How to Grow Your Wellness Practice: 5 Common Mistakes new business owners make
Starting a wellness business is exciting — but the first months can feel confusing and overwhelming. The Seed stage is all about testing, learning, and figuring out what works for you and your clients. At this stage, revenue might be small — $0–$2K/month — but the work you do now lays the foundation for everything that comes later.
In this post, we’ll cover 5 common mistakes new practitioners make and practical strategies to navigate this stage with confidence.
1. Following Advice Meant for Later Stages
This is the number one mistake I see practitioners make when they’re just starting out. Podcasts, coaches, and online programs often speak to business owners who are already established. Applying those strategies too early can create overwhelm, self-doubt, and completely unrealistic expectations about how fast your business “should” be growing.
Key points for the Seed stage:
Experiment first: You can’t pick a niche until you’ve tried different offerings and seen what you enjoy and do well.
Refine your client avatar later: Work with enough people to discover who lights you up and who doesn’t.
Hold off on big investments: This is not the time for a fancy website, paid social ads, or an expensive coach. Those make sense once you have clarity on your offers and audience.
Pro Tip: The Seed stage is about learning through doing — not forcing structure before you have the data to guide it.
2. Charging Too Much Too Soon
Advice like “charge what you’re worth” can be misleading — especially for wellness practitioners just starting out. At this stage, the goal isn’t maximizing revenue; it’s learning, practicing, and gaining real-world experience.
Tips for pricing:
Base your pricing on your current experience and clarity, not industry comparisons.
This is the only time in business where I see sliding scale pricing to be an asset for 1:1 work. (Check out this article for sliding scale resources) IMHO, sliding scale usually isn’t sustainable long term, but it’s a great strategy early on.
Consider introductory pricing to attract clients willing to give feedback.
As your skills and confidence deepen, gradually adjust your pricing.
Pro Tip: Pricing is a tool for learning at this stage — not a measure of your value.
3. Relying Solely on Social Media
Many new business owners spend hours creating Instagram posts for an audience of 200 — largely family and friends in different zip codes— instead of building real-world connections.
Better strategies for the Seed stage:
Attend local events, farmers markets, or pop-ups.
Introduce yourself to nearby yoga studios, gyms, coffee shops, or wellness spaces.
Offer mini sessions or free chair massages to let people experience your work.
Build relationships with potential referral partners (e.g., trade sessions with local chiropractors or trainers).
Pro Tip: Face-to-face connections build trust faster than any algorithm and often lead to your first long-term, referral-based clients.
4. Skipping Experimentation
Some entrepreneurs wait for the perfect offer, website, or marketing plan before taking action. This slows progress and prevents learning.
Seed-stage strategies:
Beta test your offers: Share imperfect, in-progress versions of your work with real clients. It’s okay if those clients are friends — in fact, offering discounted sessions to people who already know, like, and trust you can be one of the safest and most effective ways to try new ideas. This gives you room to experiment with new skills, refine your language, and notice what lands without the pressure of needing everything to be polished.
Gather feedback on pricing, structure, messaging, and results.
Refine your offers intentionally based on what clients actually want, not what you assume they want.
Pro Tip: Treat your early clients like collaborators in your learning process.
5. Not Gathering Feedback and Refining as You Go
Every client interaction is a learning opportunity. Failing to collect feedback is one of the fastest ways to stall growth at this stage.
Practical tips:
Offer a discounted second session in exchange for feedback or a Google review. Put a time limit on discounted sessions.
Collect testimonials, reviews, and suggestions to refine your offerings, pricing, and messaging.
Start building systems: scheduling, intake forms, and simple workflows.
Figure out an accounting system to track expenses and income- a spreadsheet works great in the early days.
Begin building your email list, even if it’s small — this helps you nurture relationships over time.
Pro Tip: The Seed stage is about iteration: the more you test, gather insight, refine, and systematize, the faster your business will align with your values and ideal clients.
6. Find Your Business BFFs
Surrounding yourself with supportive peers accelerates learning and keeps you motivated.
Ways to do this:
Join a small mastermind of people in similar industries — ideally, a step or two ahead of you.
Create a WhatsApp group with friends from your training or school.
Share what is working and what feels challenging. Edit each other’s website copy, be each other’s test subjects, and cheer on progress.
Consistency matters: Schedule a weekly coffee date or a monthly review to check in, review challenges, and celebrate wins.
Pro Tip: Trusted peers give perspective and accountability— all essential for the Seed stage.
7. Embrace the Mess
The Seed stage isn’t about scaling fast or chasing metrics. It’s about grounding yourself in your business, your clients, and your values.
Let your website, offers, and messaging evolve naturally.
Expect some trial and error — this is how you learn what works.
Focus on experience, learning, and growth rather than perfection.
Pro Tip: Plant the seeds carefully now, and your business will grow stronger roots.
8. How to Spend Your Time in the Seed Stage
This surprises most new business owners, but in the Seed stage, at least 50% of your working hours should be spent on the backend of your business. And if you’re brand new and just starting to see clients, that split might look more like 80% backend work and 20% client-facing work.
If you don’t streamline while it’s slow, your backend hours will quietly snowball. What feels manageable at five clients a week can quickly become overwhelming at twenty. Writing a personalized follow-up email to ask for feedback might be sustainable early on, but once your schedule fills up, it becomes a bottleneck unless you have an automated system in place.
The Seed stage is your chance to build simple, repeatable systems while you have the space to do it — so growth doesn’t come at the cost of burnout later.
Client-facing work (50%)
Focus on getting as many sessions or beta clients as possible. Treat it like a paid internship — your goal is to practice your skills, gather feedback, and learn what works.
Offer strategic discounts with potential referral sources to fill your books.
Backend work (50%)
Build simple systems: scheduling, payments, intake forms, accounting and workflows.
Start growing your email list and planning communications.
Do marketing that actually reaches potential clients — local networking, events, cultivate referral partnerships, schedule trades — rather than focusing solely on social media.
Pro Tip: Set clear work hours and stick to them. Treat your business like a real job. When a day isn’t fully booked, don’t default to blasting your list with last-minute offers or opting out of work completely. Instead, use that time intentionally: offer a strategic free session to a potential referral partner, refine your website copy, practice your language, or do informal “market research” by talking to people in your community about their needs. This kind of focused, behind-the-scenes work is what turns early effort into sustainable momentum later on.
The Seed stage is also the time to learn rejection. Don’t expect a reply from every email or outreach, don’t assume every offer will be well received, and don’t expect all reviews to be glowing — that’s normal and part of the process. Every interaction is an opportunity to learn and improve: refine how you talk about your work, clarify your messaging, gain confidence asking for money, and adjust your approach. This stage is all about testing, iterating, and learning from experience — so don’t take anything personally.
Let your business be a little messy: your website might change, your offers might shift, and your messaging will evolve. That’s not a problem — it’s evidence that you’re paying attention and responding to real-world feedback instead of forcing a brand identity too early.
Conclusion
The Seed stage is messy, experimental, and full of learning opportunities. By avoiding common mistakes, gathering feedback, beta testing offers, building local connections, and surrounding yourself with supportive peers, you’ll set a strong foundation for sustainable growth.
Next steps:
Read about the other stages of business growth to see what comes next.
Schedule a FREE offering audit for personalized feedback on your current offers and strategy.
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