At Your Vegan Family, Stacy and Markus Naugle help excellence-driven people to Burn Bright, not out®. We’re high-performance health coaches guiding clients to generate consistent energy, focus, and stamina necessary to amplify business success while nurturing themselves and their families with potent, plant-focused diet and lifestyle enhancements. We engage clients through Burn Bright, not out: A 6-week Success Acceleration Program, and our wait-listed Independently Healthy: A 3-month Health Acceleration Program, The Foundations of Plant-based Cooking, and a soon-to-be-released High-performance Diet & Lifestyle Membership. How did we get here?
Founders Story
Unlike most businesses, we didn’t search for a lucrative marketplace gap or overcome great personal challenges as motivation to start Your Vegan Family. Rather, we quit our day jobs because we had something that we knew could help people change their lives in amazingly positive ways. In reviewing our 50+ years of intense, active, adventurous lives, we realized that we had a responsibility to share the secrets of our success. We’d lived a high-performance, plant-focused lifestyle, studied it, pushed it, raised our kids from conception with it, and honed it with clients over 30 years to realize the maximum benefits. And we gained peace of mind knowing that it’s one of the best actions we can take for the environment.
We are the engines that drive our businesses and families, and our health is the fuel that powers us. Realizing life goals, succeeding in business, and living the life of our dreams depend on our personal health as well as the health of our loved ones. In fact, spousal health is a key factor in entrepreneurial success.
Even though excellence-driven people are highly motivated, we saw them struggling to establish habits required to build vitality driving sustained success. They felt guilty when they were too tired to make a healthy dinner or exercise and they never seemed to have enough time to get it all done. Because they weren’t sure what to eat, they ate the same old thing, tried a new diet or supplement, or hardly ate at all as they squeezed more time from this essential need. Lacking fuel to burn bright, they couldn’t sustain consistent action, commitment, or forward momentum and began to burn out. Burnout doesn’t mean you crash dramatically; it means that your performance suffers and you cannot sustain consistent progress towards your or your family’s goals.
We empathize with this struggle. As entrepreneurs who started multiple businesses while raising children, we are masters of leveraging every advantage that we can! With only so much of us to go around and because our professions focused on health, we dove deep to figure out how to optimize our energy, focus, and stamina. What we’ve found helps people fuel their dreams with high-performance diet and lifestyle strategies that support them through all they love to do while realizing a longer, higher quality of life. Because we’re all busy, we guide them to keep doing most of what they were already doing, but better.
Market challenges and Opportunities for Consumers
Ultimately, fabulous health is quite simple, but our lives are not. In our rushed, busy world, inundated with media, disparate marketing and a glut of people trying to help, what was once simple now seems incredibly complicated. Consumers are overwhelmed with often conflicting fad diets admonishing one to eat oil-free or high-protein, avoid carbs, or only eat fruit before five. Even vegan food marketing now muddies the waters with processed foods that consumers think are healthy just because they’re vegan.
While we recognize that different body types require different nutrition, we promote the adoption of a plant-focused diet because it has robust, long-term scientific support, and we’ve enjoyed the benefits for nearly 30 years. The largest human study in history proved the personal health benefits of a plant-focused diet, and the longest-lived people in the world eat mostly plants. Long-term studies show that it can mitigate several of the leading causes of death in the US, including cancer, diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and stroke. Learning how to prepare delicious plant-focused meals has never been easier with an explosion of inspiring plant-based cookbooks over the last few year. (You can find our family’s favorite recipes on our blog, along with detailed nutritional analysis guiding you to a well-rounded diet.)
When consumers look for professional guidance, it’s even more confusing. They see a market flooded with newly certified health coaches that often have little experience, and even Western-trained physicians and nurses receive minimal to no nutritional education. This is part of why we stand out in the marketplace. We leverage Markus’ molecular biology degree from MIT and Stacy’s masters of Acupuncture along with our experience as yoga instructors and training in myriad health modalities. And Stacy’s enjoyed a thriving world-wide private practice for 30 years.
While the information age can be overwhelming to the point of paralyzing our motivation for positive change, it is also an unparalleled opportunity for the intrepid, savvy consumer to leverage the power of the internet to find the people who can best support their health improvement.
Market challenges and Opportunities for Entrepreneurs
During the Great Resignation, a record-setting 5 million people registered new businesses in 2021. Some replaced their jobs while others started new businesses as a side-hustle. Internet marketers can make starting a new business seem so easy as the plethora of support materials, courses, apps, and programs have exploded. Ten years ago, we were cobbling our online businesses together with baling wire! Now programs are integrated, technology such as Zoom turns your computer or phone into a conference room, and a tech answer is ever-present for nearly every question we have. We’ve integrated technology to help our clients achieve faster results and provide more personal support when they need it.
Being an entrepreneur in the current environment is not for the faint of heart. A steep learning curve requires hard work in the beginning especially if you’re a solopreneur. Building your business, establishing systems, creating effective copy, designing a website, figuring out social media marketing, and growing your email list while still caring for yourself and your family can be overwhelming. It’s a bit like homesteading in the wild west! You’re looking for anything that can give you an edge and help you achieve success faster to become one of the 50% of new businesses that survive beyond five years.
This creates an environment ripe for innovative entrepreneurs to solve the problems we all face when growing new online businesses and searching for the edge to help us stand out in a saturated market.
Market challenges, Opportunities and Advice for Online Wellness Providers
For the budding online health coach, there are additional considerations. Most people want to feel better, but helping people understand why you would be the best choice to help them is daunting. Coaches may feel great at 21, but when you feel fabulous over age 50 and have walked your talk, you stand out. When establishing your practice, you must focus on building trust by showing people you understand them and are qualified to help. You need to become a marketing expert in addition to being an expert in your field.
Most people haven’t been formally educated to understand the causes and potential solutions to their disease. The negative effects of poor diet and lifestyle, as evidenced by the nationwide epidemic of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, is even growing in our youth. This means effective health providers must educate consumers about the benefits of adopting healthier habits as well as promote their business. And education takes time even with and often because of the internet.
Once you begin seeing clients, new challenges appear. Success as a wellness provider is built over time, and those early success stories build your confidence while providing valuable social proof necessary for marketing. However, working virtually with people can make transformation harder to achieve. Clients can more easily hide their true feelings and avoid intimacy in a video conference or phone call than in person, yet it’s in these moments of vulnerability that quantum change can happen. Learning how to create meaningful connections through technology is a skillset most people are not taught, yet client outcomes depend on it. While developing this skill, you may feel disappointed in the results your clients achieve or question your abilities. Be patient, it takes time, but with a strong dedication to service and an open mind, you will develop strategies that work for you.
Thanks to Covid, a new opportunity for online wellness practitioners presented. Now more than ever people are accustomed to online courses and professional appointments. They appreciate being able to work in a program on their own schedules and are more tech savvy than they were just a few years ago. More people are working from home and motivated to integrate healthy choices into their lifestyles.
Advice for Online Entrepreneurs
The world of online and location-independent entrepreneurs is exploding and creating an exciting time to enter the market. It’s easy to get lost in the stampede of others who are doing the same thing. Here are our tips to support your success:
- Invest in your health and that of your partner and family. You are the engine that drives your business. If you want your sales to climb to the stars, you need to run on rocket fuel. You wouldn’t run your business with subpar equipment, and you shouldn’t settle for anything less than your optimal health.
- Focus on solving a real, immediate problem for your clients. Understand your clients and sincerely add value.
- Find the unique voice that helps you stand out in the marketplace. Think: “How can I be a zebra in a herd of wildebeests?”
We anticipate continued growth in online education opportunities, with those who find a sincere way to solve struggles inherent to our fast-paced world creating opportunities for success. We don’t want people to fail in their passion-driven businesses because they don’t have the energy, focus, and stamina they need to succeed, just because they don’t know how to generate high-performance level health.
In the next two years, we envision our family living a vibrant lifestyle in a natural, wild, and biodiverse place with crystal waters and clean air. Our online programs and coaching will be helping thousands of people reap the benefits of a smart, plant-focused diet meal-by-meal with lifestyle enhancements that help them surpass business and income goals while living long, active, and meaningful lives.
As Michael Pollan advocates in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, “Eat good food. No too much. Mostly plants.” It’s one of the not-so-secret key success factors for the healthiest and longest-lived people on the planet. Eating as many plant-based meals as possible empowers your personal health, your family health, and our collective planetary health. Burn Bright, not out!
We invite you to get started on your high-performance health with our free 5 Days to Fabulous Challenge. This 5-Day Challenge introduces potent dietary enhancements to increase your energy, focus, and stamina AND the recipes to do it with. Here’s the link: https://www.yourveganfamily.com/sales-page
Links:
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In today's world, people's eating and exercise patterns have changed, and it is often lifestyle that is the cause of many diet-related illnesses. I believe that each of us is unique – what works for one does not help another. What is more, it can even be harmful. I am interested in food psychology, which studies a person's relationship with their body and food, explains our choices and desires for specific products, the difficulty of maintaining optimal body weight, as well as the influence of various internal and external factors on appetite. I'm also an avid vintage car collector, and currently, I'm working on my 1993 W124 Mercedes. You may have stumbled upon articles I have been featured in, for example, in Cosmopolitan, Elle, Grazia, Women's Health, The Guardian, and others.
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