ep014: Practitioner Spotlight: How to work with clients the way you really want with Hilary McKown

[JOANNA SAPIR]

Welcome to the Business Revolution Podcast, where practitioners and coaches that provide services in health, wellness, and education, come to learn the business side of things like marketing, pricing, hiring, finances, all the things you need to streamline and organize your business, create steady and predictable income, serve your clients even more deeply and reach your full potential as a business owner. If you are a skilled, experienced practitioner of your craft that has or wants to have a profitable and sustainable business doing the work you love, you’re in the right place. I’m so glad you’re here. Let’s get into this episode.

In today’s episode, I’m talking with practitioner Hilary McKown. This conversation originally happened in a live stream I did with Hilary earlier this year. I didn’t do the interview intending for it to be on the podcast, but I wanted to bring it to you here on the podcast, because there are some really important elements to Hilary’s story that you may resonate with. So Hilary was the owner of a yoga studio in Northern Italy. She’s American, but she’s been in Italy for the last 23 years and she owned and ran this yoga studio until the pandemic started.

You might remember that Northern Italy was where one of the first big outbreaks in the world happened. It was shut down and quarantined before most of the rest of the world was and so her yoga studio was shut down in the midst of all that indefinitely. That ended up being a catalyst for Hilary. She got to think about what she really wanted to be doing with her business, who she really wanted to be working with and how she really wanted to be working with clients because although she had owned this yoga studio for years and was known as a yoga teacher, you’ll hear about how over time she had actually started doing much deeper work than just yoga. She wanted to be more public about that, to bring it all together, to bring together all the modalities she was using together into one offering for the people who she knew really needed this work. I hear that quite a bit from other practitioners.

So I’m hoping that you’ll be inspired by her story to do what you really want to be doing in your business. Here’s my conversation with Hilary. Why don’t We start with you just sharing a little history of you as a practitioner?

[HILARY]

If I go way back into prehistoric times, I worked in corporate and had that crazy career. When I moved to Italy 23 years ago, I put that on the side and I decided to concentrate on my kids and started taking yoga and got really into yoga and then did a teacher training and then became a teacher and then opened a studio, a yoga studio. That’s the ancient history. That studio, I just closed it right before, when was it, right before I did the BRA with you.

[JOANNA]

So let’s see, so was in COVID times already?

[HILARY]

Yes, it was right at the big sort of —

[JOANNA]

2021, it must have been.

[HILARY]

Yes, it was right for us. In Italy, it was like during the lockdown still, definitely.

[JOANNA]

So was closing the studio something, was that a result of COVID or had it been something that you were already planning to do?

[HILARY]

I was already planning definitely on leaving the studio, like physically me leaving and going to Spain. That was the idea. I had a hope that I could keep the studio, keep it running and go back and forth with it and have my teachers keep it going but I think COVID gave it sort of the death now. Also, it just was getting really complicated, like tax wise and all these boring administrative stuff too, being an American in Europe. So it was something that felt like a ball in chain at a certain point and I felt like I had to keep it going for all the people and the community and everybody that I loved and the people I’ve been working with and all my teachers and so COVID yes, having had the lockdowns that definitely made it, let’s say easier to close it down all together.

[JOANNA]

It’s interesting how COVID was like that for a lot of businesses, how it created, actually opportunities for people to really pursue what they wanted or clean up things they wanted —

[HILARY]

Exactly. It gave me a lot of clarity and this confidence and, okay, this is the step. This is the next step.

[JOANNA]

I’m just recalling in your BRA cohort was Peter and Lynn who also COVID gave them this chance to pause, basically rebuild their business to be what they wanted it to be rather than the business they ended up with.

[HILARY]

Exactly, exactly, because that’s exactly how it all happened for me and how I sort of came upon you and decided to do the work with you because I was like, oh, look, here’s an opportunity. Here’s a little moment of pause that I’ve not been able to give myself and carve into myself because businesses, yes, they just get momentum and they go, oh, wrong. I’m in inertia. Then you have all these feelings around it as well and attachments to the people that you’re working with that you let down.

[JOANNA]

Well, tell us more about that. First of all, tell us what is it you really wanted to do and then what was that like as far as those attachments and saying goodbye to them. What was it that was pulling you forward?

[HILARY]

I was definitely being pulled out of the yoga world, the stricter more limited yoga world into more of just the movement and also nervous system regulation and then trauma world. I started working more and more with people who, or sort of gravitating more or more and also attracting more people who had chronic pain and other chronic conditions. I myself have a chronic condition that I got clearer about as well during COVID and got an official diagnosis finally. So all of that gelled together that I felt that I really wanted to serve a certain community, but there was this feeling of like, yes, but I love all my people and I want to serve all my people. So when I got honest with everybody and was able to have those conversations and COVID gave me that opportunity to be able to have these conversations with the clients that were coming and had been there for years and years, it was almost like this natural thing. They were all like, yes, of course that’s what you’ve been doing. That’s where you are going. A lot of them actually fell into that pool, let’s say of people, you

[JOANNA]

What do you mean moved over into the pool? So clients from the yoga studio who were coming, I mean, one of the things I remember you saying back then, and I hear this actually a lot, particularly in yoga is yes. People think of me as a yoga teacher, but really I’m not really a yoga teacher. Like it’s not really yoga I’m doing and so that was your entry point to this work, but then you went deeper into these other modalities and really started to see that elsewhere?

[HILARY]

Exactly

[HILARY]

Yes, and I had all of these trainings under my belt as I was going along after doing my yoga teacher training. Then I did other trainings also in trauma sensitive yoga, then cryo, sacral work. So I was getting a lot of other trainings and I was having a hard time fitting it into, my business was called The Yoga Place. So it was like, yes, but I’m doing other stuff too. So, yes, that started to feel a little bit funny, just sort of hard to put it all together in my mind.

[JOANNA]

So that’s probably right around when you joined BRA, when you found me and joined BRA?

[HILARY]

Yes. Was all about that time when I was already thinking about pivoting. I had carved out space for myself more clearly within my yoga place, within the yoga studio, so people that were coming to my classes tended to be more along the lines of the people that I ended up, that I am working with more now clearly. But I just had all of the baggage of managing that space and trying to also, I guess it was also how to navigate people’s expectations. Clients that were coming in and wanted just yoga or, so all of that was hard.

[JOANNA]

So tell me about, when you joined BRA, what was that decision like for you? I mean, for someone listening who might be going through the same decision-making process, how did you know you wanted to do it and how did you decide?

[HILARY]

It was so serendipitous because I did not think about doing a coaching program. I mean, I know you don’t identify really with that. I had never thought about it because I had never thought about doing anything with any business coach. All of my investments and myself had been in trainings and I realized that I no longer needed to do any more training. I mean, I love doing trainings, but I felt really confident in my offering. I thought I actually needed to invest in my business now, like I need to think about this because I have this opportunity. I don’t want to be dragged along by what had been happening before. I don’t necessarily want to clean break, but I want to understand how to have a little bit more systemized thinking around it. I also do love training stuff, so your curriculum, I was like, oh, of course, I love that. So I wanted to do something and I also didn’t want to do something completely one-on-one. I wanted some one-on-one stuff. I was really clear now that I think about it, like the things that I wanted. I wanted a cohort, I wanted a curriculum, I wanted business help and I wanted to learn processes.

[JOANNA]

So great. Tell us about your experience in BRA and what would you say your biggest gains or biggest takeaways were from it?

[HILARY]

Definitely, it was creating my program. That was the hugest accomplishment, the biggest satisfaction that I got out of it. It’s basically what my bread and butter right now is, the program that I created with you and having a more systematic way of getting about my day and processes that help me go forward and do the things that are involved in a business that I was just cobbling together when I was at the yoga studio and just felt like I was alone in that, like doing it on my own in the yoga studio. So being with you and with the cohort definitely gave me that also that community and that collective experience and sharing that was so helpful and so huge.

[JOANNA]

Share a little bit about what you do now. So your location independence, so you’re working online with clients, right?

[HILARY]

Yes. That was huge too.

[JOANNA]

Share just a little bit about what your program is, what your pathway for your clients are and you know who these folks are, you said chronic pain, so maybe a little bit about that. I just want to highlight for anybody watching that, how some of your clients from the yoga place still transferred over. They were still clients. I want to mention that because many, many people have ideas, just like you Hilary, about now, how they want to change things in their business. Sometimes they start to imagine, oh, this is going to be a whole other business and they shut off all the old stuff when really there can be a lot of carryover that benefits you. So even if you’re starting something new, which is what you did, your old audience is still an asset to your new business.

[HILARY]

Absolutely.

[JOANNA]

Even if you’re doing something that seems very different, which at the time it felt like it was really different, what you were doing, you were saying, oh, people are just coming for yoga, but I’m not doing yoga anymore yet still there are core people that absolutely transfer over. So anyways, share with folks what you’re doing now and how you help people.

[HILARY]

So what I created, thanks to also working with you was this program called embodied resilience. It is a body-based, movement-based program that helps people who are living with chronic conditions or chronic pain of some kind to feel safer and stronger in their bodies and regain some trust and reclaim agency; so sort of move through the world with a feeling of more confidence and trust in their own bodies. So I’ve gotten pretty focused on the people that I’m serving and that I would like to work with and that get the best results with me. They do have chronic conditions. They often have my same chronic condition, which is called Sjögren syndrome, which is a connective tissue disorder. But I work with people who have all different types of chronic pain or chronic issues. They may not have a diagnosis. A lot of times they have trauma from living in a body that hurts or feels weird or doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do. They often have trauma from their experience, maybe any hard situations that they might have had to go through to try to figure out what’s going on in their body.

[JOANNA]

I’d love to hear what it’s been like for you, I think one of the biggest transformations that practitioners work with me experience is that change from session by session, class by class model or even a pack of classes. Even if somebody’s buying a pack of classes still that’s the old way and this new way of enrolling somebody in this program, that’s this pathway and this journey together, what can you share, because I think it’s hard for people to really understand what that change is like.

[HILARY]

Absolutely.

[JOANNA]

What’s it been like for you?

[HILARY]

That was huge because I did, I worked, obviously I had weekly lessons and people who would come to those lessons when I had my yoga studio, but I also worked one-on-one with people. Also I would do that five, 10 session package. Even though I knew that they needed maybe more or less or, everybody’s different in some certain way and so just these packages seem random. Then maybe they would not continue and I knew that they needed to do some more work. The whole beauty of doing and creating this program was actually seeing the journey. As you said, it was like this whole journey that starts here and has, of course it’s a spiral type of journey in learning. It’s not any linearity, but it was definitely so transformative for me to be able to better see exactly how I could help people and really serve them in my most powerful best way. So it was also transformative for me personally, because as I was going through the program with other people, I was also getting so much out of it.

Also I realized where I needed to tweak and reiterate and go back over things but the program itself is so much more powerful than the packages that I used to have. Absolutely. There’s a continuity, there was a building upon the learning that we start in the beginning. It allowed me, it gave me sort of the permission to do a lot of the upfront learning stuff that I needed people to do but I felt like if I took the time to do it in the five class packages, they’d get bored or they’d be like, they wouldn’t see the results right away and then they wouldn’t come back for more. So that first module that I have is really the most important module, but I used to condense it into like very short session part of the sessions. So it’s just allowed me to really also give myself the time to dedicate to my clients and it’s allowed them to give themselves permission to take care of themselves and give themselves this commitment to actually really, really committing to what want, which is to feel better.

[JOANNA]

Yes. I think from there’s the practitioner side and the client side, and we often don’t realize how powerful it is on the client side to be making that commitment. But it’s them making that commitment to themselves, like, yes, I am entering this container and taking care of this thing and addressing mine and I’m in it.

[HILARY]

I’m in it fully. Also because, I mean, for me, particularly what, the work that I do, the packages were okay. People would show up and we’d do stuff, work on the mat and then they’d go home and I maybe I’d get them homework obviously that they could do that were exercises and things. But with this program there’s so has much money, more dimensions, many just like multidimensional. So they don’t just have little bits of homework that they have to go and do and come back with. They actually have bigger takeaways. They have a lot of learning resources that they can go to and come back to later. So there is, it’s just a fuller program and then they have access to me, which of course the other clients did as well. But I don’t know, there’s like a different level of communication and I think also a different level of trust and we’re in this together and I’m not the person that’s telling you what to do or working through different strategies together and finding out what works best for them.

[JOANNA]

That’s so beautiful. Then just to be clear for people listening, you’re still working one on one with your clients, even though you have, when you say module, I think some people sometimes think of program as like, oh, DIY or like online course, no, this is one on one with clients.

[HILARY]

Yes, doing one on one with clients, definitely.

[JOANNA]

To design this pathway with these resources and to, as you say, serve them at this deeper level and that deeper level of trust as well.

[HILARY]

So it’s allowed me also to have this program that’s there. Obviously, the content has been, there’s content that I use with everybody, but the one-on-one allows me to also help them personalize it and adapt it to them and to themselves and to their issues and their aims and problems.

[JOANNA]

So beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. Now at the top, I reamed this, something about aligning your business with your life or shaping your business to support the lifestyle that you want. What does that mean to you because that’s how, right before I hit record or streamed us live, that’s what you said is that what I’ve done now is —

[HILARY]

That was the driving. Yes, and that was really the impetus to when I realized that I could close the yoga studio and I could start something new or pivot. That was driving me, I was like, I don’t want to be a slave to my business any longer. This is my business. I’m not working for anybody. I’m deciding here and I want my business and I need my business more than even just wanting it at that point in my life.

I needed my business to be flexible and adaptable and portable because I am sort of between here and there for personal lifestyle family issue reasons. That became even more important during COVID. Luckily again, this is how COVID, I think served a lot of us in being able to move things online and being able to, yes, I can work from, obviously doesn’t matter wherever I am, I can be working with my clients and still be traveling and being able to be there for my family, which has been still important in the past few years.

[JOANNA]

That’s awesome. Thank you so much for sharing all of this, Hilary. What are your future plans for your life or business and what are you most excited about with your business and where it’s going?

[HILARY]

I’m very excited about just how the program is flourishing and how I’m taking people through it more and more, but I am also thinking about the next steps. So now I have the first graduates who want to continue working, so I don’t feel like creating a whole new program, but I’m definitely thinking about what that next step or how I could help them. So spiraling back in and seeing how I’m going to do that. I’m working on that.

I’m also really into sort of the branding and the creative process around it, which again, having a program there, which I love and take forward and it’s there and like you said, it’s not a self-paced program, so I’m taking people through it, but the content’s there and it’s pretty much done. So I have some extra space, mental and soul space to be able to think about, Ooh, how do I want this to look and like play with the websites more and platforms and all of that.

[JOANNA]

Oh, I just love that you’re highlighting that. I want to pull out two important pieces of that, that to me are important lessons for practitioners to hear. One is that by systematizing your business and basically streamlining, like identifying who are the people I want to serve and building the program around them that has given you the space to actually start to really be creative rather than all your time taken in the hustle of serving people, getting clients, et cetera. You actually have the space to now be creative and look at your branding and having fun with that.

[HILARY]

Yes, I love that part.

[JOANNA]

So I love that. Then the second takeaway that I would like people to hear is that this branding piece is coming after, the branding piece is coming after you’ve been getting the clients and knowing how to serve them really well and have a sales system to enroll them. Boom. That is when it comes afterwards. A lot of people mistakenly try to put it in front. If you’re putting it in front, you’re spending this time and money and energy all in this effort to get clients and you’re not bringing the money in as you’re doing that necessarily. So they’re doing it backwards and it costs money and time to be doing that.

[HILARY]

Yes, and now that you highlight that, definitely that was something that was a surprise for me working with you being like, wait, don’t have to do branding first. I think if I had focused on that, I wouldn’t have been able to create my program. I wouldn’t have been able to have this very rich nourishing program. I also find that yes, the branding part now is more fun, whereas before it felt like, oh gosh, it was a stress and it was something I needed to get done. So one of the big takeaways for me from working with you was being scrappy sometimes, like just getting stuff out there and working, because I have the experience, I have all of the knowledge. I just needed to take it out there and start putting it out there in a new way. And I was lucky that I did have people that came from my previous business.

[JOANNA]

Yes, well we always start with the assets you already have. This is for everybody listening, is where do you have any sort of community, connections or audience that already knows you? Even if you’re making a big pivot or starting something that to you feels completely different and new, the fact is your community and connections are always there. That’s always going to be your greatest asset even in starting. It may not seem like that’s your market for the new thing, but it’s often not the case. There’s at least threads of it or they’re connectors. Those are people who know they can trust you already.

[HILARY]

Yes, absolutely. Word of mouth, absolutely.

[JOANNA]

So you’re not the only one, Hilary. That’s how it works and how it should work. Thank you so much for sharing all that. This is really wonderful to hear. Do you, I’m going to put you on the spot a little bit here, but do you have any final words that you would want to share with other practitioners? Particularly who I tend to attract and who I love working with are people just like you, who are experienced established practitioners who are bringing in now multiple modalities and wondering wait, how do I do this? How do I bring in all these multiple modalities and how do I share this and how do I work with clients around this and how do I explain what I do? Do you have any messages or message for them?

[HILARY]

Well, I do think that getting support is really helpful, so working with people like yourself and also having that collective experience as well, I find very, very helpful. Also just, I mean, it sounds so cliché, but just don’t be too scared about making that step. All of us have so much knowledge and so much experience that the world absolutely needs and so, yes, just start trying it in this new way. You could always go back. I always like, because of my nervous system and my issues around past trauma in my life, it’s like as long as I have the backup and like, okay, I can walk out the door, I can change it, I have different options that makes me feel okay.

So practitioners have what they’ve been doing all along, which is always there if they need to go back to it but I really think that trying this new way, that also incorporates so much more creativity and authenticity and being able to let go a lot of old baggage is so transformative. But you do, it is very helpful to have somebody there who’s either been through it or is going through it also. In your program for me, it was really so helpful because you were there as the help, the leadership and the container and you’ve been through it all and then going through it with the cohort who was going through it with me in real time was just very, very supportive.

[JOANNA]

Wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing. It’s so sweet to see you.

[HILARY]

You too.

[JOANNA]

I look forward to hearing how it all continues.

[HILARY]

Oh, thanks so much, Joanna.

[JOANNA]

Thank you too.

Hey, if you enjoy listening to this podcast and you want to apply what you’re learning here in your business, did you know that you can meet directly with me and ask me questions and get my help when you come to the Practitioner’s Business Round Table? The Practitioner’s Business Round Table is a free gathering for innovative practitioners that I host each month. We meet live via Zoom and when you sign up for a spot, you have the chance to submit your questions beforehand, to get them answered by me at the round table discussion. You can grab a seat for the next Practitioner’s Business Round Table by going to joannasapir.com/roundtable. Let’s go deeper. Come learn more about how to build a fulfilling and profitable practice with long-term clients and stable income. I hope to see your face there.