We recently connected with Danielle Dinkelman and have shared our conversation below.

Danielle, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What was it like going from idea to execution? Can you share some of the backstory and some of the major steps or milestones?

The idea for our employee wellness coaching business sparked when I was in Colorado, training to become a health & wellness coach in February 2018. The instructor shared that there are three paths you can take: clinical, private practice, or corporate wellness. I was immediately enamored with the idea of “corporate wellness” since the term seemed so paradoxical. I had watched my husband struggle through his executive career to be well, physically and mentally. I knew in that moment I had found what I wanted to do. I flew home after that weekend of training, bubbling over with this idea of starting our own corporate wellness coaching company. I shared the idea with my husband and asked if he wanted to do this with me someday, and he said yes! That was in 2018. We laid the plan then and there to have me focus on my private practice first and to get established as a coach first. I did just that.

Three years and a big out-of-state move later, we launched Advanced Corporate Wellness, or ACW Coaching as we’ve come to call it.

We had written the business plan in 2020, before the world shut down. It went on the shelf as we transitioned to at-home learning for our 4 children. When we moved to Portland, OR in the summer of 2021, when the kids went back to school in the fall, I was itching to dust off the business plan and get to work.

I remember going to my first chamber of commerce meeting and sharing our idea for an employee wellness coaching company and every single person I spoke to about it lit up at the idea. This felt like “an idea whose time had come”. Everyone’s mind was on health & wellbeing, both staying physically healthy and safe from covid, but also mentally healthy, as we were all dealing with the challenges of remote work and such.

It was after that meeting that I decided to build the website and start spreading the word.

We had our business model thanks to some mentors in the industry who shared bits and pieces of their wisdom with us. Aside from that, we modeled the business mostly after what I saw work so well in my private coaching practice over the last 3 or 4 years, combined with what Blaise knew about how businesses make purchasing decisions. We innovated! And from our ignorance of the industry, we created something completely fresh and new.

The plan was to launch our coaching services with me doing the coaching for our first contract, and then start to hire contracted coaches once we got our next client. It took 9 months of networking and pavement pounding for our first client to take a chance on us. The next client came a few months later and we brought on our first two coaches. It was scrappy, exciting, creative times.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I got into health & wellness coaching after a “tap on the shoulder” moment. I felt called to help other people be successful with tending to their health by taking charge of their habits. I got a board certified by the NBHWC and got trained on Motivational Interviewing. I started by building a private practice online in 2018 helping folks adopt a whole food plant based lifestyle without making it another diet. I wrote a book in 2021 called If Diets Don’t Work What Does. Then my husband and I launched our employee wellness business in 2021.

We help businesses take care of their people! We give personal coaching available to their employees so they can tend to their health & wellbeing in order to show up at their best at home and at work.

I am most proud of the ways we have kept the highest standards of coaching and the care for the individual at the center of everything we have built since the beginning. I am also proud that we specialize in supporting small businesses who are sorely underserved and under resourced in employee wellness services. We are building a corporate wellness company that is really and employee wellness company. For us, it’s about finding the win-win, always quality over quantity, and serving the one. Rare things indeed in the corporate wellness space.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

We are major business nerds. We have based much of what we have built our business around a few key resources.

1. Essentialism, by Greg McKeown

2. Traction, by Gino Wickman

3. Who Not How, by Dan Sullivan & Benjamin Hardy.

We are constantly learning and growing as business owners and leaders. That is part of the fun of it! There is always a new challenge, a new question, a new puzzle to be solved.

Have you ever had to pivot?

Much of the journey of building our current company has been a series of pivots.

You start with an initial idea of what you want to do, what it will look like, and who it is for.

Then you go test it out!

Some things work, and some things don’t. You keep the things that do, scrap the things that don’t and keep refining and adjusting until what you are providing lines up with what the market is asking for.

For us, there have been lots of little pivots all along the way.

Some had to do with who our ideal client would be. We thought we would go straight for the big corporate contracts, but instead found that our opportunities were lighting up in the small business space.

Other pivots were around the way we structured our programs. When we started we offered weekly sessions for the first month. Then we got feedback that people were just too busy to show up for that many sessions. We have refined the program design over time to respond to what we were hearing from the people our coaches were working with.

And of course our pricing has evolved over time as well. Not only what we charge, but how we structure the pricing model. Currently we have 3 pricing options based on the size and need of the company we serve. However, that too may change and evolve over time as we learn more about the wants and needs of the clients we best align with.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://acwcoaching.com/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielledinkelman/