Lynnis Woods-Mullins CHC,CLC,CPI, is CEO and Founder of PraiseWorks Health and Wellness – a faith-based mind, body, spirit wellness company that specializes in educating women 40 and over on total wellness through coaching programs, e-books, CD’s , DVD’s, radio programs, podcast programs and video series, about holistic practices, fitness, nutrition and spiritual renewal.
Lynnis has over 40 years experience in dance and is an accomplished Praise Dancer. Lynnis is the host and producer of a featured program on BlogTalk “The Wellness Journey-LIVE!” and “Our Journey to Wellness Moments”. Her shows are heard on I-Heart Radio, Itunes, PodBean, Spreaker and Living Well Talk Radio Network. Lynnis is the Publisher and Editor-n-Chief of the digital magazine Wellness Woman 40 and Beyond, Different Background…Same Journey and co-author of “DeStress The Mess-Minimizing the Impact of Stress on Your Body, Maximizing the Joy in Your Life” Lynnis signature coaching program is “DeStress The Mess” a holistic stress reduction program.
Lynnis has been recognized nationally as a Health Advocate for Women and was recently a finalist for WEGO Health Advocacy Award. In 2014, Lynnis’s company has also been recognized as Visionary Business of the Year by the National Association of Women Owned Businesses. Lynnis also writes for several blogs and is a featured columnist forWomen’s Voices E-Magazine, Sacramento Observer Empowerment Series,Post40Blogger, and Curejoy.com . Over the last five years she has done countless radio shows and has appeared in print media throughout the United States. Lynnis is married and the proud mother of four grown daughters and one grandson.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
KIMBERLY: In the Mind Body Spirit arena and in wellness I know a lot of times people have a little feeling of the ickiness of marketing, branding and putting themselves out there. What do you think are the specific challenges you have seen and faced and how did you overcome thosE?
LYNNIS: I think one of the particular challenges is that you really have to get a branding that resonates with you, and you might improve upon that branding. But changing the branding every six months or every year is a disaster. I am thinking of one particular person who just keeps trying to find her niche, and I guess she is just trying to find something to make her successful. The reality is whatever your passion is, you find that, and you find that niche and keep tuning that instead of changing things trying to figure out what works and plagiarizing or copying someone else. Find your song, find the thing that makes you want to dance, and that is what you focus on. So I found my song, and then I hired professionals to brand me. I am not talking about professionals that did the work for me, I could not afford to have someone do the work for me. What I did was put it forward to have someone create a strategy for me. I took that strategy, made it my own, tweaked it to make it work for me, and I am using that strategy to this day.
The best money I have ever spent was to hire a business consultant and marketing strategist to help me put together a strategy and teach me the implementation. Here is another thing that I feel very strongly about: if you are operating in your passion, you are also going to have to learn how to do a lot of things yourself, otherwise you end up spending a lot of money before making a dime. If you have a lot of discretionary income, go out and get a business owner, you can do that. I decided not to get a business owner, I am not advising this, this is just what I did. I decided to take some money from my savings to live on and basically learn how to do all the key components of my business.
The sacrifice was a while before I started making money… a couple of years. I made enough money to keep the business going, I did not actually get into the profit arena until this year. This is my fifth year of business, but I had a goal, sat and prepared myself for that. I said, ‘It is going to take me five years to do what I really needed to do.’ I got a logo, the first logo was a woman who was praise dancing, and it looked like a picture of me, but it was not; it was a picture I had found, and that a graphic artist changed and worked over. Over time that began to change, and the one woman became four women representing my daughters from small to large. The large is from how we start on our journey and how we end up on our journey. We might start small but we end up big large and thriving. Everything reminds me of something that had to do with me, that is why it was easy to get the branding tied to me because it reminded me of me and was my journey.
I have always kept that, and the only thing that I added that was a little different was Health and Wellness and not just PraiseWorks because that is really what it was. The tagline is ‘Total Wellness For Your Mind Body Spirit.’ This was a few years ago before the whole Mind Body Spirit movement got so popular on the internet, but I have kept that because it is who I am, I am my branding and my branding is me. Just because everything else is popular does not mean that you have to change to something different. You keep doing you, and people will recognize what is real, passionate, driven and what is a copy and the same old, same old. I do not think PraiseWorks is the same old, same old because I am not the same old, same old, I am my branding and my branding is me. Therefore, I continue to improve and tweak but keep the same initial belief system in place so that the branding and messaging does not get confused.
KIMBERLY: I love that you had a passion and you just did it. I think a lot of entrepreneurs have ideas and get stuck in the rout to creating the business. But you just did it, and it flourished. That is such an amazing story to hear and such an inspiration.
LYNNIS: Yes, I was definitely one of the cliff jumpers without the net. When I was working for my first big corporate job, my boss gave me this book called Working Without a Net, and I have never forgotten some of the wisdom that was shared in that. One of them is to just do it anyway, what is the worst that can happen? You can fail, so you learn from the failure, take that and apply it. I have to say, probably the most driving force for me is that I found something I am passionate about, and I just did a radio show a couple minutes before yours and was talking about this same thing because I think people need this: if you are going to pursue something you are passionate about, it is going to be very difficult for you to really fail. Of course, you want to use wisdom, get training, get mentorship and all that. But the first step is you have to have that passion because things will get tough, you have a lot of stumbling blocks along the way, but if you have something you are passionate about, you get up, dust yourself off and keep that on down that trial towards success. What has kept fueling me is my passion.
KIMBERLY: What marketing strategy has worked best for you in reaching your clients in all your different formats?
LYNNIS: I have done just about everything, and think everything was necessary to be done in order to figure out what resonated with my demographic, and that is where the two years comes in. I would say there is nothing that I used to do that I am not doing now, I just have some emphases. Initially I started with the events so that people could put a name out and do things locally. After that I went onto the internet and learned social media which probably took way too much time.
So I had to set realistic expectations in terms of what social media is and what it is not. You are a strategist, and you know much more than I do. My personal opinion is that you really can’t use your personal face and touch in whatever market that you are in, you have to make sure you stay in that market. I left my market after two years and felt that there was not much money there because of what was going on economically. The thing that probably saved me was social media, and when I got back into my market again, at least people knew who I was because they were watching me on social media. In the meantime, while I was on social media, I had to figure out how to monetize what I was doing. So I learned how to monetize my radio program, podcast series, v-log, YouTube channel and the world of e-books. Probably my most crowning achievement was the e-magazine because that was monetized though advertisement.
So it was a process and definitely a learning curve that I am still on, I do not have it all together, but at least I know I have products and services. I only found out how to do that through trial and error. If I had it to do again, maybe I would have found out more about what resonates with women and what they really want. What I really ended up on in terms of my specialization for wellness, I had to go back from what I knew worked. I said, ‘I am not going to talk about weight loss a lot because I have not had a problem with weight, I have always been this tiny person, and me talking about weight loss to someone with chronic obesity, they will look at me and say, ‘Yeah, right, whatever!’ So I decided to do what I knew which was stress, anxiety, and depression. I created a program called Distress The Mess, minimizing the impact that stress has on your body and maximizing the joy in your life as a result. That resonated with people because it was something I felt comfortable with people talking about it.
And another thing is that there is plenty of business for everyone. I had to get to where I am not trying to become a coach to how many billion women in the United States or the world, just a few hundred would be fine in terms of me actually counseling them or coaching them. If my message resonates with thousands of women, that is fine, millions of women is fantastic! But my initial goal is to be realistic, I do not need to do all of that to make a living wage, I do not necessarily have to have all the women ever created come to my coaching service. That is not necessary, there is enough for everyone. Once I figured that out, which seems like common sense, I stopped panicking. You have to set realistic expectations, you want them to be petty, but you want to reach for it and not be ridiculous.
KIMBERLY: You have some really great points! I love to just touch upon figuring how to monetize because a lot of times in Mind Body Spirit someone has a unique ability, their passion or gift, and they create a blog or have these different interactions with people. But then everything goes out for free, and they are not monetizing. Then they have to stop doing their passion because they are not making any money. I always talk about the energy and money and sending it out.
LYNNIS: The reason I am marketing my radio programs is because people said, ‘Do you know you can make money on internet radio?’ I wanted to tell them, ‘No!’ I do have paid advertisements but that is not my focus. My focus is using this as a vehicle to get the word out. Basically my focus is to get the word out and drive them to my website, and there are different ways and vehicles to get them on my website, and I will drive them to my social media if there is something going on.
I always drive to my website, which is just some advice that my business consultant gave me when I got to the point where I said, ‘I think I need to create a project,’ and she said, ‘Finally you get it!’ He told me about this very early on, but I was not ready to receive it because I did not know what I was doing. So when I figured out what I was doing, it was my ‘aha’ moment, and I came back two years later. So please, do not do as I do in that regard. That was when I really began to focus on the podcast series, the 99 cents per download for my fitness videos, the collaborative opportunities for book publication, the advertising for the magazine which is going to be huge! But it took me a while to get there and figure that out.
I want to say something about freebies, and this is just my own personal opinion. Yes, everyone on the internet expects freebies, and I think we should give them, but we also need to remember that our time is valuable, and what we have to offer is valuable, and there is a certain point where I will not do it anymore. I had an interesting experience just this morning. I am doing something called Wellness Women Week which is a group of 18 women from the field of Mind Body Spirit wellness over 40, and they are all going to be interviewed talking about what they do in wellness, how they came to do it and what it does in particular to help women. Of course, they are going to talk about what they do and drive people to their site. It is 18 women over four days, and that is a lot of work. I did this once before, this is the second annual one.
So I thought that this time around I am going to take this and create a podcast series, develop an affiliate link for the people on the show, and they can sell it to their people too, so everyone gets happy and makes a little money. I sent all the information out for this upcoming week on Monday, I always send it a week ahead of time, not too much more than that because people have so much going on they will forget about it. The reality is I need to make money, I am in this business to educate but I am also in this business to make money. Therefore, I feel that it is okay to charge so much for the download for the podcast series. It might be $9.99 or 99 cents per download, I do not know, I have not set the pricing yet. It will be free for three weeks then I am taking it down, it is going to be a podcast series, and that is okay to go ahead and attach a value to your products and services.
Do not feel bad about giving everything for free. I do have free things on my website that came over time. But I am not in the social service business, I love what I do and want to help women but I am in the business to make money and be profitable. It took me a long time to be able to say the words I am saying to you now, believe me. I think you can be both: you can be a service to whatever genre or population that you want to work with, but you also need money doing it too.
How did I learn this? Trial and error! Reading information from people who are great like you, actually taking the time to read that stuff not because I want to be you, I could never be a strategist like you are, I do not have that background. But in order to find someone to help you, you have to understand what they do. So I learned and I had enough information to know what to look for. I cannot stress enough how important it is to learn some of the key things that are important to run your business not because you want to be an expert in everything, I am a master of none of this stuff, but I knew enough to be able to figure out what would work best for my company.
Just do not take the first person that comes your way that has all the bells and whistles. I run for the hills when someone tells me they are an SCO expert. I feel there is no such thing as an SCO expert. I really do not even want to think about someone who is thinking they are already an expert because it changes, and you have to be willing to learn the change. I cannot stress how important it is to take what you know, fine tune that and find out what you do not know, learn a little bit about it so you can find the people to help you do that particular facet of your business, surround yourself with people who know more than you do in those areas where you are not the expert.
INSPIRATIONAL BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS
Working Without a Net (Silhouette Special Edition)
LYNNS’S BOOKS
Wellness Woman 40 and Beyond EMagazine
MARKETING AND BUSINESS RESOURCES
Stumbleupon – free web-browser extension which acts as an intelligent browsing tool for discovering and sharing web sites
Tumblr – microblogging platform and social networking website
AboutMe – personal web hosting service
SlideShare – web 2.0 based slide hosting service
Drupal – open source content management system
WordPress – free and open-source content management system
Bluehost – web hosting company
YouTube
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
Google+
LinkedIn
INTERVIEW TWEETABLE
“What has kept fueling me is my passion.” ~Lynnis Mullins
INTERVIEW LINKS
www.praiseworks.biz/lynnis-woods-mullins
The Wellness Journey-Live!
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