We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jessica Palmisano. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jessica below.

Jessica, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What do you think matters most in terms of achieving success?

Passion.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned throughout the years in my coaching business and now within R3cess is that following your heart and staying true to what you’re passionate about will propel you forward.

Any time I’ve ever tried to push/sell/market something that didn’t really ever align with me, I’ve failed. A really great example of this is trying to chase a social media trend. There have been so many times where I’ve tried to create content that was trending in hopes to gain new followers or make a sale. I’d spend hours racking my brain and obsessing with no great result. Whereas any time I’d design content authentically and spoke to my audience from the heart, I found that I’d receive much more feedback. Meaningful feedback, nonetheless, which is the whole reason I began coaching to begin with- to provide meaningful value to the ones who need it most. People love love, they can feel it and are more drawn to it.

Not to mention, it truly never feels like work when you chip away at a project you’re truly passionate about. If it’s fun, why stop?! More passion = more productivity, naturally.

Jessica, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Working as a health coach over the years, one of the claims that I hear from many of my clients regularly is that it’s hard for them to find the time to workout. Many of them feel overworked and chained to their desk. I’ve had to work with most of my clients from the ground up, focusing first just on incorporating more basic movement like walking in between virtual meetings rather than jumping in all at once to intense exercise.

This is where R3cess Retreats was, almost accidentally, born. I wanted to offer something to people that was easy for them to commit to, inspired them to incorporate more exercise, and didn’t feel so daunting. So I hosted a couple small retreats in Sedona, AZ and Oahu, Hawaii, where hiking and exercise were the main focus over the course of a long weekend.

What I found after each retreat is that guests left feeling much more than motivated to workout. They left feeling recharged and empowered. Quite a few have gone on to book their own hiking trips and take on new endeavors of their own that they didn’t necessarily feel confident enough to take on before their experience with R3cess.

Our mission at R3cess Retreats is to break you free from your desk and provide you with a 3-day weekend that gets you MOVING through exercise, adventure, and the outdoors.

All of our retreats are held over the course of 3 days, Friday- Sunday in both domestic and international locations like Sedona, Asheville, Costa Rica, Hawaii, and Colombia, with more locations being launched in 2025. On each retreat you can expect to see all-levels yoga, low-intensity outdoor workouts, hiking, and adventures like surfing or white water rafting on the itinerary.

I’m proud to say that we are now a thriving retreat company made up of 5 additional female fitness coaches who all share similar values and believe in the R3cess mission. We are continually making new connections all over the world and meeting other like-minded professionals in the health & fitness and adventure tourism space.

Our guests attend not just to improve their physical health, but also their mental well-being. We’ve been blessed to host trips for men and women of all ages who join us to try solo travel for the first time, reunite with old friends, challenge themselves to try something different, visit a bucket list destination, face a fear of heights, work through a personal trauma like divorce and heartache, or just to make lasting memories.

We started with 3 trips in 2023 and by the end of this year, we will have hosted 10 incredibly epic R3cesses.

Fitness and travel have changed my life, and I’m so fortunate to be able to share all of this love with others through R3cess Retreats.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

I don’t have a huge social media following, actually. Right now my Instagram sits at just 5,100 followers, but I’ve been able to leverage that. I think the key is to nurture the audience you do have, to start at least. They trust you and confide in you, never take that for granted. Deliver meaningful content that’s created with love and the ROI will be worth it. Could my following be bigger? Of course. Would I love for that to happen? Absolutely, but in the meantime it’s important I recognize and serve the people that are watching me now.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

Oh yea! I was teaching dental assisting at a career college until 2019. I had just became a personal trainer, but wasn’t quite confident enough to pursue it full time just yet. I had a few friends reach out to me for fitness advice and it just never stopped. I really put my heart and soul into giving them the best guidance I could. They would tell their friends, and I’d receive a new text or DM asking for guidance. This went on for a while and I began to integrate systems to create a solid coaching platform I’d use with these people. I charged each something like $50 a month and these people became clients.
Eventually, I had so many clients that the work I was doing with them was overtaking the work I was doing for my dental students. It wasn’t fair to either and I had to make a decision- either be 100% all in in coaching, or 100% all in in teaching. I chose coaching and gave my notice to the school.

That same day I hired my business coach. This was a key milestone for me. I knew that if I were going to take a risk as big as quitting a secure full-time job, I’d need to get really serious about starting a business. She was phenomenal and in the first year of working with her I had tripled my yearly income. Since then, I’ve been blessed to have helped over 200 people with their health and fitness goals, hired an absolute rock-star co-coach, and have evolved into a fitness-focused travel company. Sometimes I have to pinch myself just make sure I’m not dreaming!

If there is anything I could suggest to somebody starting off on their own in business, aside from lead with passion, I’d say invest/hire help and never stop learning.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.R3cessRetreats.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/r3cess.retreats/ and https://www.instagram.com/jessica.kayy/

Image Credits

Snapback Films Photography @snapback.films