How I chose to go against industry norms and move to Voxer only coaching
What if the industry standard for your business was draining you physically, mentally, and emotionally?? That’s the experience Amy had a year into the pandemic. In this episode she shares what she did to drastically change how she works with clients and the benefits she’s seen from taking that risk.
In this episode she dives into:
How she progressed from offering medical care to coaching
Her “hot take” on what coaching is and isn’t
What it looks like to no longer offer coaching calls as a coach
The pros and cons of Voxer only coaching
Links to things talked about in this episode:
Learn more about my coaching offering and working together.
Find me on Voxer or explore using it for your own business.
Paperbell is an all-in-one tool that handles scheduling, payments and client management for your coaching business. Create a free account here.
Links and resources:
Join the Breathe Into Business Patreon to get access to the community Discord server, live events like group coworking, plus the private podcast feed with interviews, breathwork recordings, and more.
Record a question for us to answer here on the podcast!
Find transcripts to all my episodes here.
To learn more about Amy, head to amykuretsky.com
Try breathwork for 5 days and see how your business benefits
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[0:04] Welcome to Breathe Into Business, a podcast for folks who want to hear what it's really like to run an intuitive-led business. I'm your host, Amy Koretsky, a Breathwork facilitator who helps service providers, course creators, and artists tap into their own inner knowing so that they, can run businesses from a place of trust and self-confidence. I created this podcast to help folks like you, who are disillusioned with the overculture of online small business building, to permission yourself to follow a different path.
In these episodes, you'll hear conversations that are direct, messy, and even a little bit scary at times.
My biggest hope is that each of these episodes helps you feel even 10% more confident in leaning into what your intuition is sharing with you and doing business your own way.
Now, let's take a breath and talk business.
[0:58] All right, y'all, welcome back. It's Amy and you're listening to Breathe Into Business.
And if you're like me, maybe it's time to take a deep breath right now before we get into things.
So let's take a nice deep inhale and a big sigh to let it out.
[1:20] Okay, so I'm excited to share this episode with you today because I know a lot of you are like me and are big fans of the peek behind the curtain style of episodes.
A couple episodes ago, I talked about my experiment for this year of not selling, and I got a lot of responses from a lot of you of like how interested you are in this experiment, and like how you want to do some different experiments, and you want to hear more about the other sort of experiments that I've run in my business over the years.
And so then recently, I was getting a lot of questions lately, like in the last couple weeks, specifically about one of the things that I do very differently outside of like the coaching industry norm, which is that I don't do live coaching calls with my clients. And I'm not talking about like live coaching calls, like where you have a group program and you have a hot seat and you like do live coaching in front of other people.
I'm talking about that in my coaching container that I have with my clients, I literally don't get on a Zoom call with them.
I don't get on the phone with them. We don't do live synchronous coaching, meaning like in real time, having a conversation that is a coaching conversation.
[2:48] So you might be thinking right now, well, how is it that you are a coach if you don't have coaching conversations? And the thing is, I do have coaching conversations with my clients, but I do it asynchronously, which means we're not doing it in real time. So I thought that today it might be kind of a fun episode to talk you through kind of the evolution of how I came to making that decision in my business and like where I started and the experiments, kind of the unconscious experiments that I ran along the way to get to where I am right now. Whether or not where I am right now is where I'm gonna stay permanently in the future. I usually don't consider anything super permanent so I'm sure it will evolve again at some point but it's where I am right now and it's working really well. And so since it is kind of outside of industry norm, I thought you might be interested in learning more about it. So let's talk about it. I'm going to give you a little bit of backstory and timeline just to kind of set the stage so you can understand the evolution. But I promise we're going to get into like the nitty gritty of the pros and the cons and everything in between as to around this change or around this decision that I made in my business.
[4:11] So for a little bit of backstory, you know, I have a background in Chinese medicine.
I'm a licensed acupuncturist. I graduated from acupuncture school in 2013.
And when you're in school, when you're getting a graduate degree in Chinese medicine, you learn a lot about Chinese medicine.
You learn so much, and you work with so many patients. Honestly, we have thousands of clinical and classroom hours on Chinese medicine, but very, very, very few of those are about learning how to run a business, and almost none of those hours are helping you understand how to actually, like help patients take initiative into their own lasting change.
It's very much that whole program, and I'm only speaking to the program that I was a student in.
I do not know exactly what the curriculum is for other schools across the country, but for the school that I went to.
It really is coming from the perspective that like as the licensed acupuncturist you are the expert you are the doctor you are the one prescribing the treatment whether that includes herbs or even.
[5:31] You know lifestyle changes or exercises breathing exercises or tai chi or qigong, but it's all coming from this place of like you are the expert and you are prescribing these these things for the patient and then they do them.
But it doesn't at all teach us how to really engage with our patients so that they are taking more of an active role so that they are engaged so that they have buy-in to the outcomes.
[6:02] And so that's a little bit of the background. And you know, my own personal philosophy is that we are our own best healers.
Yes, I'm an expert in Chinese medicine, but my patient is the expert in their own body.
My patient is the expert in their own brain. My patient is the expert in their own ways that they create rituals, that they set goals, that they meet those goals.
And I can't just say, oh, do this, this, and this, and then all of a sudden, poof, everything is gonna be better.
And I really found in my first year or two of being an acupuncturist, that my patients, who were having the best success were really the ones that were taking a more active role, that they were really engaged and wanting to learn more and really find the strategies that worked for them to make lasting change.
They weren't just expecting to show up once or twice a week for 60 minutes, get some needles put in them, and poof, everything's gonna be better.
You know, like sometimes that does happen and that's amazing, but a lot of the times.
[7:11] Maybe there's something that really needs to change with their sleep hygiene, or maybe the way they engage with their stress levels at work, or maybe there's changes in their diet.
There's all sorts of different variables that go into our physical and emotional health, and acupuncture and herbs and these things, they're one variable that we can tweak, but there's so many of the variables I have no control over and it is completely within the patient's realm navigate those.
And so because I wanted to figure out a better way of engaging with my patients and really getting them to be excited about making some of these changes that, you know, I knew with my expert hat on was like, you know, the good idea for them to do, but they needed to figure that out for themselves as well. And they really needed to want to make those changes. I couldn't just say.
[8:13] You know, put your phone down two hours before bed and don't look at any screens and you're going to be able to sleep better. You know, they needed to really want to change the relationship that they had with, you know, just for example, like with their sleep or with technology or with their stress. So since I didn't really feel like I had the tools or the skills or the knowledge to work on that more psychology aspect of it, I signed up for a health coaching program.
I think it was around 2015. It was called Well Coaches. It's still around. I enjoyed the program a lot. And it's a program that was only open to people already in the medical field. This program really just taught all about coaching psychology. So there was, it wasn't like a quote-unquote health coaching program where you learned about different nutrition or anything like that. You know, this was expecting that you were already the expert in your field of study and that you were going to stay within your scope of practice, and this program was really just teaching you about.
[9:19] Coaching psychology. So we were learning things like motivational interviewing, the readiness for change model, design thinking, those sorts of things. So I got certified in that program, And then I ended up being part of the very first cohort of health coaches that ended up taking the national board exam. It was a brand new thing. They had never even had a board or a national board exam for health coaches. And I think I took the test in 2019. And so I was one of the very first nationally board-certified health coaches in the United States.
But it was really never my intention to be a full-time health coach. I mostly was interested in following that path all the way through board certification.
[10:08] Because at some point or another, you know, things are going to change in our system, in our healthcare system at large, and it's possible that insurance might start to cover those sorts of things, and you'll only be covered if you're board certified, and, you know, I want to keep my options open, and maybe someday I'll want to work in a hospital system or somewhere where we take insurance, who knows, just throw in all of the options out there in the world.
But so, you know, even though I was never really planning on being a full-time health coach, I wanted to use those skills that I learned in my clinical practice with my acupuncture patients.
[10:43] And I promise that I'm getting this all to be, you know, circling back to Voxer, but for now, it kind of makes sense to have some of this background. So I started including coaching into my work with my patients. And I have continued even to this day to use those skills that I learned in my clinical practice with my clinical patients. And then in about 2018, I actually started blending that coaching knowledge with so much of my own business experience because, you know, I'm a Capricorn rising. Everyone loves talking to me about business. I love talking to everyone about business. And so many of my acupuncture patients were actually creative entrepreneurs, that it just kind of naturally progressed into these, business coaching relationships. So in 2018, I went official with it, started having business coaching clients. And at the start, I went super traditional. I really wasn't thinking about.
[11:45] Subverting the system at the time. I really didn't even understand the system as it stood to even know how to subvert it.
So I just went super traditional and I had three month coaching packages of bi-weekly coaching sessions.
I was getting great results. I had lots of people to work with.
People were signing up for package after package with me because they enjoyed working with me.
It was going great.
And I will like, I'm going to pause for a second and just give, you know, a slight hot take, which is that most of the time, when you hear people say business coach, what they really mean is business consultant.
And this is especially true for all of y'all in the online business world who are saturated with messages and podcasts and newsletters from business coaches out there.
Because here's the thing, most of those folks are very, very, very smart people.
I have learned a lot of things from a lot of people out there who call themselves business coaches.
[12:54] But most of them are showing up with, you know, a prescriptive funnel or action or best practice to take or like here's my methodology, if you follow this exactly to the T, you're going to get these results.
And that's not fucking coaching. That is business consulting, which is wonderful and necessary and that's great that there are people in this world that want to provide that service, but that's not coaching.
Coaching is about showing up with curiosity, it's about asking thought-provoking questions, and it's about offering a reflective ear for listening. Coaches are not necessarily the experts. They do not know the best action or the right action to take. They are here to help you find the right action for you. So that's just like my hot take. I get kind of worked up about this sometimes because there are so many people out there that call themselves business coaches, but really they're business consultants.
And really, I feel like one of the reasons why I've started shifting my wording to business mentor is because I definitely show up as a business coach, but sometimes I show up as a business consultant because I have a lot of years of experience under my belt. And I think that blending those two things can be helpful. But I like to be really.
[14:17] Really obvious when I'm wearing one hat versus the other. So I'll tell my clients, like here I'm going to put on my consultant hat for a second and like you know give you some advice quote unquote versus okay let's find the option or let's find the answer that works best for you which is when I'm wearing my coaching hat. Okay so that was my hot take for a second but let's go back. So here we are 2020 happens and the pandemic strikes which like throws everything into chaos.
For me personally, because I also had a business, a clinic, an acupuncture clinic with employees, I really had to put all of my time and effort into making sure that business stayed afloat during that time because other people's livelihoods was, dependent upon how myself and my business partner navigated the storm.
And so I really took a pause on my own business. I dealt with all the other things going on.
I even like paused this podcast, which at the time was a main driver of bringing people to my business.
And so I didn't have a lot of clients and that was fine with me.
[15:28] And then once we got the pandemic understanding under our feet, obviously, we are still in a pandemic, but those first couple months, everything was in upheaval.
And once those first couple months went past and Kim and I figured out how we were going to run an in-person business safely for both our employees and our patients.
[15:52] Then I decided to come back and work with coaching clients again.
And I did. and I mostly kept it to that same structure, but I added in Voxer support at that time and clients loved it. So if you don't know what Voxer is, it's like oh they call it a walkie-talkie app, but really it's like a voice messaging app.
I'm guessing somewhat similar to like WhatsApp, even though I've never actually used WhatsApp, but basically you can leave voice notes through this app. You You can also do like texting, you can send pictures and files, and it works great because it is still through an app, so it's not like you're giving your personal cell phone number to your clients, because that's a boundary that I didn't feel comfortable crossing.
But I'm a verbal processor, so I wanted to share in a verbal way.
[16:44] And I wanted to give my clients to share in a verbal way to me, because I'm also really, good at audio processing, I like doing that, as opposed to reading.
So I added Voxer in and clients just loved it. They were really finding it supportive.
They were, you know, using it both to like ask me questions, but I found that they were also just like verbally processing through their own stuff and almost coming to their own conclusion by the time they were done with the voice note.
And so then I could like chime in and add my two cents. But really, for the most part, that verbal processing just made a huge difference.
[17:25] And so, here I am doing that same sort of traditional coaching structure of like bi-weekly calls. I was doing it over Zoom at the time, but I'd added in Voxer support.
[17:36] And then 2021 hit, and I needed spinal surgery. And this was not my first rodeo. It was not my first spinal surgery. But this one was way more intense than what I had expected. My first surgery back in 2012. You know, I felt like my recovery period for that one was pretty short. I felt.
[18:02] Like six weeks I was kind of back to myself. And with the surgery that I had in January of 2021, I really feel like it took me a full six months before I felt like myself again. And I was not expecting that. And it was a real big hardship both on my physical body and my mental brain.
It was really challenging to come back from. And, you know, even though I was planning on taking time off from my client work during that time, I was still supporting clients through Voxer, which worked really well for me because it allowed me to show up for my clients in a in a way that worked for my body during this incredibly challenging time for my physical body.
Like I literally didn't get off of the recliner chair for like weeks at a time.
I was sleeping in this recliner chair. I, you know, it was winter time so I couldn't even really get up and try to do gentle movement at the time. So I was really stuck inside.
[19:07] But, you know, I could open up my phone and pull up Voxer, and from the recliner chair, listen to what my clients were sharing with me, process it in my own time, and then respond back to them.
And so it was the one thing that allowed my business bring in a little bit of money during that time that I had to take time off from client work.
And so it was incredibly important for me that I wasn't completely income-less for those couple of months.
However, at the time, I was seriously undercharging for what I was offering, like really undercharging.
Gosh, at that point in time, I'd been doing this work for over five years, and I was charging $400 a month for bi-weekly sessions plus Voxer.
And Voxer's unlimited, so people could reach out as much as they wanted.
[20:13] That was a problem for my energetic receiving and giving.
And so when I kind of came back from surgery, I doubled my prices.
So I started charging over $800 for that same offering for bi-weekly sessions plus Voxer support.
And that was great. I felt like I was finally getting reasonably compensated for my work.
I was hitting my enough number kind of for the first time almost ever.
I was feeling like I had the energetic capacity to hold space for the clients that I had in the way that I needed to.
[20:52] And that was all great. However, on the flip side, I really felt like I was on Zoom a lot of the time.
Like I was on Zoom for my coaching sessions. I was on Zoom for, you know, group breathwork sessions I was holding, I was on Zoom for just general life stuff because it was still in the height of the pandemic. I'm sure you can relate, like so many of us are so zoomed out right now because we spent like three years of our lives on the internet looking at those little squares on the computer. And so that was like really hitting a wall for me. And also when I I raised my prices, I priced out some of the folks that I really love working with.
I love working with the punk kids. I love working with the weirdos.
I love working with the counterculture healers who are offering sliding scale work to their clients.
Like, I love those folks and I love supporting them.
And I consider myself one of those people as well.
And yes, a lot of those folks had joined my Patreon or coworking container at the time, and so there were accessible aspects to my work, But that was a little bit of a mental challenge that I was working through at the time that I felt like my work was only accessible to a certain level of business owner and it wasn't fully aligning with my values all the time.
[22:15] So then we fast forward a little bit and I do the incubator.
The first round of the incubator, which was a group program, we only did group calls live.
I loved it. It was great.
The participants loved it. It was a success.
I go into the second round of the incubator, and that launch was a total flop, complete flop.
And so the couple of folks that did sign up for that, I actually transitioned them to a one-on-one coaching model.
But I cut back on the number of live calls. So instead of doing those every other week live calls, I just did three calls over the course of five months.
So it wasn't even one call a month.
[22:58] And that was great. I really realized like that's where this experiment, where I noticed that there was an experiment, where I was like, wow, when I cut back on the amount of time that I have to be on Zoom live with my clients, me personally as an energetic, human being felt so much better. And, you know, to, I don't want to say to compensate for it, but as part of this transition I also put a little bit more structure and emphasis on the Voxer and the couple of people that were brand new to me, like that I had never worked before, that had joined that program and got transitioned to the one-on-one work, they didn't know anything different.
Like I brought them right into that Voxer container and they thrived with this sort of container. They absolutely loved it. And I'll get to why I think think that was in just a minute.
But that really clicked something for me. It was like, okay, this can work.
So, when I first brought on those new folks, we were connecting over Voxer for a good couple of weeks before we even had our first of three live calls.
[24:24] And we got so deep in those couple of weeks before we even met face-to-face.
[24:31] And I was getting messages from them being like, whoa, this is the most impactful work that I've done with a coach and we haven't even met face to face yet. And it was blowing their minds and it was blowing my mind. And I knew that Voxer was great, but it was the first time that I had really gotten data from this style of work where it wasn't adding on to an already established relationship, but it was actually starting the the relationship within this container, and it was great.
And I was so stoked about it.
So I'm like, all right, I'm thinking that I'm going to do more of this, less live calls. Cool, cool.
It was all kind of percolating in my brain.
And then the end of 2022, just a couple of months ago, I got the cancer diagnosis.
And as cancer diagnosis generally does, it kind of flipped my life upside down and made me reevaluate a whole lot of things.
And one of the things that it made me realize is that I do my best work and I have the most success helping other people when I have ridiculous amounts of spaciousness in my schedule, like ridiculous amounts of space, like almost guilt-producing amounts of space.
And when I don't have that space in my schedule.
[25:58] People cancel, technology fails on me, like all sorts of obstacles come in the way. And so.
[26:06] It kind of almost made the decision for me to no longer include live coaching calls, like at all, none in my coaching practice. I decided in that moment that I was moving to 100% Voxer only support. So only asynchronous coaching support.
And that was a big, scary decision to make, but it also felt so right that I knew that I had to do it, or at least experiment with it. I knew I had to at least try, because if I didn't try, I was gonna always think back, like, oh, well, what if, what if, what if?
[26:46] And let's be honest here, like, I still offer a couple ways for people to work with me live, over the computer one-on-one and in groups. I have my monthly community breathwork groups that happen through the patreon. I still offer some private virtual breathwork sessions like it's just up on my website. Anyone can go on there and book it at any time if they want but in reality I only do a couple of these a month. It's not like I'm like raking in the money with those and it's It's not like people are booking them like wildfire.
I get way more people wanting to do private sessions with me in person at the clinic than I do online.
But they're there, and I only do a couple of those a month, so it doesn't really feel overwhelming to my body or my calendar. So right now, that's gonna stay.
[27:40] But so, you know, it's only been a couple of months now, but I am officially Voxer only in my coaching support. So that's the whole timeline of how I got to where I am right now. And now I'm going to tell you just a little bit about what it actually looks like, and then the pros and the cons. Because just like any time we do an experiment, we want to then reflect like what's going well with this and what's not going so well to see if we want to continue doing it.
[28:10] But so for those of you who still are kind of like, I have no fucking clue what you're talking about when you say Voxer only support, this is kind of what it looks like. When I start working with a new client, they immediately after signing up with me get a really in-depth questionnaire. It's like automatic. I use, for those of you who are curious, I switched over.
[28:33] Maybe like six months ago to using a system called paperbell that's like an all-in-one system specifically for coaches so through that it takes care of all of my billing so for people who are on like payment plans or reoccurring subscriptions I don't have to go in and like invoice people every month it does it all for me it does like if you have live sessions whether it's private or group. It takes care of booking all of those. It has a place to do contracts so, people sign the contract right away through that and then they get an online questionnaire. I have, I could go on and on about it if you want to hear about that later, happy to answer any questions. Also have a referral link if you want to use it, happy to share that affiliate link in the show notes. But yeah, so as soon as people sign up through Paperbell, they get a questionnaire. And it's pretty in-depth, and so it helps me really get to know the client and their business better. And once that comes through...
I take some time and I read through it. I pull their astrological chart because they're giving me their birthday and time and location in that questionnaire. So I'm looking at their birth chart, and then I maybe reflect on their answers and ask some follow-up questions so that we can really.
[29:55] Have a good baseline to start from and come up with a main intention or goal for the work that that we're going to be doing together.
And then from there, we just chat on Voxer daily, weekly, whenever clients reach out when they need support 24 seven.
So what I do is I tell them, you reach out to me when you need me, you share what's true for you in the moment as it's occurring, and then I hold my own boundaries with the app and I check into Voxer like two to three times a day on my work days and offer support.
[30:34] So some folks are reaching out to me every single day. Others check in maybe once or twice a week.
I have some structure around it where on Mondays and Fridays, I have some questions that give us a little bit of a structure to the week of what we're working on or what I'm asking them to contemplate.
And some people really just work within that. And other people give a good ramble.
And I love a good ramble.
I am a verbal processor myself.
I find that giving clients full reign to talk as long as they need to is super therapeutic for them and really helps them kind of come to their own answers in their own time.
And Voxer is great because it lets me speed it up if I need to.
So if someone leaves a 12-minute message, I can listen to it at 1 and 1 half speed.
And I'm still getting all of the pertinent information, but less of the ums and hmms and all of that.
[31:31] And then I offer support. So that can look like reflections, it can look like curious questions, it can look like business strategy if that's what we're talking about.
[31:42] Usually I get consent at the start of the relationship to pull tarot cards for the client when it feels appropriate so then I'll pull tarot messages and share those.
And because this app is almost like a walkie-talkie, sometimes we actually catch each other at the right time and really do have a walkie-talkie-style conversation in real time, and that's really fun, and I love those.
And then other times, it's a bit more asynchronous, and so we'll have a conversation that takes place over several days with lots of synthesizing and processing time in between.
[32:17] And then also, as soon as people sign up with me, they have immediate access to the library that I have of Breathwork recordings and all six of the incubator coaching modules.
And some people really like to dive into those right away and work through them, and others, like, never even touch them.
And that is totally okay. It's a whole you-do-you-boo sort of situation.
It's like the resources are there when you want them.
So let me tell you what I have found that I love about doing this because like long story short, this is an experiment that has gone really, really right. Like I love this style of working with clients and I do not see myself changing it anytime soon. Once again, I never say never, So like at some point in the future, it might change as we all tend to do, but for right now I'm really happy with working in this way, and I'm really glad that I gave myself the permission to evolve my own, Container in the ways that work best for me.
[33:27] So the pros that I've come to find are That as someone who lives in a chronically ill body like mine Just because my calendar says that I need to be somewhere at a certain time doesn't mean my body is gonna let me. Like it just comes down to that. I am able to show up now for my clients when I am feeling my best. So maybe that is first thing in the morning when I'm sitting at my kitchen table with a cup of tea. Maybe it's in the late afternoon when I'm walking my dog around the neighborhood.
Whenever it is, I can be present with my clients in ways that I really wasn't able to before, because sitting in front of the computer is actually pretty painful for my body at times.
And I feel like the same is true for my clients. So many of my clients are chronically ill or neurodivergent or are like parents or caregivers, and are under very similar time challenges or time crunches.
[34:32] And this is especially true for clients who have young kids. I've found that those folks in specific are like this is amazing I love this I can I don't have to worry about my kid taking a nap or like my child care anything like that like they just get to show up when is best for them. So that's like a huge pro a huge pro like I couldn't if this was even the only pro for doing this work in in this way, it would be enough for me because it is that important for me.
It is that important for my clients and it has made that big of an impact in my wellbeing as a whole.
And like, that's what it comes down to for me. Like, I don't wanna run a business that is gonna be killing me physically, mentally and emotionally.
And I love my business. I love the business that I run, but that's kind of what it was starting to feel like, halfway through the pandemic until I really shifted into this model.
[35:34] But some other pros is that like in that same vein of it working for me is work just feels less like work.
You know, I can voxer when I'm on a hike. I can voxer when I'm folding laundry.
I can do it when I'm sitting in the yard with like the sun on my face when it's not freezing cold out.
You know, I can take five minutes out of my day even when I'm camping and still be there for a client.
And for some of you, that might sound awful, and you're like, no, I never, like if I'm on vacation, I'm completely logged off, and that's cool, like you do you, like that's a great boundary to have.
But for me, I actually don't like having really, really, really full work days, and then really, really, really empty vacation days, and what feels better for me is having all of my days, both my work days and my vacation days, be kind of just like a little bit more flexible because I don't wanna be overloaded on the days that I'm working and then have to like crash and rest on my vacation days.
So for me, it actually feels kind of good to have less hours that I'm working on my work days, but then work a little tiny bit on my vacation days.
[36:50] And this is all because I'm not on Zoom all the time. Like, literally, I have the capacity and the spaciousness, in my energy and my brain and my body because I'm not on the internet all the time anymore.
And that's just huge.
So that's like a huge pro for me.
And then also, you know, clients get support when they need it.
Like, let's be honest, how many of us, myself included, have worked with a coach before and had some like big thing come up, whether it's like something that had a little bit of time urgency to it or just emotionally felt really big and we're like, oh shit, I don't have a call with my coach for another week and a half, so I'm just gonna like sit with this or I'm gonna have to try to write a really long email and hope that it doesn't, you know, annoy them or cross their boundary that I'm like reaching out in between calls or something like that.
You know, I feel like that's happened to all of us. And the fact that my clients are getting support in the moment when they need it is a huge pro for them.
[38:00] And I will say for me, in those past containers, when I was doing that more traditional style of like calls every other week, I did encourage my clients to reach out for support in between calls when they need it through email.
But guess what? I fucking hate email. I am just not an email person. I don't like typing. I don't like reading really long emails. It is just not the way that I process information really well and so I'm a verbal processor. I'm an audio processor. I would much prefer to send a two-minute voice note in response to a question than like sit down and take 20 minutes to write an email. I mean, come on, I have a podcast. Obviously this is how I prefer to communicate with people, you know. So that is a pro both for me and for them. And then lastly, doing this type of container has allowed me to be way.
[39:01] More financially affordable again for my clients. So when I shifted to this model I actually brought the price back down to $400 a month because working in this way, I actually have a lot more capacity to work with more clients. And when I'm pricing, I just use some basic math. I'm like, okay, if I am ideally gonna want to make this much per month and I have capacity for this number of clients, then this is what the price needs to be. And so I'm not inflating my prices just to inflate my prices, like the $400 a month is what it costs because that's the capacity that I have right now. If that changes in the future, the price might change in the future. But this has both allowed me to be more accessible to more folks and yet not feel like I'm overworked.
And it's funny because like if I actually was to add up the number of minutes per month that I'm.
[40:04] Like talking or listening on Voxer, clients are actually getting more one-on-one time with me.
Like when I was doing two calls a month before, they were only getting, you know, two hours with me. And there are some clients that probably get, you know, an hour a week with me through our conversations. And maybe not every week, like maybe some weeks they are getting an hour with me and then other weeks less so, and then other weeks even more so. It can vary a lot and I'm okay with that. It feels good for me to have that variability. But price-wise, really, I feel like I'm working less even though I'm working probably the same amount. And so at that price point, it's a It's a total steal.
So it feels good for me to offer it at this price. It feels good for people to pay that price.
And so that's been a pro also.
[40:57] And then cons, because there are some cons to this, is that, you know, plainly, some folks just want live calls. Like they do better with synchronous support.
And I'm just unwilling to do that right now. So it can feel disappointing to potential clients sometimes.
And while I feel bad disappointing people, I actually know that it's what's best for both me and them because I don't wanna be promising something that I can't deliver.
And right now I can't deliver the fact that I'm gonna be able to show up in the way that they deserve when it's a live session.
[41:35] Also, you know, another con is that I'm not really doing live breath work during coaching sessions anymore, which I do miss because I think it was a benefit and I think it was impactful.
[41:47] But there's still so much breath work that my clients are getting in my containers.
You know, they're getting the group every month, the live group.
They get that whole library of all of these recordings that they can access whenever they need.
I still offer private sessions for people who want it so they can always sign up for a session in addition if they need to.
So there's like no lack of breath work overall. It's just that I, you know, kind of miss it sometimes.
And then, you know, lastly, the last con is that, you know, in so many ways, I'm kind of ahead of the curve because Voxer is still unknown by so many people that it can take a lot of education to explain why Voxer-only coaching is great.
I mean, let's be honest, this episode right here is kind of an educational episode, not, just to kind of share behind the scenes with you as to my process and my experiment.
But for some of you, maybe you've never even heard of Voxer before.
And when you hear this, you'll be like, wow, that's actually something that I'd like to offer my clients.
And so it's still unknown and there's still a lot of education behind there.
So those are my cons. None of them are so big that it's going to keep me from doing this.
Overall, the pros very much outweigh the cons.
[43:09] So yeah, that's my whole—that's the history and my process and my experiment and why I'm no longer doing live coaching sessions.
I hope that you enjoyed getting a peek behind the curtain. You know, I really want to encourage more people to feel comfortable and confident going outside of industry norms. So really my intention with sharing this story is to give you a look at how I gained my own confidence to go against industry norms with this part of my business.
And if this inspires you to do something a little different in yours, I want to hear about it. Let me know. Reach out.
And also, if you listen to this and we're like, this sounds fucking amazing and it's exactly the sort of support I want, you know, reach out. I still have a couple spaces right now for a few more clients.
I would love to work with you. Find me over on Voxer.
The link for reaching out to me is in the show notes, and you can also find it on my website, and send me a voice note. Let me know you're interested.
We can chat a little bit and see if, you know, Voxer is the right sort of support that you want, and we could work together, and I would love that. All right, that's what I got for y'all today.
Sending y'all big, big, big love, and I will talk to you in a few weeks. Bye.
[44:38] Thanks so much for listening today. If you liked this episode, or even if it just got you to think about your business a little bit differently, I'd love for you to subscribe to the show and share it with a business bestie or a few of them. And if you're interested in breathing more into your own business, I made something just for you. It's a five-day Breathwork Challenge for business owners. Over five days, you'll learn how to use, your breath to find deeper clarity and trust in yourself and in your business.
You can find it at amykoretsky.com slash breathe. Breathe into Business is recorded on the ancestral lands of the Dakota and Anishinaabe peoples. It is, created by me, Amy Koretsky, with the production help from Softer Sounds Studios. Thanks again for listening and breathing into your business with me.
[45:30] Music.
