Spiritual Entrepreneur Sales Strategies, Building Diverse Income Streams, & Pricing Your Offers w/ Morgan Balavage
Morgan Balavage shares her journey from the corporate world to becoming a successful yoga teacher and online entrepreneur. We explore a sliding-scale business model and Morgan's advice on selling in alignment with one's values. She offers insights for anyone looking to navigate the spiritual business landscape.
Some topics explored are:
Strategies for finding your first clients
Developing ideal marketing funnels
Aligning your niche with your marketing
Developing multiple offers
Navigating sales conversations
Working from anywhere in the world
GIFT FOR YOU
If you’re a meditation teacher or coach who wants to create unique meditations people listen to over and over again, enroll in my free course Meditation Script Mastery
Music Credit: Nova by River Roots - https://www.youtube.com/riverroots
Podcast Transcript
Lou: Art. Hello. Hello, friends to another interview episode of the Art and Business of Meditation podcast. I'm your host, Lou Redmond. And today we have Morgan belovage. She helps overwhelmed spiritual entrepreneurs get clear on a plan for financial freedom by creating passive income streams and simple systems to sign clients and grow your audience without the social media hustle. I know. I'm looking forward to hearing about that. She worked in corporate world for two decades before going full time with her yoga business, splendid yoga. Other yoga teachers noticed her success and asked for guidance on building their business. And so she built courses and hopefully will share a lot of her wisdom with you today on how you can start to increase your revenue streams and just increase the work that you're doing. Because that's why we're doing this work, is to do more of this work. Morgan, welcome to the show.
Morgan: Thank you so much. What an incredible intro. So lovely to be here.
Lou: Yeah. So when did spirituality for you enter the picture? I know working in corporate world for 20 years, was this always a practice for you or did something shift in your life that kind of brought something in?
Morgan: So spirituality first came into my world when I was a child. I went to a christian school. I came from an agnostic atheist household, but I had a lot of friends in the religious community and I ended up going to a private school for a better education. And that's where I first got kind of opened up to one path to spirituality. It kind of messed with my head a little bit and it took me about a decade to like unlearn some of the patriarchal learnings in that world. But there was a lot of core stuff that I took with me. And then I got into yoga. I took my first class when I was 16 years old. I got really into it as a lifestyle in my early twenties. So, yeah, so my journey as a spiritual warrior has been vast and varied and full of skepticism and questions.
Lou: And this was in LA.
Morgan: So I grew up in northern California. I was born in Sacramento. I went to school for some of my life in reading, and then I left home when I was twelve to go to boarding school on the east coast. And I've been traveling the world since then.
Lou: Gotcha. Yeah, I was just going to say because I thought, I know you have spent some time in LA, at least what I've seen, but I feel like just always the mecca of the yoga world feels like a lot of it is in LA or started in LA in the earlier times before even before it got super, super mainstream and popular in the way that it might be now. So you're teaching yoga, it sounds like, at your company, what were you doing at your company?
Morgan: You're referring to my corporate.
Lou: Yeah, well, teaching yoga. And at your company, maybe not teaching yoga at your company.
Morgan: So, yeah, my corporate world is very different from my yoga world. By the time I was getting into yoga, I was working in logistics. I was working on the accounting side of things and revenue management. It was a lot of spreadsheets. It was a global company, and it was a way to make some money and to learn about how to build a business. I worked there for, like, seven years, and then I got laid off, blessedly, and I'd been teaching yoga on the side, kind of just to, like, keep my sanity in check. Like, it was the thing that I most looked forward to, the thing that I enjoyed the most. So when I got laid off with the severance package, I was like, well, all I really want to do is yoga. So how am I going to make a business out of this? And I hired my first business coach and learned some sales techniques and built my business from there.
Lou: Amazing. So you went right. Right at it. So you were hiring your coach. What. How did you start that process? Because I can imagine, at least in my experience, I taught yoga and also know a lot of yogis and yoga teachers that the way that they're making money is the grind of classes and going from one class to the next class, sweating their ass off and, you know, driving in traffic and making, like, $35 or something for the class. And I knew from the beginning, like, this is not sustainable, and there's no way that this works long term. Like, there's just not a great roi here. And so I was fortunate to not lean too far into that. I had other things going on, too, but it sounds like, did you realize that from the beginning, too, of like, hey, I need to hire a business coach to figure out another way, rather than hustling the Asuna grind.
Morgan: Yeah, I definitely wanted to skip that burnout route. I actually got some really good advice from some other yoga teachers who said, you know, you need to limit how many classes you're teaching per week so that you're looking forward to each class, because as soon as you're, like, dreading a class, you're heading towards burnout, and it's not. It's just not sustainable. So I knew there was. I really wanted to take private clients, and I wanted to specialize in people with chronic pain and people with really acute injuries, people who had gone through surgeries, who were going to need longer term care. I had some experience with that and various other career paths that I'd had in my one of my many lives. So the way that I found my business coach was just fortuitous. I was on Facebook one day. There was, in one of the Facebook groups that I'm in, there was a post from a business coach offering free sessions. She did three free sessions with me and made me my 1st $1,000 within a couple of weeks. And I was like, all right, I can make this work. And I paid her, I think I paid her like 25. She was very affordable at that point. She was just getting started in this side of her business herself. So it was like 2500 for three months of coaching. And I was making my corporate salary within a few months just from booking private clients. But similar, even though I was getting paid, you know, around $150 an hour working with my private clients, it was still not sustainable to the point where I was trading my time for money, right? And I needed to start replacing some of that income with passive income. And that's where I started. Started combining my nerdiness as a social media fan, someone who's been writing on the Internet since back in the geocity days and knows how to get a crowd going, and was like, okay, I need to combine these things and either start teaching other yoga teachers how to make this happen, right? Because other yoga teachers were asking me like, hey, how are you making your life work? I was paying a mortgage in Santa Barbara. I was still traveling a lot. Um, so, uh, once I started making courses and working one on one with, with other people in a business coach capacity, that's where I started to see, like, the message of yoga really start to branch out, where it's like, if I can help one person sell out a workshop where 50 people are going to be, that's better than if I'm personally working with 50 people, because I can work with a few clients like that at a time and hit 150 people in a weekend, rather than having to interact with all those souls myself. So while I still do a lot of yoga teaching and a lot of workshops, my real passion is in empowering other yoga teachers and healers of all shapes and sizes to have the reach that they want, to have the audience that they want, and to have the freedom to do whatever they want. Because that's where I think so many of us get trapped, myself included, is we get stuck in a nine to five or some sort of cycle where we feel like we don't have any other choice because we've created obligations in our lives. And yoga, of course, is all about creating freedom and flow. And so that's been a really interesting part about running a yoga business, is so much of this business has happened to me through flow, right? Just happened to be on the Internet one day, getting the free coaching that I needed to jumpstart my business, finding my first clients, because I happened to be having a conversation with a neighbor and mentioned it, and she knew someone who needed someone just like me, having that spiral out from referrals, right. And then setting up different types of marketing funnels of that same nature, where I can connect with those super connectors who are always going to be able to send me the clients if I'm specific enough to know who I want to work with. And that's, I think, where a lot of yoga teachers run into issues is they don't have those basic marketing and sales techniques in order to learn how to scale a business so that they're not burning out, to your point, but also so that they really know who they enjoy working with, so that they're looking forward to every one of their clients that day instead of constantly stressing about signing clients. The more specific you can get, the easier it is to find your clients. But I'd love to know about your own experience avoiding burnout. What has worked really well for you as you've built your various income streams?
Lou: Yeah, for me, I was only teaching maybe three or four yoga classes a week, and I had written a book and finished a book, and I was trying to get speaking opportunities, which was a struggle when you don't have a big audience. I wouldn't say I tell people on this podcast all the time, don't start with a book. I'm so proud of that book. It's still doing well. But don't start with a book unless you really need to write a book. But I was doing that, and I was starting to. For me, where things started to unfold, I feel like I've been fortunate where I've actually never experienced in this work, a strong burnout. I realized right away with teaching yoga, I was like, I don't want to teach four classes a day and do that. I see what it's doing to other people, and my way out of that to have some more leverage was through schools. And I started teaching mindfulness and yoga at schools as my own business. And so I was able to charge, uh, instead of paying paid by a studio, I'm able to charge my rate of 100 or $150 for class or wherever it was back then. And I started training teachers. I started doing, like, train the trainer teachers on bringing mindfulness into schools. And so that's. That's where that is from. 2018 really started putting a lot of my energy into building this business in schools and growing that, um, which was often still. It was not burn. Wasn't burnout, but it was, like, pushing a boulder uphill because I had to constantly be figuring out of always being. Reaching out to schools, always trying to, like, get new opportunities, and it just wasn't opening for me. Um, where things open for me was more so, um, with coaching, once I opened that door, and that's a. A separate, separate conversation. But speaking of coaching, I want to draw us back because this is really interesting. You hire your first business coach in the first three sessions, he helps you make your 1st $1,000. I think a lot of people listening are like, what did she tell you in those first? What did you do?
Morgan: So.
Lou: So, please, if you're willing to share, I'd love to hear that. That actual tactical process of that.
Morgan: So let me just shout out to Bryn Brown. Everyone should hire her. She really specializes in people who are, like, jump starting their service based business from a spiritual entrepreneur perspective. She is a sales specialist. She has studied sales for years, and the technique that she taught me just to get started was just a referral, a basic referral technique where she had me list ten people that I thought might either be interested in the new private yoga sessions that I was offering or who might know someone. And she helped make it really specific on, like, who I wanted to work with. Right. Not just people who want to practice yoga, but people who are really specifically healing from something traumatic. That's kind of where my sweet spot was. So once I was able to get specific on that language, she guided me through the process of just asking people to refer me. And as I said, one of those people was my neighbor. I just happened to mention it to her as an aside. We had another neighbor who had just had surgeries, and she was like, we absolutely need to connect. This woman hired me for twice a week sessions for two months and paid me, like, $150 a session. She handed me a check for, I think it was, like, around 1200 bucks. And it was like, that's what I knew. Okay, I can do this. I can make this business happen. I don't have to find another job. Thank the heavens.
Lou: It's amazing. Once we get that little bit of, like, it was the same thing for me once I made. I made $2,000. For doing. It was a ton of work preparing for it, but for doing a full four week, like, hour long, each one training for mindful, training for mindfulness for teachers. And I was like, oh, there's something here. If I can dial this in. Like, this could make sense way more than trying to work harder and hustle harder and do more of these many classes. And so I love that. What would you say? Because I'm imagining some people listening might be maybe you've worked on this around, like, the mindset where people might feel like, oh, I don't wanna, like, bother people, or, I don't wanna put myself out there in that way that feels like, I don't know. I don't know if you come across any of that with people, like, the mindset around putting your offers out there. Like, how do you navigate that?
Morgan: Yeah, my clients who hire me as a business coach, they have two major issues. They have a visibility issue. They're afraid to put themselves out there, and they have an imposter syndrome issue. They're like, why would someone hire me? There's someone better. They could hire you. And I'm like, all right, here's how we're going to deal with this. First of all, you have to put yourself in the position of who you're speaking to. Haven't you ever had someone come up to you and be like, oh, my gosh, I just had the most amazing massage. She healed up my whole body. You have to call her right now. And you've been like, thank you. I've been looking for an amazing massage therapist to have this thing in my neck. And then you go and meet this person, and she, like, fixes your whole life. Right? Like, that's what you have to put yourself in the perspective of, is you're offering people a solution to a significant problem that they have. Right. If your marketing language is down, you've got to look at it in terms of the problem that your business solves and the desired solution that your clients want. But you're really doing them a favor by just saying, like, hey, if you know anyone who's having this problem, I have a solution. You should connect us. You can also offer, like, an affiliate commissioner, if that helps you feel better. Like, I pay everyone a 20% commission if they refer someone to me. And some of my programs are in the thousands of dollars, so I can pay out commissions that are in, like, you know, the hundreds to thousands of dollars. And then it becomes like, you know, a real win, win win for everyone involved. But you don't have to do that. You might. You know, I have some clients who like to send a gift to people who refer people their way. That's always well received, but you can just say, thank you so much, and let that super connector rest in the knowledge that, like, they have served their purpose as a bridge between someone with a problem and someone with a solution. And that's the trick, is to find someone who just loves to connect people. Everyone has these people in their lives. You just have to locate them. And that's why I like that list of, like, ten people, because chances are one out of ten people in your circle is a super connector who's gonna just be, like, thrilled out of their minds to refer you just for the love of it. Just for the love of connecting people. And for the second part of your question, or my second part of the imposter syndrome, like, why would they hire someone else when they could hire someone more experienced? Well, first of all, you have to look at this in terms of, you don't need everyone to hire you. You really just need a handful of clients to make a business work if your business model is priced correctly. So, like, there's someone for everyone, right? And even though it may seem like your market is saturated, there are clients out there who are manifesting you right now, just like you've manifested everyone that you've hired, whether it was a great yoga teacher, a great business coach, a great massage therapist, a great doctor, a great therapist, right? Those people, what a relief it was when you found the one that was, like, right for you at that right time of your life, you're going to be that person for your clients. They're right behind you on the path. And it would be inappropriate for someone like me to work exclusively with people who were just starting their yoga journey, right? It's been 20 years since my first yoga class. I prefer teaching teachers, really, and helping them deepen their practice. And while I can teach a beginner's class, it's not my niche. But, like, beginner yoga teachers who are within their first year of teaching, they're the perfect people to teach beginner yogis because they have such a good relationship to how hard down dog is, right? They have that close memory to what it's like when even being in child's pose is like, oh, my God, what's happening in my body? So that's the response, that's the mindset, work shift that we work through, and then we work on. The concept of confidence means doing it scared, right? Confidence means doing it with all these skeptical questions swirling in your head, and you do it anyway. And you look for the evidence that you're doing it correctly. You know, whether it's signing clients, whether it's, you know, just connecting with the people who are making you feel good about what you're doing in this world, and you allow yourself to collect evidence that you're on the right path and that you should continue doing what you're doing by putting yourself out there. The world needs you. It's not like you're selling snake oil here, right? You're probably selling really powerful work. But I'd love to know, what are your tips for these imposter syndrome issues that come up and these visibility issues?
Lou: So there's a truth in, we don't get what we don't ask for, like having to be willing to ask for the thing that we are calling in. I think it feels safer to just say, well, I can create this in a bubble, and people are going to come to me. But there's a level of vulnerability. I think a lot of us teach or practice vulnerability, and it is a vulnerable act to reach out to someone and say, hey, we might get rejected. They might say no. And I think, to your point, knowing that what you have to offer is valuable, believing in the value, it's almost like you are, I don't want to say manufacturing synchronicity, because that's not really depending on the view you look at that. It's not the truth. It's like you might. You have to kind of open that door or to meet God halfway. Like, you have to take that one step. Maybe that step is to reach out to those ten people and say, hey, I have this thing for this person. Do you know anyone? Now, I'm just a question that came up for me when you said that was, do any of the people that you reach out to be like, oh, like, that's me. Like, I'd love to do that with you. Is that part of the strategy as well?
Morgan: It can be. It's not, you know, an ulterior motive or anything, but often as you're describing who you want to work with, people will be like, yeah, as a matter of fact, you know, for example, I had a yoga teacher who specialized in people with sleep issues. And they were like, actually, I have insomnia. I have a hard time falling asleep and staying asleep. Like, I would love to work on this with you. And what a. What a happy coincidence, right? I like that phrase you use. Manufacturing synergy or just meeting someone halfway, you have to put it out there, what you're doing for people to accept the opportunity. Absolutely.
Lou: And so when did this in you taking this next step with your coach? And like, okay, now I have a $1,200 client that I'm teaching, and now maybe I get another one. Like, how does this journey start growing? And do you start. When do you start adding in and be like, oh, I want to start doing social media stuff? Like, how did these other revenue streams start to come in the picture?
Morgan: All right, so I had, like, the most dramatic year ever. I ended a seven year relationship. I ended a job that I'd been at for seven years. I was on the seven year cycle. And then I, you know, got my severance package, started this whole new life. Everything was coming up roses. Then I had an incredibly grievous injury. I tore my ACL skiing in spring snow at Palisades, where I was just skiing this week, getting back on that horse. This was, like, about seven years ago, actually. It was multiple knee surgeries and months to years of recovery. So suddenly, I couldn't work with private clients. I couldn't teach yoga. I couldn't really do anything for a few weeks. I could barely keep my eyes open because the recovery from that surgery is so exhausting. But after that, I was like, all right, I got to make some money, right? I don't have disability. I was running my own business. I got to figure out how to make this happen. So that's when I started looking more into the online coaching, the online courses, especially with the passive income. But I also started getting really curious about how to license my meditations. So let's flash forward. I've recovered from my knee surgeries. The pandemic started. I've moved to Mexico at this point. I was teaching a few online yoga classes. I was teaching at UCSB, and I'd had this little whisper in my ear for years at this point of like, hey, you should figure out how to license your meditations, because I'd recorded so many meditations for clients, for YouTube, various things that I'd put out there. Another friend of mine, a former client and friend, she was like, Morgan, you need to look into insight timer. And if you don't know, insight timer is this meditation app, and it's also kind of a social media channel. And I had actually been a student on insight timer for years and years at that point. And I was like, I don't. You can teach on there. Like, I thought you had to be accepted. And I looked into it and all you had to do at this point was apply. And there was a bit of a process to it. It's very different now, but this was, you know, five, six years ago. And so I started it up. I put all my meditations on there. And I started going live from Mexico, leading meditations online. And I was studying, I moved to LA to study traditional chinese medicine. So that was all online at this point. So that's why I was living in Mexico. This is all jumbled together, this story. So I was teaching a lot of the taoist meditations that I was learning through my master's program. And that attracted me this really specific type of audience on insight timer that was also really curious about the esoteric nature of yoga. And that's when I realized, like, oh, I've got this incredible marketing funnel for people who are going to want to hire both, you know, a spiritual life coach and a business coach because there were a lot of healers on there. I need to start going live on here more often. And so that's what I did. And I really built up my business from that side of things where I was able to get passive income because insight timer pays you every time someone listens to your meditations or takes one of your courses, they do all the marketing for you. You don't have to do any extra marketing. But I was also getting this community of people who weren't just on like Instagram or Facebook or TikTok because they want a distraction from their life. They were deliberately there because they were looking for, like, healing energy. And that's really what I wanted to talk about and that's what I wanted to attract. So that's when the online business really started to take off, was right at the beginning of the pandemic. And I've just been able to turn that into a really easy marketing funnel from there. It's been very interesting to me that, so I post similar to you, I like transparency and my income as I run my business. It's kind of my little rebellion against patriarchal capitalism, to be honest, about where my money comes from and where it goes. So I post videos on YouTube about how much money I've made on inside timer. And that has been the number one way that I booked my high ticket clients. People see that video, they hire me for a discovery call and they end up paying me thousands of dollars. Within one call. I put my YouTube channel is awful. There's no strategy. The graphic design is terrible. I still make thousands of dollars every single year, if not tens of thousands of dollars off of this one video I post years and years ago. And that's what so much of having an online business is about, is you just have to throw a bunch of seeds out there. You've got to interact with the social media that you really resonate with. You never know what's going to actually germinate and blossom into what's really going to work. So you kind of just have to experiment strategically and intuitively with a lot of different stuff until you find the secret sauce that's going to make your particular business work. Just going to be very different from how my business works. Right. But I'd love to hear more from your side of things. How did you build up your online world?
Lou: Yeah, for me, insight. I started, I found insight timer. I'm like a self proclaimed Og, I guess you could say. My first upload was in 2016, and I saw that it had like 2000 plays on the first day. This is back when there would be a homepage was new meditations, and sometimes new meditations would stay on the homepage for two days. It was a wild time. And so if I could go back in time, I would, like, just drop everything and just start creating meditations on that. Because it's funny to think about then what you know now. But long story short, I did not miss the boat by any means. I started uploading weekly meditation. I had probably about ten or twelve meditations in 2017, started uploading weekly in 2018, and just slowly that started building. At that time, there was no way you're making money. They didn't even have a revenue model. 2019 courses started happening. That started growing, and it's kind of just build from there. Like you, that is a place where a lot of people find me and do one on one coaching. I wasn't doing any one on one coaching until end of 2019. I did, like, a practice with a few people, and then once COVID hit all my school stuff was like, who knows what's going to happen? Shut down conferences, not happening. All of this stuff is, like, not happening. I getting a new website built. I put coaching on my website, and it was just like the universe was waiting for me to open that door and slowly started people finding me, and that started kind of building and growing from there as a solid leg of that work. And the audience has been continuing to grow and morph and different things have happened. I didn't even know this podcast emerged out of being a co teacher. I don't know if you know who David Gandelman is, but he runs a meditation school runs. He runs meditation school and he's done a meditation teacher training. And I was a co teacher in it and I found that I loved helping up and coming meditation teachers and co. Like, it made me so happy that this podcast is what was birthed from that last year. So it's been about a year now, and this me, I'll love to talk about niching here in a second, but me moving into this niche is like kind of, I'm kind of figuring out how to step me a little bit, not away from what I was doing. Like, it's all still the same, but like wearing a few different hats at the same time, which has been an interesting, yeah, interesting unfolding. I think that video you're talking about is probably how I found you, too. Like, I saw, like, wait a second, this was, this. She looks familiar. And I was like, oh, okay, cool. I'm just, I'm curious, what is your steps? Because I know there's a lot of people listening to this podcast that are on insight timer. They're looking to grow on insight timer. You do charge a solid amount for your coaching and so not to get, you know, I obviously, I think you got it. You can give away whatever you give away. But what. How would. I guess I'm just curious because what are the results that they're, that you've, that they've gotten? Like, or I could you have an example of people, like, I've came to you and then, like, they've been able to build something. Just be curious to hear like a story, because I think I know how I would coach that. When I see you, I was like, I should probably charging a little bit more money than I'm charging.
Morgan: So first of all, I have a sliding scale of program. So my lowest ticket program is like $11 a month. My highest ticket program is two to $5,000 a month. The people who are paying then the thousands of dollars per month, they're hiring me as a business coach. So a great example is my client Tiana. She runs a marketing business called Moon Boost marketing. She found me on insight Timer. I was doing oracle card readings, and she was like, oh, this woman's got good advice. And she hired me for one of my, I think it was one of my $10,000 contracts. After one conversation, we had a six month contract together. During that time, she wanted mostly life coaching. She was ending a relationship. She was getting ready to make a big transition in her life. She was really unfulfilled by her job at that point. In her life. So within six months together, we had her moved out of her dead end relationship. We had her with a new job that doubled her salary. So that, and then within a year of us, she then hired me for another year. Within a year of us working together, she had met her fiance and was engaged, and they're getting married this year, which is so exciting. So she hired me for a full year. We took about a year break. She had been working for a startup. They laid her off. She hired me again specifically as a business coach to help her launch her marketing business. So from there, she hired me for around $10,000, I think, again for a slightly shorter program. I specialized in mergers and acquisitions in one of my roles. So I was a big negotiator in one of my corporate worlds. So as she was signing clients, her first contract that she signed was like $5,000. So she made half her money back off that first client. The second client she signed was $70,000 retainer. So that was, you know, a significant return on her investment just within, like, the first month of us working together. But it's very interesting to me when people come into my life, I don't always know why they're hiring me. They think they know why they're hiring me. I had one client hire me recently who was like, I've been living off unemployment for six months. Her best friend actually paid for her to work with me. She was a mutual friend. She was like, I need help with my career. I need help finding a new job. I'm like, great, we can work on that. Turns out what she really wanted to work on, what she really needed to work on was her dating life and stepping into her more feminine energy. She'd been a single mother her whole life and was, like, really living in her masculine I have to do everything. Once she kind of eased into that, started dating someone amazing, everything else started to come into place with her job opportunities that were coming her way and just various money making opportunities. So it's always interesting, like, what people hire me for, why they're attracted to me. Sometimes it's the business coaching, sometimes it's the yoga. A lot of people take my yoga class and just meet me in person and hire me as their coach in some capacity from there. But I all come at it from this very yogic place of, okay, we're going to start by getting you in alignment, making sure you're taking care of yourself, because how can you make decisions if you're not in alignment? And then from there, we're going to work on the Svad Yaya, the self study of this experience, of this human experience. You're going to learn how to trust your intuition, and from there we're going to make decisions. I use some of my intuitive psychic abilities to kind of get them on the path to help them realize, like, this is what happens when you're making aligned decisions. And I'm not telling them what to do, but I'm coaching them through whether it's negotiating tactic or a dating tactic. This is how to take the next step to get to your goals. Let's make it baby steps every single day, not always one big leap. And if we can have a little bit of joy while we're doing it, all the better. It's another big yogic part of it, right? Bringing cultivating that joy in the world. But those are kind of the tangible results, as you said, right? Like there's money that people make, especially if they're hiring me as a business coach. I'm constantly like, let me remind you how much money you've made from hiring me. But from the spiritual coaching perspective, there's also these big life shifts. Another big one that people hire me for is like, they need someone's permission to move to their dream house. So I've had clients who have hired me just to be like, how do I afford to move to Maui? How do I afford to move to San Diego and live with a view of the ocean? That's what I really want. And so I coach them through how to do it. And it's crazy to me how quickly it happens once people get in alignment and it always feels like a miracle. And at the same time I'm like, yeah, of course it works. It always works.
Lou: And so it sounds like even though you have this niche of working with spiritual entrepreneurs around business, that it's not like you have, okay, I also do this, this and this and this. It's just you have this, you're strong with this, but other people are like, still come out, still reach out to you or still come to you. Am I reading that correct? Yeah.
Morgan: Well, this brings us into the interesting conversation about niches because I am very pro and anti niche for specific reasons. You don't have to niche your business or your brand, but you do have to niche your marketing because you can't talk to two different populations at the same time. Right? Even though I, as a yoga teacher, can help paramenopausal women in their forties, as much as I can help college graduates, they're using two very different forms of language to describe their problems and their desired solutions. Even though I might use the same technique to get them to where they want to be, I have to pick who I'm talking to in terms of who I'm marketing to. Right? So that's when it comes to the language you use on social media in your email list, but also just the language you use to talk about your business. The statement you used at the beginning of this podcast, that's from years of market research that I've chosen those words to describe what I do because those are the words that my clients use. And that's the trick for niches, is you have to use the words that your clients use. So I market to my favorite niche. I love working with healers who are making the change in the world that I want to see. I love empowering people to do their healing work, to travel as much as they want, and to live their dream life while making a ton of money doing their divinely given work that they came here to do. So that's why a lot of my online marketing is focused on that. I've worked with people in all sorts of industries because they're attracted to my energy and they're like, I'm not sure if you work with, you know, therapists or even the most random one was like, you know how they have paints on like, like big, big airports that people like, paint the lanes? I worked with that guy to help him build a side of his business. So I met him at a yoga retreat in Bali. Like, you never know where these clients are going to come from or whether they're going to hire you or what they're going to hire you for. But that's why it's like I have a broad niche of like, I know I could help anyone, but I market to the people that I really love to work with. Not to say I don't love all my clients because of course I do, but I, to enact the change I want to see in the world, you have to empower the healers.
Lou: I just want to mic drop that line. I love having these podcasts because I get to be like, take things and bring things into my own work. But you don't need to niche your brand, you need to niche your marketing. That is powerful. I hope you start thinking about that. I'm going to be thinking of that even more because it's so I have continually like, I, this isn't starting to be my niche and it's so hard for me to say this is who I do it because I don't want to exclude. Like, I could help other people, though. Like they could, like, be reaching out to me. Like, I have such a hard time with it. Anywho, so what are you, besides maybe being too broad in their marketing, what are other mistakes you're seeing spiritual entrepreneurs making?
Morgan: They're undercharging for their work so they don't have a sustainable business model. So they get burnt out. The same as teaching ten classes a week at $20 a class. Like, it's just not sustainable. Just can't do it.
Lou: So how do you. Let's go. Let's put a thing on there, because I think that's something that definitely many can struggle with and figure out. Okay, well, how do I, how do you help someone decide and define their business model?
Morgan: Yeah, so I teach people to work on a sliding scale business model where we have a bare minimum of what it's going to cost for you to show up anywhere and be excited about it. And I have a spreadsheet that I have people go through and to figure out what that number is. I have a whole system for figuring this out. And then we have what they actually want to get charged, like their dream rate, and that's what we're actually going to publicize and put out into the world. And then we have like the promo rate, which is in between that sliding scale. I call it a scholarship rate. Like, only certain people are entitled to my scholarship rate. I reserve mine for the BIPOC community and college students and single mothers. And then a few people are going to pay that higher rate. Most people are going to pay this promo rate. And then the promo rate is if you're live launching something, then you're doing like an expiration date, like save, you know, $200 if you sign up before Friday. Or you can do it in terms of a bonus structure where you're offering things of monetary value, like you're throwing in an extra course that you would otherwise sell for $500. And that's kind of making it seem more valuable in that way. So there are a lot of psychological tricks you can use, but the bottom line is you have to know your baseline for what it takes to afford your life. How much money you need to make each day that you're actually choosing to work. You can't work every single day, just can't do it. That's not sustainable. Most people, four days a week is kind of a sweet spot. You know, around 25 hours is like to live the rest of their life. So you've got to figure out how much money you can make in those 25 hours a week. Not just trading your time for money, but also creating passive income streams. And that's one of the things I focus on with my business coaching clients are those short term income streams, like trading your time for money. The medium term income streams, things like creating online courses, and then the longer term income streams, things like investing in real estate or cryptocurrency or even things like licensing your meditations. It can take that long to build an audience, to really see the several hundred dollars a month that can make a difference in how you live your life. That was a long answer. Did that answer your question?
Lou: I think so, yeah. So defining your, your price and it sounds like you're see that. I think the issue sometimes I have with, like, selling, I have a lot of issues with selling. Like, I don't love knowing that I'm using something psychological to, like, to, to try to elicit a response from someone. Does that make sense? Like, there's something in me that's just like, am I missing something with selling? Like, is there a way to do it where I don't have to, like, hey, this is how you sell. You, like, you get them to feel this and then you get them to do this and then you do. I was like, that just doesn't, doesn't sit well with me. So, I mean, I'd be curious how you, you know, not that I'm known to make it wrong or right, but like how, how you think about that and like, actually, you know, in business, maybe there's like, oh, we're doing business here. And this is what you do in business. You sell, you know, you have these psychological things. But then we're here in this kind of different, know, different. I'm calling it different. It's not, you know, there's spiritual business where it's like about you wanting things to be in alignment with ourselves, our inner hearts and our outer experiences and our intentions and our, the consequences of our intentions. And so, like, when I think of, I have an intention that I'm going to say this and that's going to help you make a decision to work with me. There's, I don't, how do you navigate that? Or how do you do people have these kind of like, questions around sales and negotiating and all that stuff? Because I know that comes up in me. Like, I still, there's a lot for me to learn and understand and not that I need to learn something, but I'm still just, I like to have these conversations on this podcast because I don't really hear these conversations being had a lot on these type of podcasts.
Morgan: Yeah, it's a worthy conversation because literally every single one of my clients has the same issue of, like, I don't want to feel like I'm manipulating someone. I don't want to feel salesy, right. Because it doesn't feel good when people do it to me. So there are definitely ways to sell in alignment. Right. If it feels weird to have, like, expiration date pricing, just don't do it. Just set your rates where they're at and just put your offer out there and people will buy from you. You skip the stuff that doesn't feel good, but you have to go back to what's it going to take to get your clients the help that they need. You are uniquely positioned to help your clients. You are the only person who can help them at this phase of their life. Right. So what do you have to do to get them to agree to that? Now, some of my rules for signing clients are I need a hell yes client. If there's any objection, if it's around money. All right, this is why I have three different tiers for people to work with me. Right. If you don't have $11 a month, maybe we've got some other issues going on that we need to deal with before we hire a coach. Right? So having those different tiers. So, like, that very common money objection doesn't come up. Putting yourself out there is just saying, hey, if you have this problem, I have a solution. So you have to continually come back to that. And you have to remember that. Just like I'm sure you've paid for many workshops, working with meditation teachers, perhaps yoga, working with other coaches to learn this stuff, like how ever it felt to sign up for that, it can feel very empowering. And I think the secret to making it empowering and a win for everyone involved is to ask permission every step of the way. So if you're doing a one on one sales conversation, or even if you're doing it in the DM's, once you get the information, you need to understand if you even want to work with this client, right? Because you have to make that decision first before you make an offer, is to say, okay, well, I would love to work with you. Would it be all right if we talk about how we can work together and then you get their response, yes, I would love to hear that, or no, I'm not interested in that. Great. Shut down the conversation move on to your next thing. But you continually ask permission every step of the way as you're just delivering pieces of information to make sure you're both on the same page about what they would be hiring you for, what the value is, so that they're not even questioning the cost of it by the time you actually say a number. Now, the other side of it is, I prefer to be very transparent about numbers. It's very common in the coaching world not to post your rates online until you're in a sales conversation. I hate it. I hate it.
Lou: I appreciate that. I appreciate that about you. And I keep going back and I keep not knowing what to do. I've had conversations around this with other people and yeah, so I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
Morgan: Well, and this is why I built my business, to have three different very affordable and then very valuable programs and then a mid tier program so that it is accessible to people at different stages of their journey. And so when someone comes to me and is like, I need you for one on one work, I don't have to disappoint them by saying, like, there's no way you can ever afford me, right? But also, like, we put so much free stuff out into the world, our one on one time is valuable. You have to sit with that reality. Just like when you hire someone else, their one on one time is valuable and you respect that. You deserve that same respect. And if you don't respect that about yourself, it's going to be really hard to sell your clients on it. So you've got to do that mindset work. One of my favorite tricks is just to say your number out loud, whatever your high ticket number is. I charge $10,000 for a six month contract. Say it so it becomes normal and so that your nervous system doesn't get dysregulated when you say it or type it, you know, because the calmer you are putting that number out there, the calmer people are going to be giving that number to you and they're going to get a freaking huge value from it. Even if you can't put it into a quantifiable. Like you made this much money because you worked with me, right? You're going to give them benchmarks throughout the process of working together where they're going to realize, wow, I really made some huge project that was so valuable. I'm so glad I did this.
Lou: And so people know what the price is going into your sales conversation. And then if that's a barrier you have. There's also the question of, like, I've heard before other coaches that have, like, sliding scales that only the coach knows about. And when I hear that, I'm like, is that really a sliding scale? Like, because we're kind of having this one price, and then depending on if they can pay it, then we offer another price. How do you think about, like, that if you do have those other kind of tiers?
Morgan: I try to be as transparent as I can. So when I'm putting out a call for scholarships, I am sending it tiered first to my email list, and then I'm telling social media, hey, I sent out my scholarship application to my email list. Let me know if you didn't get it. So I'm not, you know, Blair, I'm not putting ads out for this rate, but I'm telling my community in multiple ways, like, hey, this is the lowest tier to get in. These are the very specific requirements, but even if you don't meet them, it's worth applying because we can have a conversation. We'll find a way to work together. And then from there, I go into a launch period. So I always start my launches with the smallest, the scholarship amount. Then I go into a bigger launch period. Meanwhile, I'm using those people who applied for the scholarship, and I'm asking them for referrals, and I'm telling them, hey, if you can't afford to pay the regular rate, I'm giving you a way to make money. All you have to do is tell your community about this. I'm going to give you a 20% commission. It's a $600 a month program. So you sell three of these, you've made your first month, right? So I'm getting those scholarships from people who I really want to work with me. Maybe they can't afford it. Whether they get accepted to the scholarship or not, I'm creating a business relationship with them, and I'm giving them valuable tools on how to build an affiliate marketing business. Right from there, I go into my launch period of, okay, here's the actual amount. If you sign up before this time, it's. It's this much money and you get a bonus. You get, you know, $1,700 worth of courses if you sign up. That feels good for me. It works on me. I only market the stuff that works on me. So I'm like, if this gets me to sign up for something valuable, I'm going to do it. It feels good to me. All right. I'm okay with that. I skip and this is not to say everyone should do it the same as me. You got to figure out what works on you and just replicate it or hire the person who, you know, figured that out for you. And then I have the third tier of pricing, the highest pricing, right, which is, like, hardly anyone pays that amount. But if I have someone come who wants to work with me when I'm not in a launching period, that's the amount I want them to see. So if I give them any other amount, whatever, for whatever reason, they feel like they're getting a huge bonus. Does that make sense?
Lou: Totally makes sense. And I think that's a good litmus test of, like, hey, if you sign up for things like this and this feels true for you, then, like, yeah, like, there's, like, a sense of, okay, if this feels good in my body, I think that's, I mean, for all of this work, right? This is what we're talking about, trusting ourselves, trusting our bodies. Um, I love. I really appreciate you having these type of conversations because, again, I think, like, this is, uh, I don't see. I'm fascinated by coaching prices in the coaching industry for multiple reasons, because I remember when I hired my first coach, that was way more than I thought. It's $5,400. And that feeling like it wasn't even about the coach. And I fully believed this in my being. It was like, wow, I'm committing this to myself. And it was so transformational in just giving that to myself. And that sounds like a crazy thing to some people, but it was true. And then for me, I thought more was better. And so, like, I think this is where I think things can get weird. It's like, well, if I spent 5400, then next time I need to spend, you know, double that because I'm looking for that same thing. It was almost like I was, like, trying to grasp on something, and when I did that, I felt like I did it for the wrong reasons. And in many ways, it felt like it. I did not. Not that I got I'll take responsibility for how I. How I. Where I put my money, but it. I felt myself doing it for the wrong reasons, and I didn't receive that value. I felt like, in that. In that time. And so, like, I. So I have these, like, I battle with myself in that way of, like, like, honoring this and then seeing where things can get a little out there. So I don't have answers, I just have questions. And this podcast is a space for those questions to be explored. So I definitely appreciate, Morgan, you exploring this with me. There's so many other things we could talk about. I know we're coming up against, uh, time. You know, you're traveling and I think that's something I wanted to maybe note on because I think, yeah, it's, it's one of the gifts and is being able to work from where we want and not to feel stuck. Not to feel stuck, but we can travel and we can make a good living and experience places and it's one of the, you know, blessings there. I'm able to go to Italy for a month to spend time with family every year. I just spent a month in Guatemala in January and I don't promote that lifestyle. Like, I don't, I'm not a huge fan of the spiritual entrepreneurs promoting the beach lifestyle because I don't like promoting the lifestyle, I like promoting the service. Anywho, um, it's still a dream. I'm not going to take that away. So I'd love to hear what you're up to and like how you've been able to like, live that life and also maybe some of the places where it's also maybe not a dream where you, you're giving away something that you maybe would like if you had grounded in one place. So, yeah. Anything you want to share about that, please?
Morgan: Yeah. So I owned a few properties in Santa Barbara. I did not like the process of owning property, so I sold them, I made some money and I used that money to start traveling and to start my master's program in traditional chinese medicine, which was in LA. I knew I wanted to build a business that I could run from my phone. And so that's what I slowly, incrementally started to do, is I worked with clients, especially in Mexico. I couldn't do zoom meetings, so everything had to be phone calls because I was living off grid. I just didn't have the Internet. And I've just, I've always loved to travel. I've always been an adventurer. As I mentioned, I first left home when I was twelve to go to boarding school. It wasn't like bad girl school, it was like smart girls school. Like, I chose to leave. It was purely my choice. And I've just been traveling the world since then. So it feeds my soul in so many ways. I have ADHD, so I need constant novelty. And I find myself on these circuits where I travel between like three and five different places for a season of my life. So right now I'm in a season. We're coming out of ski season. I'm a big skier. So I've just been traveling between Utah and Reno and Joshua Tree, which is kind of my home base. That's where my po box is and my storage facility. And I just kind of do that circuit. My next circuit coming up, I'm going to be moving through Reno, where I teach public yoga classes, Oregon Bend, Oregon, and then going down the coast to Santa Barbara. And I'll be doing that triangle for a couple of months. And as I said, I have ADHD, so it really feeds the novelty in my soul. But I'm also a capricorn, so so much of me craves grounding and, like, not knowing where I'm gonna sleep. Some nights I'm just booking Airbnbs. I house it. I stay with friends who invite me to, you know, come stay with them for as long as I need to. And I go where the snow is when it's ski season. So to not have that, like, grounding place where I have, like, you know, my closet and all my clothes organized and everything, just how I want it, that's been a real challenge for me. And it's actually been a big part, I think, of why I chose this need to travel as a spiritual being is to find that sense of home within myself. So my home becomes my meditation practice, my home becomes my yoga practice. I can go almost anywhere in the US, and there's a yoga studio within an hour's drive. What a gift. If not, I have my own personal practice I can come home to. That's been a real struggle. And then just the alternative lifestyle from people in my blood, family understanding it is, like, not there. Like, they don't travel, they don't get it. They don't understand why I'm making this choice and these sacrifices. And my friends, my, you know, soul family are like, yeah, we totally get it. Come stay with us as long as we'd love to have you here. Like, let's go have adventures. And so that's been another hard part is like, well, my family doesn't get me. Like.
Lou: Yeah, well, thank you, Morgan. Such a beautiful journey that you're on and living. Do you have any last, before we send people to maybe what you're working on or where you want to send people? Do you have any last pieces of wisdom for spiritual entrepreneurs listening?
Morgan: Yeah. If you don't know your human design, find out your human design and your strategy. It makes such a huge difference in how you run your business and how you sign clients and just how you live your life. If you've never heard of it, google it or dm me. I'll give you the rundown and you should take my quiz. I'll send you a link you can put in the show notes. It's how to make passive income based on your human design. And it'll tell you what type of passive income stream is right for you. It'll get you on my email list. I'd love to offer that to your community.
Lou: Amazing. You just dropped a bomb last minute. I'm so curious. What's your human design?
Morgan: I am a four six generator with a sacral authority. What's your human design?
Lou: I'm a manifester.
Morgan: Mmm, I love my mannies.
Lou: Yeah. Yeah. How do I make some more passive income, Morgan?
Morgan: So for the manifesters, do you really want to know? Do you want to dig in? No, you got to take the quiz. Go take the quiz. It'll tell you.
Lou: All right, fair enough. Fair enough. All right. Thank you so much for being on the show. I hope everyone got a lot of value out of it. And go check out Morgan for work. Go check out the quiz. Human design. We're actually doing some human design in a mastermind that I have running. I'm having someone come in and teach it and we're going to explore it. So, yeah, that's why I said, like, you just dropped a bomb. I think it is. I think all personality typings can be really helpful using human design. Enneagram MBTI. Really, really supportive in this. So thank you, Morgan, and thank you, everyone for listening. I will see you next time.
Morgan: Thank you. Bye.