it just becomes, if people are worried to invest. Then you need to do a better job at expressing the value in the investment. You need to double down on getting good at copywriting, messaging, speaking, communicating the value of your offer. That is a extra important right now. now. Okay, next one. Content that's consumed is different and more high level. So maybe before, you know, early Instagram days or, I mean, even five years ago, people weren't doing like highly produced reels and stuff like that, and now it feels like you're maybe up against those people who are doing that. I honestly, with this one, and this is what I said to the group too, I disagree. I don't think it's true. I think the highly produced stuff is great. Yeah. And if that's the direction you wanna go, awesome. It also can be great if you're like going to a content production place and you can sit down for two hours and crank out like 50 reels or something. But not everyone has the means or the time or the schedule or anything to do that. But people still want people, and I think that's going to get even more important. I think people wanna see the real thing. They want authenticity, they want. Just throw up your phone and start talking about something and then post it. You know, I coming from someone who never does that, but, but I get it. It, it does feel like, more and more effort to even just put out this stupid 32nd reel. I don't think it's necessary. Maybe worth trying. Do a couple highly produced reels, see how they do compared to your maybe less produced, more organic feel type of content, play around with it. If this is something that we think is making things hard, find out first before you decide that that's the nail in. the coffin, then I also just, okay. She grabs the mic. For those of you who are not watching the video, getting serious here. I also think that so much of this is just related to beliefs of what we think is making things hard without actually knowing it and making the assumption that. My content's not gonna do well. I'm not gonna sign more clients because I, I don't produce my stuff in a studio. feels a little bit like a fixed mindset belief that in order to be successful you have to do it that way. And so therefore, because you can't do it that way, you won't be successful. And so therefore you won't even try other types of content because you believe that it can only be that way. Yeah. I don't know. I felt, I feel like I just needed to say that. I also watched everyone listening to hear, I have not had a piece of content go viral in probably like three years and have been operating a seven figure business. Regardless, you can have a successful business and not go viral. Okay. I will die on that hill. But anyway, we're moving on. Okay. Desire for instant gratification or immediate result options. So that kind of ties into the idea of maybe GLP ones or. Yeah, fad diets and stuff that we've always been up against, by the way. So compare the options, compare the differences between those things. Educate your audience on the difference between hiring a health and fitness coach and doing a 30 day quick fix. Like here's what you'll see for pros and cons, and let them make the decision. And I think. I talk about this a lot when I'm even selling HMCC, that I don't want to convince people of anything. I want to give you all of the information. You can make your own decision. Chances are the decision you will come to is, this is something I need in my coaching, right? Once you get all of the information. But I think that's how you need to approach it with prospective clients and your audience and everything as well, is that how can we. Just bring more awareness to the actual problems and the reality rather than just like trying to push our own services all of the time. Okay. last one. Building trust is harder. I mean, again, my, my brain is just spitting in so many directions right now, especially after, after I get going with episodes like this where I am kind of just like off the cuff talking and there isn't much of an outline. I'm like, I'm in which direction do I wanna go with this? what we talked about at the retreat is that this is actually potentially a good thing. we don't want people to be. Not trustworthy and not ever trust anyone. Not trust us, but we do want people to be skeptical because here's the thing, all those shitty coaches out there, they are the ones who are going to be kicked outta here, not be able to sign a single client because of this trust recession, if we wanna call it that. It's going to weed out the week, and to me, I don't even really know if this is something we need to worry about. So long as we know we are the best coach we can be, we deliver on what we say we're going to do. Our clients get good results. We have great relationships with them. We are getting awesome testimonials. Our retention rates are high. Then let there be a trust recession. You are safe so long you have those things in place and you have the tools in order to do that. Yeah. I don't see the building trust is harder. That's like, that's so interesting for me to think about because that don't care. I don't, I don't care if it's harder. I know that what I have to offer in my business and the work that I do is ethical and moral and extremely helpful. Potentially life changing, honestly, not even potentially, because I have had students say that to me before. So. So. I don't give people any reason to not trust me, so why would I be worried if there's a trust recession? People may be more hesitant to buy, but that's, I mean, it's my job to make sure they feel safe and secure in making that decision. So anyway, take that for what you want to. Let's move on. I have two more components of. Business mindset reframes that I wanna go. That was just one by the way, but we went through all of the, the reasons why we think things are hard right now, and then kind of got into them all. Okay, the next thing I wanna talk about, every single retreat I do something called the red, yellow, green exercise. And it's essentially everyone goes around and take some time to write down and share. Greens being things that are going well in your business, yellows, things that are going, they're fine. They're, they're okay. Maybe no, like immediate attention needed. And red is like SOS, this either like, needs to get the F outta here, it needs to change. I need to do something different. This is not feeling good. So we do that and then everyone goes around and kind of teaches on the green stuff, like what is. What's going well for you and is there like a teaching component that you can share with everybody else? Like spread the green, spread the knowledge, and then we get into the reds and the yellows too, where where necessary with the yellows. Sometimes the yellows are just kind of like a, I don't feel great here and I felt like I needed to put it down, but I think there's no actual action required. So Reds, something I did differently with this exercise in this last retreat is we actually talked about. What is real versus perceived from those reds? What aspects of the red material in your business? The things that are not good, are actually just your perceptions that they're not good versus them factually grounded in reality. Not good. And this unearthed a lot of breakthroughs and conversations and just importance around all of this. And I put this in here as like mindset reframe, because how often are you doing this? How often are you telling yourself, this is bad, this needs to be better, I need to improve, I need to do more, I need to do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. When it's. it's Really not that bad, but you're just perceiving it as bad, like compared to what? Is it bad compared to what, because also when we are talking, we're talking about all of this stuff, like the economic uncertainty and the changes in the health and fitness coaching space. Like we got so much going on right now in the health and fitness coaching industry. It's hard to even follow and keep up with. So if you are still. In a position where you have a successful business and you're paid, if you have assistant coaches, they're taken care of, your clients are being taken care of. You can generally live your life the way that you want to, but yet you're like, oh, I really should be at like half a million dollars and I'm only making a quarter of a million dollars a year, whatever. Or I'm only making 80 k, and I would really like to hit the six figure mark. Is that bad? Or are you just perceiving where you think you should be in comparing that to where you are now and then labeling it as bad, labeling it as red, right? Because maybe if we toss in all of these other variables of what's going on in the industry and like things that you've gone through and all of this, then like maybe it's not so bad. So just maybe little thing to hang onto for yourself. To really understand the things that you need to work on in your business, how much of that is perception versus reality, and what are the pieces of it that are your perceptions versus what are the pieces of that that are real and do need to be tackled? So that will give you a lot of clarity too. Okay. The last thing I wanted to talk about, reframe wise, from a business perspective, just general goal setting and planning avoidance, are you one of these people. We have new members coming into the Growth Collective. right now I have eight members in the group and we usually are like five to 10 in that range. I keep the group very, very small. This is not an offer that I like, wanna scale to the clouds or make a ton of money off of. I just really, really love it and enjoy it and. Do not have the capacity for the amount of time and effort and one-on-one attention that each of my members have. I do not have the capacity to have more people. So anyway, I digress. When we get new members, this is so often the case that they've never planned out their year in advance before. Is that you? Do you also never plan anything in advance? Do you just go from month to month and then retroactively look back on the data and your KPIs from last month and go, okay, yeah, I should do better next month, and then move on to the next month and then proceed to do the same thing at the end of that month. Or maybe, maybe you plan like a couple months in advance, but you don't really have a full understanding of what that means for your whole year. So I start to get curious on this, like why are we avoiding the goal setting and the goal planning, and I. We spent half the day at this last retreat on yearly, quarterly, and monthly planning and getting into what that looks like and having an exact game plan for the first quarter of the year and working that backwards into specific actions that need to happen on a monthly and weekly basis and got into sprint planning and what that looks like. And I think, correct me if I'm wrong, my friends, it's scary to hold yourself to a plan. It's scary to commit to a lofty goal to do something that you've never done before, because what happens if you don't hit that? What does that mean about you if you don't hit that goal? If you don't execute that plan that you set? I I think that's why a lot of people don't set goals, but the reality is it just gives you tons of clarity and direction. And if you need to adjust the direction, change the route, move some things around. I mean, we move fricking dates and deadlines and things in my business all of the time, but that doesn't mean it didn't have a a home in the year already. And that's the important part. So take this as your reminder that you don't want this year. I know at this point you're listening to this episode and we're well into 2026 already. Uh, but it doesn't mean you can't make a change now, starting next month, starting next quarter. This is what you tell your clients all the time. Just because you didn't hit your macros yesterday or you kind of didn't work out or do anything over the weekend, doesn't mean that we're just gonna throw with a whole month out. So don't make this another ear where you look back. Wish you did more, did more planning. Were more on top of things because having those larger goals split up into those smaller goals and having action items that will drive those things, it just feels so good. It really does, and take it from my experience, both working with my Growth collective members and myself. We have like a few main toggles for revenue in the business. We set quarterly and monthly goals for those things, and then we split them up into good, better, and best goals that we're seeking for. And we have a lovely little spreadsheet that changes color based on whether it's a good, better or best value. All that fun stuff we do. Plenty of sprint planning where every single week we're meeting and talking about where we're at on certain projects and who's responsible for what and like who needs to do what this week so we can come back to the next week and go, okay, now we got that done. What's next on the agenda? And by the way, if you don't have a team, you can do that with yourself too. You know, team meetings can be just you. Schedule it in, make a plan, get on top of it. I promise you're gonna feel so much better, as much as it might feel scary to do so. Okay. That is all I have for you guys today. I hope that was helpful. I kind of just. It was pretty tangential in that episode. I feel like, like immediately reflecting like, Hmm, did I just fully go a different direction with this episode and, and say a lot of things? And I, I, I just hope it made sense and was helpful. That's all I care about, so I would love to know. Let me know. Reach out to me on Instagram, my Instagram. Handle, is in the show notes. Reach out to me there. Come find me somewhere, talk to me, let me know. Sometimes I feel like I'm just sitting in front of this microphone and camera hoping that you like this. Actually, that's exactly what I'm doing, literally every time I sit down to record. So it would be great if you told me if you have any feedback, anything you would like to hear from me. I am so open to that. I'm here for you. And yeah, I will leave it at that and I'll see you next week. And that's a wrap for today's episode of Not another Mindset show. If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you get notified of the next one. Because if you're anything like me, if the episodes aren't popping up for you automatically, you'll keep forgetting to come back to the show even if you really, really enjoyed it. So go ahead and hit that subscribe button and make it super easy for you and of course. If you wanna see more episodes just like this one, I'd love for you to let me know by leaving a review. I know, I know it's super annoying to do, but the few seconds that it takes means the world to me and also ensures that I can keep providing free education and value to you. And just to sweeten the deal, I am going to be picking a random reviewer every single month to receive a free workshop or product from me. If you're looking for more free resources or just wanna connect, hang out, chat a little bit, come find me on Instagram. I'm Coach Casey, Joe over there. That is where I hang out the most in the land of social media. Alright, my friends, that is all I have for you this time. I so appreciate you being here and love to see you prioritizing your growth. I'll see you next time.