Laura Schoenfeld: I don’t know if this was specifically for me and Kelsey, this question. Kelsey and I have a little bit of a different structure for our appointments, but what I do is I just have a single case review. It’s 75 minutes. They send me all their paperwork and their food diary ahead of time. Usually I spend about 30 or so minutes looking over all their paperwork, all their labs, looking into their diet, looking at what their reason for seeing me is, what the main symptoms that they want to deal with are, if it’s a digestive issue, if it’s an autoimmune disease, if it’s a PCOS client, if it’s an eating disorder—whoever it is, I kind of start to tailor what I’m going to ask questions about, depending on what they’re trying to accomplish.
I don’t usually start people on a 14Four, and that’s only because the majority of the people coming to me, they’ve already kind of bought into the whole Paleo/ancestral health thing, so doing a 14Four wouldn’t really be super helpful for them, and maybe that’s more the diet side of things. I mean, certainly the lifestyle factors in 14Four are really helpful, especially the sleep and the stress management practices. I think everyone can benefit from that, so I’m not saying the 14Four wouldn’t be useful, but the level of complexity with my cases is such that the 14Four wouldn’t really apply to them. But if you’re seeing people that off the street, eating a Western diet, have never even heard of Paleo, or maybe they saw it on Dr. Oz, but they don’t really know if it’s for them, then the 14Four can be really helpful because it’s kind of like a reset that covers a lot of different factors beyond just the diet. If you just focus only on diet, you can miss a lot of things that can be causing a lot of their symptoms.
I don’t do initial phone consults before the case review. I used to do free 15-minute consults back when I first started working, but I got to the point where those weren’t really paying out for me as far as the amount of time I was spending compared to how many clients I was getting, and after I got rid of them, honestly my client flow didn’t really change. If you’re new and you just started your practice, then, yeah, doing free consults can be helpful, but once you get to the point where people are finding you from word of mouth or referrals or you have a popular blog, then doing the 15-minute consults, or however long your free consults might be, might not make sense for you.
Now, if you charge a pretty high price for a package, like if you’re setting up a package that’s like six months’ commitment and it costs $2,000 and it’s that kind of business setup, then, yeah, doing a consult ahead of time is probably a good idea, but for me, because I just do the one-off appointments, at least right now, I don’t see that somebody needs to have a free consult before buying that.
Again, I don’t get clients that a 14Four really would be appropriate for. Usually what I do is I focus on what their main goals are and then make recommendations for the diet that are going to help them meet their goals. Hopefully that makes sense. Again, there are a thousand different ways you can do your business. If you’re taking insurance, you don’t do a free consult at all because basically people just get referred to you or they go to you because you’re taking insurance. If you are not taking insurance and depending on your prices, maybe a free consult is important. Maybe it’s not. If you don’t have any way for people to learn anything about you, for example, I write a blog, I have a podcast, I do interviews with people, so I’m on other people’s podcasts. I’m very fortunate that I’ve been on Chris’ team for the last four years. It’s gotten me a lot of exposure, so I don’t feel like I need to do a 15-minute consult because by the time people buy from me, they already kind of know who I am and what I stand for. But if you’re new and you really need to start building clientele and you don’t really have a lot for them to learn about you through, then doing an initial consult that isn’t really the full case review might be a smart thing for you to do.
All right, so hopefully that makes sense. Like I said, I have a friend who’s a dietitian, and she does, like, a three-month package that, I think, is $1,800 or something for it. It’s definitely expensive, but she’s a very good businesswoman. If that’s your style that you want to have people commit to a really big package, then doing a free consult would be smart.