Allison Jones
Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Therapy Matters podcast, your one-stop resource for expert insights and advice on everything therapy and rehab. I’m your host, Allison Jones. Today, I am joined by Corey Hiben, founder and owner of Andro Brands and host of The Health Hustle podcast. Corey, thank you for joining me today.
Corey Hiben
Thanks for having me, Allison. I’m looking forward to this.
Allison Jones
It’s great to have you here today. Corey, before we jump into today’s discussion, why don’t you take a minute to introduce yourself to the audience and tell them a little bit about yourself and about your background?
Corey Hiben
Sure. My first stint in the health and wellness world was actually as a personal trainer. I did that for a few years. I was mostly responsible for getting my own clients and customers through working at an out-of-the-box gym. Through that experience, I quickly realized that although I love the fitness world, and it was a world that I spent a lot of time in, I ultimately decided to go back to school and become an occupational therapist.
By trade, I practiced as an OT, specifically in outpatient orthopedics, for a while. Again, I found myself in a position of having to generate my own clients, leads, and patients. Through both roles, I’ve really just had this emphasis on having to learn marketing. Through doing that for, I want to say, probably six, seven, maybe eight years total of both being a clinician and a practitioner and also trying to do the marketing side of things, I ultimately found myself in a position where I didn’t love the patient care side of things. I didn’t love the front-facing experience of actually seeing the client and customer on the front lines, and I have so much respect for people who do that. But I found myself way more skilled and positioned to be behind the scenes, helping people generate those leads, do their marketing, build websites, lead funnels, campaigns, and all those sorts of things.
That’s ultimately what I do now with both Andro Brands and the podcast show, and then also a community that I built here in Austin, as well as everything that’s built around serving those exact same individuals, people in the health-related world, whether they’re health care practitioners, gym owners, or trainers. It’s really more or less like helping them understand the basics of their business and their marketing and helping them ultimately get more clients and customers. But that’s how I spend basically all of my time now.
Allison Jones
Awesome. Excellent. That is what we’re going to dive into. That’s what we’re going to talk about today. I’m super excited about it being in the marketing space. It’s one of my favorite topics to talk about. We’re going to dive into a little bit more about that and how you help your community.
Let’s dive in. Let’s talk about that. On your LinkedIn page, as you mentioned, you do help early-stage fitness and wellness entrepreneurs build high-converting lead funnels and attract and nurture their ideal clients. Tell me, what’s the first step entrepreneurs must take to build their dream business?
Corey Hiben
That’s a really good question, and it’s a conversation I have regularly with lots of clients and calls. Just to give you a little story, I recently had somebody come to me because they wanted a website, or at least they think they did. Through having this conversation, I quickly realized that they weren’t really in a position to be thinking about that, and they were putting the horse in front of the buggy.
What most people do, and I recognize why people do it, is because it feels productive to get a logo, to choose a name, to build a website, to capture all of your social media platforms, and to create content. Those things all feel productive. But in reality, the Tao of business, no matter whether you’re a practitioner or really anybody, is serving our customers, having conversations with them, and understanding their problems and their pain points.
Through this call that I had with the client who thought they wanted a website, I quickly realized that they didn’t even know who they were serving yet. They hadn’t defined who their ideal client was. They didn’t have a unique position in the market. They didn’t really have any understanding of even what problem they were trying to solve. For us to build them a website, it would have been just a cool online digital business card, which, at the end of the day, I personally hate business cards. I’d never had them. Even when people give them to me, they often end up in the trash. Maybe I should take their phone number down. But that’s what a lot of people do on the internet as well: they build a site, and they think that all of a sudden, all their lead generation or early-stage business problems will go away, and they don’t.
To answer your question full circle on what’s the best place to start? The best place to start is to talking to who you want to work with, your customers, and having conversations with them. I think it used to be a founder-first model in which you could build the website and the platform and the solution to the problem, but now in reality, in the world that we live in, we are very lucky that we can have a conversation with a potential customer immediately.
You can open your phone, go to your contact list, look at the people that follow you on social media or your emails, and you can just shoot them a message and say, I might be able to help you with this problem. Maybe I can or can’t, but I’d love to try. Until you have that understanding of who is it that you want to talk to and how you’re helping them solve that problem, everything else that you do from a business standpoint is often just procrastination to the bigger issue of you hadn’t figured out what problem you want to solve yet. I’d say that’s step one, if anything.
Allison Jones
Do you think that’s the most important thing that a business needs in order to succeed?
Corey Hiben
By far. The platform I use to build websites is called Webflow. I met the founder of it. It’s a great platform for anyone who enjoys design and responsiveness for websites. I remember meeting him at South by Southwest here in Austin a few years ago. He took what used to be a side hustle business of his, just trying to figure out if this Webflow business was going to even work. I think they’re now evaluated at, I believe, $4 billion the last time I checked. They asked him, ‘How did you do it?’ He basically said the exact same thing that we’re talking about right now.
He went as far as printing out a cutout billboard of who his ideal client and customer was. Every time he had a business question or concern or was unsure about what he should be doing, he looked at that cutout billboard and asked, ‘What would they want?’ I honestly think that is the fundamental. Like I said, I think it’s the Tao of business. The better we can understand our customers and their problems and challenges, and the better that we can provide the solution to those things, that is the groundwork for everything else working in your business.
Allison Jones
Excellent. Once you have that foundation in place, what’s the next step?
Corey Hiben
Once you understand who it is, we can finally talk about the ‘how’. The ‘who’ is essential. Oftentimes, it’s the person that you once were. I think that’s where most people start in terms of the ‘who’. Whatever problems or challenges that you personally dealt with are often the best people to work with because you understand their problems and you can provide a solution for them. Let’s say, for example, that you’re a physical therapist and you’re really into running. You want to work with other runners because that’s something that you know very well. That’s the ‘who’. You want to work with other runners, and maybe they have knee injuries, and that’s the thing you want to focus on.
Well, the ‘how’ then is the solution to that problem. What are the steps that I would take from ground zero to three months down the road to rehab from this injury? What is the solution to this problem, and how can you be very granular with that? I think that’s the next step. Once you have the ‘who’, now you can start working through the ‘how’. The best way, honestly, for most people to figure out the ‘how’ is whether one, you did it yourself so that you already know the framework, or two, you’ve worked with enough people that you’ve seen the consistent things that they do in order to get them from point A to point B.
Allison Jones
When you’re creating that optimal lead funnel, is there a secret sauce? Is there a magic formula that is one-size-fits-all, or is this different for every single business?
Corey Hiben
I think there’s both. I think there’s overlaps in both realms. I think there are some tried and true practices that will be true across wherever it is that you’re trying to generate leads, whether it’s through paid ads or any social media platform. Or maybe you’re interested in podcasting like the show or a YouTube channel. There are for sure some tried and true methods in terms of the one that always comes top of mind because it’s actually a conversation I recently had with two amazing content creators on my show. Between the two of them, I think they have over a half a million followers. We really broke down what it was that they were doing that allowed them to grow the attention that they wanted from a lead generation standpoint.
I think that the most tried and true things that I pulled from that conversation was one, they didn’t try to be anybody else. I know that’s cliche, but I think that it actually happens more often than we think. Our authentic version isn’t actually our authentic version. What we think is our authentic version is actually just buffed—we only show the highlights. We don’t actually show the times that we fail. That’s a mistake. The real authentic version of you messes up probably all the time, and actually talking about those things is what people gravitate towards. We gravitate towards each other’s rough edges. If you were always shiny and perfect, you’re like a Teflon pan; nobody sticks to you. Nobody sticks around, and you’re not real. But when you show both sides of the spectrum, that’s where people actually resonate with you.
I think that’s one of the tried and true things. I think the other thing, too, is storytelling. There is a very clear and obvious correlation between the people that can tell really, really good stories and their ability to attract attention and ultimately turn into leads. A few examples that I love to think about, and I have read both their books, is Matthew McConaughey, who’s here in Austin. He wrote an incredible book called Greenlights. If nobody’s read it, I highly recommend it. But what makes that book so compelling is that he’s an incredible storyteller. It’s just his life story, and that’s not to say that’s more interesting or less interesting than anybody else’s, but the way that he tells the story is captivating.
The other person that came to mind too is actually Will Smith, another actor and incredible storyteller. That is a tried and true thing, and this is equally true of those two people that I had on my podcast show as well, is that they’re both really good at just being unabashedly themselves and telling interesting stories. Their ability to tell stories in unique and different ways allows them to attract people from different audiences that maybe won’t be attracted to them otherwise just because they’re compelling and they’re interesting.
Humans have been telling stories since the dawn of time. It’s how we’ve always communicated information. If you can do that, whether it’s through your website or your social media content or even a conversation you’re having, or even if you go to a networking event, if you can be the person that tells a compelling story, that is going to be way more attractive to people, and that’s actually going to be something that they remember and resonate with.
In terms of the other part of that question, are there differences? For sure, to a degree. Every platform has its own social norms, just like it would be in any environment. If you go into a fancy restaurant versus a McDonald’s, there are very different social norms when you walk into those environments. It’s equally true on the internet. Whether you go into a Facebook group or LinkedIn or Instagram or TikTok, you can automatically imagine how those things play a little bit differently.
There is a degree of understanding the social norms of the platform or the medium that you choose to have a conversation with. Even something as simple as a YouTube channel or show, where people generally want some visuals or entertainment, is very different than a blog or a newsletter where people are just more interested in the information. There are definitely social norms that come into all this.
To answer that question goes back to the original question of, where do you start? Well, it depends on who we’re talking to. Knowing who you’re talking to automatically answers that question of which platform, what is the languaging? What are the social norms of this person? All those questions are answered by getting very clear on who it is you’re talking to.
Allison Jones
Does it also tie back to what you’re comfortable doing? If you’re not really comfortable doing TikToks, you’re probably not going to gravitate towards doing a lot of TikToks. There’s a little bit of that in there as well.
Corey Hiben
This is based on something I learned from a mentor of mine. His name is Noah Kagan, and he calls it the Rule of 100. Something that I’ve never seen happen is someone being successful at lead generation without also being consistent. The key to being consistent is to choose a medium or an avenue that you know you can stick to, and that’s where the Rule of 100 comes in.
The idea is that if you think about this thing you want to do, for example, a podcast show because you haven’t done a podcast show, and the idea of doing 100 podcast shows sounds daunting and awful to you, it’s probably not a good option. But if the idea of writing 100 blogs or 100 newsletters is more attractive to you because you like that medium, that’s a much better option.
Without that added ingredient, if you were to use a baking example, of consistency and doing it for long enough to start to see a return on it, it’s probably a waste of time. Yes, I totally agree.
Allison Jones
My second question is going back to the storytelling, which I 100% agree. If you can be a really good storyteller, that’s going to resonate a thousand times better than anything. But my question is, and this is a hard question, how do you become a good storyteller?
Corey Hiben
Yes, that is a really hard question. There are a few ways to approach this, I think. One of them is to understand the basics of a story framework; beginning, middle, end. The most common example of this is a hero’s journey. This is a very classic storytelling template that has been used for millennia. It’s the exact story of Star Wars, Pocahontas, Avatar, and name every single big movie in the history of big movies.
Actually, speaking of Will Smith, he even talked about how he had a streak of I think it was 10 or 11 big, massive box sellers. He crushed every movie from Hancock to Bad Boys to everything in between, and every single one of them followed that exact same framework of the hero’s journey. The hero’s journey is, in its most simplistic form, you have a hero. They encounter a problem that they don’t think they could possibly overcome. They meet a mentor, whether it’s like Yoda or name your thing, whatever it is. They show them the way, and then they overcome this insurmountable thing that they didn’t think they could possibly overcome.
That’s the basics of a hero’s journey. There’s a little bit more to it. There’s a great book by Joseph Campbell. He’s the one that really coined that idea of the hero’s journey. That’s really step one, and that’s honestly how I started creating a lot of content and how I started doing both podcast shows and even writing basic social media posts. I was trying to understand just the basics of a framework. You have some sort of pain or problem. You have a story, and you tell a solution. Understanding the basics of a story and its framework is a really good place to start.
It’s almost like seeing The Matrix. All of a sudden now you can read the code. You can see how everyone’s doing it on their sales pages or on their blog posts or on any social media content. Once you see the code, it’s very obvious to you what’s happening. I don’t think it’s manipulative. I think it’s just a realization of how the human brain works. We like stories. We like the story arc. Once you understand the basics of that framework, and you could maybe read a book or even read a few articles about the story framework, I’d say that’s part one of it.
Then the other part of it too, that I think is vastly underestimated that anybody can do listening to the show is just pulling from your own life. If you want to check me out on LinkedIn, I’d love it. Check me out because I do this all the time. I just did it today. I went on this camping trip, which we briefly talked about before we started recording, and I have been just pulling stories from that camping trip and relating it to marketing.
We can all do this. If you’re living in the world, which we all are, is that you have things that are going on in your life, and there’s often things that you can pull from it that are interesting related to that story. It could be something as basic as, here’s the ten things I learned from this camping trip. Here’s a short story about what happened on this camping trip. At the end of it, these are the ten things. We can all do that, just pulling from your own life. Those things actually make you more relatable when you can pull from your own life as much as possible.
We don’t have to get too nerdy on it, but there’s been a lot of studies that basically show that when they look at which post or content does the best, it’s often things that you’ve gone through, and then you essentially teach on those things that you’ve gone through. People can resonate with the fact that you did it as opposed to speaking from some platform or pedestal that you have never actually done.
Allison Jones
People want to relate to you. They want to feel connected. Absolutely. We’ve talked about ways to be successful, and now we’ll go the opposite way. Because you’ve worked with a lot of folks and talked to a lot of people, what’s the biggest mistake that you see entrepreneurs making as they’re starting their businesses out? What’s the biggest mistake that they make?
Corey Hiben
Just to circle back to what we were originally talking about, because I think that this probably resonates with me as well, it’s probably the biggest mistake that I made, and then in turn, I’ve seen my clients and customers make as well. They don’t actually have in-depth, real-world conversations with their customers. It’s very easy to stay behind the scenes, or if you have an online business, to stay behind the keyboard or to only see them in your practice for this one specific thing and not really take the time to have a conversation with somebody and get to know them on a granular level.
To refer back to a mentor that I had before, Darren Hardy, he uses this analogy of—sorry for the visual—crawling into bed with your customers or your clients. When you can crawl into bed with them, and you can think about the questions of what keeps them up at night, what they are excited about, what their ambitions are, what their personal goals are, what their professional goals are, what their purposes in life are, the more clearly you can define and granularize those exact things, everything else about the business becomes easier.
I think most people skip that step. I think most people try to offer whatever skill or product or service that they have without actually taking the time to have a conversation about who they’re actually helping. It’s way too ‘me’ focused as opposed to being customer focused. I think it’s probably the biggest mistake I honestly see. The cool thing about doing that is once you do have some clarity around that piece of it, every other question that you have about your business in terms of what platform should I be on, what are the services that I offer, where do I post these services, all those questions are answered by getting very clear on that initial piece of who it’s for.
Allison Jones
It’s interesting that you asked, ‘What keeps you up at night?’ We recently conducted a session at a conference titled ‘What Keeps You Up at Night?’ In this session, we gathered our clients and facilitated roundtable discussions where they could share their concerns and challenges. This session was the highest-rated of the entire conference, as participants found great value in discussing their deepest concerns with their peers. They asked questions like, ‘Are you guys dealing with the same issues? How are you addressing them? How are you overcoming them?’ If you can engage with them on this level and provide answers, feedback, or strategies to address their concerns, it’s a definite win.
Corey Hiben
I completely agree. I believe this holds true at all levels, whether it’s the customers, your teammates, or even the people funding your organization. The more you understand those at all levels of your organization, the better things become. I understand why people might not do this; it’s challenging and doesn’t seem scalable. Questions arise like, ‘How can this be effective or efficient?’ But in reality, if the essence of business is to provide the best service humanly possible for our ideal customer, I don’t think there’s a better way to achieve that than by having these conversations and gaining clarity on these matters.
Allison Jones
Now that a business is established, and they’ve got things running smoothly, how do they take it to the next level? How do they pump it up?
Corey Hiben
I briefly alluded to this at the beginning of our conversation. This is where I believe that community has become almost trendy, for lack of a better way to describe it. I feel like we’re seeing communities pop up everywhere, and I truly believe it’s because there’s a craving for more than just a product or service. No matter what you’re offering someone, whether it’s, let’s say, a physical therapist treating a knee injury, that person may want to get out of knee pain and be able to run a marathon at the end of the year in Lake Powell or something like that. But deeper than that, they want connection, they want people to relate to, and they want people with like-mindedness.
I think that once you get to that point where you understand your people and your community, and what problem you help them solve, the next best thing and the biggest thing you can do, and it’s something I’m doing right now in my own business, is understanding what a community would look like. I find it ironic that at the same time there seems to be a decrease in organized religion, you’re seeing an increase in all these niche communities. It’s because there’s a hunger and a craving for this.
You realize that once you get far enough along in your business, whatever it is, it no longer becomes about the actual product or service. It becomes about the people within that you can relate and connect with. As we know from a lead generation standpoint, lead generation is actually super expensive. It’s way cheaper to keep people around and continue to offer them products and services that are helpful and useful for them once you have them. But the best way to keep them around is through community. How can we connect these people?
There are quite a few ways that you can do it. Depending on where you’re offering your products or services, this could be Slack communities, Facebook groups, a circle group, a local meeting, or maybe you set up a dinner once a month for your people at your practice. Actually, my girlfriend is a chiropractor and something that I recommended to her and she started doing it and it’s been awesome is that she’s doing these monthly wellness things at her clinic. She’ll shut down the clinic, bring in a yoga teacher or something of the sort, bring in a bunch of her patients and allow them to take a class, have a conversation, have some food and drinks to foster this idea that it’s more than just chiropractic. It’s actually a group of people that have similar challenges in a similar community that want to get to know each other.
That helps for so many reasons. It helps for retention. It helps for referrals. It helps for offering more products, more revenue, like more products and services through this, supplements, whatever you want to sell. I think we try to complicate this idea of scaling and building a business into needing all of these funnels and ads and things. In reality, we just need to be people again. We need to care about each other. We need to know what our challenges are. We want to relate. We want to have a conversation. We want to get to know each other. We want to be in a tribe. Being human again, I think, is something that I’m seeing most businesses that are succeeding have found a way to just be human again through these communities.
Allison Jones
Excellent, I love that. Just be human. It’s a great takeaway. What would you like to leave the audience with today?
Corey Hiben
I think the biggest thing I would like to leave you with is this, and it’s something that has taken me a long time to learn. I wish somebody would have taught me this earlier on. So, this is for anybody who’s facing challenges in their business or in the early stages of their business: the best thing you can do is be the best solution to a problem. Most every other problem is solved by doing that.
To go back to that original example about the physical therapist who helps runners, if you could be the best solution to somebody that has an overuse knee injury and likes to run marathons, most everything works itself out. That’s really what it comes down to.
We love to complicate it with all the other things that I honestly do. I help people with logos, websites, and lead funnels, and I think those do serve their place. Even as somebody that does those things, I can also confidently say that those can be distractions. Those can be distractions from actually just doing what you should be doing, which is just providing a really good service or really good product or really good care to the people that you’re ultimately helping.
I think a good exercise that people can use is this: if you only had one patient or client and you had no other ways of marketing other than through that person, how would you treat that person? You would probably treat them pretty well. You’d probably go above and beyond. You would probably be obnoxiously kind and giving and supportive and helpful, making sure that they get the best results possible. Now, multiply that by ten and that solves most problems, honestly.
Allison Jones
Excellent. Corey, how can our listeners find you?
Corey Hiben
You can visit Coreyhi.com, or check out my podcast, ‘The Health Hustle’. If you are a health-related entrepreneur or business owner, I highly recommend checking it out. Over the last three years, I’ve had the pleasure of hosting many cool and interesting people on the show. Primarily, I’m active on LinkedIn. To circle back to the original point about knowing your audience, the people I’m engaging with are on LinkedIn, so that’s where you’ll find me.
Allison Jones
All the information will also be available in the show notes for you to check out. Corey, thank you so much for joining me today. It was a truly insightful conversation. I believe our listeners, especially our entrepreneurs looking to accelerate or grow their businesses, will find many valuable takeaways. I appreciate you sharing your insights with us today. Thank you for being a part of our show.
I want to express my gratitude to our audience for tuning into the ‘Therapy Matters’ podcast, your one-stop resource for expert insights and advice on everything related to therapy and rehab. We look forward to welcoming you to our next episode. Thank you so much.
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