Key Takeaways
- How a four-week meal planning course led Lauren to launch her first membership site.
- Why it was okay that Lauren’s membership site started with just a Facebook group, emails, and PDFs – and how it organically grew into something much bigger.
- How to provide value to your audience even if you haven’t necessarily faced the same struggles or challenges they have – and why so many great membership sites succeed by simply cataloging and curating good information from other sources.
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Ready to reclaim your time and attract more monthly paying customers? Our step-by-step guide will show you how to build a membership site that turns your passion into recurring profit. Click here to download!Memorable Quote
“There are limitations to private practice, especially if you’re seeing clients face-to-face. You’re limited by your geography because people don’t necessarily travel that far to see you. You’re limited by the number of hours in your day. Eventually, it gets to the point where you think, ‘How am I ever going to make a decent income out of this career?’” – Lauren Gayfer “Sometimes you’ve just got to get out of your own way and quit talking to yourself about all the things that are stopping you from doing what you want to do. Hit the live button. Hit the record button. Write a blog post and just get it out there.” – Lauren GayferEpisode Resources
The Fairy Food Mother Lauren Gayfer on FacebookTranscript
Read The Transcript
Shelli: You can’t steer a parked car. Today’s guest is nutritional therapist, Lauren Gayfer, and in this episode, she describes how getting started before she had it all figured out actually helped her members revealed exactly what they needed. Lauren Gayfer, welcome to the It’s a TRIBE Thing Podcast. How are you?
Lauren: I’m great, Shelli. How are you?
Shelli: I’m fabulous. Thanks. I am stoked to share your story because I have been talking to a number of therapists recently and the idea of going from a one-to-one therapy model and, in your case, nutritional therapist to group coaching to what in your case has transitioned to this incredible membership site is transformative to the way you operate and also the number of people that you’re able to help. So, thank you so much for coming to share.
Lauren: Yeah. You’re all so welcome. I’m really happy to be here.
Shelli: I loved hearing the story about how you started as you’re a nutritional therapist. Can you give some back story on sort of what that looked like for you and now how having a membership site is helping you to serve more people in an even deeper way?
Lauren: Yeah. Absolutely. So, I qualified as a nutritional therapist almost 10 years ago, and as every nutritional therapy graduate does, I went into private practice seeing clients one-on-one for years and years. I took a little bit of time out to have babies and then went back to it but there are limitations to private practice, especially if you’re seeing clients face-to-face. You’re limited by your geography because people don’t necessarily travel that far to see you and especially because I live in quite a small village. And also, you’re limited by the number of hours in your day and with two small kids, I really didn’t have that many hours in a day so I maybe only see one or two clients a day three or four times a week and eventually gets to the point where you think how am I ever going to make a decent income out of this career? I’m really only helping so few people each week. So, I felt very restricted with what I was doing and frankly, getting a little bit bored as well.
So, I joined a business coaching group and I started hearing about online business, thought I’m going to give this online thing a bit of a go and see how it goes. So, I launched a very small, very generalized kind of healthy eating four-week group coaching program, and that was the meal plans and some advice on self-care and it was very generalized and I had about 15 people on there, women mainly. When the program came to an end, they said, “Well, what are we doing now?” and I said, “I have no idea. What are we doing now?” And so, I thought about it and I said, “Well, do you want a membership? Should we have a membership and I’ll give you meal plans each month?” And most of them said, “Yeah. That sounds great. Let’s do that.” So, that’s basically how the membership was born.
Shelli: I so appreciate that because as you started on your journey, I can imagine that as you’re limited by both, like you said, geography and time. And especially with a young family, how immediately you can stare down the barrel of that and say to yourself like, “This thing that I loved enough to go to school for, this thing that I loved enough to learn about that has meaning to you, am I actually going to be able to make a living at?” Was there a moment for you as you’re transitioning from a one-on-one model to before you had the membership where you either regretted the choice you made and thought perhaps, “Should I have done something different?” Because at the onset this is going to be something that again you’re limited by geography and time.
Lauren: Yeah. Well, I left a corporate career in advertising to retrain as a nutritional therapist, so I’d been there, done that with regards to working for other people and it wasn’t for me at all. I knew that I needed to work for myself and I have no other interest in nutrition. This was the one thing that I’m so passionate about. So, it wasn’t really an option to quit and go back to something else or get a regular job. I just find a way to make this passion work and kind of no matter how that looks and I guess I just found my way through the online world and just kept pushing to quite where, okay, now this is gaining some traction. Now, I’m reaching more people, now I’ve got the recurring income. It’s unusual in my industry to have a recurring income for a start but to reach this number of people, especially in the UK, most of my colleagues and my peers and the other people that I studied with so very much stuck in kind of one-to-one clinic model and some of them are struggling. Some of them made a success of it bit but I’m much happier doing what I’m doing.
Shelli: Well, I want to acknowledge you because there’s something really magical about finding an innovative way because you didn’t know anything about online marketing or membership site. All you knew is you have this passion and the skill and this desire to help people have better nutrition and to be able to balance their time and all of that kind of stuff and to be able to start from ground zero and say, okay, I love what you said, “I’m going to figure this online thing out.” I just want to acknowledge how amazing that is. Because I think you’re a shining example of that, if you can start with a skill set or passion or knowledge for all of those people listening, you don’t need to have it all figured out with respect to how does this “online thing” work. In your case, you joined a group, you figured it out, and you realized very quickly that the skill set that you almost weren’t able to make a feasible living from because of geography and because of time now becomes incredibly scalable and so you’re able to reach and help so many more people.
Lauren: Yeah. Absolutely. And what you were just saying in terms of you don’t have to have it all figured out, it can be very overwhelming in the online space to think that you need all the bells and whistles and all the platforms and all the tech. I started with Facebook group and some PDFs and email. That’s how my membership site started out. I didn’t have anything. I didn’t have a platform. I sent them an email every week or every month. We had a Facebook group but that was it and I was designing my own PDFs and that was it. And now it looks completely different like what a beautiful membership site, hosting a good job with videos and whatnot. It didn’t look like that, to begin with at all so I kind of wanted to speak to that side of people who are thinking, “I can’t possibly have a membership site. I can’t possibly make a success out of an online business because I don’t have all the tech.” You really don’t need all of that to get started. You just need, like you said, your passion and then the rest of it will just fall into place.
Shelli: Yeah. And you can also unpack it and unfold it as it grows too. You don’t have to take it out of this package and have this amazing pristine membership site with all of the moving pieces completely perfect and figured out because the truth is we were speaking earlier and the truth is that your members will help you with respect to what they need and what they want by communicating that with you. And I loved what you said when we are speaking earlier because you said one of the best things that you’ve done is get crystal clear on the problem you solve and then create a success path around that. And for everybody listening, a success path is basically the steps to get from the beginning a level of whatever your niche is to the sort of higher-end expert-ish level. And in between those two distances, there are a few steps that your people have to go through to be able to create that transition and that success. I’m wondering if you could speak to how you figured out what the laser problem was for you because you said you did start out talking to more people and a broader audience and then they sort of told you what they wanted.
Lauren: Yeah. Absolutely. So, in the beginning, when I first set up my membership, I really have no idea what my niche was. It was very general healthy eating. It was women. I did have a focus around busy moms because that was the space that I was in and those are the kinds of clients that I was seeing. So, it was really kind of about saving time with meal plans but I really struggled to get really deep on how I really solve their problems. But the more I spoke online and the more I launched so this was I launched my membership with numerous five-day challenges, and it was a sugar-free challenge. And the women that joined my sugar-free challenge tended to be women who’d been on a lot of diets over the years and they really resonated with what I talked about in terms of finding balance and getting of this kind of roller coaster being on a diet, roll off the diet, and just choosing balance and nourishment. And all this stuff that I’m passionate about and I believe in and these are the women that start to gravitate towards me and then I realize, gosh, I’m solving this problem of getting women off diet.
And then it all just fell into place so everything that I spoke about even though I’m not about weight loss. I don’t talk about weight loss at all. A lot of women do have weight to lose obviously because they’ve been on many diets but my angle is very much that’s not your be all and all. The number on a scale doesn’t define who you are. There’s so much more to you than being defined by a number and to changing their mindset around what food, what they need food for, for their nourishment and for their energy and for their brain function and just turning it all in its head in terms of what they need to eat, why they need to eat rather than just measuring everything that they eat by some sort of calories to go or numbers of point or whether it’s going to make them put on weight or not.
[ANNOUNCEMENT]
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[INTERVIEW]
Shelli: Well, I want to point out to everybody and I just want to refocus what you just said because the truth is you can’t steer a parked car and you didn’t have all of the answers but through these series of five-day challenges, what happened is it actually revealed the need that your community was actually craving. So, for those who, again, think they need to get it perfect or they have it all figured out, in your particular case, you have an incredible niche that you’re supporting in a very special way but you wouldn’t necessarily have known that had you not started moving before you are 100% ready.
Lauren: Absolutely, right. And also, a lot of people feel that they have to have been on the same personal journey that their audience had been on in order to be able to connect with them. And I did struggle with that for a while because I thought, “Well, I’m not my avatar. I haven’t ever had to lose 50 pounds or been in slimming clubs,” but yet I still manage to connect with them and they still resonate with what I’m saying. So, I think that can be another sort of limiting belief for people that they have to have been through, they have to have a big personal story that their avatar can resonate with. I think there’s still other ways to communicate with them. It doesn’t have to be always about you.
Shelli: Absolutely. And you know to your point, there are many people that have membership sites that curate other people’s talent or skill or information. Basically, the purpose of those people’s membership site is that they are the filter by which people don’t have to go out and do all the legwork or the research. They’re curating information from all different kinds of resources. So, to your point, there’s many, many kinds of membership site and you don’t have to be the face of or the person is the person you’re serving. In your case, you have this incredible skill set and this knowledge and this passion that serves a certain demographic even though those aren’t things that you specifically struggled with yourself.
Lauren: Yeah. Absolutely.
Shelli: What is the best unexpected positive surprise that you have experienced through having a membership site that you just didn’t see coming when you started?
Lauren: Just the unbelievable connection that you get with people. I’ve got ladies who’ve been in my club since the very beginning, which was I launched at November 2016 and then again in May 2017. And so, I’ve got a lot of women who have been with me since then and that’s kind of like my family and that’s the level of connection that you can get with people through having a membership site because you are speaking to them every day in whatever community you choose to host and mine’s in Facebook and I do coaching calls and Facebook lives and I’m now doing live events as well and so I’ve got to meet some of them in person. And it’s just I never imagined that I would get so close to these people and just get that level of connection with them. So, that’s just been a really lovely surprise to create to that community and also something in my own I guess personal professional development is kind of a being a leader for these people. I never imagined that I would be that person but I am and I love it.
Shelli: That’s fantastic and I love what you had said in the conversation we are having earlier as well. You were talking about doing all of this while also being an introvert and I’m wondering like what your opinion is for those people who are thinking, “Oh, I’m not sure if I’m comfortable being the face of something.” What advice would you give those people who were sitting on a gift, a passion, the skills, the knowledge, who aren’t really sure how to navigate through that? Because at the end of the day, this has transformed your life, and this has transformed the lives of the people you serve and had you not figured out a way to navigate around that, these people would not be receiving the help and the support that they are through your membership.
Lauren: Yeah. Absolutely. And sometimes you just got to get out of your own way and just stop talking to yourself about all the things that are stopping you from doing what you want to do. Hit the live button, hit the record button. Write a blog post and just get it out there. A lot of people might not believe that I’m an introvert because I had to do a lot of public speaking in my career in advertising and I’m fairly comfortable on camera but I do then have to go and have a lie down afterwards because it’s…
Shelli: Fair. Totally fair.
Lauren: So, that’s the introvert side of me is that I can speak to groups of people. I can get on camera but it does drain me and so I just have to protect my energy in other ways. But these things can really daunting but if you are passionate about helping people and your skill and your passion is about transforming other people’s lives, then you’ve got to stop holding that from people and it’s just one piece of advice I’m going to give but I can’t remember who gave it to me years ago was it’s actually selfish for you to keep your talents to yourself. There are people out there waiting who need you and don’t let your shyness or introverted-ness or your limiting beliefs stop you helping the people that need it.
Shelli: Yeah. I received a very similar piece of advice with respect to the same and people in general but also women specifically were wired to want to give and want to serve and once we reframe in our minds that by not honoring our gifts and not sharing that that we know with those who need it, it is holding other people back. So, in some ways, we are either causing harm by not providing the help that we’re able to and we’re not serving in the full capacity that we can in the world and making that contribution and leaving that legacy and helping those that need the help that we can provide.
Lauren: Yeah. Absolutely. And it’s so heartening when you get lovely messages from the people that you’ve helped and people say things to me like, “I wish I found you years ago,” and, “You need to go and then speak to all these slimming clubs,” and, “You’ve changed my life.” And that kind of thing made me think, “Well, I have to keep going. I have to keep going. I have to reach more people. I have to keep launching. I need to speak to thousands of people,” because thousands of people out there need this. I want to put an end to dieting. I want to stop people having to go to slimming clubs and feeling terrible about themselves because they put a pound one week and all of that. That’s my bigger mission is to just do away which people happen to go on diets.
Shelli: To your point, there is always a ripple effect that is bigger than that which we do and, in your case, I love what you just said because on the outside it looks like you’re helping people with nutrition and getting off diets but really, I mean, there is a layer of that. That as people’s self-esteem is harmed and in some case, self-loathing, and in other cases just making choices based on a limiting belief that you’re not the amazing gift to the world that you are and so on the outside it looks like you’re simply changing the way people view nutrition but what you’re really doing is empowering people to live full healthy complete lives free from pain.
Lauren: Yes. That’s it. You summed it up.
Shelli: So, what is the piece of advice you would give somebody who’s considering starting a membership site but maybe doesn’t have it all figured out?
Lauren: It doesn’t matter. I hardly had any of it figured out and it just every little piece evolved and changed as I went along and every month I learn something new. Every launch I learned something new. Like I said to you, I didn’t have my target audience. I didn’t know who my avatar was. They kind of revealed themselves to me as time went on and if you have a gift shared then don’t keep it from people. Just start with exactly where you are and let it unfold and evolve because my membership and everything that I do is just evolved and it keeps evolving. I’m in a completely different place now in my career than I was two years ago, three years ago, and I expect I’ll be in a completely different place again in another two or three years and that’s exciting.
Shelli: And, yeah, and to your point there is something that’s beautiful about watching it evolve as it unfolds because, again, you can’t steer a parked car and you get to experience all these amazing transformations and innovations that you’re making with and for your members and that literally would not have happened had you not started before you had all the pieces figured out. So, I just wanted to acknowledge you for that and thank you for spending your precious time with us today. We so appreciate you.
Lauren: Oh, thank you, Shelli. I loved talking to you. Thank you so much.
Shelli: If people are looking for you online if they want to connect and if they want to be part of your amazing community, where is the best place for them to find you?
Lauren: So, probably on my website, TheFairyFoodMother.com or on Facebook.
Shelli: And is on Facebook, is it the same name?
Lauren: I literally just in the last sort of week or so decided to drop my brand-name and go for my personal name. So, it’s Lauren Gayfer on Facebook.
Shelli: Perfect.
Lauren: I’m transitioning over. Yeah.
Shelli: Incredible. Well, thank you so much for your time, Lauren.
Lauren: Thank you, Shelli.
Shelli: And we have definitely appreciated your insights.
Lauren: Thank you so much.
