81 | Starting and marketing an herbal program: Insights with Ember Peters and Oren Hercz

0:00 Hi there, welcome to In the Clinic with Camille. My name is Camille Freeman. I'm an herbalist and nutritionist, and in this podcast, I share little tips and tidbits that might be helpful for other practitioners. Today, I'm really excited to bring you a conversation with Ember Peters and Oren Herx, both of whom are herbalists in Nova Scotia. And this conversation is around the intermediate herbal program that they have developed through the Maritime School of Holistic Herbalism. And whether you are an herbalist or not, I think this conversation is going to be really interesting to you because we get into the pros and cons of working with somebody else, thoughts on marketing a program, how to understand who your students are going to be, where you find your students, what to do if you're not sure who your students are, and more.

0:47 So again, if this is something that you've considered, creating an educational program of any sort, I think there's a lot that you're going to learn from listening to this conversation. I'm going to let you read more about Ember and Oren on the podcast webpage. If you want the full bios, I think you'll find that they're both very experienced practitioners. Both have been in practice for quite a long time, Ember for more than 10 years, Oren for, well, since 2010. I'm not going to do the math on that, depending on when you are listening to this. But both of them have so much experience and so much thoughtfulness and care to bring to this conversation. So I hope that you find it helpful. All right. Hi, everybody. I'm so excited to be talking to Ember and Oren today.

1:31 And we're going to start out with just orient people who are listening to the program that you all offer. So Ember, do you want to just give us a brief overview of what this program is and the mini version of what we're talking about here? Yeah, for sure. Hi, everybody. So Oren and I offer what we call our intermediate program through the Maritime School of Holistic Herbalism. And the intermediate program is a year-long, 250-hour herbal program. You know, it's fairly comprehensive, but it's not a clinical program. So it gives people kind of a really good foundation for maybe more like community herbalism, or if they do want to go on to do something more professional later, they could do that.

2:18 So it consists of 10 weekend intensives that are live, either online or in person. So we have a hybrid classroom, plus pre-recorded videos to watch in between the sessions. So it works out to, you know, about half of the hours being live and about half of the half of the hours being pre-recorded and yeah that's that's kind of the the gist of it overall you know or is there anything you want to add. No, I think that pretty much covers it. Just, I mean, I think that the thing I like to say about it, because it does fill this kind of interesting place between sort of a beginner program and a clinical program that it is, I find it quite, like, it's quite in depth for a non-clinical program.

3:07 I think our students are often surprised by that. Like there's like a major anatomy and physiology component. There's quite a lot of therapeutics. We talk about other issues like ethics and things that you wouldn't necessarily get in a beginner program. So, yeah, I think that's the only thing I want to add about it. Got it. And how often do you all run the program? Well, we run it once. So far, it's once a year. And it's our third year doing it. So, I guess we're still relatively new at it. I guess three years. This is, I mean, we feel like we have some comfort with it now, but we plan to offer it for many years to come. Got it. And when does it start? If people are interested in kind of learning more and possibly jumping in, when would the open enrollment kind of be?

3:50 So it's open for enrollment now, and it starts in May, first weekend of May. And we do have a little early bird discount until the end of January for people that are keen. Yeah. All right. Great. Well, I think that kind of sets the stage for the rest of this conversation, which is going to be a little bit more behind the scenes. We have a lot of practitioners who listen to this, some of whom may be interested in the program, but others of whom may be thinking about their own development as professionals, teachers, collaborators, and so forth. So we wanted to dive into that aspect of things um to start out with could you all just share a little bit about how the two of you met and decided to start working on this program how did this how did this come to be amber do you want to do right sure so yeah i i uh i moved i started to move myself back to nova scotia and around 2018 2019 and me and orin met at herb gathering.

4:52 And I think, you know, we each went to each other's classes at this herb gathering at the medicine of the people gathering up at our friend John's farm. And we really liked each other's teaching styles. We just kind of like chatted and was like, Oh, okay. Like there's this person has, you know, kind of a similar approach. We just kind of like got along with each other pretty easily. And we kind of just started hanging out. We had a year of what we call like professional courting. We just like went on hikes and talked about our work and, You know, just just kind of exploring the possibility of collaborating really, really loosely and really informally. And then we decided that we wanted to offer this kind of program and we spent a year planning it before we started running it.

5:36 So we had sort of two years actually of, yeah, of kind of just getting to know each other and working together before we actually started running it. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Or did you have something to add? Yeah. No, I just think it was just, it was, it was nice to have that time to sort of feel each other out, as it were, and sort of learn about each other's more about each other's teaching style, but also about our work style. So we started working together. And then, you know, we saw that we were really compatible, because I think there's, there's lots of things that go into a good partnership. You know aside i mean there's there's you know having a good interpersonal relation like you like the person their teaching styles are compatible but then there's all kinds of things around work styles and sort of how you get stuff done and so that's a whole other aspect that you know we found that we worked quite well together so i don't know it just seemed like a really good idea and and we're all both of us also have like our own things going on and we're quite sort of independent in our own practices so i don't know i don't know i think maybe i could speak for both of us when i say that it was just really nice to have like this partnership where we had you know someone who had our back and that was helping us put this bigger thing together that we could not have done just on our own so it was my first time doing uh working on a collaboration like that herbal collaboration and it's just been great like it just opens my mind up to what's possible like when you just aren't doing everything on your own.

7:04 Yeah i'm sorry i was just gonna say like that's something that that felt really important to both of us was was really this aspect of like you know we have our clinical practices and we're you know both teaching this beginner programs and a lot of what we end up doing is on our own right as as practitioners so it felt yeah it just felt really good to to be able to do that together and we also just very easily just became friends and have that also as like a baseline in our work together. You know, we make sure to like at least seasonally, you know, spend time together that isn't based on work and, you know, go canoeing or have dinners or, you know, whatever it is just to make sure that we also have that, have that there as well.

7:48 And yeah, that friendship as being also a baseline in how we work together. Yeah, I'm curious because I think, One of the nightmare scenarios for a lot of people who are maybe thinking about this type of collaboration is, what if you start out friends with somebody and then there's a rift professionally? What happens around conflict resolution? How do we overcome where people have two different visions or there's some sort of disagreement? And I'm curious if that's come up or have you talked about that or is it just like, oh, no, it's just clicking and everything's going? Because i always have a fear of like oh wow i don't want to throw a friendship out the window in case something you know unusual happens in a professional context i'm curious if that's ever come up for you all or i guess we had the benefit of not really being friends.

8:40 First you know what i mean like we were professional colleagues first and then we became friends so it wasn't at the outset it wasn't really i didn't really we didn't really have a lot to lose, I guess, in that sense. But now that we are friends, now we have more to lose if we were to have a conflict. And so if I think about it, I think I'm pretty happy to say we haven't had anything major come up. Ember, am I missing? Am I blocked something out of my mind? No, no, it's true. Yeah. But we did create like a conflict resolution process and something that we kind of need to update.

9:21 But like we did talk about it of like, what if we disagree? What are we going to do? What's the process that we're going to go through? And I think it's nice to have that to fall back on just to know that we're not just going to like yell at each other and never speak again. We have this process that we're going to go through and, you know, it could even involve mediation or like various things to like try to resolve things if things went awry. I love that you have a little safety net just in case. And Oren mentioned, like, our work styles being compatible, which I think is really important, just like we both can feel that we can rely on each other. We share the workload pretty easily, I think. And we also are both very direct communicators in terms of, like, if something is coming up that we disagree on, we just say it right away, right? Like there isn't really anything like left unsaid, I would say, in our meetings.

10:14 And that is also a part of our work styles being compatible is also just that we both feel really comfortable with that kind of communication. So neither of us ever feel like we're getting pressured into something we don't want to do or something like that. So I think that that is also kind of an important part of why it works and also why we haven't had conflict. Because it's not that we haven't had disagreements, right? It's that we've been able to address them really openly. Yeah, it sounds like trusting that the other person will just be upfront if anything comes up is a big part of it. But you don't have to try to read somebody's mind.

10:56 You just are like, I'm going to tell you what's coming up and then we're going to deal with it. And I think feeling comfortable being honest, like me feeling like, okay, I can just tell Ember what's on my mind, and they're not going to, like, they're going to listen, and even if they disagree, we can have a civil conversation about it. Like, there's a level of trust there that, like, no matter what we say to each other, we're going to be respectful. And that makes, at least makes me feel more comfortable to bring up things that I might be sort of embarrassed about or shy about, or I'm not sure what Ember's going to think about it. So, I think that's really helpful. I love it. Well, thanks for sharing that. I know it's a little bit, can be a little delicate to get under the hood like that.

11:39 I'm also wondering if you can share a little bit about how you've come to think about who the program is for and how you market it over the years. Because I know when you first do it, you're sort of just fumbling around in the dark trying to figure out, you know, what are we doing? And then over time, you get a little bit more clarity. And I'm wondering how things have evolved on that end for you all. Should I start? Okay. So it's interesting. Like when we first started this program, we thought, okay, it's an intermediate program. Where are we going to get, where are students going to be coming from? And I think the most logical thing we thought was, oh, they'll come from our beginner programs. Cause we both teach these beginner programs and that would sort of be the next, could be the next step for people.

12:20 And what we learned actually pretty early on is that while some students did join from our beginner program, it was actually quite a small number. Like it was quite few students actually went from a beginner program to this program. And I think the reason for that is it's quite a big jump. It's not like they just did the beginner program. And then this was kind of like another incremental step. It's like a much bigger time commitment. It's much more academic. And it just turns out that those people in our beginner programs are not necessarily interested in that. You know, they're interested in a different quality of herbal education, which is, you know, more about community and just getting to know the plants and just they're not really so academically inclined they don't want to do that kind of a deep dive so so then we had to start thinking about okay well where where else are people going to be coming from and we started like we we luckily we did find people just people happened to find us that had done training elsewhere that were more academically inclined.

13:16 But we also started to be a little more intentional about it and we started doing these workshops where we designed this workshop specifically for people that like wanted to study herbal medicine. And it was about like, if you're interested in becoming a herbalist, here's, you know, the things you should be considering in your, in your search for, for education. And, and there's like a bit of a hands-on component where we shared, you know, we, we kind of talked about our principles of like what a good herbal education is about. And then we also did some hands-on components where we kind of like did kind of a practical, you know, if it was in person, we would actually be tasting plants and showing like how we teach about the herbs so they could sort of understand how that's done.

13:57 So anyway, the purpose of that was to just try to find people that are more serious about learning herbal medicine. And we did that workshop many, many times over the years. We've done it probably got 20 or maybe even 30 times now. And it also had limited success, interestingly enough. So we thought that was going to be the thing. But actually, we did get some students into our program from that, but not as many as we had hoped. And it was great for getting people into our orbit and knowing about us and getting people onto our email list. So it had a lot of benefits doing those workshops, but not necessarily people signing up to our program. And I think part of the reason for that is it's a pretty expensive program.

14:41 It's a major financial commitment. And so for people that are just meeting us for the first time, it would be quite a big jump to jump into a big program like that. So, we've kind of realized over the year, a couple of years, is that we just need to have more and more offerings of different kinds at different levels so that people can just experience working with us. So, something we started to do last year is we did more short paid programs. Like we did, we've done a cold and flu series. This year, we're doing a mental health series. In the summer, we did like a first aid intensive. We did a root medicine intensive. And these were all paid. whereas before we'd been doing just this free a workshop to to get to know people and that's been really good too because it also like attracts people that are a little bit more serious they're already running ready to like pay for something and it's also more sustainable for us because we're actually getting paid to do our workshop so so that's kind of been a bit of an evolution and i think we're still really learning in terms of the kinds of people something we've realized just in terms of seeing who are the people in our program that are that do really well and are really successful.

15:48 We find that one group is like people that are already practitioners of another modality. So like some kind of professional health practitioners, you know, we've had nurses and massage therapists and different kinds of health practitioners in our programs. And so we're starting to think more about like, okay, how can we reach out specifically to those people, maybe go to those associations and do that. So this is kind of like a new avenue and exploration for us. I don't know, Amber, is that, do you have more to add? I feel like I could speak more, but I thought maybe I'll pass it, pass it to you. I don't think I have a ton to add that that kind of sums it up for sure.

16:28 And, you know, there's always going to be people. We have a pretty wide range of people who are who are kind of attracted to what we offer, partially because Oren and I have different audiences. Right. My audience tends to be a little bit younger. Right. Most of my promotion happens on Instagram, for instance, whereas Oren's audience tends to be somewhat older and, you know, Oren Moore uses Facebook. So we kind of have these different audiences that we have. Yeah, that we have access to. And it leads to a very interesting mix of people. So, you know, we've also had many people thrive in the program who are retired and like looking for something to like offer to their family and community, you know, when they have the time and financial resource to do that.

17:13 We've you know yeah we've seen many different kinds of people thrive and it just does seem really clear that yeah there's going to be that it because the program requires a certain level of commitment and kind of academic interest that yeah people who are going to go to a you know a free one-hour class might not be the same people, actually, who are going to want that kind of academic deep dive. So yeah, like Oren said, it's just really about, okay, continuously kind of zooming out and being like, okay, where are the people who are gonna, who are, who want this? Yeah.

17:57 Hey, one of the things I really want to highlight for the listeners, because I think this is such a great demonstration of this principle in action, is that no matter whether you're talking about a service like just your one-on-one herbal or nutrition consults or a class or a program or whatever the only way to start to figure out who it's for is just to do it to like take a guess and do it and then you do it a few times and you realize like oh what i originally thought wasn't quite right but now we're finding oh okay, it's not the people in the free classes it's not the people who do our introductory ones it's not you know you start to sort of be like oh these are the things people we thought would be there but it's not and the ones who are thriving are like oh wow retirees massage therapists that opens up a new avenue of like how do i connect with people who are retired and how do i connect with massage therapists that you never would have thought of from the beginning but i love thinking about marketing as sort of like a co-evolutionary process where you can't do it on your own you have to do it in relation to the people and you can't just sit at home and think about it you have to out there like, okay, I'm just putting it out there, doing the program and seeing who shows up.

19:07 And then it's the two of you together, or the, you know, the two entities together sort of crafting the whole thing together. And yeah, I think it's so easy to like, try to wait till it's perfect and get a perfect marketing plan. I'm like, no, really, you just have to kind of do it and evolve it as you go. So I love, I just love this behind the scenes peek. It's so true and i think like you know these days there's like a lot of talk about like find your niche and you've got to like figure out who your people are and i think that's like all really valuable work to do but i think that the downside of that is people get like afraid of just like oh if i don't have my niche quite figured out like of just doing it and i honestly think like i've we've talked about our niche and like i've thought about it a lot but sometimes i'm just like you know what i think just like being out there and just doing something is like has been way better for me than, than all this work that I've been doing on my niche.

20:01 Like there's just so much to be said just for that, just being out in, out there and having people know about you and, and they'll get a sense of your vibe and they'll get a sense of like the quality of, of like what you have to offer in some ways that sort of can create your niche. And I wanted to just add in too, right? Like our teaching is really part of an ecosystem with our clinical practices. So we use teaching as a marketing tool. Yes. We might think about it kind of primarily for our other programs to kind of get people in the door so they know about other things that we're offering. But some of those people actually might be more inclined to start seeing us in clinic, right? We've definitely had lots of people who come to our classes who actually want to see an herbalist one-on-one.

20:43 So there's a lot of different things that that looks like. And for sure, for both of us, while we run our private practices up on their own, it's not a part of our program that we run together, we know that it still all supports each other, right? And me and Oren also like often refer people to each other, right? We have that kind of collaboration happening as well. And we see the benefit in how our collaboration also brings more people knowing about both of us, right? We've been teaching these, like I think the immune series and the mental health series is a good example of that, where we each do one of the classes so they're online they're open to everybody you know you bundle them for discount pretty much everybody does the bundle right so orin does one class i do the other class it means that people who would have only maybe before heard about heard about my me through me now they're also hearing about me through signing up for something because they follow orin so that that is also a huge benefit just for for both of us i think generally professionally well it's just another example, too, of how.

21:51 Collaboration pretty much always wins out over competition. It just benefits the field as a whole when there's more people being visible and doing this work and. It's so easy to think like, oh, well, you know, there's only so many clients to go around and like, you know, blah, blah, blah. And it just isn't true in practice. It feels like it's true in the beginning, I think, for people. But then you see this in action. You're like, oh, no, it's not true at all. There's so much more than we understand logically out there that, you know, we can just just renew and renew and renew when we're working together, which I think is really cool. All right. I don't want to keep you all tuned along because I know you're both have a lot going on, but I did want to just maybe briefly touch on accessibility for the programs.

22:37 I know that's a really important thing for both of you is how do we make the program accessible, but also, you know, we have to make a living. Like, there's sustainability for ourselves as teachers and clinicians. And I'm wondering if you'd share a little bit of how you think about pricing and accessibility as you're navigating these early-ish years of the program. Yeah, definitely. I think one of the things that Orn and I share in our values is really that we, like, we really don't want to have to turn people away. We really kind of want the more people the better who get to have this experience right who get to have this education and we also both recognize like the different barriers systemic barriers that exist right that you know change depending on on what people's baseline you know life is what people's backgrounds are so you know we do offer discounts and we we do say that we prioritize those discounts for people who are Black, Indigenous, people of color, people who, you know, experience those barriers on a more intergenerational kind of level.

23:50 But that being said, anybody can apply. So the way that we first did it was we just had actually people self-select for discounts. So this was the first, I think we changed it halfway through our application process last year, where we actually had a description. But the first two years, we just had people self-select. When they registered for the program, they could just select a discount if they wanted to. And so a lot of people selected it. And we were really glad that we were able to offer that, but it also was hard to cover our budget. And so we're trying to really balance the desire for it to be accessible and wanting it to be available to people in the community who might not otherwise have access to this education, and also making sure that it's sustainable for us.

24:35 So we changed it to making it the default for people to pay full price. And now we have a separate application that people fill out for discounts. And that actually also gives an outline with guidelines on how to self-evaluate for the discounts and choose the tier, right? So we have us kind of, okay, if you are getting, if you're paying full price, this is maybe what you're a little some kind of snapshot of what your financial situation might look like. If you're asking for a 25% discount, this is kind of what we would expect your financial situation to look like. If you're asking for a 50% discount, this is kind of what we would expect it to look like. So we're giving people a little bit more to go on.

25:16 But we don't want to like have to actually do the evaluating, right? We don't want to have to get into the details of people's finances. So there really is kind of a trust that people will self-select based on what their need is. Yeah, and you know, something that's come up, especially this year, is we know that people are kind of more hard up, right? There is an economic downturn happening, and we know that everyone isn't affected by that equally. So we're realizing we really do need to find people who are maybe less affected by that economic downturn to help subsidize the people who are more affected so that we can still offer those discounts so that's where we're at kind of at, kind of right now yeah is there anything you want to add orin yeah only that it's tricky it's tricky, trying to be sustainable and also offer you know tuition assistance on the one hand on the other hand in in our early years it's been kind of nice because we we were kind of just trying to find students right so a student who any student is better than no students so there's there's actually i think like a also a benefit there where it's like if you're that can open us up to having more students especially in the in the early years where we're where we're growing our student base.

26:34 And also i think like it does make for an interesting and diverse program like i think it actually creates more richness in the course because we have like people from all kinds of different backgrounds and it really creates interesting discussions in the class so i think, there's a lot of benefits that that it offers beyond you know there's there's the accessibility for the people getting the the discount but also i think it offers benefits for other people in the class too because it makes for just more interesting rich discussions in the class so yeah i think it's been good and i think we're just gonna it's we're gonna evolve it i mean this is the first year we've done it in this different way where it isn't just on the application where you can just select it we have to make like a separate go to a separate form to select it so, you know we don't want to make it harder for people to apply but we also want we do want it to be an intentional thing where people are really considering it, Because finances are a weird thing and how people perceive their finances is quite varied. And it's really tricky.

27:39 It's a really tricky area. And I know there's lots of different philosophies on how to do this. And we're just, you know, I don't think we would say we have it figured out at all. We're just sort of experimenting and trying different ways. Yeah. Yeah. And I, I, it seems like a lot of people in the last year or two, it has been more challenging to fill programs just across the board. Pretty much everybody I know who has a program is saying like, yeah, probably because of the political and financial circumstances, people are just really, a lot of times people are holding back a little bit from programs they might have otherwise signed up for. So I love your point about, oh, okay, what does that mean for us?

28:20 It means partly like, Like, how do we find some folks who can comfortably pay full price in order to also kind of balance things out for the folks who are not able to do that right now? And yeah, it's really a juggling act. And I think everybody's just sort of navigating it the best they can. So I'll be curious to hear once your enrollment closes what you all think about this new path and how it feels. And yeah, it's always a little bit of a guessing game to just figure these things out and how to make it work as best you can. So anyway, is there anything else that you all wanted to add about the program?

29:00 Anything else you thought might be relevant for other practitioners before we wrap up here? I mean, I guess I just maybe want to say that I remember when Oren and I first started talking about offering this program and it felt really daunting. And it's been a lot of work for sure, right? We've been meeting pretty much every week for like, I don't know, four years now or something like that. And it's also just been incredibly rewarding. Like the people that we've been able to encounter, Also, we decided kind of last minute our first year to make it hybrid so people could do it from anywhere, so people could do it online.

29:42 So that's really opened up a lot for us in terms of trying to figure out how to get people to know about it, about what we're offering who live further away, and really being clear with people like what our values are and why they want to learn from us, right? Like those are all kind of pieces that, yeah, I think like, you know, getting over the, if you're, if you're thinking about doing this kind of, this kind of bigger venture, this bigger project, you know, putting the time into, into planning it out, not rushing into it. And then really thinking about like, what sets it apart, what is going to bring people to your program, you know, and I think for Orin and I, what we've really realized is like a lot of people come to us because of shared values, right? Because they hear us talking about inclusivity and ecological sustainability and, you know, they get to learn from experienced clinicians.

30:28 They get hands-on experience. We talk a lot about critical thinking, you know, and the live classroom. So there's a lot of things going for it that people might not be able to get in other programs, especially other online programs that might not have that live classroom experience. So yeah just thinking about you know going slow and and thinking about what you might be able to offer that that's gonna you know you're gonna find if you're if you're authentic with what you want to offer and if you're clear about what you're about then the people will will find you right too yeah yeah good work begets more good work i think for sure yeah anything else from your end or in or is that i don't know i think ember summed it up really well so i think i'm just gonna leave it there yeah yeah i'll maybe just throw in one little thing which which i've noticed over the years too is like if you are really doing your best and pretty organized and you know putting a lot of heart and soul into a program i find that the participants are usually so willing to work with you when you're stumbling around at the beginning and like making the inevitable mistakes that will happen no matter how many years you've been doing it.

31:41 Like people can sense that you're coming from a good place and you're putting in the work and they're completely willing to just like work with you to overcome any little stumbling blocks that come up along the way, which I think is another beautiful example of like community collaboration evolving as things grow. So... Anyway, I'm so grateful. I'll go ahead. No, I was going to say, I think we've definitely experienced that. It's so true in some ways. I mean, I think in some ways it can be challenging when you've been teaching a program for a long time to keep it fresh. And that's sort of the challenge on the other end. But in the outset, yeah, you're making a lot of mistakes, but people can really sense the energy of trying to do something new and really trying to make it work and really trying to make it of value.

32:26 And it's like you're part of something together, kind of creating something together. And I think that's pretty special and I think our students have definitely enjoyed that aspect. Yeah. And a huge shout out to our students just for their support too and trusting us, like especially, you know, I mean, like our first class for sure, we were like, all right, like this is, you know, this is really the practice run, and we really, really appreciated and felt that, like what you're talking about, Camille, Just that, yeah, that, that willingness and, and ability to just kind of roll with it and finding that to be actually like totally fun and not taking away from it. Right.

33:11 So, yeah. Shout out to our students for all of their support. Yay. I love it. Well, I'm just so grateful that both of you all were able to take a little bit of time out today to share, you know, the behind the scenes and let people have a peek into the process. I think it's really valuable for anybody who's feeling alone or thinking about a bigger program. Maybe it's worth looking around and seeing if there's somebody else that you could work with. And it's really great, juicy tidbits in here about how to make that work and how to think about promoting in early years of something like this. So I just thank you again for being here and sharing all this with everyone else.

33:52 I will put some contact info about the program and also how to get in touch with Ember and or Orin in the show notes. People can check there. And otherwise, we'll look forward to seeing everyone in our next episode.