What Twelve Years in Business Has Taught Me

This article is going to be different from what I usually write about here. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time and I think it’s overdue. If you’re a practitioner with a practice, or you’re building toward one, this is for you.

If you’re trying to figure out the business side of your work, I can almost guarantee you’ve done at least one of the following. You’ve Googled “how to get more clients” at midnight. You’ve bought a course that promised a system and delivered a PDF. You’ve stared at your Instagram wondering what you’re supposed to post that would actually make someone book with you. You’ve sat in front of a pricing page for your own services and felt your chest tighten because you have no idea if what you’re charging is too much, too little, or just a number you picked because it felt less scary than the other number.

I’ve done all of those things.

Three quarters of private practice therapists in the U.S. gross less than a hundred thousand dollars. After business expenses, nearly a third take home less than twenty-five thousand. That’s after the graduate degree, the supervised hours, the continuing education, the licensing fees, and everything else you invested to get here. The bodywork field loses the majority of its practitioners within five years of graduating. In coaching, the number one reason people don’t make it after certification is that clients never show up, because nobody taught them how to let people know they exist.

For you to live the lifestyle that someone making $120k/yr in 1999 had you now need to earn closer to $350k-400k/yr. – Let that sink in for a second…

You are not failing at this because you’re bad at it. You were just never taught it.

I’ve been working with practitioners for more than ten years. One of my first long-term clients was a therapist. Many of the others were coaches, entrepreneurs, and high performers of various kinds. Over those years, the same pattern kept showing up. Highly skilled people who were great at the work they did and had no idea how to sustain a business around it. I watched talented practitioners burn out, undercharge, struggle to describe what they do, and leave a field they loved because the business side was never part of their education.

My own path through the business side was long and expensive. Over twelve years I’ve tried every kind of system you can imagine. Website builders, funnel software, membership platforms, course hosting tools, checkout carts, webinar systems, design software, email platforms, obscure niche tools that promised the world and delivered a support ticket. I’ve built sites, rebuilt sites, migrated between platforms, learned to do things I never expected to learn how to do. And the conclusion I came to, after all of it, is that the system doesn’t matter nearly as much as what you understand about the thing the system is supposed to do. You can have the most beautiful website in the world and if you don’t know how to describe what you do in a way that makes the right person stop scrolling, nobody will ever see it.

I’ve also read widely and purchased programs from a long list of experts. Seth Godin, Michael Gerber, Russell Brunson, Alex Hormozi, Donal Miller, Marie Forleo, Amy Porterfield, Eben Pagan, Scott Oldford, Chris Do, the list goes on. I personally know Mike Dillard, Jesse Elder, Alex Charfen, Ron Lynch and many, many others who have influenced whole markets and industries. I’ve joined masterminds, hired consultants, and spent thousands of dollars on business programs, some of which changed how I think and some of which were someone else’s framework repackaged under a new name. I also live in Austin, where I’m tightly connected to the internet marketing world through people like David Gonzalez, who has been running Internet Marketing Party, a global network of internet marketers, for more than seventeen years. I’ve spent years in close proximity to some of the biggest names in online marketing and innovation, and that exposure was a natural byproduct of building my own businesses and paying attention to what actually works.

After all of it, I’m here to tell you that it’s not as complicated as what many people online make it sound. Many of these people have told me exactly that.

The principles of how people find you, trust you, and decide to work with you are not complicated. They’re not proprietary and they’re not hiding behind a paywall. The medium changes and the context changes, but the principles have been the same for a long time. The business education industry has built itself around making this feel complex because complexity is what sells the next course and keeps you dependent on the next framework.

A lot of the business canon is useful. Godin’s thinking on attention as trust changed how I create content. Gerber’s diagnosis that most small businesses fail because skilled technicians assume skill equals business competence describes nearly every practitioner I’ve trained. Miller’s insight that nobody cares about your credentials until they first feel understood is the opposite of how most of us present ourselves, and it’s right. There’s real wisdom in these observations and models, and most of it works within the context it was designed for. The problem is that almost none of it was designed for someone whose work depends on sustained relationship, ethical boundaries, and the kind of trust that takes months to build.

The person who changed my understanding of marketing more than anyone else was Ron Lynch. I absolutely love this man. He’s been incredibly generous with his time and personal mentorship, and I wouldn’t be where I am without his support along the way. What he taught me was simple. People have problems. They want solutions. When they find out you have the solution to their problem, they buy.

That’s it. It’s really that simple.

You don’t need to convince anyone of anything. You need to understand the problem your people have, you need to actually have a solution, and you need to communicate clearly enough that they can recognize you have it. Everything else is technique for those three things.

As you know, I’m a somatic practitioner and trainer. I’ve spent my career studying how people process experience and make decisions and move toward or away from things based on what their body is telling them. That understanding is useful in business in ways I didn’t expect when I started. When someone lands on your page or reads your post or sits across from you in a consultation, they’re not running a cost-benefit analysis. They’re trying to figure out whether you get it. Whether you understand what they’re going through. Whether they can trust you with the thing that’s been keeping them up at night. And if they can feel that you do, the conversation about money becomes the simplest part of the whole interaction. You’re confirming something they already feel.

Think about the best first consultation you’ve ever done. The person begins guarded and uncertain, and somewhere in the first few minutes you say something that makes them realize you actually understand their situation. Their shoulders drop. They exhale. And at that point, they’re in. They probably don’t need to know any more. That exact same thing is what happens when your marketing works. The person reading your website or your caption has the same experience. They feel understood. They feel like you’re describing their life back to them. And they reach out. That is the skill that fills practices. It’s the same skill you already use when you’re working with someone. You just haven’t been taught to apply it to how you talk about your work.

I’ve watched a lot of bad behavior in this industry. Manufactured urgency on digital products, enrollment conversations designed to overwhelm, emotional vulnerability used as a sales lever. I understand why you look at that and want no part of it. I made that same decision 8 years ago. But the version of selling you’ve been exposed to is a caricature, a distortion. There are ways to do this that are grounded in the same things your training is built on. Honesty, empathy, clarity, and respect for the person in front of you.

Most practitioners I know won’t raise their rates even as inflation almost completely eats their margins. Because somewhere along the way they picked up this belief that earning well and serving well are in opposition. That staying underpaid is proof of their commitment. There’s a whole culture around this mindset, and it’s destroying your ability to continue doing the meaningful work of helping people who are suffering. If you’re not able to take care of yourself financially, there’s absolutely no way you can continue to help others.

Nobody is going to hand you a plaque at the end of your career for having charged less than you were worth. What actually happens is you leave the field exhausted, because you built a business that could never have supported you. I’ve seen that happen to people with extraordinary talent. It’s heartbreaking. And it is one of the most preventable losses in this profession.

I care about this because helping practitioners succeed has been the through line of my entire career, even when it didn’t look like what I’m doing now. I started by getting deeply into my own craft. I spent years studying psychology and belief structures, then physiology and somatic work, then developmental psychology and early attachment, building my skills, and working with clients one on one. Then I realized I could teach what I was learning, and I started training other practitioners. That grew into an organization, and for the past six years I’ve been doing that across 28 countries with over 500+ practitioners.

At every stage I kept seeing the same thing. The people who came to me with real talent and deep commitment to the work, were struggling financially because they had no framework for the business side. I’m not talking about just a few of them. I mean most of them. It didn’t matter how good their technique was, or how many certifications they had, or how passionate they were about helping people. If they couldn’t fill a caseload and charge appropriately and communicate what they do in a way that reaches the people who need them, the rest of it eventually collapsed under its own weight.

I’m not talking about a side problem in this industry. This is a major problem. A practitioner who burns out and leaves the field doesn’t just lose their own livelihood. Every person who would have found them and been helped by them loses too. When I think about why I built this program, that’s what I come back to. The cost of a practitioner failing ripples outward into the lives of everyone they would have served. And most of the time, the failure has nothing to do with their ability. It has everything to do with a set of skills that are learnable and that nobody in their training ever mentioned.

I built a private practice that generated over a million dollars in revenue and then, separately, a training organization that did the same. Two completely different business structures, both from scratch. I did all of it while choosing not to use any of the manipulative tactics I described earlier. Every enrollment conversation I’ve ever had starts from the premise that the person across from me is a capable adult who deserves clear, honest information without emotional manipulation or pressure to buy what I have.

I waited for the right person to build it with. Lacy Healey has generated millions in online revenue over the past decade, sustained, through structure and systems and strategies that produce real results. She’s been my student and client for over five years. She designed this curriculum from the ground up based on a decade of real experience. She’s also one of the most direct people I know. She doesn’t let you hide behind complexity or tell yourself stories about why things aren’t working. She’ll ask you three questions, listen to your answers, and tell you exactly where your business is leaking. Most people have never had someone do that for them without an agenda attached.

Build Your Business is four phases, twelve modules, and six live calls. It covers pricing, offers, content strategy, messaging, sales, infrastructure, and the boundary systems that keep it running over time. We’ve taken proven business principles and adapted them to the reality of practitioner work, where what you’re offering people is a relationship and the way you sell it has to reflect that.

If you want to see how we think about this before you commit to anything, we’re hosting a free workshop on Monday. It’s called Balancing the Practitioner and Business Owner Roles, and it’s about the tension between those two sides of your work, how to hold both without losing yourself in either one, and why that tension is actually the thing that makes you better at both roles if you learn how to work with it.

The Somara Community – The free public-facing home of the practitioner network. Curated somatic resources, weekly teachings, and a global community of practitioners. No cost, no commitment.

The Collective – A monthly membership for practitioners building a somatic culture. Four live experiential somatic practice classes per month with expert faculty and rotating global guest teachers, plus lifetime access to all recordings and the full resource library. $57/month or $470/year.

Foundations of Trauma + Somatics – A self-paced mini-course in the foundations of trauma and somatics. Nervous system literacy, somatic awareness, and trauma-informed principles. One-time payment for lifetime access. $299, plus a $750 discount on the T+S training once completed.

If you have a question or topic you’d like me to explore, leave a comment below. I read them all, and they shape what I write.

Thank you for bringing your attention here. In a world that pulls us constantly toward distraction, your presence matters.