Carrie Lupoli: Scaling a 7-Figure Coaching Community

Carrie Lupoli is a certified nutritionist, women’s health expert, speaker, educator, and award-winning behavior specialist who used her extensive expertise in health and wellness to create Disruptive Nutrition. Her company is a community and coaching program created to empower women and families to achieve optimal health through blood sugar stabilization and behavior change. 

Since launching on Kajabi four years ago, Carrie has made nearly $2.5M in revenue. She also started a second business called PFC3 where she mentors nutritionists, fitness professionals, doctors, physical therapists and others in the health industry on her coaching approach. Here’s a snapshot of her success: 

• Earned over $2M in revenue through coaching programs 
• Built an audience of 25,000 on social media 
• Hosts the Diet Disruptors podcast, one of Apple’s Top 100 Health & Wellness Podcasts

What led you to start your businesses?

I started these businesses because my own journey with health and wellness was so problematic. I had such a disordered relationship with food and my body. Once I went through this process of really figuring out how to live with what I call food freedom, I knew I had to teach it to others. 

I started teaching people through one-on-one phone calls and text messages as a side hustle, when I realized I was saying the same things over and over again. I knew I needed to get this into some sort of a format so that I didn't have to keep repeating myself. And as a former educator, I had experience writing more than 30 online courses. But I was so scared of online learning because the platform I had been writing courses for was very antiquated and required a very heavy lift.

What was your job before starting your businesses? 

Before I became a full-time entrepreneur, I was a national educational consultant. And before that I was a special educator with a specialty in behavioral science. It was that work as an educator that really allowed me to educate my coaching clients in the nutrition world at the level that I do. 

Teaching is my passion and coaching is my love language. When I went through this whole journey of self-discovery and figuring out the missing pieces that I had needed for so long and knew I needed to teach others, it was a natural connection to what I knew I could do because I was an educator.

Tell us how you started your business. How did you go from starting to building an audience that you can monetize?

Starting my business was a really interesting journey because I actually just texted a bunch of friends and I said, “Hey, I'm doing a 30 day challenge and I need you to join me.” And I got 20 people to say okay. I knew the content I wanted to teach, so I practiced on them. They saw such great results that they told people who then told more people. 

The next thing I knew, I was just sort of inundated with people reaching out to me and asking me if they could be a part of the next group that I was starting. I didn't have anything scalable. I didn't have anything duplicatable at all, but I was just going after one person after another after another. 

I slowly built up a few hundred nutrition clients and it was from there that I knew I needed to find another platform to be able to keep building, but I really didn't do a lot on social media or anything like that. It was just a very grassroots, organic way of getting my first few hundred people.

What role does social media play in your business?

Social media is where I build my audience and share content, but we don't focus on social media that much for our business. We're on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn and across all channels we probably have about 25,000 followers.

I am proof that you can have multiple successful online businesses without having a huge following on social media. When I get people into our funnel and give them tons of value and they're into our programs and our courses, they are followers and they are kind of behind the scenes alongside us. 

Social media is an important aspect of a business, but I've learned I don't have to stress that much about getting followers. If I am developing a really good product and I have a good funnel, then social media is important, but it doesn't become a time suck that I think it can be so many of us.

What challenges did you run into as you were building your business? 

When I first started out, I was communicating with everybody over text message. I had multiple text groups, and trying to get them all connected was hard. Then I moved to WhatsApp thinking that was going to be a better platform for me. I also used Facebook to put people into some groups so that we could communicate a little bit better. I just piecemealed as many free things as I could to try to get people into a community. 

It was then that I learned if I didn't have some systems in place, I was going to lose all of these people. I knew I was never going to be able to grow something bigger if I didn't figure out these systems. I started prioritizing systems and organization, and then looked for software technology solutions so that I could breathe a little bit.

Which platforms did you use and when did you learn about Kajabi?

I started using ClickFunnels, Leadpages, MailChimp, and a text messaging platform called Skipio and just piecemealing all of those things together. I would say ClickFunnels was the one thing that I felt I wasn't sure if I really wanted to transition from because I had built so much already in there.

I was struggling with the fact that things weren't all connecting. I knew about Kajabi, but I was a little bit worried about the investment. But then my coach made me look at it and said, how much are you spending on all of these individual solutions compared to what you could be doing with an all-in-one solution? 

I did a two week trial with Kajabi and within a day I realized how much easier everything was for me. Now I tell everybody that sometimes it's better to invest the money and work smarter, not harder so you can grow faster. It wasn't until I joined Kajabi and gave my systems some sort of a focus and organization that I actually started really making money.

After you migrated over to Kajabi, what did that open up for you with your business?

For starters, I feel like it opened up a whole new world of time I had. I don't think I realized how much time I was spending toggling between all the different tools that I was using.

The other thing that Kajabi helped me with was my team. I had a few people on my team, and although my previous technology and the software I was using all made sense in my head, I had such a hard time bringing on people to my team to be able to help manage the things. Once I moved over to Kajabi, everything was so much more streamlined — we had an easy communication system and knew exactly what we needed to do. 

Migrating to Kajabi also really helped with our payments. We do a lot of payment plans with our clients, so to have my bookkeeper keep track of payments suddenly became so much easier. 

It helped with all these things that were weighing me down and taking so much time that I didn't realize. But after moving to Kajabi, I suddenly became a CEO. I suddenly became more strategic and was able to start thinking about how to grow my company instead of just managing it every day.

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