Nathalie is the CEO of Practice Better, a complete nutrition practice management platform for health and wellness professionals. Our conversation begins with learning how Practice Better came to be and how Nathalie and her team have helped to grow it from a small user base to what it is today. Nathalie also delves into the client experience, going the extra mile, and keeping users long term in the subscription-based model. For those not intimately familiar with the app, we touch on Nathalie’s favorite features that she believes are most useful to users and we wrap up with useful advice for team leaders.
Practice Better Remedies an Unsustainable Process
Nathalie started her career as a nutritionist with the intention to make health and wellness available to as many people as possible; however, it didn’t take long for her to realize that her business processes (like so many others) weren’t scalable. For every one hour session she would spend coaching her clients, she was spending up to two more hours handling administration and other work in the background. This meant that her hourly rate was being slashed into thirds for each client and there was no way that she could create a sustainable model that would allow her to grow her business and maintain a healthy salary.
This realization, along with her business partner who had technical skills, led to the decision to look for an app to handle all of the “extra” work that went into each client. They began by inquiring in their professional circles as to what apps and tools were already available that they could leverage. What Nathalie and her partner quickly learned was that the type of tool they were looking for didn’t exist. The options were lacking not only for nutritionists, but for other similar professionals as well. To correct this, they decided to build their own app to help themselves and their small circle of nutritionists, never thinking it would grow like it has.
Growing Practice Better with Genuine Relationships
I was curious how Nathalie’s team had grown the user base of the app from their close circle of nutritionists to a larger group and Nathalie expressed her opinion that relationships are the foundation of growth. Nathalie takes a two part approach to the relationships she is building and cultivating for this growth. First, she builds genuine relationships and remains connected to the Practice Better’s community of users. She mentions that many people try to skip over this step, but it’s so important and I couldn’t agree more especially because relationships can contribute significantly to your referral circle.
The power of a client’s voice who has had a positive experience is so much stronger than any advertising, cold call, or email a potential client may receive and can contribute to helping sell you to others. The other half of her approach to relationship building is to build strong, genuine, two-sided relationships with influencers. It’s important to her that she believes in the influencers and that the influencers truly believe in Practice Better. This type of relationship has been the driver to most of Practice Better’s growth.
The Client Experience inside Practice Better
I often talk about the importance of having a good client experience and the fact that you shouldn’t do it just to do it but instead should be doing it for all the benefits that come along with it such as growing your business and referrals. For my own business, I send out an email with a bullet list to my clients to let them know what to expect while we work on a project. Doing this simple task lets me plan ahead, sets expectations for the client, and gives them the sense that I am prepared.
Nathalie agrees and shares some other points of why the client experience is so important, especially in her line of work where people are making huge changes in their lifestyle and need structure. Providing a simple, clear and straightforward process removes roadblocks and sets them up for success. People in general want to know as much information as possible, they want to know what’s coming next.
Creating a client experience might start out as bare-bones and can evolve over time. It provides your client with a roadmap, consistency, expectations, and the all-important insight into what’s coming next. It also creates healthy boundaries for both sides and establishes an environment where clients can succeed. We talk a bit about these boundaries and the need to be consistent with all clients on sticking to them. Nathalie shares a really great example of a client coming and asking for something that is not manageable to provide to every one of your clients.
By having the clearly outlined process established at the beginning, she is able to easily steer them back to it and reinforce it. Doing this consistently is important. For example, if your process indicates that you communicate via text or voice call only and a client is using Facebook Messenger to try to get in touch, it’s important to point them back to the process and reinforce it. The last thing you want are future clients saying “Oh I thought you communicated on Messenger because my friend told me that’s how she got in touch with you.”
Enhancing the client experience and going the extra mile is important for all service types, but is especially critical for clients going through a tough journey that requires emotional and energetic support. Ensuring your clients don’t feel like a number, letting them know that you’re there with them on their journey and providing a way to access you as their practitioner is important. In general, people can tell when you’re authentically there for them and treating them right. This authenticity once again sets up the client for success and helps to grow your own business through future referrals.
Keeping Customers Long Term
In today’s fast-paced environment we have so many choices and options at our fingertips that I was interested in hearing how Nathalie and her team kept their user base engaged and coming back each month instead of switching to another competitor’s platform. Nathalie noted that even though it sounds cliche, they have the mindset that the customer is always right. She elaborated a bit more to say that authentic and open lines of communication with users are the most important part of keeping them long-term. Practice Better is always looking for and welcoming user feedback and requests.
Every single request is taken seriously and goes through a process where the team tries to understand what the root cause of the request is, how the feature might be used, and whether it would be beneficial to more than just the user who requested it (such as a larger subset of users or even the entire user base). Of course, this doesn’t mean that every request that comes through is put on the roadmap for development, but it does mean that every user’s voice is heard. In those cases where feedback has been implemented, being sure to reach out to let them know that their feedback has inspired change is crucial because it makes them feel valued and know that they made a difference.
By encouraging feedback, you are engaging your users and also opening yourself up to viewing things from a different perspective. The last thing you want is no feedback because in reality everyone has some feedback and when they’re not encouraged to or don’t feel comfortable sharing it is when you’re missing out on important information. Personally, I like to follow up with my clients after completing a project and explicitly ask for their feedback with the question “Is there anything you would have liked to have done differently?”. By doing this, I have been able to improve my own client experience.
Nathalie’s Favorite Practice Better Features
There are tons of great features in the Practice Better app, but I wanted to get Nathalie’s perspective of what ones she felt were the most important or useful. She mentions right off the bat that she is a big fan of automation – setting and forgetting. Then she gets into her top three favorite features:
The Onboarding Process
After the initial setup and configuration, the onboarding process is 100% automated and zero-touch for the practitioner – talk about time saving!! The client is able to access the app and onboard themselves. They can learn about your services, schedule or sign up for them, make payments, complete all of the necessary paperwork, and enroll in alerts and reminders. The amount of administration work this takes off the practitioners plate is huge and totally eliminates the back and forth of trying to find an appointment that fits both schedules.
Accountability
Practice Better is mainly used by people who are engaged in an ongoing journey where they are constantly taking steps to improve their health. Accountability between sessions is key to success. The app includes food and mood journals that are shared with the practitioner in real time versus days or even weeks later when the client has to rely on memory to tell you what they ate or how they were feeling. This can be extremely helpful during the session because oftentimes a client may believe they’re eating healthy because they truly forgot all these things that they may have consumed that may be working against them.
Online Programs
Nathalie gets a little giddy talking about the online programs that Practice Better now includes! She loves the ability to streamline processes by being able to deliver your content automatically via email and that practitioners can leverage the online group forum to reduce some of their own support tasks while allowing clients to support each other. The ability to now integrate different videos into tasks helps practitioners keep clients on track as they work through their program.
My takeaway from Nathalie’s description of her favorite features is that Practice Better has effectively taken a bunch of separate programs and put them into one single place, streamlining the entire process. Gone are the days where things get lost in the shuffle or forgotten and the amount of time saved by working within one single application is huge.
Of course, there is that sometime nagging thought in the back of my head of the monthly subscription fee; however, as Nathalie points out, the opportunity cost by not being able to take on new clients (due to lack of time) or the cost of hiring an administrator is oftentimes higher than the subscription fee itself.
Advice for Team Leaders
Nathalie is clearly a great leader that has helped develop her team and grow her product so I wanted to know what advice she has for my listeners that are currently leading or about to embark on leading a team.
She dives right in and mentions that you must be open to look inward at yourself when something goes wrong or not according to plan. You have to think: “What did I do wrong?”, “Where did I fall short?”, “Did I give my team the information they needed to succeed and communicate it clearly?” By using these introspective questions and having the awareness that everyone learns, communicates and receives information differently, and asking your team “How can I do this better?”, you can find the root cause of the issue, implement changes and begin to course-correct.
We spoke about the use of personality tests and both agree that this tool can be very useful in learning about your team and seeking feedback. They can also help you to surround yourself with strong leaders so you can learn from them. Nathalie suggests surrounding yourself with a combination of people – some a few steps ahead of you that you can learn from and some a few steps behind that you can teach and help to grow – as this will help develop your own strong leadership skills.
She emphasizes throughout our entire conversation on this topic that developing your leadership skills is a constant evolution that doesn’t stop and cannot be put on the backburner. You need to commit to evolving yourself forever because the whole team and the whole mission truly rely on you being proactive and the best leader that you can be.
Learn more about Practice Better
Nathalie and her team work tirelessly to ensure that Practice Better continues to be a tool that professionals can use to streamline their work, become more productive each day and easily grow their business. It is constantly evolving and becoming better as they build authentic and genuine relationships with their users and seek feedback and different perspectives to improve their product. For more information, you can find them here:
Website: www.practicebetter.io
YouTube: Video Tutorials and Trainings
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/practicebetter/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/practicebetter/
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