Pursuing Advanced Education And Building A $336K/Year Health Coaching Business

Leslie Chen

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Published: October 22nd, 2023

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Leslie Chen

Founder, Rise Lean

$28K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Rise Lean

riselean.com

from San Jose, CA, USA

started October 2015

$28,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools Leslie recommends to grow your business!

web hosting tool-icon

WP Engine

reviews

Google Review...

social media tool-icon

Tiktok

accounting tool-icon

Quickbooks tool-icon

Google Sheets

productivity tool-icon

Google Suite

payments

Square

analytics

Google Analytics

blog

WordPress

design

Canva

Discover what books Leslie recommends to grow your business!

Want more updates on Rise Lean? Check out these stories:

Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?

I’m Leslie Chen, the owner of Rise Lean — a transformational weight loss & emotional eating coaching business I started eight years ago.

My company helps clients worldwide heal from toxic food and weight patterns to have a head-turning body while enjoying unbridled food freedom.

My flagship program is Lean Instinct Formula, and my clients are intelligent, driven, high-impact women pursuing big dreams and sparkles in life — including neuroscientists, engineers, data scientists, chairwomen of multi-continental NGOs, corporate executives, entrepreneurs, program managers, and other successful coaches, etc.

They are brilliant, passionate, and loving women. However, they’ve been struggling with an abusive relationship with food and the weight problem, which sets them back often. My solution helps them rewire the year-long psychological and physical patterns by fundamentally shifting how they perceive, respond to, and experience eating and weight loss. The outcome is sustainable, long-lasting, and stress-free weight loss while ultimate liberation from food anxiety, obsession, and shame.

Rise Lean’s 2022-2023 revenue from this business is $336,000. The number alone can’t tell much about the company without considering other metrics, with the main ones being:

ROI
Cost per customer acquisition
Client success rate

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

One day, an ex-client from my previous corporate job asked: "Can you teach me how to remain fit while eating whatever you want? Back in the old days, you were the only one eating bimbimba while the rest were having salad!"

I'm Chinese. I eat tons of carbs. I don't count calories. I have cakes whenever I want. I don’t have time to go to the gym often. And despite all of that, I'm Size 4, fit, and healthy. That might be difficult for most Americans to understand — especially those who have worked extremely hard to contain their weight only to find failures and eating disorders.

That's why my ex-client was curious. However, she didn't know that I wasn't always skinny. I gained 50 pounds in one year after moving to the US. No diet worked no matter how hard I dieted, and I could only kick off actual, lasting weight loss after reconnecting with the freeing, satisfying way of eating we all lived by in China.

I instantly felt I had a robust and valuable message to share with the Western World, and I asked her:" Would you pay me $500 for four calls where I'll share my secrets with you?" "Hell yeah!" Now I'm suddenly profiting from a business idea freshly from the oven.

At this point, I wasn't sure if an Asian-inspired weight loss program would be a successful business idea, so I tested more — first, by organizing a group on Meetup.com, where I took people out to eat delicious Asian food and talked about weight management and eating on the table. In a month, more than 100 people signed up and I could host events with 20 people each time. It was a gold mine, I was face-to-face with my ideal clients, and I learned a lot about them.

During my 'immersion' research phase, I also acquired clients and formulated the initial version of my program. To this day, Lean Instinct Formula has been through 12 rounds of revision as I learned more about my clients' needs and continued to refine the solution, by pursuing advanced education in coaching, product design, and food psychology.

Besides my personal experience in losing 50 pounds effortlessly, restoring my relationship with food, plus those 20 years of upbringing in China where the most liberating food and health wisdom were everyday norms, my corporate career experience also prepared me for leading deep changes in people.

Before I started Rise Lean, I'd worked at a top global Management Consulting company in Shanghai and New York City for years, where training executive clients and implementing structural, cultural, and mindset transformation on the organizational level was an intrinsic part of the job.

To help Rise Lean’s clients experience thorough, holistic transformation in their food life, I've generously invested in educating myself — including pursuing a Master of Science degree in Neuroscience at an institution ranked the world's #2 in this field and boasting Europe's most prestigious neuroscience research center.

For those who are starting, invest in yourself and commit only learn from the best.

Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.

By the time I was about to build the first version of Lean Instinct Formula (named “Automated Freedom” then), I already had a handful of interested prospects waiting to become clients. I didn’t go ahead with creating a full-fledged program before enrolling them. Instead, I outlined the key components of it and had my prospects review them to provide feedback.

Once they gave me constructive feedback on the key essentials, I enlisted them into the outline without creating anything concrete.

So, I rolled out the program while teaching live based on the drafted outline. Meanwhile, I was very receptive to new ideas and needs that popped up during the live coaching experience and extended into the important ones on a real-time basis.

It’s fair to say I made the plane while flying it!

In my home office with Rise Lean’s Chief Entertainment Officer during Rise Lean’s early days:

Describe the process of launching the business.

To me, launching means making sales vs going through business registration, website design, and other admin processes. Instead of spending extensive time on the latter, I kept it lean and simple and spent the majority of my time on inspiring awareness and building the lead flow.

Generating leads wasn't the most challenging part because, as I mentioned earlier, I naturally acquired my initial group of clients in my Meetup group when I was purely doing research.

The fund was tight initially, and I had no experience or knowledge in running ads online. Therefore, I chose to find clients organically and steadily — guest posting. My basic lead generation structure included:

A straightforward website with crisp, clear, and compelling copy that articulates who my clients are, their problems, and what makes my offer a fit for them.
A 'lead magnet' which attracts people to sign up for my email list.
An email list communication strategy for relationship development, engagement, and conversion for people on my list.

So, whenever I posted high-quality content on other people's sites, the readers came to my website from there or directly landed on my email list through the 'lead magnet' landing page shared at the call-to-action.

Growing my email list to the first 1000 took me about a year. It took a lot of work. However, I was great at attracting a suitable audience and keeping this list highly engaged. Even today, with a fairly sizable list, my email open rate is still 40% —- more than 3 times the industry average for the health and fitness industry. Because of that ability, as soon as I've had 550 people on it, I've already started making sales from it.

Client acquisition and growth are inevitable as long as I ensure my product is golden, messaging is compelling, and positioning is befitting.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

After the first year of growing my list organically, as I shared above, I've used multiple ways to increase my lead flow. Here's a run-down of what worked for me and what didn't:

Guest posting at large, credible, and relevant sites worked and generated high-quality leads. Many of them became clients.

Being a guest on globally acclaimed Top 1% podcasts worked similarly well.

SEO works and has caught up with the speed, generating excellent results so far.

Facebook ads worked to a certain extent. It used to be my primary lead generation machine for years — with an ROI as high as 85%. However, I stopped using it in 2022 because, after Facebook's iOS 14 upgrade, my cost per customer acquisition on Facebook skyrocketed.

TikTok ads: I tried it for 2-3 months last year, but it didn't work for my offer.

LinkedIn: still in the early stage of testing at the time of writing.

These are the funnels. Let's talk about messaging now because it's an essential part of lead generation and must be straightened up before funnels are even considered. Ultimately, if your message doesn't work, you can invest in lead generation only to see low conversion.

And since messaging is such a broad topic area by itself, let me focus on one aspect of it that is extremely important for newbies:

Establish authority as much as you can. Compared to 10 years ago, today's customers have become much wiser, vigilant, and well-educated when choosing which expert to trust, and it's promising for the health of the entire coaching profession.

For instance, I've got people booking an enrollment call with me after sitting on my email list for five years. Also, almost everyone who has booked a call with me has at least visited my website, listened to my podcast episodes, watched my videos, checked my client case studies and reviews, and sometimes checked my LinkedIn profile.

Clients want to be well-informed before taking action. In my communication everywhere, I encourage them to check all these to understand my philosophy, expertise, and energy before booking a call. People need to feel confident about their choices, and I want the right fit only.

From what I can see, the effort and ability to establish authority in your industry present a golden opportunity, especially for the new joiners. It takes time, determination, education, financial resources, and strenuous effort to build that authority. That's why most people don't do it. And because of that, owning it will instantaneously set you apart and prepare you for the long-run victory.

Furthermore, I'm already seeing a new disruptive trend here:

Moving forward, the coaching industry will see more and more AI-generated courses sold by insincere individuals seeking to make money fast. I must admit I’m concerned. Just today, I saw two Facebook ads on using AI to generate coaching programs for making quick sales.

That's what makes being authentic even more attractive and valuable in the future. If your goal is to build something iconic and world-class, you must become a leader in both expertise and authority because winning this marathon requires faith in your purpose and endurance.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

Two things I can pinpoint right now are:

Scaling the current B2C model. I’ve been holding back on it. I’m currently doing group coaching, there are multiple groups, and each group is limited to 6 people. The group size is contained so my clients can get the most out of me, which matters to their overall experience. However, I can’t change the world by working with 20 people each time. And by not scaling, I’m keeping the door closed to more people who need help. I’m looking for a way to scale without compromising client experience and results.
Starting B2B. Have conversations with corporate leaders to see where Rise Lean can add value.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

I’ve learned not to set goals on things I cannot control — for instance, revenue goals.

It may sound counterintuitive. But I know the following for sure:

Client acquisition and growth are inevitable as long as I ensure my product is golden, messaging is compelling, and positioning is befitting. Attracting the right clients can happen with the simplest strategy, with a high conversion rate, when these things click.

These four elements are the core of the business. And having a robust core can eliminate 80% of the falls.

Today, I'm an entrepreneur and a mother. I'll pass on everything I've learned in creating a business — including copywriting, sales, resilience, risk planning, winner mindset, adaptability, etc.- to help her thrive.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

WordPress for my website
WP Engine for hosting
Kajabi for information delivery
Zoom for live sessions
Calendly for booking calls
Wufoo for collecting applications
Squareup for transactions
Quickbook for tracking finances

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

A lot. Right now it's ‘100 Million Dollar Offer’ by Alex Hormozi. Read it again, again, and again.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

Advice #1. If you haven’t yet started and wonder if you should, ask yourself: “If I don’t do it now, what’s the chance I’ll do it later?”

Either answer is fine. If the answer is “less or none,” ask yourself: “Will I regret it in the end if I never did it?” Just be honest with yourself.

Advice #2. If someone says you won’t succeed, kindly remind yourself whether you are winning or not is a joint decision between you and God.

Advice #3. Once you decide to do it, assume success. Reverse engineer by asking yourself this question:

“In two years, my business will change 100 lives. To get there, what do I need now? That brings up the victor’s mindset and energy that prime you for success.

Advice #4. For those who are starting, invest in yourself and commit only learn from the best.

Start by identifying 1-2 core skills you need the most right now to master to run the business successfully.

Don’t settle for cheap programs with fancy, exaggerated promises made by unknown sellers. Instead, learn from true masters — the topic authority. It'll sure be expensive, but you’ll get far better results much faster, which ends up making you money and saving you time.

If acquiring this skill is going to take me one year regardless, I’d want to make sure I’m learning the best which is worth my while.

Beyond the methodologies you learn, the wisdom and mindset shift you acquire just by training with a true master is much more advanced and far-reaching, serving you for years to come on a whole different level.

Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?

I am. I need another assistant coach with experience and qualifications in Food and Nutrition. It’ll be a paid part-time role. If interested, send me an email at [email protected]

Where can we go to learn more?

Rise Lean Website
14 Minutes of Pure Gold video for people struggling with toxic food and weight patterns
Follow on LinkedIn
TikTok videos
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