In this episode I’m chatting with Marina Borukhovich, health coach, CEO and co-founder of YourCoach.
Streamline Your Coaching Business with a Client Management App
Marina shares her own health journey and how it led to her starting her own health coaching business. The app was originally designed to help her communicate with her own coaching clients, but Marina realized that this solution could help coaches worldwide. Since that its initial design in 2017, it has become a sleek, easy-to-use, and budget-friendly way to streamline an online health coaching business.
It’s designed to help clients sign clients, send documents, take payments, exchange messages, schedule calls, and track client progress. It even pairs practicing coaches with new clients!
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Connect with YourCoach
Marina Borukovich is a transformative tech leader, an exemplar of the power of health coaching, a breast cancer superhero, and a passion-driven CEO. After moving to Amsterdam and receiving her breast cancer diagnosis, her mission became to help other women feel in control and beautiful.
Shortly after her diagnosis, she received her health coaching certification, which guided her to discover an opportunity to innovate in the increasingly important field of health coaching.
She founded YourCoach.Health as a practice management platform and interface for all things health coaching, to kickstart the Health Coaching Revolution. It’s Marina’s mission to bring the power of health coaching to as many people as possible. Out of the office, Marina enjoys boxing, wife-ing, mom-ing and catering to Bentley, her French bulldog and Chief Emotional Support Officer.
YourCoach.Health is your virtual home for all things health and wellness coaching. Built for coaches, by a health coach, it’s a practice management platform and one-stop-solution for cultivating coaching and client relationships and achieving real and lasting health outcomes.
Together, we’re working towards our mission to deliver the power of health coaching across the globe, creating Happy and Healthy Humans worldwide.
Episode Transcript
Welcome, everyone. I am here with Marina Borukovich.
She is the CEO and founder of YourCoach.Health, which is a practice management platform and interface for all things health coaching. Welcome, Marina. I am so excited to be here with you.
How are you? Thank you, Laurie. Hi, so good to be here. I’m excited to be talking to you.
As always, we always have good conversations. We do, indeed. So let’s just dive right in.
Okay, so what I want to get into is I know you have your own kind of story with health coaching and how that kind of led to the birth of your coach, and I would love to hear this. Yeah, it was very, you know, we joke around here that everything is holistic and organic, and this actually was very holistic and organic. I was diagnosed with cancer when I was 37 years old.
It was breast cancer, and I went through my own journey. So I had chemotherapy. I had a mastectomy.
I had radiation. I had multiple reconstructive surgeries, and at a point in my life where everything seemed like it should be great and I should be healthy and move on, that’s when I felt that there were a lot of unknowns. I wasn’t sure where to go next in my life.
So I started to hack away at my body because I was giving a lot of medical attention, but I was not giving really any information on what to do after that. So I started figuring out what I should be doing nutritionally, what worked for me, because the guidelines that were there clearly did not, because the guidelines were do whatever makes you happy. It wasn’t, you know, you should be eating more greens and you should be staying away perhaps from sugar.
I mean, maybe not for everybody, but that’s what worked for me personally. And as far as exercise, I was told to not let my heart rate go above a certain point, which it reaches more than that when I walk. So when I started boxing, it was not something that my doctors were happy with.
That’s not even something they were aware of, but that’s something that worked for me. And once I started hacking away, the idea of becoming a health coach and kind of just solidifying my knowledge that really resonated with me. So I went on to receive my first coaching certification, and that’s how I became a health coach.
And so even though my journey started six years ago, it’s still a process because it never really ends. And having had cancer as part of my life, it’s always part of my life. Getting sick is never just getting sick, not feeling well is never just not feeling well, because that’s something that’s always in the back of my mind.
And that’s why it’s a constant struggle to deal with all these different aspects of my life on a regular basis and seeing what works for me, which is really what health coaching is, because it’s applying the knowledge to all different parts as we album flow as people, as human beings. So yeah, that’s how I became a health coach. And I guess your other part of the question was, how did I come to found your coach? Yeah, let me just pause real quick.
So did you hire a health coach while you were recovering? Like while you were working through your treatments, did you hire a health coach to help you kind of work through finding out what worked for you as opposed to just following the guidelines that you’ve been given? I did not. We were living in Amsterdam at the time. So that’s not something that was readily available.
There were nutritionists. There were trainers. There was not a health coach specifically.
And I think that’s what really opened me up to the idea of becoming one, because that’s not something that was readily available. So when you can’t find, do. That’s great.
And it sounds like a health coach, right? So health coaching is a patient led or a client led journey to find, you know, what’s best for them. So it sounds like that really you would have it. You had a good idea of like listening to your intuition and to your body and saying, you know, what works for me may not match what, you know, the guidelines are, but this is, this is where I feel led to like, this feels good.
This is working for me. And I feel it seems like a health coach really would have been a valuable asset in that journey. Absolutely.
And you hit it right in the spot when you said intuition, because intuition is something that’s helped me in all aspects of my life and just cutting out the noise and listening to what it is. And that’s how, I mean, I discovered the cancer myself. Like I felt the lump of my breast.
That was 37. I was too young for mammograms, you know, and while I was told that it was a cyst a couple of years prior, I just, my intuition told me it’s not just like my intuition told me that the guidelines that were given, that’s not something. And that’s something that I advocate very much when I spoke to, when I speak to coaches on a platform or when I speak to clients.
And I do like to say clients because saying, calling somebody patient just puts them in a certain mindset. Right. So, I mean, that’s just my preference.
But I always say, listen to your instinct because nobody knows what you need more than you do. You are the expert on your own body. Absolutely.
Which is health coaching, right? Which is that’s why the idea resonates so much. Sorry that I interrupted you there. But listen, you were about to tell me how, how this journey up to that point led to the development of the your coach app.
Let’s dive into that. Would love to. So when I first started out and so I started my journey where we’re living in Amsterdam at this point where we’re living in Germany and I became a health coach and I had my first couple of clients, which I was super excited about.
And it was actually really easy to find clients over there because again, in Europe, especially four years ago, the idea of health coaching did not exist. Um, so my husband walks into the kitchen one day and he sees me up like emailing stuff back and forth. And I’m writing on a piece of paper and like, okay, I have to meet with them because they have to sign this contract.
And he looks at me and, you know, you and I have spoken before. So, you know, I have a very weird, sarcastic sense of humor. And clearly my husband does as well.
He looks at me, he’s like, are you crazy? Is this what you’re doing? And I thought it was, I thought I was doing great. And he was like, no, no, no, no, no. You need to, uh, like you need an app.
So I always joke. My book is going to be called how was willing to become a CEO at 43 years old. So I think it also bears mentioning too, that your husband’s background is my husband.
Yeah, he worked at farmer for a really long time. He was head of digital at a big pharmaceutical and yeah. So he founded and sold a couple of companies in digital health.
So yeah. So he spoke from experience and he said, you need an app. So I reached out to my co-founder and friend, Dan.
And I’m like, Dan, we got to do something because Eugene is not going to let this one go. So we started putting together this app and it was really for me to just communicate with those two clients that I had at the time. And it’s very, very different from the your coach that you see today.
It was just this basic like two way communication and really awkwardly sending attachments and photos back and forth. And this was the original, I don’t know, this was maybe like three and a half years ago. But we started taking this much mysteriously in the past year and a half.
So the, your coach that you, that you see now that it’s there, it’s something that stemmed from my need to have something with my own two clients. But right now it’s a virtual place for all things self and wellness coaching. What’s the quote? Necessity is the mother of invention or something like that? Do I? Yeah.
I totally butchered that. Something like that. We’ll just go with that one.
Yeah, we’ll go with that. That’s what it is now. All right.
So you have a need, you know, or Eugene saw a need and said, listen, this is happening. This is what you need to do. And it kind of formed to suit the needs of you and your business at the time.
And of course, he saw the need and me simplifying my life. He just didn’t want to see why I needed all this extra noise. And this is actually the kind of our motto in building your coach.
Why do you need the extra noise? Everybody should be doing what they’re good at. And this is what our platform does. So it started out as a practice management and coaches can do everything in a platform from onboarding their clients to actually having to setting up their programs and inviting clients to those programs, having chats and video calls, signing contracts right within the app, sharing materials.
You never have to leave it. I mean, everything is right then and there. And then I always joke that we just can’t leave well enough alone.
So from that we step to what we are now, which is the marketplace. So what we do is we match the coaches on our platform who are practicing. And I want to put emphasis on the word practicing.
So just because somebody registers in a platform and puts their bio up, they will never get matched with clients. They need to practice on a platform. And for those coaches who are helping their clients, who are practicing, we match them with individuals who either come to the platform looking for a health coach and there’s dozens of those daily.
Or we’re very lucky and we work very hard at it to have really great employer partnerships where there are progressive employers who are looking to set up their talent with health coaches. So we match them based on what the client’s needs are and what the coaches are really great at. So it’s a very, very individualized approach.
Okay, so we have a lot to cover. Like just in what you just told me, we have a lot to talk about here. So first of all, it started out as practice management.
Okay, and that’s amazing. Let’s cover a little bit about what that means for a coach and what kind of tasks and things can they use the app for to work with their clients? And then how does that help them kind of streamline the process? So really anything. We don’t tell them what to do because I think the beautiful thing about health coaching is everybody brings their secret sauce.
Everybody has their individual approach and that’s what works for them and their clients. So when they come into the platform, if they want to meet with their client via video every week, they can set that up. If they only want to have chat sessions, they do that.
They can set when they want certain materials shared with their clients. If somebody’s working on breathing techniques, they may want to have a video that is shared with their clients every day. So they can set that up so that’s automatically shared.
Some coaches want their clients to journal and that’s something that their clients can do right within the app. Some coaches, they create tasks. Some coaches want their clients to track their food.
So they can do that and then they can do some basic macro breakdown on the platform as well and that’s going to be shared with a coach. They can track their water intake. So really anything.
If it works for the coach and that’s something they do with their client, they can do that on the platform. And the best thing that they can do is set long and short-term goals. So the long-term goal is the goal of the program and then as the program goes on, they can set short-term goals.
For example, you decide with your client that you want them to go to sleep by 10 o’clock every night. So they set that as a short-term goal for the week and then they check off when that happens and that’s something that’s trackable. I love that.
So if you’ve known me for more than five minutes, you know that like habit tracking and using kind of habit stacking and just using habits to kind of shape your behavior. I love that and as somebody who works as a trainer and a coach with clients, I know that small baby steps and doing smaller things consistently over time is actually far more impactful and sustainable than trying to give them a whole lifestyle change at once and expect things to happen magically. So here’s what I love because as I do have a background with coaching and using apps, it sounds like there are so many great features here that can help coaches onboard their clients, right? So they can sign and house all the documents that they need like because you said you need to like meet with a client to sign this contract and like so that’s in the app.
Sorry, do you think let’s do a faxing back and forth? Faxing, what year is it? What year is it? It is magic. Bless it. So, you know, they can onboard their clients, they can provide documentation, they can kind of put their programs in there to drip out content.
They can have, you know, chats and video chats and schedule meetings and calls with their clients, right? Because I work with a lot of coaches and I know that these are the things that they’re always looking for. How can I streamline this process? How can I make it easier for my clients to work with me and instead of having to, you know, I call it a Franken business where you’ve got all these different apps that you’re trying to integrate and integration is kind of where, right? Like when you have to get different platforms to work together, you know, you can have hiccups, things can stop working and then, you know, I work with a lot of health coaches and health coaches are generally people, people people, right? They’re not tech people. So the less that they have to worry about integration and making different things work together, you know, the happier they are.
You didn’t mention this, but I do know what’s on there. So I’m going to go ahead and mention it. Payment.
So taking payments, you can they can integrate their payment process or I think you guys have Stripe. Yeah, so we work with Stripe and we don’t take anything on top of it. So whatever Stripe charges, that’s it.
We don’t take an extra payment fee and if they if coaches want to accept payments through our platform, they can if they don’t, we don’t oblige them to do anything. So use it as much or as little as you want. I love this.
I love this flexibility that, you know, use the features that are pertinent to your business and everything else can just ignore. You don’t have to. You don’t have to even worry about it.
And, you know, I think the most beautiful thing about this platform that we’ve built is that we always listen to client feedback. We actually we have focus groups all the time. We have community groups on the platform.
We have a Facebook community group. Basically, we meet coaches where they are and there’s always this communication back and forth because if I built something that just works for me, it doesn’t matter. I want this to work for you.
I want this to work for the coaches that are out there. So as we’re building our system, as we come up with new features, we make it as flexible as possible. So based on the feedback that we get in that feature, we can always modify it and we can always see.
I know I’m going to go there. I know your favorite squads. Oh, squads.
I love squads. Yeah, there’s no more squads. They went away because a lot of people didn’t understand it as much as we love the idea of it.
People didn’t understand it. So you know what? That’s okay. We got away with it.
We made it more clear, more accessible to people. And this is exactly what I’m saying. No matter what we think it should be, if that’s not something that the clients want.
You know, it’s interesting. A lot of times and a lot of forums and a lot of coaches ask it. I signed up to this platform, but my clients are not using it.
What can I do to make them use it? There’s nothing you can do to make them use it. They should want to make. They should want to use it.
And this is why we not only look to what works for coaches. We look at what works for their clients as well. Yeah, because I know for me, using an app is great.
And this is also another example of you guys listening to your audience and giving them what they’re asking for. The desktop app. So you know, not everybody wants to be tied to their phone or, you know, type a lot of like content on there.
They want to just, you know, sit on their laptop, you know, or on their desktop or whatever and do stuff on there. So you guys add it and I was part of your focus group and I did some testing for the desktop and it’s amazing. So it was really, I thought, impressive that you kind of branched out from yeah, we have an app, but oh hey, we also now are making this more accessible for people who don’t want to be tied to their phones all the time.
Yeah, because when we came out, so we released the version of the of the app that was before this one. So like the version like 1.0, basically we’ve released it before the pandemic happened and everybody was always in a move. So it was more important to have it in the app.
And then all of a sudden, everybody’s home and everybody’s in front of their computers and desktop. We always had desktop in the plants, but not so soon in our plans. But we listened.
We listened to what the people wanted and we put it out. It took a little longer to put it out there because of course with the designs and I mean, you know, behind every button there’s hours and hours and hours of work. I know all about that.
Yes, I do know all about that. So but you know, people don’t necessarily see it and they shouldn’t necessarily see it. That’s not interesting to them.
What they want to see is the final clean product, but we’re beta testing it for a few months and you’re one of our beta testers and we got really great feedback. And when I say great feedback, it doesn’t need to be like, oh, it’s fantastic. It works.
I love it. That’s no, that’s feedback. That’s really great for me to hear, but the great feedback is this works, but what could make it better is this because the ability you want to know exactly you want to know how you can take the feature that you’ve provided and how you can make it better.
That’s valuable feedback. And I think that, you know, even for coaches who are working with our clients, feedback isn’t always what you want to hear, but it’s what you need to hear because that’s how you get better at what you do. And I think it’s really important, you know, just thing to remember that when people give you feedback, it’s not feedback about you.
It’s feedback about the service you provide or the product that you put out there. And when we start separating those two and not taking it personally, I think that’s when real change can start taking place. Absolutely.
One other thing I wanted to go back to you mentioned that practicing coaches can actually find clients on the app. That is amazing because that will, that is probably the number one thing that I get asked about. It’s like, you know, the tech is great.
They need help with that. They need help with, you know, websites and integrations, but finding clients, right? Because if you don’t have clients, you don’t have a business, you don’t, you know, you don’t have a business, you have an expensive hobby. And so getting these clients, right? But you make a very specific point that it is for practicing coaches.
So you need to have a client in order to be matched with a client. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, so coaches come into the platform and they, there’s a reason why we want coaches to practice with their own clients first. Number one, when we match them with clients and they don’t find clients in the platform and clients don’t find them, we match coaches with clients based on what these coaches do.
And I want to make a distinction. There’s no good or bad coaches. There’s just specific coaches for specific clients, right? I mean, yes, I mean, there are bad coaches, the ones who don’t follow the scope of practice, the ones who just stay, you know, they go outside their lane, right? So they’re not great coaches out there.
But the coaches that we look to match, it’s not to say, oh, you know, we’re looking for this specific type of coaching and if you don’t provide that, you’re never going to get matched. Absolutely not. People have different niches, coaches, they have different styles and the way our algorithms work is they pick that up when you work with your own clients and that’s how we can match you with the clients who come to the platform that are looking for coaches.
So that’s one reason why it’s important to practice and not because it’s not going to do anybody any service. If we just match you and then that relationship is not going to work because you’re completely different styles of coaching, completely different. What you look for is very different and you just your personality is just not going to go together.
And then another reason why it’s really important is because you need to familiarize yourself with the platform with your coach platform because when we match you with the clients, all the coaching takes place on our platform. So it’s really important for you to know what it is that you’re doing, how to navigate it in order to be able to help those new clients that we match you with. Right, so as kind of a matchmaker, you want to protect basically your reputation as a matchmaker here.
You don’t want to be recommending somebody who want to be who want to be a good matchmaker, who want to be a good match. You want to be like the OK Cupid of health coaches. We want it to be a lasting marriage, where it doesn’t just end with like a three-month program.
We want this to be an ongoing relationship and we want people to recommend your coach and to recommend the coaches on the platform, because it’s all about looking to all the advertising we want, but if the word of mouth is not there, nothing is there. And then so I just want to segue into this a little bit because I think you were one of the people with the pandemic where we’re giving the platform away for free. And I think you were one of the people who were saying why are you doing this? I was like, I’m not understanding this.
So we wanted to help out where we could because times were really tough for everybody and we felt coaches just needed to help as many people as they can. So we offered the platform for free. We heard your feedback.
People were very concerned that your coach was doing this and not making any money. So, you know, we decided to start charging, but our pricing model is very, very, very different than what you’re used to. So in the normal pricing model, the more clients you have, the more you pay.
That’s what we do. We actually want to reward coaches for having more clients and for helping more people. So the more you practice on the platform, your price actually goes down.
I love this. This is like, this is genius because it incentivizes you to use the platform, get more clients and then it actually drives your cost of operation. You’re like your operating cost goes down and your income goes up.
I mean, this is how… We think outside the box, right? That is brilliant. Yeah, I mean, I’d like to think so, but let’s see what the people say, but so far the feedback has been absolutely incredible. So when a new coach comes into and what we did is, all the early adopters, all the people who were using the platform before this pricing took place.
Everybody’s grandfather is free for life because that’s what I promised and I don’t go back on my promises. So if you were helping us build to what we are today, and you were with us from the beginning, grandfather again, but the new coaches that are coming onto the platform, you always get two individual programs and one group program for free. During that time, and it doesn’t need… There’s no time limit on it.
If you want to run your program for six months, you run your program for six months. During that time, you can still earn points and you earn points for everything you do on the platform. It’s for creating tasks, for creating goals, for inviting clients, creating questionnaires.
It’s basically just for coaching. There’s nothing specific. There’s no secret to it for everyday tasks.
And why these points are important is because the more points you earn, the lower your price becomes. So after those initial programs, your price could already be… So because we started $40 a month, once you have those free programs with your clients, your price could already be at $25 a month once you start paying. So we start at $40.
That’s when somebody just signs up and just starts with us and it can go down to $10 a month. Right. Okay.
So the more clients you have, the less you pay. The more you practice. Yes.
Sorry, the more you pay. Yes, the more you practice. Yeah.
If you only have five clients, but you practice with them all the time, you’re helping them, you’re working with them, you’re creating goals, they’re reaching those goals, right? Then that’s okay. If you run group programs of hundreds of clients, that’s okay. So the way we designed it is it doesn’t work better for somebody who runs group programs versus somebody who runs individual programs, right? Because you shouldn’t be rewarded just because your style of coaching is different.
You should just be rewarded because you’re coaching and you’re going to appreciate this. People are trying to hack the system. Of course, of course.
Yeah, it’s hysterical. So to that, I just say, if you coach and you do what you’re good at, you will get points anyway. If you’re hacking the system, what is the point for you to do this? Like you’re not going to get recommended to clients anyway because our algorithms are really, really smart.
Let’s talk a little bit about health coaching in the future of it, right? Because this is kind of a field that seems new to a lot of people because a lot of people are just hearing about it, but it’s been around a while, but it’s kind of exploding right now. It is. Yeah, there’s, you know, we have our finger and a pulse of the coaching schools and how many coaching schools there are.
It’s exploding. I mean, every day we hear of at least one new school that’s popping up better and all of a sudden they have hundreds of graduates and you kind of just think where did they come from, right? So there should be, we are in the process, right, as an industry of putting a lot of controls into place to actually see who the qualified coaches are because the word health coach has been thrown around a lot. I mean, there’s a lot of these coaches.
I mean, we talked to this guy who had a coaching school and he was very proud of his coaching school. He had one graduate in three years and he’s still considering himself the coaching school. So, you know, you just got to go into it with your eyes open.
You don’t know what these schools are teaching their graduates, right, which is why I think it’s so important. What we’re doing on a platform is we’re seeing what these coaches are doing in real life, like not we are, but our algorithms and a very de-identified fashion seeing it’s not just your certification, which is great, but it’s also what you actually do with that certification. And I think that’s going to increasingly become more important as this profession progresses.
And I love what NBHWC is doing with their certification. I love the work they’re doing to and it’s just yet another check and making sure that the coaches that are out there calling themselves health coaches and promoting this profession know what they’re doing and know what they’re talking about. Because let’s face it, people are vulnerable and I’m one of those vulnerable people myself.
And sometimes when you’re so desperate for help, you’ll just go to anybody who calls themselves a health coach and who says that they can help you. That’s why it’s so important for us as a community to make sure that the genuity of this profession is preserved and only people who know what they’re talking about. Right, and unfortunately there is not a lot of regulation around who can use the term health coach.
Right, so the more the more measures that we can put in place to help protect people from getting scammed or people from signing up for spending money on a coach who really can’t help them, the better off the whole profession will be. Right, it kind of protects all of us. So real quick, one thing I have to ask you about, tell me a little bit about your chief emotional support officer because I saw his picture on your website and I immediately fell in love and I think I ask you about him every single time I talk to you.
And there have been times that I’ve just felt like I should just text you and be like, how’s he doing? Can I get a pick? I would not be lying if I said you’re not the only one. He’s got a fan club. He’s popular.
He does have a fan club. So I mean, for those, I mean, most people don’t know what you and I are talking about right now, but we’re talking about our chief emotional support officer and I am going to venture out and say he is my favorite member of our team. And he’s Eugene.
Sorry, Eugene. I mean, Eugene knows, you know, it’s a hierarchy, right? It’s Bentley that everybody else. So it’s Bentley.
It’s my French bulldog and he is absolutely amazing. So a little backstory and Bentley, my husband actually got him from me as a surprise when I was going through cancer treatments and I never wanted a dog. I never liked dogs.
I was not a dog person and this could have gone either way. He took a gamble. He had a 50-50 shot.
He went for it. I think it was like a 90-10 shot. It could have been a disaster.
But yeah, so, but you know, there were days that I couldn’t get out of bed when I was going through chemo and it was just things were really tough. But his idea was when you have somebody that you need to get out of bed for, not to say that Mike, you know, my girls were eight and 10 at the time, 10 and 12 at the time. Sorry.
But with them, I could have my husband take care of them and they were a little more self-sufficient. But when you have a little puppy, you’ve got to take care of them. You got to do those walks, right? So he’s been there for me from the beginning, from the beginning of this journey and he’s absolutely amazing.
So if you want to see Bentley, he is on our website. We do post him.
