3 Numbers Coaches Skip That Are Draining Their Business

Running an online health coaching business requires more than just clinical expertise; it demands clear visibility into your operational metrics.
 
In this episode of Fuel The Flow, Valerie Feghali explains why ignoring the foundational numbers of your business is a fast route to burnout. 

We break down the three essential data points every health coach should track monthly: Cost Per Lead (CPL), Conversion Rates, and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). 
By shifting your focus away from vanity metrics, you gain the clarity needed to optimize your marketing budget, improve your funnels, and build a sustainable, thriving practice.

✨ WHAT YOU'LL DISCOVER:

• Why calculating your Cost Per Lead (CPL) is the necessary first step to scaling effectively.
• How tracking conversion rates across all marketing channels reveals where you are losing potential clients.
• The strategic importance of determining Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) for long-term business sustainability.
• How to transition from guessing to using monthly data to direct your daily operational focus and budget.

⭐ MEMORABLE QUOTE:

"If you know just these three numbers in your business and you're really solid on them and you track them every single month, you will have a much better system of knowing where to spend your efforts." 

— Valerie Feghali

🔥 NEXT STEPS TO SCALE (Resources Mentioned):

• Start your 7-day free Wellness Vault trial: https://wellnessvault.com/
• Workshop Video: https://youtu.be/9uhi7mI3IAQ?si=hfEeJ6LuT7Yp8saz
• Client Growth Pathway: https://youtu.be/utM9HwzKeh4?si=8Yb6ZMNtXO4eVcue

⏰ DETAILED CHAPTERS:

00:00 Intro - Welcome to Fuel The Flow and why tracking your business numbers is essential for growth.

02:29 #1 Number to Know: CPL (Cost Per Lead) - How to calculate what it actually costs to acquire a new lead.

08:21 Wellness Vault Promo - The all-in-one content solution to streamline your coaching operations.

08:51 #2 Conversion Rates - Identifying the drop-off points in your marketing funnels and sales calls.

14:20 #3 Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) - Understanding the long-term financial impact of every client in your ecosystem.

17:33 Recap - How to use these three core metrics to direct your daily focus and budget.

⭐ ABOUT VALERIE

Valerie Feghali is a physical therapist turned software CEO, helping health and wellness coaches scale their businesses without burnout. As the founder of The Wellness Vault, she provides white-label resources and strategic coaching to help you grow. 

⭐ CONNECT WITH VALERIE

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/v.feghali/

The Wellness Vault: https://wellnessvault.com/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ValerieFeghali/videos

🎙️ SUPPORT THE SHOW:

If you found value in this episode, please leave us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify! Your support helps us continue to bring you the best strategies for your coaching business.

Disclaimer: 
The Fuel The Flow Podcast is for educational purposes only. 
The information provided is not intended to replace professional medical or business advice.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

It takes more time now than it's taken in the past to build that trust because there's just so much noise, especially in the online space if you're doing online coaching. You should be nurturing these people who have now gotten to know you a little bit. They're building that trust with you still. They might not be ready to buy. If you know just these three numbers in your business and you're really solid on them and you track them every single month, you will have a much better system of knowing. Welcome to the Fuel Your Flow podcast. I am your host, Valerie Figali, physical therapist, turned software CEO and business coach for health and wellness coaches. We are going to be talking about all things health and business. They might be more closely related than you think. So let's go ahead and get into it. Welcome back to another episode of Fuel the Flow. Today we are talking about numbers. And before you say, I'm out of here, come back to me. We are going to keep it really simple. You don't need an accountant or a bookkeeper to track these numbers or any sort of CFO or anything like that. These are simpler numbers that most coaches miss. They're doing so much for their business. Oftentimes you might be thinking, this didn't work, or why am I working so hard when I'm not seeing the result? I need to try something new. I need a new strategy. What's the secret? Right. And the truth is, there's no secret. We just have to be really clear on what's working and what's not. And the only way to know that is to really know our numbers. If we don't know our numbers, then oftentimes we're going to think something's not working when really it is, or we're not going to be able to find where the leaky bucket is. So what I mean by that is I oftentimes have coaches who come to me and they'll say, I did this workshop or I did this webinar and I only had 20 people sign up and only one person converted. And so it was a bust. I need to try something new. I need to come up with a new workshop idea and I need to start all over again. When in reality, a conversion rate of 5%, which is what that would have been, would have actually been quite good. And the problem wasn't the workshop. It wasn't the topic of the workshop. It wasn't their sales strategy during the workshop. It was likely their lead generation process of getting people into the workshop. They needed more people to be there and more people to be on the call to make it a success. And so by knowing our numbers and understanding our numbers, we know where to focus our energy and our effort so that we can actually come away with the result that we are desiring and hit our goals. So the first one that I want to talk about is the cost per lead. So this is how much it costs you as a business owner, not only in money, but also in your time to bring in a new lead. Now, when I say lead, this isn't somebody necessarily that buys your product. This is somebody who's interested in your product and has the potential to buy the product that's now coming to you either by signing up for your newsletter. And so they're getting weekly or monthly emails, by showing up to a workshop that you have, by sending you a DM asking about your products, potentially booking a free call. These are all leads for your business. So every new lead is going to cost us in some way. And a lot of coaches think if I post on social media more and more, it's organic traffic and it's free leads. It's not free leads. You're paying in your time to make that effort. Now there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. And you have to figure out where is my time best spent and what are my resources now as a business owner. If you're just getting started and maybe you don't have the funds, then organic traffic could potentially be a good way for you to grow. Maybe you do have more time. If you don't have the time, then paying for traffic is a great way to do it. This could be paid advertisements to a workshop. This could be paying somebody else to get in front of their audience. So paying to speak in front of their audience. There are other ways to get in front of a lot of people without it taking so much of your time. But you're going to pay for it one way or the other, whether that be in your time or in money and in finances. So we have to figure out, including your time, how much did it cost you to bring on that lead? So let's say that you are doing free traffic. So you're spending your time getting organic traffic to a workshop website and you're creating social media posts and then maybe also going to, you know, local coffee shops and posting about it, maybe going to a referral source and asking them if they'll send out an email for you to invite people into your free workshop, perhaps. All of this is going to take you time. So what you want to do is you want to add up the time it took you to do all of those different marketing efforts to bring people into your workshop and multiply that by your hourly rate. So let's say that in your business as a whole, not just your client time, but as a whole, when you're working in or on your business, that you're getting expecting to get paid$100 per hour. Let's just use that round number. And now let's say that you worked for 10 hours to bring in that, you know, to bring in a hundred people to your workshop. So if you worked for 10 hours and that's$100 per hour, so that's a thousand. And then let's actually say, let's say that you got uh 50 people realistically, that's a that's probably a round number for 10 hours of work. So 50 people onto your workshop. Now, what is that going to be if we divide a thousand by 50? That's going to be what,$200 per lead? I think I might not be doing the math right, but I may not be doing math right, but you get the point that you're dividing your time and your hourly rate by the amount of people that are joining that workshop, by the leads you're generating from those specific marketing efforts. Now, if you're doing this all through, let's say, social media, you might think, okay, how many people are downloading my free guide or signing up for my newsletter? How many new people did you bring in to now nurture that are in your world now? They're getting your content on a regular basis. And I don't mean they're getting your stories in their feed. I mean you're somehow in contact with them either through DM, email, or they're coming to a live event with you. And so you have that aspect of it. Now you also have to calculate the amount of money you spent on it. So whether this be through paid ads, if you are running pay paid ads, it's pretty clear, right? You can see right on the ads dashboard. Great, I spent, you know,$2,000 and 20 people converted, you know exactly how much money you spent on each lead. Now, so that's the simple part. But what about other tools that you're using specifically for marketing? You want to calculate that cost as well. Now, you might be using other tools that you're using for multiple different pieces of your business. And so I wouldn't necessarily calculate that into your marketing expense. But if you have tools that you're using specifically for marketing, you want to make sure that you're calculating that expense too. So this just tells me how much does it cost for each person that I'm bringing into my space. And then it tells you, okay, well, I, if you're realizing it takes, it cost me$200 per lead or it cost me$50 per lead, whatever it may be, you're realizing, all right, well, I really need to nurture this lead now. It shows you like the efforts and the money that was spent going into just bringing that people, that person on makes you more incentivized to follow up with that person. A lot of times, coaches, they'll do their workshop and then that's it. If people don't buy on the workshop or if they don't, you know, respond to their DM, they don't follow up with them. And that's a huge missed opportunity. You should be nurturing these people who have now gotten to know you a little bit. They're building that trust with you still. They might not be ready to buy. It takes more time now than it's taken in the past to build that trust because there's just so much noise, especially in the online space if you're doing online coaching. And so it takes a little bit longer to build that trust and to get that person to then sign up for your course or your coaching and join you in your in their journey. And so make sure that you are following up once you've realized how much it cost me to get that lead, you're much more likely to follow up with that person. Hey, sorry to interrupt, but if you are a health or wellness professional and you haven't yet checked out the wellness vault, you're missing out. The wellness vault is a content hub for coaches who create their own plans and programs for their clients, run workshops, create digital guides, and so much more. You can now do all of this in a fraction of the time so you can focus on your clients and grow your business faster than ever with more U time. The link to the Wellness Vault is in the show notes. So go sign up for your free trial today. The next metric that a lot of coaches forget to track or are really not paying close enough attention to are their conversion rates per marketing effort. So an example of this would be if you're running a workshop, and I used this in the beginning, is that if you have 20 people shut sign up for your workshop and one person converts, that's a 5% conversion rate. Now, I remember when I first started hosting workshops, I figured, okay, if I can get 10 people on the call, maybe I can get five people to buy. And that was like a dream that very, very rarely will happen. That would be a 50% conversion rate, which is a wildly high conversion rate. And so, yes, if they book a free call with you, those people who are actually booking a call and getting on that one-on-one conversation with you, those are people who are really committed. They've set the time in their calendar, they're having that one-on-one discussion with you, that you should be converting anywhere from 20 to 50%. But a workshop, especially a free workshop, where oftentimes they're going to have cold leads. And what cold leads means is that it's people who haven't gotten to know you yet. So this could be if you're running paid advertisements, it could be people who are just seeing your advertisement for the first time and they're just seeing you for the first time and they're getting on that workshop with you. It's a free workshop. They haven't committed any money to it. And so they're just getting on to kind of like test the waters. They may or may not even show up for the workshop. And that's a whole other discussion. We actually did a podcast on that recently that you can go listen to of you know how to improve your workshops. And one of those things would be to offer things like bonuses for coming live as an example. But getting back to conversions, these oftentimes are cold people that are coming in. It could be somebody who is referred to you by somebody else that's a bit more of a warmer lead, or it could be somebody who's been on your email list for quite some time. And so, again, that's a warmer lead. They've likely gotten maybe some free content from you, some value from you through your emails. And so they're a little bit warmed up. So you're going to have different types of people on the call, but much of that call is likely going to be cold traffic, people who haven't heard of you yet. And so in that case, the expectation to close is anywhere from like three to five percent. And that would be a really successful workshop, webinar, boot camp, whatever it is that you're hosting. If you can close at three to five percent, that I would consider a success. Now, we always want to try to push towards the higher side of that, especially if you're doing any sort of like paid boot camp, oftentimes paid experiences, even if they're$20, just the fact that somebody has put some money down on it, they're more likely to show up, they're more likely to engage, they're more likely to convert. Now, on the same note, you're also less likely to have a larger group of people there. So you'll get more people on your free free workshops, but they're going to be less committed and convert at a lower rate. And this is why you have to run these numbers because you have to test what works best with my audience. Did this free workshop where I had lots of people on actually get me more people into my paid program? Or did this lower ticket paid workshop that maybe was more of a three-day boot camp or had a VIP experience or something along those lines that people had to put money down on? Did that actually bring more people into my into my paid experience? And so you have to run the numbers. Now, this will help you determine where is the problem in the funnel? Is the problem that people are not signing up for the workshop? And if if so, what's happening there? Is it the sales page? You should be looking at the sales page conversion too. If it's a free event, you should be converting that sales page above 10%. You know, 10 to 20% would be great to for a conversion on a sales page that's to a free one-day workshop. Now, if it's a paid experience, that's going to be way different. You know, you might be converting at 5% for a paid experience on that sales page. So we're not even talking about the workshop at this point. We're talking about the amount of traffic that lands on the registration page to your workshop. And then they click to actually sign up and get into the workshop. So you should be tracking conversion rates at the sales page and inside of the actual workshop itself. And then if you have any paid calls, like a book a call, a discovery call, if you're selling a higher ticket program, then you're tracking conversion rates for those sales calls as well. And those should all be different numbers, kind of moving up in conversions across the across the uh stream of things. And so you want to figure out where is the breakdown happening? Is it that I didn't get enough traffic to my page? Is it that the page didn't convert as well? The conversion rates on the page were not as well. Is it that people had a really low show-up rate that people didn't actually come live to the workshop? Maybe they signed up for the workshop, but maybe you gave a free bonus for signing up and maybe that's all they wanted, right? Maybe you should save that bonus next time for only if they come live, right? This tells you a lot to track the conversions across the different channels, across the funnel. And this will show you where do I really need to make those improvements? Where do I need to focus my efforts? Because if you convert it during the workshop at 5%, then the workshop is solid and the the issue is happening somewhere else. So pay attention to those numbers. They're really going to help you grow your business and figure out where uh the leak is happening. The last thing that I want you to always check is are your um earnings or your lifetime value of your client. So your earnings per lead, right? And this is across like the entire time that they are in your ecosystem. So a lot of people will say, okay, well, this client was by cost per lead was$100, but the client was worth$500 because they bought a$500 product. That would be great. That means that you had a 4x return on, you know, your spend, right? So that would be wonderful. But what if that client was actually worth worth$1,000 for the entire lifetime that they are with you? Now, what I mean by this is that they might not just buy one product. So they might sign up for your$500 coaching program, but then they also might sign up for your$50 a month membership after they're done with the coaching program. And the lifetime, maybe they stay in the membership for a year. Well, great, that's an additional, what,$600? So now that client went from$500 to$1,100. So you can see how when you add different segments or different products that all relate to the same client, it's not for different types of clients, it's all for the same client that your earnings per lead, your earnings per per person that actually buys from you is going to be much higher. So this is the client lifetime value, is really what we're talking about here. Your revenue per client. That's really important for you to figure out. If you are just starting out, I would start with one product. So you wouldn't have necessarily the membership and the coaching program. Like just start with one product if you are just starting out. But if you've gotten some traction and now you're coaching and you have clients and you're selling, you know, one particular product and you focus long enough on that that you know it works and you know how to get people into it, it's time to expand into additional products for that same person. What do they want to do after they have worked with you for some time? Or is there a lower ticket offer that maybe you can put at the front end to get more leads and more people into your higher ticket program? So we talked about this again on another podcast a while back. It's called the client growth pathway. And you can check out that podcast as well. But this is really talking about your ascension model. So, where do clients start? What do they buy into next? And then do you have a way for them to continue on with you or maybe upgrade into a more elevated experience? And this is going to make that lifetime value of each client even higher. And then you're providing more value. They don't want to bounce around from coach to coach. Oftentimes they want to stay with the same coach because you've gotten to know about them. You know what their problems are, you know what their issues are. And so you know how to guide them and you know how to continue to help them. And so they will want to stay with you. And that's a service, it's a value that you're providing by making it possible for them to continue on with you even after the initial program that they signed up for. So the next number to figure out is your lifetime value of your client. What are they worth over the entire course of time that they are in your ecosystem? So, just to recap, we talked about your cost per lead, your conversion rates, and this is across everything you do, your sales calls, your workshops, your email marketing systems, what are those conversion rates on each part of your marketing flow? And then also what is the lifetime value of your client. If you know just these three numbers in your business and you're really solid on them and you track them every single month, you will have a much better system of knowing what do I need to focus my time on? Where do I need to spend my efforts in my business and how can I continue to grow and scale? So I hope you got something out of this episode. If you did, please share it with a friend or write us a five-star review. We would be so grateful so that we can keep the podcast going. I will see you again on the next one. I hope you enjoyed our conversation from today. Any links we discussed will be in the show notes below. Also, we would be incredibly grateful if you would leave us a five star review. This helps us keep the podcast going so that we can continue to provide value for all of you. I hope we see you on the next one.