The Holistic Business Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Choosing the Right Education Model Aug 10, 2022

Show notes

Confused about which online education model is actually going to lead to good results for both you and your client?

Maybe you’ve set up a self-study course that you’re excited about, but few of your students are actually completing it. Or maybe you sold a traditional live online course in the past, with lifetime access to material for the customers, but that’s now proving to be a lot of unanticipated and unpaid work to maintain and update for former students.

If you’re struggling with problems like these, it’s likely that you’re using the wrong online education model for the offer that you’re making. The right model makes a huge difference for effective client results, and the wrong model can lead to low sales and unsuccessful outcomes—ouch.

But both of these can be remedied with careful thought about what transformation your offer is providing, and choosing the best educational model to deliver that transformation.

In the latest episode of The Holistic Business Podcast, business coach and strategist Sarah M. Chappell guides you through key questions that will help you choose the right online education model for your business.

Should you have a time-bound program like a live cohort course or group coaching program? An ongoing, subscription-based membership? Or maybe a self-study course with a digital e-book? Listen to the episode at the link in our bio to find out, so you can finally sell your offer, teach effectively, and help your customers achieve their goals.

TIME STAMPS

4:26—Why the outcome of your offer is so critical
4:54—The first question to ask yourself about your offer
5:45—What you need to know before making a digital download
6:37—The biggest sign that you should have a membership model
9:35—The problem with self-study courses
16:15—Breaking out of assumptions about what a membership is

CONNECT

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If you’d like to learn more about online education memberships, sign up for our waitlist to apply for the Membership Accelerator program, our year-long intensive where we help you design (or redesign) and then scale an effective membership that gives great results for your clients without burning you out. We’ll be opening applications in just a few weeks, and if your application is accepted, you’ll be invited to attend a free private training with Sarah where you’ll learn much more about memberships, the math behind running a successful business, and concrete actions you can take to start generating the revenue you’re dreaming of.

How to Fix Your Membership Jul 27, 2022

Show notes

Is your membership business making you feel trapped, overwhelmed, and burnt out?

Your membership was supposed to make life easier for you, not harder. But now you’re stuck doing more work than ever, you’re losing customers faster than you can replace them, and your membership is turning out to be unsustainable, unprofitable, and just not what you’d hoped it would be.

Don’t give up yet. If you run a membership that’s running you into the ground, chances are that you’ve fallen into some common traps. And the great news is, you can overcome these traps with some solid planning and restructuring.

In this episode, holistic business coach Sarah M. Chappell outlines the four major reasons why memberships fail. She draws from her extensive experience running memberships and coaching other business owners to membership success to put together a comprehensive roadmap of pitfalls to avoid.

Once you’ve learned how to navigate through these common challenges, you’ll be well on your way to building a membership that provides immense value for your customers AND supports your well-being.

When properly implemented and integrated, your membership has the potential to highlight the best aspects of your expertise while providing consistent recurring revenue that allows you to feel energized about your work, minimize unnecessary labor, and help more customers than ever before.

So before you throw your membership in the trash, listen to this episode to find out why your membership isn’t working, and what you can do to make sure that it helps both you and your customers thrive.

CONNECT

If you’re ready to dive deeper into how to run a membership that works for you and your community, sign up for our waitlist to apply for the Membership Accelerator program, our year-long intensive where we help you design (or redesign) and then scale your membership sustainably, without burning out and without falling into these common traps. We’ll be opening applications in just a few weeks, and if your application is accepted, you’ll be invited to attend a free private training with Sarah where you’ll learn much more about memberships, the math behind running a successful business, and concrete actions you can take to start generating the revenue you’re dreaming of.

TIME STAMPS

3:33—The primary challenges in the membership market
4:59—The biggest issue when people create memberships
14:25—Why you need a sustainable sales system
20:14—How to create a customer retention plan
27:36—Why integration into the rest of your business is key

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Starting an Online Membership Business with Ward Sandler Jul 13, 2022

Show notes

Are you burnt out from endless private sessions, or worried that clients are going to stop booking in this economic downturn?

Great news: we have a solution for you. Memberships, which are courses, communities, or group coaching programs accessible through a paid subscription, can address your burnout, boost your income, and actually help more people.

Here at the Holistic Business Academy, we know that memberships are a rock solid way to use your unique expertise to serve your community with less work for you and lower prices for your customers.

So, how do you get started? On this week’s episode of The Holistic Business Podcast, we invited MemberSpace CEO Ward Sandler to share his expertise on how to successfully establish and run your online membership business.

MemberSpace is a software as a service (SaaS) that enables creators to turn any part of their website into members-only with just a few clicks. Their mission is to help entrepreneurs build a sustainable membership business (without coding!) anywhere on the internet. Ward and his cofounder Ryan have helped thousands of people around the world generate tens of millions of dollars from their members since 2015.

In this conversation, holistic business coach Sarah M. Chappell chats with Ward about the foundations of building a membership business model: how to know if you’re ready, what the biggest benefits and pitfalls are, and how to overcome perfectionism when you’re getting started.

Tune in to learn how to build a sustainable and profitable membership business that creates consistent recurring revenue at an accessible price for your customers.

TIME STAMPS

7:18—How to know if you’re ready to run a membership

9:30—The key benefit of running a membership

13:03–The biggest membership pitfalls

15:43—Why perfectionism is your enemy

22:41—How the membership model fits into economically challenging times

CONNECT WITH WARD

MemberSpace Resources

MemberSpace’s Twitter

Ward’s Twitter

Listeners get TWO MONTHS FREE with the code “holistic”

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Why No One Is Buying Jun 29, 2022

Show notes

Does your offer suck?

You spent weeks developing a new offer that highlights your areas of expertise. You sat in front of your computer for hours in Canva designing graphics. You made a sales page and changed the link in your bio. You told your followers how excited you were about your new offer, and a couple of your friends even shared your latest post.

And nothing happened.

Your website didn’t crash from an onslaught of incoming sales like you had imagined.

But this offer is amazing! You know it could really help people!

So what do you do now?

Now it’s time to assess. A lack of sales is, in and of itself, feedback. And it’s your job to do the detective work to determine what this feedback is telling you.

Lucky for you, Sarah M. Chappell, business coach and founder of the Holistic Business Academy, is outlining exactly how to do that detective work in this week’s episode. She’s sharing her experience with failed offers, the four primary culprits of low sales, and how to take action after assessing the situation.

Tune in so you can do a little detective work in your own business and actually start selling your offers.

TIME STAMPS

1:36—Lack of Sales as Feedback

2:20—You’re Not Actually Promoting It

5:32—Your Messaging is Ineffective

10:00—Your Audience is Saturated

12:20—Your Offer Sucks

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Values-Aligned Branding for Small Business with Christine Lieu Jun 08, 2022

Show notes

It’s no secret that great branding is important to your business: it can save you valuable time and energy while quickly and effectively communicating your core values with your audience and boosting your sales.

But what exactly does branding entail? And which parts of branding are actually important to focus on for small businesses?

In this episode, holistic business coach and strategist Sarah M. Chappell chats with Christine Lieu, the expert behind CL Designs and the Brand Party Podcast. Christine is a graphic designer who helps purpose-driven businesses create cohesive branding, web design, and social content to drive impact and sales.

Sarah and Christine discuss why branding is so critical for holistic entrepreneurs, how to use branding to reach your ideal customers, where to begin when starting out with branding assets, how strong branding can create more ease during launches, and the most important aspects of branding to focus on in order to bring your messaging to the surface and make it shine.

Tune in for a fun and information-packed conversation on how to use branding to align your business with your values, attract the right people, and make running your business a whole lot easier.

CONNECT WITH CHRISTINE:

Website: christineldesigns.com
Brand Party Podcast: christineldesigns.com/podcast
Instagram: @_clieu @brandpartypodcast
Pinterest: ChristineLDesigns
Facebook: ChristineLDesigns

Get instant access to a free Brand Consistency Checklist: https://mailchi.mp/941959d7add5/christineldesignsemail
Grab the guide that has helped business owners alike determine what’s most important when you’re just starting to build a brand so you can continue on with what you do best.

Join the FREE Brand Party Challenge!
It’s a 5-day online challenge for purpose-driven businesses who are ready to stop being inconsistent and finally build the brand they’re so deserving of! Get access to a branding expert at your fingertips as you discover your core values, color palette, and font pairing to attract quality leads and sales.
Join now: christineldesigns.com/brand-party-challenge

TIME STAMPS:

1:18—What is branding and why does it matter?
8:09—How to use branding to communicate core values
12:54—How to save time during launches with branding and assets
17:20—The importance of sales pages and why you should love them
23:44—Where to start in approaching branding assets

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Four-Day Work Weeks in Small Business May 25, 2022

Show notes

Four-day work weeks sound great in theory. Getting to work less and having three-day weekends every week? Who would say no to that?

But as a small business owner, you probably have serious worries about being able to get everything done in a shorter amount of time. What about keeping your clients happy? Can you really make enough money by working four days a week?

We were curious if the model could work in this specific context. So as a small business with these needs ourselves, we decided to conduct a six-week trial of working only Mondays through Thursdays.

At the end of the trial period, the feedback from our team was unanimous: the four-day work week was a resounding success, and we made the policy permanent. Not only were all of us happier and better rested, there wasn’t a single negative impact on the business.

In this episode, Holistic Business Academy founder and business coach Sarah M. Chappell discusses how the Holistic Business Academy was able to make a four-day work week possible for a small and busy three-person team with a significant amount of client-facing work. She covers why we decided to make the change, her biggest worries and what actually ended up happening, the most important takeaways from the shift, and rules and guidelines for cultivating success.

Tune in to learn how you can work less, accomplish just as much as you did before, keep your customers happy, and most importantly, support your well-being with a four-day work week.

TIME STAMPS

1:13—How did we end up with standard five-day work weeks?
2:48—Why HBA decided to shift to a four-day work week
5:24—Sarah’s biggest concerns and what actually happened
14:22—The most important takeaways from the switch
16:45—A few rules for deriving the most benefit from a four-day work week
20:18—How to set clear expectations for your customers

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Subverting Capitalism in Small Business with Stephanie Najjar May 11, 2022

Show notes

Capitalist ideology loves to promote the idea of business and entrepreneurship. Capitalist logic says, if your idea is innovative enough, if you work hard enough, if you discover all the right strategies—you’ll make it big. You’ll be rich.

But when things aren’t quite so simple, you start questioning yourself. Your ideas, your products, your work ethic, your intelligence, even your morality.

This disconnect has serious consequences. There are very real reasons rooted in capitalism’s colonial, racist, and gendered origins that explain why so many small business owners—especially those who aren’t white, straight, cis men—don’t see the kind of straightforward visibility and wealth promised by capitalism, even if they do everything “right.”

And capitalism doesn’t just affect your work life. It’s embedded in how you see your self-worth, your relationship to essential human needs like rest and leisure, and maybe even in how you were raised and educated from a young age, creating deeply entrenched beliefs about yourself and the world around you.

So is there anything you can do to subvert capitalism, especially when you’re a small business owner who needs to make money in order to survive?

Yes! And you can find your own version of success while doing it.

In this episode, holistic business coach and strategist Sarah M. Chappell talks with Stephanie Najjar, a queer witch, life coach, and former PhD candidate in political theory at Johns Hopkins University. After quitting academia last summer because of burnout, racism, and toxic masculinity, Stephanie began a life coaching business rooted in decolonial values, witchcraft, and the esoteric tool of Human Design.

Stephanie’s specialty is the theory of capitalism and colonization. She uses her expertise to explain the basics of capitalism, going back to its roots and why it has such a powerful effect on us today. She breaks down dangerous narratives that capitalism promotes about business and entrepreneurship, debunks money myths, and critiques toxic spiritual spaces.

Stephanie and Sarah also discuss the critical importance of rest and leisure, ways to heal from capitalism-inflicted wounds, recovering from burnout, and how small businesses can become liberatory spaces that subvert a harmful paradigm.

You won’t want to miss this episode. Tune in for an information-packed hour of critique grounded in solid theory, as well as actionable insights on how you can use your small business to imagine and build a better future.

CONNECT WITH STEPHANIE

Instagram
Website

Holistic Business Podcast listeners can get 15% off their first booking of any offer. Connect with Stephanie by email to get the discount!

If you’re a member of the Holistic Business Academy, you have access to Stephanie’s 90-minute bonus training and reading list on the Social Theory of Capitalism for free. Not a member yet? Join our waitlist!

TIME STAMPS:

4:36—What is capitalism and why does it matter?
14:19—How capitalist logic affects small business owners
23:13—Labor and worth in the context of entrepreneurship
30:15—The generative power of rest
32:59—The myth of meritocracy
42:17—The liberatory potential of spiritual practices

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Sales Funnel Foundations Apr 27, 2022

Show notes

Sales funnels can be intimidating, but at their core, they’re simple: a way for you to communicate with your ideal customers and give them all the information they need in order to make a buying decision.

In this episode on the holistic business approach to sales funnels, business strategist and coach Sarah M. Chappell discusses why sales funnels are so useful for small business owners, what their essential components are, how you’ll know if your sales funnel is successful, and how to address the common problems associated with them.

Think of sales funnels as a tool to facilitate your customer’s experience: a conversation where you don’t necessarily need to personally walk them through every step of their buying decision, but they still get all their needs met as they explore the offer that you’re providing.

By the end of this episode, you’ll be equipped with the foundations of how sales funnels work, so you can build your own and take action in your own business.

TIME STAMPS:

5:37—How sales funnels help distinguish leads
6:41—The components of an effective sales funnel
11:31—The six needs your conversion phase must address
16:48—How to know if your sales funnel is working
17:31—Guidelines for sales funnel conversion rates
19:03—The ugly side of sales funnels

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Holistic Project Management Apr 13, 2022

Show notes

How do you want to run your business? On fear, exploitation, and the assumption that you and your employees are incompetent? Or on open communication, shared accountability, and ease?

In this episode on the holistic business approach to project management, business strategist and coach Sarah M. Chappell breaks down how the early 20th century roots of project management as a system that fundamentally disrespects and distrusts workers still impacts the way businesses typically operate today.

Then, she explains how the holistic business model departs from this history and uses project management in a radically different way: as a tool for cultivating ease and clear communication, and reducing cognitive load so you have more time for creativity, work-life balance, and rest.

Project management doesn’t have to be about surveilling yourself and your employees to maximize productivity. If implemented with a focus on ease rather than punishment, project management has the potential to help you structure a work environment that is calm, respectful, and communicative while reducing the amount of work your brain has to do on a daily basis AND making sure you get all your shit done.

Curious how you can apply this approach to your own business? Tune in and find out how you can question your systems, explore their assumptions, and then, of course, take action.

RESOURCES

Scientific Management on Wikipedia
A history of project management models: From pre-models to the standard models by Gilles Garel

TIME STAMPS

2:55—A quick history of project management, and why it’s problematic
14:38—The fundamental key to holistic project management
15:32—Three ways project management can make your life easier
18:55—How to use project management to reduce cognitive load
26:40—The link between project management and good communication

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Why Holistic Business? Mar 30, 2022

Show notes

What exactly is a holistic business? And why does it matter?

In this introduction to the philosophical foundations of building a sustainable business, holistic business coach Sarah M. Chappell breaks down the key characteristics of holistic business and shows you how it’s a radical reimagination of what business can do.

Put simply? Holistic business is different from paternalistic entrepreneurism, which operates by reflecting the extractive values of late capitalism and white supremacy culture.

Holistic business is contextual. It’s interrogative. It’s actually sustainable.

Tune in to learn what these principles mean, and how you can build a business that aligns with your values, serves your community, and sustains you in a way that works with your needs and limitations, instead of against them.

RESOURCES

The Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture

TIME STAMPS

1:00—Why small business matters
3:17—The key characteristics of holistic business
11:30—Examining assumptions in traditional business advice
13:49—Expansive vs. extractive work
15:35—Radical reimagining of success metrics

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