Transforming An Offline Biz Into An Online Empire with Emily Rosen

Director and Chief Operating Officer of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating – Emily Rosen

Are you eager to take your offline biz and turbo charge it with an online presence? Or? are you stumped on how to predictably create traction in your fizzling online efforts? This week I welcome millionaire guest Emily Rosen, the COO and Director of the internationally acclaimed Institute for the Psychology of Eating. She dives deep on how she went from -totally tech challenged? to successfully building a 7 figure business now considered to be an icon in the online education space. No matter where you are, Emily proves, you’re in the perfect place to get started and become an authority online.

Resources Mentioned in the Podcast:

• The Psychology of Eating Podcast
• Essentialism by Greg McKeown

Check out PsychologyOfEating.com for more info!

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript: Download

Announcer: Welcome to the Eventual Millionaire podcast - with your host, Jaime Tardy. Real talk and real advice from real millionaires, with a sharp focus on you - the Eventual Millionaire.

Jaime: Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Tardy and I am so excited to have my good friend Emily Rosen on the show. She is part of my all-woman mastermind group and I am ridiculously excited to ask her tons of questions today. She runs the Psychology of Eating, it's an amazing vocation program all about eating. We're going to dive into that a little bit, but mostly she has built a kick butt business in just a few years alongside Mark David and so I want to ask her a ton of questions about that. Thanks so much for coming on the show today, Emily.

Emily: Thank you for having me.

Jaime: So tell me about the Psychology of Eating and how you've gotten involved in it. You were a private practitioner before you hopped on board, right?

Emily: Actually, originally my degree is in Fine Arts. I was positive I wanted to be an artist, I have a degree in Printmaking from Rhode Island School of Design and I was clear that was my life trajectory but I developed a really intense eating disorder and I struggled with that - first anorexia, then bulimia and binge eating for nearly a decade - and I decided to fix myself. It wasn't to help others, it was "Wow, I'm feeling super crazy and I don't know what's going on with my body," so I started studying nutrition and that led me to counselling and teaching just because I felt that I had to share the information that I had access to and what kept coming up, with my clients and myself, was that, no matter how much nutrition information I could convey to them or apply to myself, something was still missing, something wasn't right, maybe they couldn't follow through on what they had to do or maybe they were doing everything right but they still weren't getting the results they wanted, which led me to study psychology counselling and eventually the integrated approach which we teach, which is eating psychology. It was not my career plan, it was not the trajectory I wanted for myself, and I was working as a chef and teaching nutrition and counselling and so forth and seeing private clients before I ever got involved with the institute.

Jaime: We talked a little bit about this before - I was an art major too, go art majors! So how did you make that shift? Learning on your own as a hobby is one thing, and there are tons of people right now, stuck in their day jobs, on what they think is their trajectory, and they're like "I'm doing this as a hobby. How do I do it as my own thing?" How did you make that shift?

Emily: I wish I could say it was more intentional than it was, like I had this master plan and I executed it. It was really a case of what happened for me in the art world was that I got very clear that I didn't like doing commission paintings of peoples? cockapoos. This was something that was so intimate and personal and dear to me that when I started to try to do it for a money exchange it really wasn't a match for me. The nutrition and health information I felt so passionate about because I saw the effects it was having on my physiology so translating it into a career was just happenstance. I had worked at one of the wellness programs before as an art teach and I went back and approached them and said "I'm now studying nutritional science and I was wondering if I could come in and work with you guys," and they didn't really have a structure in place so I was given free rein to create what felt like the best match for me, which was how I got into private practice because we would with these kids all summer and at the end of the summer they would go home to their everyday life and things would fall apart, because when you're in an insular environment and then you go to your home environment and you go back to school it's hard to sustain or maintain habits or teachings that you learned and I got into private practice because I saw a need and that's a lot of what's driven me in my life. I see something missing or I see a need or something that needs to happen and then I just take action and make it happen because there's a need there.

Jaime: That's awesome. So tell me a little bit about your journey with that and what you found because I find that really interesting. I have people who are in health on this show and we dive into that because it's integrated with your business - if you're not healthy as a person and you're not feeling good or confident or you have an eating disorder or something like that, that can affect everything else. So tell me about how you started to figure that out because I'm sure tons of people want to know.

Emily: I think there's often this idea that I have to fix myself before I step out and do anything and I think if you're living in that mentality you're probably never going to take action and I was definitely like that. Initially, when I was going to nutrition school, I didn't see clients, I didn't work with clients, I didn't start teaching because I felt so messed up myself. I had this belief or this thought that "When I finally fix this or figure this out, then I will finally live my life." Not only professionally - then I would start dating - there were so many aspects of my life that I put on hold because of guilt or shame or not feeling good enough and the turning point was actually doing those things in spite of that. So it was when I started to put myself out there and when I started to counsel and teach that I started to feel more nourished and I started to feel that I was being filled up in other areas of my life so I didn't need to act out as much with food. Sometimes people's relationship with food is a symbolic playground for other areas of their life where they're not getting their needs met. It might be in your personal or intimate relationships, a feeling of not getting the intimacy you desire, and of course we're going to turn to food, which is this intimate act of self-nourishment. So it might be that, professionally, you're not doing what feels true or right or congruent for you. that was huge for me and I feel like, really in the last three years, obviously I've had major turning points in my business but I've had major, major shifts in my health and the way I feel mentality, emotionally, spiritually and physically and it wasn't because I started to fix myself mentality, emotionally, spiritually and physically, it was because I found a real purpose that feels so congruent and so in alignment for me that everything else around that, frankly, has fallen into place with far greater ease. It wasn't because I healed my eating disorder and then took steps professionally, it was because I took steps professionally despite the fact that I struggling and that's when things started to resolve themselves.

Jaime: That's such a catch-22 for people that makes things difficult. What did you do to push yourself past that? Because it's super easy to be like "Eh, you know, I'm just going to wait until I have it all figured out." You had to take those first few steps and you had to push yourself to get there. What did you do or how did that happen?

Emily: There are a couple of things. One is that I'm super self-competitive.

Jaime: Sorry, I'm laughing because we got on the podcast and first she goes "I want to win!" I want to too, we're the same person!

Emily: My work with the Institute for the Psychology of Eating started four or five years ago and, initially, what happened was that Mark, who was the founder of the institute, was ruselfnning in-person programs. So he was training professionals, they would come in to Boulder, Colorado for ten hours a month and it was a great program but it was incredibly hard to fill because who can take ten weekends off a month, plus the training was thousands of dollars, then you had to get flights and all of this stuff, and I saw how much the work was impacting people but how small the impact was because of the way in which it was being delivered. He wanted to bring it online, I knew it had to go online and he basically said "Can you help me bring this online?" and I was the kind of person who typed like this, I was anti-tech savvy, but he said "Can you do this?" and I said "Of course I can," not having a clue, not knowing what a website was, knowing nothing about the online space. Frankly, I wish it was a better story but I just wanted to prove that I could figure it out. so that really propelled me and what was great for me, initially, was that I got to do a lot of the behind the scenes stuff, so it wasn't like I was out there and having to be a public persona and having to deal with what comes with that, which is a whole different story, but I knew how precious the work was and I knew what an impact it could have and I had been working in weight loss programs and overeating programs for the last seven years, also in person, and you can't replicate what happens when we're sitting in the same room together but I saw the possibility of bringing his work and what I had learned online an how much impact that could have and that motivated me, that desire was stronger than my fear. So for people who are struggling with these things, I think you have to find the driver for you, what really matters, and I got deeply in touch with the fact that this was bigger than any insecurity I had. I really wanted people to have access to what had changed my life. I had a very intense eating disorder, it was severe, and I remember when I was in the throes of it that I made a commitment that if I ever got out of it I would help other people to get out of it and I took that very seriously. Five years ago, when I was starting this, there wasn't these plug-and-play forums, you couldn't go onto some website and upload a video, it was super janky what I did, I had not a clue, but the desire to get it out there was just so much bigger and I think a lot of times we can either move away from fear, we can be driven by reaction to something - like so many people, when they're choosing a partner, have a list, like "I don't want anybody like the last guy that I dated, or anybody like this," and it's so easy to know what you don't want but for me it's a much better way of living your life to move towards what you do want. It creates more ease and less friction and more clarity and I think with more clarity things come to fruition much easier.

Jaime: And you get excited about it. Being "I don't want that," is very different to "I want that." It's pull versus push. Just to catch everyone up to speed, your boyfriend is Mark David who started the Institute for the Psychology of Eating. He had an offline program, you were like "Hey, I'm going to help you do it online," which would be crazy even coming from someone who's techy. Tell us how much you've grown in the past five years. Because I started Eventual Millionaire five years ago also, so when you started how much was it making and how much is it is making now that you've started this whole online thing?

Emily: We were way under $1 million when I started. It was very much a time for money exchange type of thing. I actually asked him, "Before I get on this call, can I make fun of the website you have?" because it was just so bad. There was no online platform, I think it was Weebly or something, it was five pages and it looked like someone had taken a brochure, cut it up and put it online or something. Now you can buy programs on how to create an online course or how to build an online business but there wasn't really that when I started five years ago and it wasn't like I took over the institute, I was just on the project of creating a distance learning program and I feel like that was really helpful because if I had it in my mind that I had to create this school it would have been daunting. I just had one piece that I had to create in the next year and I ended up preselling the course so that I had to create it in the next year because I personally do better with a sense of actual deadline, as opposed to ethereal made up deadlines. The content was over 200 hours so I had to figure out whether we were going to do video, audio, whether we were going to do handouts. What were we going to do? There weren't a lot of online courses being done, I think the University of Arizona were starting to bring programs online and stuff like that, so I just bought everything that I could find, or that I could afford, and went through programs and took notes on what I liked, what I didn't like and what I would do different and what I like so much about the online space and creating online programs is that I think it's a perfect marriage of the creative part of me, the artist part of me, and then the part of me that's analytical and has a strong left brain and likes to problem solve, because anything you imagine is possible. You could be like "I want this to drop down and an automated butterfly to come out." It's so phenomenal what is possible and I did have a program design background so I understand user interfaces but the tech part, I mean I'm not a coder, so I didn't do that, but I just drew out with a pencil and paper what I wanted and how I wanted things to go and how I wanted them to happen and that's how I got started, just reverse engineering and figuring it out from a user's perspective, which I think is really great because our user is actually 40, 50, 60 year old women who are terrified of being online so I think coming from that was really useful.

Jaime: What do you think really rocketed it? Because, okay, you created the program, you sold it beforehand, which I think is an amazing idea, but when you're going through and trying to make this entire online course it's daunting and you don't know the tech, everyone would stop at that point. You sold the course and you went "Okay, great, I'm going to make sure that I have the content ready by this time." Were there any obstacles that came up along the way? Because I think the nitty gritty is really important for people because that sounds easy - you created a program, it took a year - ta da! Butterflies! Which I?m sure is not the case. Give me the pain, Emily!

Emily: I started on the course and then I was like "Oh, we need customers, so we probably need a better website." I think this is where people get a little bit stuck and every so often I would just throw my hands up in the air because it was so hard because every step I would take would make me aware of another step I needed to take - so you think you're making progress but I would start making the course and then I would think "How are they going to get e-mail notifications? I don't think I can send those through Gmail. And I have to get a content management system." We were using a content management system but not at all to its full capacity. We actually use InfusionSoft but this was before campaign builder - it was good, but it was a different universe. I like learning new things, that's a characteristic of mine, so I fully enjoy that and when I first started it was only really me and Mark and we ended up having a bunch of team changes because going from running in person to online programs you actually need different skills in your employees, you need different people helping you out, so it was really just three of us when we got started, figuring things out, and you have to commit as much to the craft of creating a business as you do to the craft of knowing what you're teaching. I see this all the time, especially in the health space - people will go to school for six years to become a medical doctor or a registered dietician but they want to build an online business overnight and they don't want to put the same level of attention and commitment and education into learning the systems so that they feel empowered in the same way that they do in their practice and I became really clear right away that that was what it was going to take. I think if I had a push back or a resistance or a desire for it to happen overnight I would have been fighting myself along the way so I really dove into the systems and initially I was doing everything which I think was really empowering because I felt like the business really was mine and now I have a bunch of team members, in house and virtual, and there are parts of my business I don't even know how to run, but that wasn't the case when we started.

Jaime: How many people do you have in house right now?

Emily: We have eight full time people in house and then probably six to ten vendors, depending on what's going on, but these are all part time.

Jaime: That's what I know about you, from being in the mastermind - you know marketing like crazy, and it's interesting to hear your story because it hasn't really been that long. Five years is a long time online but in business it's not that long, to have become a kick butt expert at it. You are insane at it. Tell us how big your e-mail list was at the beginning and how big it is now so that we have some frame of reference.

Emily: When I started it was a couple of thousand and now it's over a couple of hundred thousand.

Jaime: A couple of hundred thousand!

Emily: I remember watching some YouTube video that was like "If you're going to have an online business, you need to have an e-mail list," and I was like "Oh, well then I'd better get an e-mail list." That was how I would figure things out. Initially, when I first started, I built our business in large part through social media. We didn't bring in any investors, we didn't want to give anybody equity in the company, we couldn't afford Google AdWords - we couldn't afford that stuff. You can afford paid advertising when you know how many students you're going to have or how much money you're going to make or you can track your customer lifecycle. I knew nothing, I just didn't know any of that, so I had to find ways to do that and I used social media quite a bit - and this was back when you could actually do stuff on Facebook without spending money. I built, I would say, probably a fourth of our business and our revenue and our e-mail list from Facebook alone. So that was a huge, huge piece for me and I loved it because I was actually a Facebook user so I think another thing is using the platforms and the skills that you already like and identify with. You might think you need to be on every single social media platform, and we are now but at the start we weren't, and I would rather do one better than a bunch crappy so don't use the ones you hate. People are like "I hate Twitter!" and they're on it all the time - don't be on it. If you got every customer that it was possible for you to get from Facebook you would be a multi-billionaire. So I'm really all about people taking action in the places that are the best match for them. It's interesting what you say about marketing - I don't even feel like I started studying marketing until two or three years ago. I started building my program five years ago but that was kind of a side project. To me, marketing is just psychology with an immediate ROI and I understand psychology and counselling so I feel like where I've come from with it and I will sacrifice conversions for the sake of integrity of messaging. I'll just say that up front because so many people will be like "If you do it that way, you might lose 2% conversions," and I'm like "Yeah, but my refund rates are under 1%. What are yours?" So there are things that I might take action on at the front end that result in fewer customers but they result in better customers, who stay with you longer and like you more and, honestly, it's a better match for them. So in terms of marketing, for me it's just about talking to people on a wave they can hear, so as a counselor it was always my job, when I was sitting with someone, to really understand their story, to understand what was going on for them, to understand what they need that they're maybe not aware of and to help them draw out connections they didn't previously see. So, as a counselor, I was always about helping people come to an awareness on their own versus telling it to them, because when someone comes to an awareness on their own it's a thousand times more powerful, impactful and helpful than when you tell them "Here's the connection that I see." So I see marketing very similarly - it's about teasing that out for people so that they feel empowered in the decision making process. Like when Mark and I are writing a sales funnel, we're never about "How do we get them to do this and then do this?" we're about "How can we get them to figure out if this is a match for them?" which I think is a slightly different way of doing it. So I have been studying marketing, there are things that I take from it and don't take from it, there are little things like where you put a landing page and where you put a button and things above the fold that I really love, and I love learning those skills but I feel like marketing is just talking to people in a way that they can hear you.

Jaime: That's awesome, and I think that's the thing that's really interesting, as you go through what you're saying - it's all just people. Whether you find them on Facebook or Twitter, it doesn't really matter, they're all people and you have to talk to somebody and find out what they need and if you have what they need, you sell it to them. I know that sounds over simplistic and I'm going to ask you for a bunch of tactics and stuff like that but I'm doing a ton of calls with potential clients this week and hearing their stories is so important because you forget when they become analytics on their website or people buy stuff and they're just numbers but when you actually talk to people it's a real person on the other end that you're really trying to help and the fact that you care whether they're doing it because they really want to and not because you figured out the red button and the arrow thing is huge, having integrity, especially online, because a lot of people don't. I still want to know all of the tactics that you used, though! So in those first few years, I know Facebook has changed, but what were some of the biggest tactics that really made the difference for you?

Emily: It was really connecting, personally, with people. We have two offerings now - the certifications training and we have a program for the public - but I started with the certification training and through creating that I realized we had this whole front end to bring in customers. That may seem obvious to you but to me I was like "Oh, right, there has to be these things that bring people to us. The program may be great but if nobody knows about it, who cares?" So I made a decision that we were going to have a policy that no e-mail goes unanswered, no comment goes uncommented on and no message goes un-responded to. That was just something that seemed really important to me. That was back when we had an e-mail list of a couple of thousand and we had a couple of thousand Facebook fans and it was way more doable but we actually still do that, we still stick to that five years later.

Jaime: What? I have people who do that for me and we still have a hard time with it. That's awesome.

Emily: If you don't get a response from us it's because your e-mail got lost, which happens sometimes, but we still do that and that's why we've grown our customer service team over the years. On social media I literally responded to, commented on and engaged with every single person that came my way and it used to actually be me responding to every single Facebook comment. You would come to our page and you would see a post and 138 comments back when we only had a couple of thousand followers because people were seeing it, they knew that people were there that they could engage with. Maybe it sounds woo-woo but it built a lot of good will. It's branding versus marketing - you don't always know the immediate ROI, you don't always know the impact that you have, but there was this sense of this culture that we created in our private groups and so forth where people felt that we genuinely cared and they felt that way because we did care; it wasn't some gimmick about how we could get people. This was back when you could send messages to people and they wouldn't end up in their "Other" folder on Facebook. For blogs and Facebook I would create documents and lists of everybody online that would like what we were doing or people who had similar audiences. Now you can do that with a click of a button on Facebook - you can create lookalike audiences. You couldn't create lookalike audiences back then, I had to create lookalike audiences, I took a lot of pride in my lookalike audiences, I just didn't have a name for them. I did a lot of research about what other people were doing in the space. Already our material was different - nobody else was teaching eating psychology, nobody else had integrated their approach to nutrition and psychology and how to work with clients using both fields together, so I already knew our material was unique but I needed people to understand that it was unique so I needed to see what they were already looking at and how I could create a connection with them. Sometimes people are like "I want to create something so unique and so different," but if people have no connection to it or they don't understand what it is, there's a dissonance there and it almost feels too far out and people want to push it away so I really thought about how I could them to understand what we were doing and how it connects to what they're doing and there was a lot of going to other people's posts and pages and generating conversation there. Never pitching, never posting links, just "How can I add to your world?"

Jaime: On other people's pages?

Emily: Other people's pages, other people's groups, other people's worlds, other people's blogs. Never pitching, always just giving value. So it was "Here's a great conversation. Here's my perspective on it," and that started to create crossover. I spend a lot of time on Facebook, it's like all of a sudden you're in a world and you see who this person likes. That's how that world works, it's the same thing as social interaction. I think, originally, social platforms were created for online social connection and if you lose sight of that you lose sight of the possibility that's there. I'm on this because you met me in person and we connected. If you got a random e-mail from me it would have so much less value, you'd be like "Oh, another person who asked to be on my podcast. Put them on my lineup of wannabes."

Jaime: That's what I do, I have a waitlist, you know that!

Emily: I know you do! But if you've connected with me or you've seen me give value to you in some way and you saw how incredibly awesome I am, you know what I mean? That's really how I started to build it. On social media we have over a quarter of a million followers now but when I started we had about 3-4,000.

Jaime: That's insane, especially as it's only been four years or so. The congruency in my head of you commenting on things, I mean I comment on things, I don't go to other people's pages and comment but still, I do things that are kind of similar but I haven't seen a massive growth, and especially since you're in a niche that's pretty full, there are a lot of people there.

Emily: Well yes and no. I would just say one thing about Facebook ' I did start writing ads for likes this year, which was the first time we've done that. Probably up to 90,000 were organic ' you can do things on Facebook like add all of your friends and I opened up other Facebook profiles, like pages where we share content, so now I have an Emily Rosen fan page, I have a Mark David fan page, a Future of Health fan page, so I started opening fan pages in other segments just to create some crossover and integration because if someone is looking for me, I want them to know about my business but they don't know that I have the business, someone might connect with me because I speak at an event or something like that. So if you're a business owner it's figuring out all of the ways that people are coming to you and making sure all of that is interconnected. Some people only know Mark David and that was a big issue - Mark had been an author and he had written books that were bestsellers and widely popular but this was back when people read a book and they put it down, you didn't have a place to go and option to watch a video of them talking about something, there was no e-mail list that supported these books. His "The Slow Down Diet" was translated into eleven languages but nobody knew there was the Institute for the Psychology of Eating because how would they know from this book, that they put down after reading, about this whole virtual world that we had created? So I think if you're a business owner it's figuring out all the places people might be looking for you, if they don't know they're looking for you, and figuring out how you can get into those worlds, either with guest posting or really just commenting, engaging or giving value. So that was really huge, I think, for us, to create such an interconnected universe through various platforms and ways.

Jaime: Did you do a lot of guest posting and stuff like that? Did you reach out that way a lot?

Emily: Not a lot. We definitely did some. A lot more interviews, I would say. Four years ago we said yes to everything that came our way, pretty much, unless it was off-brand, unless it was a weight loss summit where they're like "We're going to beat you into losing weight!" But everything and anything, like talk to this person for ten minutes so we could maybe get featured in this newspaper article. We said yes to pretty much everything. That's not the case at all now. Now, if you want to have Mark on an interview you have to fill out an application and stuff like that. I think sometimes people try to seem more important and successful than they are before they are, like they charge $1,000 an hour and it's like "Are you worth $1,000 an hour and do you actually have clients? Because if you don't have clients maybe you want to reduce your rates and get good at what you're doing and when you have more clients than you can handle, then have an application process or then charge $1,000." I think a lot of people want to guru-itize themselves when they have no business doing so. I would do interviews for ten people and we would have meet-ups here in Boulder, Colorado that were free evenings and we would get fifteen people. Now we have an online event and we have 76,000 and that's been in three years but that was because nothing was too small for us because you never know what it's going to be. I feel like a lot of people are like "I'm waiting for my big opportunity," and they're missing all of these small ones. If you're overbooked and you're busy I'm not telling you to do that but I think when you're just getting started there's this sense of "I need to seem important," and it's like "Are you important?" Really, are you? Do you have value to offer? Because if you don't have value to offer, anything you do is just not going to be sustained.

Jaime: And you can kind of tell the value you have to offer from the number of people who are coming to ask you for that value, especially online because at the beginning, when nobody knows you, you're like "Listen to me! Listen to me!"

Emily: There's so much noise. I feel like now everyone and their mother - I don't even know if that's an expression - is giving away so much free content, that's the thing right now, and we have a certification product but we also have info products and I think the info product space is changing because, like with eBooks, people used to charge $45 for an eBook and now there are sites where, for $9 a month, you can access thousands of eBooks. So it's really easy to figure out that not only can you give great free content but what is the result that you're offering people? A lot of marketing is pain point marketing - what's your pain? But one of the things that we do that I think is maybe different is we speak to past pain - where do you want to go? What-s the transformation? Because if you're just a problem solver then you're just Google. I could type into Google "I have a cut on my arm, what should I do?" If you're just a problem solver you're a commodity but if you're asking people to step into a bigger version of themselves, a greater version of themselves, and you can inspire people, that's priceless. I think for me, as someone who had an eating disorder for nearly ten years, one of the things that I feel that I was caught in was really a lack of desire to be here and be alive because I felt like what was offered to me, at best, was a solution, meaning I would be able to stop the behavior and I was like "I don't want to live my life just not acting out. What's on the other side of that?" So when you can paint a picture for people of possibility, that's like a whole different universe and I feel like a lot of the commodity marketing is getting phased out and people are just tired of that kind of problem solving. You probably know what you should be eating, who cares? Information is not lacking. That's not where we're at.

Jaime: So in the world of eBooks that are ridiculously cheap, and you've built your e-mail list to ridiculous numbers, you probably have to have an option, how do you separate yourself from all of the noise? Because we're still working in the same means with the same media so how do you separate yourself so that people are like "I see the transformation and I love you for it?"

Emily: The health space is a crowded space so I'm definitely in the health space but we are not teaching just health and nutrition information. Eating psychology is a field that Mark invented. He made it up, he was like "This is a field," and it's been very interesting to watch. He made up that field - I'm probably going to get numbers wrong here - probably ten years ago. People heard the term "eating psychology" and they assumed eating disorders but we're not teaching about eating disorders. I had an eating disorder but we're working with everybody else because everybody has a relationship with food. Your relationship with food is your longest term relationship. Whether you like it or not, you're in a relationship with it - you're making choices in your brain from your psychology based on your beliefs and you're eating and you're engaging with food based on your food stories. So if you grew up in a family where you had five brothers and every time you sat down to a meal you had to eat really, really quickly because if you didn't the food would be gone, if you haven't addressed that story, you could be living that out for your whole life and you could be thinking "I'm just a fast eater" but it's actually driven by a childhood experience that hasn't been integrated or address. So one of the ways that we differentiate ourselves is by just doing different work. On one level, nothing is ever new, but what is new is how you combine, integrate and extrapolate. I think when you're in a space, like let's say you want to be in the healthy space or whatever, it's looking for what's missing, so Mark did that - he wasn't a marketer, he just saw "Wow, everyone's doing nutrition or everybody's learning psychology," and he did both - he studied both, he went to medical school, he was a clinical psychology - but nobody's talking about how, when you're working with a client, with some clients it's appropriate to start with food, with some clients it's appropriate to start with their food story, and talking about when and how and how to discern and figure that out. So eating psychology, because it's a field we created, we own it on Google, we're the whole first page. People ask "How did you make that happen?" and I'm like "Well, we invented the field."

Jaime: Step one - invent a field.

Emily: It's true. I don't remember who it was but I went to some marketing conference and the guy was talking about how - and I'm going to butcher this analogy so I'm glad I don't remember who it is - but there are buckets and in any one bucket, which would be a category, you can fit six to eight brands that people retain and remember. So, for example, gas companies, if I said to you "Jaime, name gas companies," you would probably say Shell, Exxon and whatever, the top ones. There are tons of other gas companies but you're not going to be able to remember or retain that. In your ideal universe, what you do is you create your own bucket and if you're not creating your own bucket you're figuring out how to get in that bucket and if there are already ten really huge brands in there it's going to be really hard or not possible to become a household name at this point in the game. This was after we had already founded the institute and I was like "Oh my god, I have a bucket!"

Jaime: There's a great book called "Blue Ocean Strategy," have you read it?

Emily: I haven't read it but I've heard about it.

Jaime: You either play in the red ocean where all the sharks are and everyone dies or you go to the blue ocean where it's nice and pretty, so being able to separate yourself that way, in different markets, is huge for you, but the question that I still have is that you still have eBooks and I know you're coming out with a podcast which I think is perfect for you guys because you can show the case studies - I want to hear what you're saying to the people that really makes shifts for them because it is so radically different but how did you do that for a couple hundred thousand people on your e-mail list? How did they raise their hand and go "You guys are different, I know you are, I love you, sign me up.?

Emily: We provide a tremendous amount of value at no cost, asking for nothing, which I think everybody kind of knows but they don't always take action on it.

Jaime: What do you do? Tell me, tangibly, what it is.

Emily: For social media we have probably 24 different platforms that we disseminate on three to four times a day, whether it's articles, memes, we produce a lot of video content so we basically do a lot of virtual handshaking. If someone said to me "What was the number one thing that you could attribute your success to?" I would say consistency. It's not sexy but it's true. I remember posting on Facebook and some days no one would respond but I wouldn't go "You know what? If you're not going to respond to me, I'm out of here." I think that's what a lot of us do. There would be months where nothing would happen. I read somewhere that you're supposed to regularly communicate with lists, so I was like "Okay, I'm supposed to regularly communicate with my list," so I started to e-mail my list. The first couple of times people responded because they weren't used to it, they would be like "That's so cool," and then there was about six months where nothing happened - nobody was liking our posts, nobody was responding to our blogs - this was about three years ago and there were times where I thought "This is just not working. I need to go back and start counselling people and figure it out," but I just kept doing it. I had schedules for everything and I just kept doing it and doing it and something shifted, people were just like "Okay, I've seen you enough, I'll like you, you poor girl." So it's just practice and consistency. I wish I could say it was more than that. For example, one of the things we've done on social media, now it's hard to post outside links without putting money behind them, but we used to post a lot of outside links. I would go "Go read this blog," so I would rewrite intros to blogs that I knew people would really like and then when they'd click to read the blog they hit a squeeze page and integrated into the copy of the blog would be numerous places for them to option that made sense to them depending on the content they were reading and that used to work really well. It doesn't work that well anymore because people used to give out their e-mails left and right so we would get hundreds of options per week just from people hitting this squeeze page on our blog because they were coming from social media to read our blog based on whatever I had written to lead them to it. We did online conferences and events that were really huge for us and we did some paid traffic for those but we also had people that were affiliates that marketed them and it was a really big win for people. If you're going to reach out to people to partner with you or promote you, which we didn't do for the first three years, we did a little bit this year, you have to provide them with value and give them something that, when they give it to people, people still like them.

Jaime: Yes, exactly! Nobody wants to hurt their list.

Emily: Nobody wants to hurt their list, I don't want to hurt my list, so whenever I think about an ask I think about how it's going to uplift you and how what I'm going to ask you to give to your people going to leave them so overly enthusiastic and appreciative that you want to engage with me again. A lot of people are really sloppy with their asks, they just don't think them through. I've had people, where I'm having a drink at an event, ask me "Will you mail for me?" and I'm like "What did you just say?"

Jaime: Didn't you notice they were feeding you drinks the whole time? "Hey, baby, wanna mail for me?"

Emily: You're just like "Really?" That's like coming to me and asking for $100,000. You have no sense of how big of an ask that is. So we took a while before we asked because we wanted to get really clear about what we were going to be asking for and how we could make it a true win/win because I think if you're not thinking about how you could make it a true win/win it's a small space and, yeah, you could fix things but you don't want to mess around, you didn't want to have people send for something and have your landing page not be mobile responsive and have your content be crappy. You've got to get that stuff figured out before you ask anyone to do anything for you. at one of our online conferences last year we did the Future of Nutrition, that's the one that had 76,000, and the morning the conference went live we actually provided 60 hours of content for free and we invited people we knew were recognized and known and we invited people who were no names that we thought just had so much value to offer and people were just loving it so much that within six hours we had 8,000 options because it kind of went viral, people just started sharing it. I remember being there with my team and I was like "We have to be commenting every time someone comments," so we were sending traffic to social media to have people share about their experience in the event, so on Facebook, if there's a lot of conversation on a post, that post is going to stay in that newsfeed forever. So we were sending tens of thousands of people to our Facebook page to comment, and of course not all of them went on and a few of them wrote to us really angry because they hate Facebook, but a lot of them went on and were like "I'm loving this interview with Mark Hyman, it's changing my life," and immediately someone on my team is responding. So there was just this ongoing conversation the morning the event went live that you couldn't avoid. If you had liked our page or were in any way connected with our people you couldn't avoid us. We were also just so excited, like "Oh my God, people are talking to us!" and getting in there and commenting. It was kind of like if you go to a really big event - how can you create that sense of connection? I think we're all creating that. If we're buying programs or we're online, there is something that we're looking for. Our people are looking for help around their health, they're tried a lot of things, they haven't worked, and a lot of our clients and people who take our programs have a sense of "prove it to me" because they've been hurt or they've been jaded so if you engage with them with more of the same of what they've gotten, which is "You have to buy by midnight, otherwise you're going to lose everything and nobody's ever going to love you," I don't want to be that person, they're not looking for that, and it's so different to have them be like "Wow, you're just talking to me for free." We had this one woman who reached out because she was having trouble gaining weight and we don't provide counselling via e-mail, so if someone reaches out with a personal problem we send them to an article or a link or a resource or a counsellor because it's illegal and unethical to provide health information in that way, but for this woman we sent a template response for what was going on with her and for the last three weeks she's commented on pretty much everything we've done on Facebook, saying "These people really care." She's never going to be a customer but that matters and that has an impact. So someone who's never seen your Facebook page comes to it and they see someone writing on all of your posts "These people really care," that could potentially influence a thousand customers. You don't always know the impact of things but I think, if you act in a way that's congruent with who you are and what you want, those things naturally unfold.

Jaime: I love that and I love hearing how much success you have. We're extremely lucky in the world we live in now - the more people you help, the more money you have coming in, normally, which is insane. I love the idea of this online summit thing. A lot of people ask me to be on online summits and I don't know if it's worth it but you've run them before so tell me what that looks like. How did you know to do 60 hours? I would have thought that was a lot. Were you looking for a long period of time? Tell me the strategy behind the online summit in case someone wants to get into that.

Emily: The reason why we did a lot was because of the topic. Don't do a lot to do a lot - like I've seen people do very successful ones with twelve people because they're the perfect twelve people. We were talking about the future of nutrition - in the nutrition industry there are so many diverse opinions and so many different dietary systems that, in order for us to cover all of the topics we wanted, we needed a lot of people. So, plain and simple, that was a huge component of it. I also like to go big or go home.

Jaime: I love that about you. It doesn't matter how big it is, just do it.

Emily: Our first one had 45,000 people on it and it was all about eating psychology. 45,000 participants - it had a lot less experts in it. I think the summit model can be really good. I'm trying not to be offensive but I would say know your place - people do it for list building and if you're doing it for list building exclusively, just don't. First of all, it's not always the most targeted leads. The amount of time, energy and resources that you're going to spend doing an online summit could potentially cost you more and give you less targeted leads than if you ran Facebook ads.

Jaime: Really? That's really good to know. Because as you were talking about online summits I was thinking "A bunch of millionaires on an online summit, that could be cool."

Emily: That could be really great for you if it's really related to your brand. There are pluses and minuses - a lot of people just don't know where they came from, so you'll have some expert on it and people will go "Oh, I'm signing up for the Future of Nutrition Summit," and then they're like "Why am I getting e-nails from the Institute for the Psychology of Eating?" and I'm like "What do you mean? That was my summit. My branding is all over it!" People don?t always understand where they came from, so I think if you're doing it exclusively for list building, it would not be my number one list building strategy, but it is a massively successful thing for exposure and brand recognition overall. For us, when we did our first one, we already had a list and I think that was really important to me because we absolutely asked people to mail for it, who were experts, and I felt fine about it because I knew how much exposure they were going to get to our world so when we said "This is what you have to do to be in it," we said "And we're going to market it to our list for eight weeks, so you're going to get exposure to our list for eight weeks, we're going to have your picture and your bio featured, we're going to run ads that feature you on all of our social media platforms so you're going to get face recognition." I wanted to make sure that when I asked them to do a big thing - it's big to ask people to mail their lists - that I knew they were going to get something from it as well. So the very first one, I was like "I really hope we get people in this because otherwise I'm going to be super embarrassed." After that, I felt way more confident. It also produces a ton of good will. What's really interesting is that we made a lot of money with a very small list. I think my first online launch was 500,000-something, something like that, but we had a list of under 5,000. So I would think "Oh, s your list is not over 200,000? Obviously you're making 500,000 times 10,000." I'm not making eight figures, so it doesn't always work that way. Sometimes the bigger your list goes, it's like "Who are those people?" so you've got to be careful about how you grow it. I have a friend who just did a massive launch and he brought in about 200,000 leads in a very short period of time and he didn't have proper segmentation in place to really figure out where those people go and then you have this massive list and you don't know whether they're professionals or not. You need to figure out, when you bring those people in, how you're going to segment them out. People hate surveys so how can you figure out little tricky ways to get them to raise their hands about who they are and what they do? I think summits are awesome from the perspective of getting a lot of exposure and a ton of good will. Our programs are high price point - our certification training is $7,000 - so there are tens of thousands of people who will never be able to afford what we do, what we offer, but we still want to provide them a lot of value for free. We also do eating psychology, so when we are inviting people to our summit and they are nutrition teachers, they teach different dietary systems and it's awesome because we are now providing people in our universe who go "Listen, I have a thyroid issue," and we can go "We're not going to help you with that, but this is an expert who we trust and respect," so we're doing a service to our community and then we're doing a service to the people who are now going to get clients from us that we don't need and we can't help. I would say if you're going to do it, everything you do, you need to think about how it's going to serve you and enhance your business but also how is it going to feed the ecosystem that you're in' After we did our first summit we had people reaching out to us to be in our next one which, to me, is such a compliment because it feels like the experts got something from it. I've been in, I don't know how many, so many, summits, and there are ones that have yielded results for me and some that have not and I pay attention to it and I think about what they did that worked differently for me. So if you're just thinking about it as a list grab, don't do it. Nobody who matters is going to say yes to you and you're not going to like yourself, it's going to feel slimy. There are so many people who do 15 minute interview and then it's 20 minutes of pitch - ours were 55 minutes of content. We did not allow any pitch in the interview; we allowed pitch at the end and we allowed links to their websites and their bios and blogs and all of that stuff, but we're really clear that, when people are tuning in, we want them to hear actual content. The other thing is that Mark researched every single one of our speakers, like he ordered their books if we didn't have them. I've shown up for interviews and people don't even know where I'm coming from - they're like "Oh, you're like a nutrition coach, so good to have you here," and I'm like "Really?" That's so rude.

Jaime: It is, just "Welcome to my thing. I don't know who you are."

Emily: I feel like if you treat it like it's this curative online event it can be magical. It did so much for our business in terms of exposure, recognize and obviously lead gen. it's unbelievably cheap lead gen. if you're going to run ads on Facebook, like if I'm running a video series versus a series of fifty interviews for free, you're going to get much cheaper leads - much, much cheaper - and then, again it's a question of what's their customer lifecycle, do they actually buy? But we also do some affiliate marketing now too, so there are some programs that we promote because they fill a need that we don't have, so instead of us producing more content we're like "Oh my God, our friend is doing that exact same thing," so some of those leads will end up converting to other offers. You just need to consider your business ecosystem and where it's actually to be an advantage to you.

Jaime: I love one of the things that you said before - you did this online summit and you were scared.

Emily: Oh my God, so scared.

Jaime: But I think that's really, really awesome. We have to start wrapping up, so I am going to ask you the last question in just a second, but you said that online summits wouldn't be your number one tactic for lead gen - what would be your number one tactic for lead gen?

Emily: Right now the thing that does best for us is Facebook ads. In terms of cheap and targeted, overall, that would be my number one. The other thing I would say about that is that I full time team and a lot of people don't have a full time team so if they're going to run a summit they're outsourcing. But I know how to run it and I have a full time developer on my team. I did not have that two years ago so if I was going to produce a summit I would have had to get someone to run the backend of it and all of those pieces. If you already have a team and you're just using team resources then it can be a wash because you're just allocating their time to different areas but, if you're someone who has X amount of budget for lead gen and marketing strategies, most of the time I would choose Facebook advertising - unless, like in your case, you have a very specific market, you're doing interviews with millionaires, you could have a summit with millionaires and then it makes perfect sense. When we do the eating and psychology summit, the field is so diverse and there's not really a lot of eating psychology experts so we'll get people who come in who are somatic archaeology experts and that's not what we do, so there's some creative difference there.

Jaime: Who are these people?

Emily: "What is this list that I'm on?" Oh my God, you signed up! You have to be aware of that when people come in for a summit. You can get higher spam rankings when you start mailing people after a summit and they're like "I thought I signed up for a summit, why are you now e-mailing me?" Some people are super grateful, there's just a whole set of problems and a whole set of awesomeness.

Jaime: I love that. I think it's awesome that you've tested so many different things and you can tell us the number one strategy that's working for you in a really busy niche. You've built an amazing business in just a few years and I think that's one of the reasons that I wanted to have you on, because it's so inspiring, especially in the niche that you're in. it's ridiculously impressive so pat yourself on the back. I know you don't do that too often, you're too humble, but pat yourself on the back. We have to start wrapping up so I'm going to ask you the same last question I ask everyone. It's always weird asking my friends the question for some reason but I'm going to do it anyway.

Emily: I'm wishing I had known this. I would have gone through all the interviews, listened to all the last questions, collected them and then created the best answer.

Jaime: You want to be the best! I love that.

Emily: I also thought that during the interview I would have time to think of a response but I was so busy talking about myself I didn't have a chance.

Jaime: I hope you're ready! Maybe put on the deer in headlights look. I gave her a heads-up at the beginning, I usually do for everyone, but sometimes I don't and it's kind of funny, I should maybe take screenshots but that would be mean, I wouldn't do that. What's one action listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of $1 million?

Emily: I feel like the place that I started that was really helpful is if you don't already have clarity about what you do then you definitely need clarity about what you're doing and what you want to create. I'm so glad that I just started with the distance learning program and not with creating a business, in my own mind. I was creating a business but in my own mind I was just creating the certification training. So figure out the one thing that you need to start right now to move you forward one step and take that one thing and single pointedly focus on that one thing and if, as you're focusing on that one thing, other things come up that need to be done that are related to it, do not go down a rabbit hole and try to get those things done - make a list and get back to them - because once you accomplish one thing it's so much easier to accomplish the next thing. It sounds unsexy again but that was really helpful and I just want to say one more thing as I think I spent a lot of time in research. I spent a lot of time doing research because I had no idea what I was doing so I think really seeing what's going on, like if you're in the make money space, to really look at what other people are doing in that space and what you like and don't like from it. I haven't read the book "Blue Ocean" so I'm probably just saying what somebody else said.

Jaime: But in your own words, which is better.

Emily: What I did is I looked at what was happening in certification programs - I literally mapped out what everybody was doing from when a customer first engages to when a customer graduates and every step along the way, places where customers get lost, like we do a lot of follow-ups and reminders and we track out students very extensively because I feel like the educational facilities of the future that are going to be successful are the ones that take responsibility for their students actually learning the material, not just buying the material - that's really important to me - so what I did was I looked at what everybody else was doing and I saw what I thought was working and what I would want to keep and what I would want to change and how I could really make our program as different as possible. So I don't know if that is helpful but those would be my things.

Jaime: Because you went super deep on one specific thing. Have you read the book "Essentialism"

Emily: No.

Jaime: The reason I say this is I think this is a visual summary of exactly what you've said and I've heard this over and over again, I think it's critical, so I'm going to show everyone. This is the exact same amount of line as that. So if you're putting yourself on a thousand different things, which is what everyone seems to do nowadays - we're entrepreneurs, we sort of go all crazy - you only did the distance learning thing, that's it, you went all in, you went deep, you made it the best, because I love that about you, the best humanly possible, and then you can go and do the next thing as well as humanly possible. It's not about doing 17,000 things and then nothing gets done and you look back and you're like "Why didn't I make any progress?" The amount of progress you make in your entire business is exactly what you said in this last question, which is huge. It's so congruent too, so thank you.

Emily: It's so important. I just focused on the learning program and I was aware, during that, that I needed a new website and I needed an e-mail list but I didn't stop what I was doing. I finished the certification program and then I moved on to a website rebrand and the whole time I was itching to build my e-mail list, because I always want to get everything done all at once, but I was like "I have to finish this website," because who the hell cares if I'm bringing in leads if my website looks like crap? I'm going to drive traffic to this thing? Hell no! So I finished the website and then for a year I focused on list building and other things came into my universe but I pushed them aside. So I guess I do that but I don't have a cool diagram.

Jaime: You were before the cool diagram.

Emily: Okay.

Jaime: Thank you so much, Emily. I want everybody to check out your podcast and everything but tell us where we can find you online. If they're interested in signing up for your website and your e-mail list and all of that fun stuff, tell us where we can find more.

Emily: My home is PsychologyOfEating.com and we've got tons of free content on there. There's a video series you can sign up for if you actually want to learn more about dynamic eating psychology, if you want to become an eating psychology coach that would be awesome because we want to get as many out in the world doing this work as possible, and we have programs for the public as well, so for people who are struggling around their own food issues. But go to PsychologyOfEating.com, sign up for my e-mail list, because I like building my e-mail list!

Jaime: And tell them that I sent you!

Emily: Tell them that Jaime sent you.

Jaime: You also have a podcast coming out.

Emily: Yes, Psychology of Eating Podcast, we're so excited. What we're going to do is we're actually going to do sessions live. Mark is actually going to work with clients live. I love it because it's a combination of clinical skills and reality television, which I think is the best thing that's ever happened. I'm actually a voyeur, I just like to see what other people think and do. So we're actually doing live sessions and he'll break them down so if you're a practitioner you'll be able to hear why he did what he did and if you're someone who's maybe struggling around your own food or health or body issues there are very likely insights that you can learn and use on yourself and I'll be doing short, quippy, to match my fast paced personality, insights into eating psychology, so if you have a short attention span or you just want to listen to something very quick you can tune into mine and Mark's Psychology of Eating podcast.

Jaime: Perfect. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Emily. I really, really appreciate it and can't wait to hang out with you again.

Emily: See you soon.

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Hi I’m Jaime. Each and every week I bring you the top business advice from the people who know best.

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