15: Fall In Love With Your Yoga Student’s Problems

What Is This Episode About…

In this episode, we are going to discuss the difference between a product/service and an offer.

Every yoga entrepreneur should focus most on offering their students a valuable service that solves a very specific problem that they want solved. If you are not creating an offer that solves your student’s problems, then you just have a service that probably 5 other yoga studios in your area have. This means the only way to “win” is to race to the bottom on pricing. Crafting an offer allows you to increase the value to the potential student.

Tune in so you can learn exactly how an offer can not only help you make more money in your yoga business, but also enable you to make a bigger impact on your students’ lives.

Key Points Discussed:

• The difference between a product/service and an offer (01:00)
• An offer increases the value of the service business is providing (01:52)
• You cannot be the second cheapest Walmart (03:33)
• Only those with huge capital can win a race to the bottom (05:07)
• 80% sign-ups when you solve your students’ exact problems (07:31)

Learn More About The Content Discussed…

Join The Facebook Group –> http://bit.ly/yogaentrepreneur

When Was It Released…

This episode was released October 2, 2019

Episode Transcript…

Disclaimer: The Transcript Is Auto-Generated And May Contain Spelling And Grammar Errors

00:00          You can come in and you can take introductory week for $20. So what does that mean? And just get to come to… Unlimited. You can come as many classes as you like, and that’s it. For one whole week. I need a mat. What do I do about getting them? You don’t have a mat. We have mats for rent here. You can rent a mat. A water? There’s a water fountain. Make sure you bring a bottle. All of a sudden you’re like, “Wait. So, if you see what happens is that, when you think about those problems, here’s a real simple way of doing it.” Fall in love with your student’s problems, and figure out however you can to help solve those problems.

00:29          What’s up everyone? You are listening to Yoga Entrepreneur Secrets. I am Chris Yax, and I’m John Yax. We are part of a small group of yoga entrepreneurs who are committed to making a living, doing what we love, without feeling guilty about making money, or ashamed of being successful, because we know the real value of yoga and how the world needs it now more than ever. This podcast is here to teach the strategies and tactics so we can thrive financially as yoga entrepreneurs. We are the Yax brothers and welcome to Yoga Entrepreneur Secrets. .

01:00          Alright. So, what is that the difference between a product/service, depending on what you’re doing, and an offer. So, when we started, when we first started, we had no idea what the difference between a product… call it service, cause that’s what we’re offering. Well, it’s the service industry, but it’s the same. Call it service/product, and an offer. And, we kind of stumbled on this when we… way back in the day, and by the grace of God, because it really… it made a huge difference. But then, as of recently, in our studies, and coaches, and trying to go next level with what we know and understand, we’ve realized that there’s a real difference between service and an offer, and what we need to do to really get the most out of what we’re doing. Right? What does that… what does that even mean? Get the most out of what we’re like, what we’re doing.

01:52          I would say that differently. I would say, “Get the most out for us, extract the most amount of money”, right? And for the student, “To extract the most amount of value and transformation for them.” Cause, we talked about it last couple times, and maybe we did. Did we? I don’t know. I’ll… I’ll pretend like we didn’t. Like, what we talked about, or what we will talk about in the future, is that when someone pays, they pay more attention. And so, what we’re saying is, an offer gives you the opportunity to increase the value of what you’re providing, whatever service that… whatever service or product that is. And thereby, because the value increases, you can charge more, and make more money. Now, when someone pays more money, it sounds like very like capitalists, and you’re trying to like, steal as much money as possible. No, no, no, no, no.

02:46          We’re talking about offering a valuable service that is valuable to the person and is solving a very specific problem that they want solved. And it’s yoga people, we’re talking about like, maybe the most life-transforming experience that you can ever do. So like, I place that value way high, and I don’t have qualms about charging what we’re worth. No. And, I may add to that. Yes please. The majority of yoga studios, whatever your service, or your… the majority of people don’t actually create offers. They say, “Here’s my product, here’s my service, and this is what I charge for it.” And then the person down the street that offers the same product or service says, “Oh Chris over there is charging this much. I’ll charge $10 less.” And then the person down the street says, “Oh, John’s charging this much. I’ll charge $10 less.” And then it becomes a race to the bottom.

03:33          There’s a saying that you cannot be the second cheapest Walmart. Yeah, it’s actually by Dan Kennedy. He’s like, there is no, if you can not be the cheapest, there is no strategic value in being the second cheapest. So why not be the most expensive now you can’t just like throw your prices way up there and expect people to start paying it. They have to see the value in it. And this is the difference between a service. Just a regular service and an offer. So the story is when we first started, we just provided a service and we didn’t charge anyone for it. They’d come in, here’s a free class. Everyone gets their first class free. Now this was back in 2005 right? This is pre Facebook. This is pre social media, right? Google’s just getting a kick in. There are no cell phones. There are no mobile phones, right? There’s no, there are only car phones like straight up attached to the dashboard.

04:23          Car phones. I had one. It was phenomenal. You imagine a life like that right now, like you couldn’t just pick up your phone and find out any information on the planet. Right? Great. Make a phone call whenever you want to be in. Anyway, so we stumbled upon this. So the reason I said that, let me just finish that real quick, is that we, at that time, yoga was at such an infancy stage that it was probably the right call just to expose people to this and be like, Hey, listen, there’s no, no commitment. Just come and take your class and just see, see how you like it. Right now. It’s a totally different landscape. The whole landscape of our industry has changed and to continue offering free classes is a disservice, not just to you, but to the student. Because going back to what I was saying before, it becomes a commodity.

05:07          If everybody’s offering it and everyone’s cutting their prices racing to the bottom, then the only people that can survive are the ones that will, the ones that have the most capital, right? The ones that had the most savings that can survive that battle right to the bottom. Unless you create an offer. This is what differentiates you from all the other people that are trying to just price cut to the very bottom. We stumbled upon this kind of organically, way, way back in the day and didn’t really know what we were doing, but created an actual offer. Yeah. We had a really good friend, Johnny Gillespie. He actually has a couple studios up in Philly, Tristate Tristate area, and we ended up doing a workshop up there with them and he talked to us about what he was doing and he had this brand new beginners course and that’s what he called it.

05:53          And he was like, guys, you should totally do it. It’s awesome. And so we it. But what he gave us was this course of like the idea of, Oh, you just, you’re going to bring people in and this is the course they’re going to take. So they’re not just coming into regular classes, but what we decided to do without knowing it, which is funny because then we actually got away from it and now we’re learning about how to actually create offers and we’re like, Oh, that was it. We were already doing it way back in the day. And so what we decided to do was not just say, here’s your course that is over four weeks, two times a week, eight sessions. But we created a pamphlet. Basically now it’d be a PDF file that you would give digitally that we actually had a folder and we had like our logo, a sticker that we put on the front of it and we wrote out, we actually took pictures and put the pictures of each pose in orders for the sequence or they had the sequence that they could look at and reference.

06:46          We had a nutrition part that we talked about water and we talked about like what to eat before you come in and how to do it and good foods to eat bad foods, [inaudible] foods to avoid overall. And then with your practice, we have a nutrition piece to it, a water piece to it, how much water you should drink, the kind of water, purified water meditation, dove deep into meditation. So we gave them meditation experience and kind of an intro to meditation, so it was packed with such good material. Chris talked about this before is when you come in, when your students, the people that want to, Oh, let me say it this way. When you solve your students’ problems, your client’s problems, more problems arise. And this is one of the cool keys of creating offers is that, and we’re actually gonna talk about this in the very next episode, like super deep dive.

07:31          So John’s going to give you a little precursor to get you excited so that you listen to the next episode. You got to do it. But this is what happens is, so we fixed one of their problems and another problem happens. So they come in, they want to do hot yoga for the first time. Oh, we have this, uh, this course called Brandon beginners course. It’ll teach you everything you need to know. Okay? So when they get into that and then like, well, I need a mat. Oh, don’t worry about it. We got a mat. It’s included in the course. Well isn’t water. Let’s see what’s going to be hot. I’ll be sweating. I need to drink lots of water. You guys have this whole thing about water. I guess I need a water bottle. Yeah, we’ve got that for you. It’s included in the course.

08:03          So as I’m doing this, obviously I’m going to practice at different times a day and then I want to eat a shirt or am I supposed to not eat or what kind of food should I eat? Oh, don’t worry about it. We’re going to talk about that. Cause we’ve created this awesome pamphlet that actually tells you exactly what to eat, what not to eat before and after class. And so yoga, I’ve, we do yoga and there’s yoga poses, but I also heard yoga is not just about poses meditation and meditation seems a little bit like esoteric and like really hard. So what about meditation? Yeah. And the very first session we’re going to talk about it. It’s very simple in the practice, but it’s challenging. So we’re going to dive into the mechanics of it and give you a really clear cut idea about what to do and how to do it.

08:40          So here’s one of the coolest things is that we had 80% of people that went through that brain and beginners course sign up for a package. They didn’t blink an eye on it. And I think we charged almost $200 for this brand new beginners course. Yep. Which actually was really good for it, but we actually probably could have charged more for it because of the benefit of what people were getting, the value that people were getting out of it. But we had 80 plus percent of those people sign up for a package after they did it. In fact, there are some of those people who are still with us today. When we started this back in 2006 still practicing with us. Some of those students are now teachers with us and have been teaching with us for over 10 years. It’s phenomenal. So like the quality of the course was such that it attracted people and held them in, got them so indoctrinated into what we do and how we do it and gave him so much good information that they were like, man, why would I go anywhere else?

09:28          Why would I do that? So now here’s the difference. What we just described in our, what was the brand new beginners course wasn’t offer because we didn’t just say, you get this course. We also said here all the other things that you’re going to get with it. And we started stacking one after the other, after the other, after the other, after the other. And we said, guess what? It’s gotten. Not just that, but you also get unlimited yoga during the time. So you get to jump into classes and actually practice what you’re learning. Yeah. And so what happened was we are able to increase what we were charging because we didn’t charge for the service itself. We charged for the offer that solved all of these problems for those people. Right? For our students. Now you can look at that and then look at [inaudible]. Oh, you can come in and you can take a introductory like week for $20 so what does that mean?

10:16          And just get to come to unlimited. You can come as many classes as you like and that’s it for one week. For one whole week. Okay. And then what happens? Like, so I need a mat. What do I do about getting them like doing, don’t you, I need a mat with yoga. You don’t have a mat? No. Okay. Well we have mats for rent here. You can rent a mat. Okay. What I water like so much. There’s a water fountain. Make sure you bring a bottle, right? You know, all of a sudden you’re like, wait. So you see what happens is that when you think about those problems, you’re just like there. Here’s the thing, here’s a real simple way of doing it. Like fall in love with your students problems and figure out however you can to help solve those problems. And so you don’t need like all the lists that we just said about what we offered in the render beginner’s course.

11:00          You just start falling in love with your students problems and then start figuring out ways and solutions of helping them solve those problems. And what happens is you then package that together and then it creates crazy value for them because you’re solving all these problems that some they knew, they had, some they didn’t know they had until they decided I want to do yoga. And you’re like, don’t worry, I got that, I got that. No worries, don’t got that, and then I’ll look at that. Someone over there is like, I got a 30 for 30 30 days for $30 that’s it. And you’re like, Oh well I’ve got this course that you’re going to learn every single pose. We’re going to break them all down. I’m going to give you this pamphlet. Or maybe it’s PDF now because we were like in 2019 not 2005 and it’s not going to kill a tree.

11:36          And like mats are included, towels are included. And by the way, you understand water bottle and you understand nutrition, you understand like all of a sudden I can charge over a hundred dollars for this offer. They can only charge $30 for 30 days. Right? You can just look at it and be like, there’s not, it’s not equal all. Here’s what I’m going to use. That exact same example that Chris gave. If I went to Joe Schmo studio and it was, he was doing 30 for 30 and I got to the end of that 30 days and then he came to me like, Hey John, you got to the end of 30 days. How’d you like us? Like, yeah, it was, it was great. Okay, I want to join. What does it cost? So $150 per month. I just paid $30 for a month. Yeah, that’s $150 per month to be a part of the member.

12:16          It’s a part to be a membership here to for a membership here. Okay, well let me think about it. As opposed to, I went to Chris’s studio and he charged me $300 for this course. That taught me all the poses that got me into eating the right foods and I had a water bottle and a mat included in telling me about meditation and it allayed all my fears, all my concern, indoctrination into this actual into the style in which I teach and I get to the end of that one, which was also 30 days hypothetically and I’m like, Chris, that was so good. I want a membership here. How much is it? That’s a $130 a month or even 150 it’s, let’s say it’s $150 Oh, I just paid $300 four a month. I’m only paying $150 for a month for unlimited practice I’m in. I see the psychology, right?

13:06          I got such value on the forefront and I paid a higher price, which means I paid attention. Right? I got crazy value out of it. When I go back to actually be a member there, it seems like a great deal, right? I paint half the price I just did for unlimited practice. It works every time guys. It’s a psychology, right? And it’s psychology-based off the value that we can give our students fall in love with your students, fall in love with your students’ problems, give them such value in the upfront and the loving the one say with you. Yeah. So it’s a very simple concept, right? What’s the difference in a service or a product and an offer and then you’re just stacking as much as you can in that offer to increase the value so you can charge more and solve more of their problems, which means they’re going to fall in love with it more and they’re going to be like totally like dialed in to what you do and how you do it and it’s a win, win, win for everybody. Yeah. Alright, so that’s it for that. Thank you so much for joining us. Tune in to the next one cause we’re going to dive deep into offer creation and exactly how do you increase the value. Not just like stacking a bunch of stuff, but there are specific ways and that’s what we’re going to dive into next time to be a good one. All right, we’ll see you peace.

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