Teaming Up for Triumph! Podcast Monetization As a Co-Host with Marnie Dachis Marmet

[00:00:00] If you meet someone who has a similar health or wellness business as you, do, you take a collaborative or a competitive approach? I. When today’s guest met her longtime podcast co-host at a mastermind over five years ago, neither of them knew what was to come, but it certainly seemed that they were meant to meet.

They both had similar businesses and they couldn’t have been happier to connect. Marni Dos Marmet and her co-host Stephanie, have seen some amazing synergies over the years as they teamed up on their podcast. The Art of Living Well started a business within that. While maintaining their own businesses and are now looking for even more ways to work together.

Marni is the founder of Zenful Life Coaching, a practice dedicated to helping women and teens create healthier and happier lives. And she’s joining us now. I’m Joel Oliver and this is Profits Through Podcasting. Hello Marni. Welcome in.

Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, I think you’re going to provide us a lot of insight here ’cause you’ve been doing this for a while. You’ve got a [00:01:00] lot built up with your podcast and your business. So let’s start by just getting a bit of background about this, specifically your business, zenful life coaching. When did you start that and why did you start it?

I started Zen for Life Coaching in, in about 2015. So I own another business actually called Chili Bean Promotions, which is a promotional products business, which is completely different from the health and wellness space. And I was raising my kids and running this business and feeling really internally dissatisfied.

And so I started searching just to figure out like, what do I wanna do in my life? How do I wanna, you know, present in the world? And, I was really just looking for something. I’ve always been interested in health and wellness from the time I was a kid. My mom was actually an aerobics instructor. She was on like cable TV in the eighties and she had a big show.

I. And I was a [00:02:00] gymnast in high school, so I, so health and wellness was always like part of my life, but I just kind of started searching online and I found something called health coaching and I was like, oh, what is this? This sounds so cool. This sounds like something I’d really like. So I started diving into that and researching, and I found a program called The Institute of Integrative Nutrition, if you’re familiar with that.

IAN. Pretty well known today, but back then health coaching was not very well known. So anyway, I started that program, which took me about a year to finish. And while I was going through that program to become a health coach, I simultaneously decided to. Do two other programs. I did a yoga teacher training program and a program called Yoga Calm, which is more geared toward K through 12.

And it’s yoga with like a component of [00:03:00] therapy. And once I completed all of those programs, I created Zenful Life Coaching. To start coaching people on their own health and wellness journeys, and it’s evolved a lot over the years.

Yeah, I should say, I mean, 2015, it sounds like it was just yesterday to me, I, it’s just crazy how quickly time passes, but that’s like, you’ve got a decade in at this now, so that’s

I guess, yeah, and I’ve taken so many courses since then. Like I just, I really like education and I like educating myself and trying to stay current and so I, yeah, I’ve, I have quite a few certifications.

Well, we’ll definitely dive into all this more and hear about what you’ve learned over the, the past 10 years, but I also want to get a bit of an insight here to start as well with your podcast, the Art of Living. Well, you started that 2019, am I getting that right?

Yes, so I have a co-host and we started in October of 2019. [00:04:00] Right before the pandemic hit. And truly the pandemic actually helped us in a way, ’cause we were both kind of stuck at home with extra time on our hands. And so we were really able to like, push the podcast forward and get all our systems in place.

And it, it helped us in many ways.

Right. So that’s another thing you’ve been doing for a while. 250 episodes. Tell me a bit more about working with the co-host, because that is something you see occasionally, but. To find someone that you feel compelled to do a podcast with and then to have that same, same mindset where you actually both are committed for that long period of time.

How did that come about and how do you find it?

So Stephanie is my co-host and I met her in a mastermind group, if you’re familiar with that. It was a women’s business mastermind group. It was local in person. And it was, it was set up just for entrepreneurs and I signed up for this just to kind of work on growing my health coaching [00:05:00] business and.

I wasn’t expecting any other health coaches to be in this group. It was like a small group of maybe 15 women. And lo and behold, Stephanie is sitting right next to me. I’ve never met her before. And she is also a health coach, and we had all these commonalities and we were both working out of this same.

Coworking space. And after going through this mastermind with her, I said to her, instead of the two of us kind of not necessarily competing for business, but we were kind of working in the same space, I said, what if we team up and we start hosting some workshops together? So we started hosting workshops together and that worked really well.

And then at the same time, I was. Starting to listen to a bunch of podcasts and a woman had asked me to come on her podcast and talk and it really kind of scared me and I didn’t know much about podcasting and I had never recorded before. And [00:06:00] so I agreed to do it and I found that I really liked it, and I realized that .

Our message could get out to so many more people. Instead of like having, you know, a small in-person workshop, we could get out to the masses. So I didn’t have the confidence that I could do it myself from a time perspective, from just feeling confident about me just sitting there talking by myself, I wanted to do it with someone, is the bottom line.

So I asked Stephanie. If she would be interested in co-hosting a podcast with me, and she said yes. And then The Art of Living Well Podcast was born.

Wow. Okay. And so your, you mentioned sort of your initial thought there was getting your message out. Was there any part of it that would say to grow the business or is it more just let’s start talking to people and see what happens and get this out there?

So, interestingly enough, I am a journalism major from college, and so I do have this piece of me that loves meeting people, loves hearing their [00:07:00] stories and sharing them with the world. Like that’s the journalist in me. So initially I almost wanted to do this more from like a health journalist perspective, but then.

I started to understand, or we started to understand that, well that’s silly. Like we’re promoting all these other people and sometimes we still have this issue. You know, we’re promoting all these other people, but the two of us have so much to offer and we’re so educated and we have to do a better job of, you know, self-promotion.

But I think that the message that we’re trying to get out to our listeners. Is that it’s just really important to find your art of living well and that that is different for everybody. And so we like to bring on people, guests from all different backgrounds that, can suggest ideas or protocols or whatever it is for people to find their art of living well, and Stephanie and I do episodes together where it’s just the two of us as well, where we [00:08:00] talk a lot about, our own expertise.

That’s a great setup that you have. You said you felt a little nervous about doing it yourself, and now you’ve got that synergy together, and then you can do your guest episodes as well. So I really like that and I’m so glad that it’s worked out over that period of time. And you, just to clarify for listeners, do you and her have any sort of business together, or is it just the podcast and then you have your own separate businesses?

Like what’s in common there?

We do have a business together called the Art of Living Well Podcast and we run quarterly functional medicine detoxes, which we call our vitality reboot, and we offer this four times a year. And it is a group program. It’s a liver detox, but it’s really mind, body, spirit. We offer a lot more than just guidance on food and there’s a group component to it.

And we also offer lab testing. Basically, we. Offer health coaching services to our listeners as a package. We kind of call it a two for one. Like you’re getting [00:09:00] two coaches for the price of one.

And then we do have our own businesses as well, but we are starting to more merge that and run more through the podcast just ’cause it makes the most sense at this point.

Well, as I hear more about this, I think how great it was that when you met each other, you didn’t see each other as competitors. As you said, this is an interesting model that you’ve got your own independent businesses, but you’ve got something there in the middle.

You’re certainly not competing or, you know, it’s, it’s all synergy and you’re actually blending it more. So this is very unique. I would say based on say the, the merits you’ve talked about, this could interest a lot of people. what else would you say from this partnership you’ve found that has been much better than doing it solo?

I mean, it’s really nice to work with somebody and bounce ideas off somebody and. She learns whatever she learns, and I learn what I learn and then we kind of bring it to the table. We both have different strengths. So from a podcasting perspective, [00:10:00] it’s good. You know, she’s better at the finances, and I am, you know, maybe better at some of the other things.

So like we both have different strengths. And the other nice thing about it is that. It’s 50% of the work. Like, you know, podcasting is a ton of work, and so we flip flop every other week. We take turns and we, you know, we’ve, I’ve been working on like manuals, meaning just like the step by step of how to podcast and what you need to do to get an episode out every week and really getting all of.

Everything that we do on paper, and we have an internship program too, actually. So we have two interns that we take on. Maybe every six months. It just depends. It’s an unpaid internship program, but we’ve been able to work with colleges to get the students college credit, which is fabulous.

And then these students are getting experience a lot of times we can then write them a [00:11:00] recommendation as they’re going into the work world. So that’s been really nice too. And we’ve had that for about four years.

Okay. Is that an in-person thing where they actually come to a place where it’s all remote?

No, it’s all remote.

Okay. That’s what, yeah, I’d be curious about, for those of us that don’t really have an office, you would think maybe something like that isn’t available. But if it’s all remote, then you can make

Yeah. So like our current interns, one of them is in, I think Ohio, and one of them is in California. We’re both in Minneapolis.

Wow, that’s interesting. Is that a, like a program that you could discuss publicly or tell listeners what it is?

I mean, we set it up ourselves

Oh, I

can set up the program. So we, Stephanie and I have developed this and then we have gone out. We go out and we recruit the students and we, lay out. Kind of what you’re gonna do in the program. We meet with them weekly. They have their tasks, and then if they’re getting college credit, which they don’t always get [00:12:00] college credit, but our preference is that the student does get college credit since it’s an unpaid position.

Then, you know, they, we may have to write like a halfway point review and an end of semester review and whatever. It’s no skin off our backs. It’s, it’s a very worthwhile experience. I really enjoy working with the students. I want them to learn and grow and they help us tremendously.

Okay. And so that, that means then that say, is it every six months you were getting a new person on board to help with this, or what’s that look like?

Yeah, so it’s, I mean, it’s usually in September, ’cause that’s when, or August, September, when the school year starts. Because they’re college students. And then depending on the student, you know, some will do a semester, but oftentimes we have them for the whole year, or like the winter ones will do second semester and then they’ll stay through the summer. cause three months, you know, three to four months is not [00:13:00] like by the time you get up and running, it’s like they get into a rhythm and they wanna actually. Be able to say, well, I did X, Y, and Z for this company and whatever. So

Right. Yeah. And I’m curious too, when you’re working with that kind of system, are you working quite far ahead on your episodes so they can just kind of keep queuing them up?

We are really far ahead on our episodes. We’ve tried not to be , but we just, we are. I. and the interns aren’t really, they’re more working on our marketing and our social media stuff. They’re not doing anything with our episodes except for a promotion. Stephanie and I are doing all of the episode work ourselves.

 You don’t outsource any of that. You do it all

We outsource editing.

it.

We do all of the research and all of the episode planning and all of that

I think that makes a lot of sense [00:14:00] too. ’cause you, you have that expertise, you’ve gotta know about the content, you’ve gotta host

Yeah.

kind of one thing that you can’t really outsource and you should

And we don’t want to,

And the eye.

one of my favorite parts about podcasting is, you know, doing the research and understanding what we’re gonna be talking about.

sure. Yeah. And so you’re outsourcing the technical part working on what you should be. That’s great. That makes a lot of sense. It’s, you know, most people end up doing that if they start out though, they might have to take on more. In the beginning, I. Okay. So that’s all great. So we will talk a bit more about the podcast, but I’d like to just circle back to the business a bit to hear a bit more about that.

So, your business specifically zenful Life Coaching, who is your perfect ideal client? Like, tell us a bit about who that would be and what you offer them with that, that business.

So I just wanna say, first of all, it is very personalized. So sometimes this is a hard question to answer, but oftentimes the clients that I’m attracting, are women [00:15:00] that have been in the workforce for a number of years and have raised their kids and are feeling burnt out and they, you know, maybe they’re becoming empty nesters now, or they’re getting close to empty nesting, they’re not like in it with little kids anymore.

And they’ve been juggling, you know, the work life and the family life and their own self-care has fallen to the wayside. Maybe they’ve gained some extra pounds that they’re not happy about or don’t even, you know, like to cook or are eating a lot of takeout and maybe don’t have a solid exercise program.

And then also. I do offer functional medicine lab testing, so helping women understand what is going on in their bodies, because a lot of women just think, oh, if I exercise more, I can do X, Y, and Z. So really trying to educate and help women get to the root cause of what [00:16:00] is going on inside of them. And also just, finding their joy and their purpose and what they wanna do to live their kind of authentic life. It’s kind of a vague answer, but I, I would say I specialize in longevity in, nutrition mindset, reducing stress, helping with sleep, like kind of all the basic things that you think about when you think about mind, body, spirit, wellness.

Mm-hmm. You mentioned burnout in there as well, which I think you’re probably an expert in, but that’s your business. But I was gonna ask, you mentioned you had this other business the promotional products, and you know when people are coming to you for help saying, I feel burned out at work.

You had this other business and you didn’t get rid of it to start something else. Like you still have it. So you’ve got that right, and you’ve got all this other stuff going on. Tell us a bit about how you deal with that. How have you juggled all this over the years and how do you, how would you help other people do that?

Well, I would say that back then when I [00:17:00] was feeling really burnt out, you know, my kids were younger, so your, when your kids are younger, there’s just more of like a constant pull from your kids, right? My kids are older now. Two of them don’t live at home. One of them’s a senior in high school, so that alone obviously makes difference.

But I’ve been doing this all the way through now, so. To answer your question, when I was just running chili bean promotions, I was feeling like I didn’t have any passion and joy for what I was doing. So it felt like work. It didn’t feel fun to me. It didn’t feel challenging. I had been doing it for a long time.

I was kind of going through the motions. I. My plan was to wind down the business as the coaching business ramped up and close it down, or sell it or be done with it. And what ended up happening is that as I found joy in my life in this other business, and I started to feel fulfilled, I didn’t mind doing it anymore.

It was kind of like, okay, I feel really good over here. This isn’t so bad. And then what ended up [00:18:00] happening is I ended up. Getting clients in the promotional product space, in the health and wellness space, and those were very different clients than I had had previously. And so that, that was fun. Like it was just more fun to like work on a product that I believe in or that I thought was really cool or whatever.

I haven’t tried to. Grow that business more because I couldn’t handle it. But I’ve taken on more challenging projects within it. So, you know, I’m doing a lot overseas now, and that’s a whole different ball game, manufacturing things overseas than when I was initially doing things.

So I’ve, I’ve learned and grown in other ways. And in terms of. Juggling the businesses and life and stuff. Like I really am passionate and love what I’m doing, so I do not feel burned out. I’m also very good at being efficient with my time. I get up early in the morning, I kind of do what I need to [00:19:00] do, and then when I wanna be done, I’m done.

Now that being said, if I’m out of town on a vacation or something. I am the only one responsible for my business, so I have to answer emails or whatever. It’s so, it is a juggling, you know, being an entrepreneur for yourself, you are doing some juggling. But I feel like I’ve personally come to a space where I feel like I’ve very good balance in my life.

And I don’t think I did for a long time. So I feel like I am able to coach people on that pretty well.

Now, when it comes to your. Coaching business and you know, you’ve got that, the partnership with Stephanie as well there in the middle.

How do you feel at this point that the podcast is tying in, like especially after doing this for 10 years, I would guess you are getting a lot of referrals. Maybe I’m wrong, but when you look at those businesses, where do you see a lot of your, your customers coming from?

Honestly, mostly word of [00:20:00] mouth. I think the, the people that come into our. Our liver detox program come from the podcast, but we haven’t been talking about our own businesses a whole lot on the podcast, which I know is a big mistake and we’re working on that right now in 25.

So yeah, I would say word of mouth people that have worked with me in the past

The podcast is a big trust builder too. But you, you’ve been doing the podcast for so long, like I see how many reviews you have. You should absolutely. Like, I think there’s, there’s potentially, you haven’t tapped into there.

Right, and we know that we, you know, it’s hard to sell yourself. It’s very easy to sell a product or to sell other things, but selling yourself isn’t always the easiest thing to do.

Well, I’m just curious too, ’cause I saw that you do have some sponsors listed with your episodes, so you’re okay. You’re saying what here? That it’s easier to sell other things. So, can you talk a bit about that? Like is, are these sponsorships you’ve set up directly? Are you working with a company to help you get those types of things [00:21:00] into the show?

We’re setting ’em up directly ourselves. We’ve built a lot of relationships over the years and we only work with sponsors of products that we love and that we really believe in and that we use ourselves. That’s super important to us. So we are not working on product placements through another company.

You do a lot yourself, and you’re still, you have, you know, a nice, efficient setup. That’s good. You’re not frazzled in any way. How long into your coaching business were you feeling like, okay, I’ve actually got something going here versus starting out.

A lot of people face this challenge of feels like nothing is happening. How would that look for you?

So, you know, I thankfully have a really good network of people in my world. And so in the beginning I sent an email out to everybody I kind of knew and let them know what I was doing. I. And I had a couple people right off the bat kind of say, oh, I wanna, I wanna [00:22:00] work with you. And that was really nice.

Now I am not personally looking to build a coaching practice where I’m working from nine to five coaching every day. ‘ I have too many. Things going on. And so for me, I only take a certain number of clients at any given time and I think it’s worked pretty well. I mean, I’d still like to grow that a little bit, but not too much.

And Stephanie and I are really trying to grow our, our groups together more. That’s kind of the way we’re going.

I do think that people, you know, there’s a place for the personalized wellness, but people also really like community and getting well together and working on things together and learning from one another.

So people really like being part of our community.

Yeah. Great. Yeah, that’s a, that’s a big thing, especially these days. I think it’s only going to get more and more valuable and important, so. Marni, this was very insightful. I thank you so [00:23:00] much for sharing this all with us. It’s Zenful Life Coaching, the Art of Living Well Podcast, and we’ll have your links in the show notes.

So thank you so much.