Wellness Coaches: How to Get Paid When You Can't Work

If an unexpected emergency pulled you away tomorrow, would your coaching business systems hold the fort, or would everything halt completely? 

True freedom as a coach requires a foundation that outlasts your daily hustle. Valerie Feghali faced this exact reality when a sudden family emergency tested the resilience of her operations, forcing her to step away for an extended period.

In this episode of Fuel The Flow, Valerie breaks down the critical difference between working in your business and working on it. When learning how to scale a coaching business, the focus is often heavily skewed toward client acquisition and marketing. However, true long-term stability relies entirely on building autonomous, self-sustaining frameworks that do not require your constant presence. Listen in to learn how to move beyond the exhausting one-to-one service delivery model by integrating robust, recurring revenue streams and strategic delegation.

✨ WHAT YOU'LL DISCOVER

• How to structure your operations to be completely autonomous and self-sustained.

• The most effective recurring income models for health and wellness coaches.

• Why predictable payment plans and memberships protect against lost revenue.

• How to utilize strategic hiring, virtual assistants, and AI to delegate heavy lifting.

• The essential framework for building flexibility into your schedule by design.

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🧭 DETAILED CHAPTERS

00:00 - The Emergency That Tested Everything

Valerie shares the unexpected family event that forced her to test the true resilience of her business operations.

03:34 - Building Autonomous Business Frameworks

Discover the foundational systems required to ensure your business continues running smoothly without your daily involvement.

05:00 - The Power of Recurring Income Models

An exploration of why moving away from strictly one-to-one models is essential for long-term financial stability.

05:52 - Secure Your Spot: AI Workshop

A brief invitation to join the upcoming AI Workshop to get ahead of the shifting technology landscape.

06:27 - Implementing Memberships & Subscriptions

How to successfully structure and offer private memberships and long-term client subscriptions.

07:44 - Quarterly & Annual Client Check-Ins

Strategies for maintaining client retention and steady income through structured, spaced-out check-ins.

08:52 - Structuring Effective Payment Plans

Why predictable payment plans are a powerful shield against unpredictable revenue dips.

09:42 - Strategic Hiring & Efficient Delegation

How to empower virtual assistants and leverage AI tools so the momentum of your business never slows down.

11:59 - Flexibility by Design, Not Accident

The ultimate hallmark of a mature coaching operation is intentionally building a schedule that serves your life.

13:41 - Episode Recap & Next Steps

Final takeaways and immediate action steps to audit your own business frameworks.

⭐ 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/

If you found value in today’s episode, please take a moment to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify! Your support helps us reach more health and wellness coaches looking to scale their businesses sustainably.

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

If I were to take a month off from work tomorrow, what would fall apart? What is my retention model like? How am I actually going to keep people? How am I going to make sure that I'm getting paid every single month, regardless of whether or not I bring on new clients? You should be building flexibility into your business on purpose and not 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. A few weeks ago, I got a phone call, and when I picked up, it was my husband in a nice calm tone telling me that he shattered his ankle. And he was off-roading with friends that were competing in a motorcycle off-roading competition. And he fell and the bike landed on his leg. Lo and behold, his ankle was broken. So by the time I got to him, he was three hours away. He was back at the campsite sitting in the pitch dark and talking to me about surgery. So the doctor at the ER said, You are for sure going to need surgery. And we didn't quite know the extent of what this meant by now. But lo and behold, it's not one surgery, but two surgery and many, many months off from work. Now, a few years ago, if if I went back six years, I would have been completely panicked in this moment, knowing that we are partly relying on his income, that I'm working in the clinic. I was at a physical therapy clinic at the time, that I'm there and need to be present and not able to bring him to his appointments easily, that I've got the kids to take care of and everything. And so I would have been spiraling, was it six years ago? But in this moment, I was completely calm and had absolutely no fear or concern that we were going to be able to take care of this. And that's because I've built a business that really runs without me needing to be there every moment of every day. And it's a business that brings in enough income that can support both of, you know, our entire family. And so if I had not had this, I realized that this moment I've actually been planning for for years and somehow kind of knew that at some point something like this might happen. And I really felt prepared. And there's been several moments in the last few years that I felt so much gratitude for the business that I built. So I want to talk to you guys today about how to build a business that can sustain itself, that can carry you when you cannot carry it at all moments of the day. Now, yes, in my business, there are seasons where I work very hard and sometimes longer hours. And those seasons come and go. However, I have structured the business in a way that we have recurring income. So I'm not worried about if I needed to suddenly take a week off that everything would fall apart. Yes, some projects might be postponed or the due dates might be pushed back a little bit later than we had hoped for, but the whole thing will not crumble. And that is mostly because I have recurring income from my membership program. Now, we do have some other higher level programs, such as our membership mastery program, where we teach coaches how to build their own memberships. But again, this isn't something that takes up a huge amount of my time. I've got to be there once a week for an hour to be live with my participants and my um clients. But it's not something that I need to be on at all times and that I'm on a strict schedule for. So let's talk about how you can look at your business in a way to say, hmm, what systems need to be built in here? How can I structure this in a way that if I could not work tomorrow or for the next week, that things would still hold up? Money would continue to come in in my if I have employees or a team that they would continue to get paid. So the first thing that I would do is I would sit down with a pen and a paper and just write down the question and be very honest with yourself of what would happen, what would fall apart in my business if I could not work for the next month. So just think about that. If something happened, you know, God forbid an accident or something, a family emergency, things come up. So if you needed to take a month off from work, what would fall apart? And with looking at those bullet points of the things that would start to crumble, I want you to go ahead and start making a list under each one of what you would need to have in place in order for those things not to completely fall apart, right? And yes, there might be times where you're like, you know, I'm the only one that can do this meeting or that can meet with this client. Okay, well, you need to structure your business around it so that if you need to postpone that meeting or cancel that meeting, that again, things don't completely get disabled. And so that might be pushed back. Yes, perhaps. And that might need to, that one thing might need to wait for you, but the whole project should not completely fall apart. And so what do you have in place that brings in recurring income? This is another question that I want you to write down in your notebook. What in my business brings in recurring income? And if you don't have an answer for that, that's something that I really want you to think about in regards to the structure of your business. Now, if you're just getting started, this might not be something that you are planning from day one. However, very early on in your business, you know, I started doing this within the first six months to a year of my business to start thinking about what is my retention model like? How am I actually going to keep people? How am I going to make sure that I'm getting paid every single month, regardless of whether or not I bring on new clients that month? So ask yourself that question. What is recurring income in my business that doesn't require me to bring in new clients every single month? I want to drop a quick note before I continue. We are hosting an AI bootcamp, which is a three-day bootcamp showing you how to start building a knowledge base inside of Claude, build the brain, and then build the skills that are going to take daily, weekly, and monthly work off your plate. We are going to show you how we use it inside of our business and how you can use it in your business. I'll be hosting this with myself and my ads manager who is an expert at AI. The show notes will have the link to the booking app, and I hope to see you there. Let's talk a little bit about how this could look because this could look multiple different ways for different types of businesses. Now, you could have a simple membership or subscription model where people are paying you every month and you are providing some kind of value to them every single month. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that you have new content that you're building every month. This could look very different for different people. For example, we're building out a client portal that goes along with the wellness ball. So this client portal is going to be a client success hub for you where you can invite your clients on. They can log their food, track their macros, get access to any programs that you have built out for them. So lessons, courses, that type of thing. There'll be a communities feature and a communication feature. So an example would be using that tool as a retention model. So when people are done with your group coaching or your higher level one-on-one coaching, that you could say, hey, if you want to continue to have access to this app and you want to continue to log your food and be part of the community, you know, it's X amount of dollars a month. Depending on your clientele, it could be anywhere from $10 to $90 a month. Again, depending on the type of client that you're working with and the added support that you're going to provide. Another thing could be that you are having somebody pay on an annual or quarterly basis for a check-in and review. So this could be somebody that you have worked with in the past and you say, okay, every six months, we're going to revisit the plan and maybe rebuild the plan if things are no longer working for you so well. So perhaps you work with them for eight weeks or 12 weeks. They make their get their goals, they're doing really well, and then you send them on your their way. You don't just completely leave them and say, that's it, we're never communicating again. You should already schedule and have them prepay for a follow-up session six months from now or a year from now so that they know that, hey, I've got to maintain this, this um progress that I've made because I'm gonna be following up with my coach again in three months. And I want to show them that, hey, I've been able to maintain and sustain this, and now I'm ready for the next level, perhaps. And so this is not only good for you, but it is such a service for your clients. They are going to love this type of service, knowing that yes, I have somebody who's going to be following up with me again in this amount of time. So that's another way that you can build in that recurring revenue into your business. Now, another thing could be payment plans. So if you do have a higher level, higher ticket course, let's say you have some sort of group coaching program or course that you sell for $3,000, then those people who can't necessarily put up front the $3,000 right away, you could offer a payment plan that's, you know, $1,000 a month or $500 a month for the extent of the program. And that way you again are getting that recurring revenue, even if you need to say, hey, we need to postpone these meetings or reschedule these meetings. You're not, you're not, again, letting the whole project and the whole course and the whole group coaching program fall apart. You might be postponing it a couple of weeks and you're still getting those recurring payments coming in every single month. So take a look again at your business and see where do I have recurring revenue coming in every single month. Now, the next thing is is there somewhere that you need to hire? It can be very inexpensive to hire, say, an executive assistant right now. You could hire somebody from the Philippines, for example, for five to between five and ten dollars an hour to help you with some of the admin work, some of the back end work, answering emails, filtering through new customers who want to book a book a session with you, following up with those people. There are many ways that you could utilize an executive assistant or even just a virtual assistant and not be, you know, spending all your profits on it. A lot of people, a lot of coaches are afraid to hire. And eventually, if you're really going to build your business, you need to build your team as well. And you're going to have all kinds of employees. But in the beginning, if you haven't started with any yet, see if you can hire a virtual assistant or an executive assistant to help take some work off your plate. And then make sure that they are truly, they truly have the systems in place that they're working without your constant guidance. If you're having to communicate with them every single day or every single week in order to get them rolling on the next thing that they should be doing that day or that week, then you don't have the right systems in place. Sure, you might be following up with them to see their progress on certain projects. And then if you have new projects that arise, you're giving them new instructions. But the day-to-day stuff that they're working on should be routine. They shouldn't need new instruction on that every single week. This forces you to take a really good look at your business and say, where do I have systems? And what I mean by systems is a regular set of action steps that are done in order to get a task completed. And if you don't have that, things will start to break down eventually. So by hiring an assistant, it forces you to take a look and say, okay, if I'm going to train someone, then I need to have those systems in place because I need to show them exactly what to do, when they should be checking this, what time, what the due dates are on each one of these things, when I expect the work by. And it forces you to sit down with your business and your systems and figure out what's broken, what's running really smoothly, and what just needs some fine-tuning or some tweaking. Now, you should be building flexibility into your business on purpose and not by accident. So a lot of times people get to a week and they're like, oh, I actually have a really slow week right now. I guess I can like take some time off or do these things. And that's great if that happens, but really that should be that should be on purpose. You should know when those slow weeks are going to arise and when the weeks where you're going to be in a little bit more of a grind are going to be happening. So again, looking at the structure of your business, planning at least 90 days in advance can help you tremendously with this. If you're going week by week or even month by month, you're likely going to miss the goal. By planning 90 days in advance, it shows you exactly what needs to be done and by when in order to reach the goal that you are striving for. It also helps you delegate. So if you do have a team or you have are thinking about hiring a virtual assistant, it's going to help you pass some of that work off. Now we are in the day and age where we can actually hire assistants through AI as well, which is incredible. And we actually have an AI train assistant training course that you can learn how to build AI assistance into your business. So again, this is another way that it's very low liability, it's very low cost in order to get help and assistance off your plate. Now, if you can take it even a step further and build in agents that are working on a time frame for you, then again, you are building in the systems that your business needs to run when you are not there 24-7. So I want you this week to really take an honest audit of your business. Go through those questions that I laid out. So remember the questions are the first one is if I were to take a month off from work tomorrow, what would fall apart? And then break that down and see what you need to do in each one of those aspects or each one of those bullet points in order to get things more systematized. The next question is do I have recurring revenue in my business? And what does that look like? If I don't have it, how can I build that in? And then the next thing is, what is my team like? Where can I delegate to? Do I have AI employees that I have? Do I have AI assistants that are working for me? Do I can I hire a virtual assistant? Or what are my employees that I already have on payroll doing with their time? And are they following systems that are efficient and streamlined so that when I'm not there, they're not having to ask me questions in order to keep their job going and keep them moving forward. So take a look in your business today, see where you can systematize, see where you can automate, and see how you can create a business that runs even when you are not there to run it. 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.