In 2015 I joined an online community called Foundr Club when I opened my small office in Houston, Texas, at a gym that offered space for allied health professionals. It was an exciting time, and I had a couple of contracts for my first solo therapy business. To my surprise, I was teaching suspension training classes and having a blast involved in social media, which I previously had no experience in. I met some great people in the community and gained access to some online courses that helped me tremendously, and one was called Instagram Domination.
I decided to purchase the course because I was at a functional training conference in Baltimore, Maryland, a short time before doing so. I hit it off randomly with one lovely professional with whom I spent most of the time. He told me that his gym space was getting tons of organic clients, so when Foundr offered the course’s first iteration, I bought it and immediately started implementing the curriculum.
I was fascinated that small businesses were creating lucrative revenue streams simply by dedicating time and fully committing to growing an organic community and consistently providing value to them. Initially, I started making therapy and exercise-related content for my therapy business and getting inquiries for new clients. Still, I realized I needed more time slots available to serve them.
I decided to get more practice implementing the course material. I’d test the information and learn more deeply if I applied the methods across a host of niches I found interesting. So in about three years, I created approximately thirty accounts from restaurants, therapy, fitness, business, motivation, philosophy, and more. As some grew, I’d shut some down to focus on the accounts growing faster organically. A few of the most successful accounts (30k-40k organic followers in less than a year with no money spent on ads) were fitness-related fan accounts.
My strategy was straightforward: be genuinely committed, insanely consistent, and build community. For example, the first account that multiplied was one I started for some colleagues I had at the time in the functional training community. Since I had experience growing accounts organically, I volunteered to create an account for our small community that would include professional headshots, detailed bios about them and their small business, and strong calls to action to follow, support, and engage with them. I optimized the use of hashtags concerning our respective niche so that anyone remotely interested in this specific modality, they’d be likely to discover the page.
I used other tips from the course that worked incredibly well, and the account took off. People were messaging me about how the page was helping their accounts grow in followers; they gained significantly more views on their videos and were even getting more clients in their local area. As the page grew, some people in the group began to demonstrate jealous and unprofessional behaviors, so I blocked them and decided to shut down the account. I don’t have much tolerance for negative energy.
I quickly created new accounts with the same emphasis but focused on identifying people I believed would be more appreciative. I naturally discovered outstanding fitness-related accounts, many of which I naturally developed positive relationships with. Around this time, Instagram first introduced video carousels. Instead of sharing a single one-minute video on the page feed, you could now share up to ten, and people could swipe through all ten from the initial squared video on the feed.
So, I would share their ten videos and write a caption that introduced them, invited the audience to follow and support them, save and reshare the content, and use a branded hashtag for an opportunity to have the same done for them. Before I knew it, the branded hashtags got used over 10k times, and the accounts just kept growing.
I dedicated about 20 hours a week to managing, curating content, scheduling it on the Later Media and Planoly app, managing free private shoutout groups, writing free email drips, sharing social media growth tips, and writing free ebooks with growth strategies. I decided to share one detailed social media tip a day on Instagram stories for eighty days straight to see what would happen and discovered that between one to two thousand people would consistently tune in. I then created private Facebook groups to provide free organized shoutouts for people, and everyone’s accounts started to grow; the group had access to the ebooks and additional tips, all for free.
Before I knew it, people reached out to me for consulting to help develop social media strategies for their small fitness businesses. I started providing them for $200 an hour or at a discounted rate for packages of either twenty or forty hours, which people purchased. I couldn’t believe it. I was having a blast doing this work, enjoying teaching, making new relationships, and learning new skills that also helped others. I began to create similar situations in other niches. I started toying with creating a social media agency that would offer various services, including full or partial account management, original content creation, copywriting for websites or email marketing, and free shoutouts and voice text support.
Of course, I experienced similar negative energy from a small majority, many of which would download my ebooks, implement little to none of the information, and spread negative information about my intentions. Initially, it was hurtful, but I knew my true intentions, blocked these people, and kept working. Not long after that, I was fortunate to interview for a social media marketing manager position with a growing wellness company that I slowly developed over a year or two through my efforts.
We’d message each other regularly with positive energy and drive thousands of organic clicks to their products and services as an affiliate while sharing key performance indicators to improve performance over time. The interview went well, but the energy was off in a way I’d never experienced before; in hindsight, I realized they were taking detailed notes about suggestions I was making, implemented all of them, and never called me back. I learned afterward from other people I trusted who were solopreneurs in the digital space that this was a growing practice for companies to interview people to gather information and implement their ideas. Many had similar negative experiences, and some considered taking legal action.
I considered it a compliment. I was a full-time therapist doing this as a fun experiment, which grew into a fun, high-paying side hustle with the potential to grow into a lucrative white-label agency for fitness and allied health professionals. Around this time, a category four hurricane hit Texas, so I decided to let that go to focus on more pressing matters. I realized that the Foundr course and community helped me in ways that I couldn’t have imagined and that I needed to shut down all of the accounts I created over three years or so and apply what I learned to a new venture, but I wasn’t sure what that new venture would be.
All I knew is those experiences taught me a lot about myself, the leverage that social media can provide, and that if I were going to pursue something new, it wouldn’t be a social media agency.
I felt no rush to make a decision; instead, I felt compelled to get back to the basics of living what I considered a simpler life; more on this in next month’s blog.
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