Health Coaching with Bonny

Health & Wellbeing Coach focusing on the body and mind

Although Bonny is still in employment, and has been throughout her start-up journey, an unexpected health scare prompted her to make the decision to start her own business, Bonny Prim Health & Wellbeing Coach.

She had already been coaching for over 15 years and derives a great deal of enjoyment from her work: ”It’s great when you see someone realise a dream they have”. When she coupled this with her interest in food and nutrition, having successfully lost weight by making better food choices some years previously, she had an ‘aha’ moment!

“I realised that I could bring these two things together to offer a unique service that isn’t available in the local area, so I decided to retrain as a nutritionist and gained an accreditation as a life coach and set out to start my business.”

Bonny saw an advertisement for Outset Swindon in the Swindon Link magazine and attended an information session in April 2014 to find out more about the programme.

Due to her work commitments, Bonny initially had one-to-one meetings with an Outset advisor and also signed up for Outset Online, which is designed to help clients follow the course and review topics in their spare time. The flexible vocational approach adopted by the Outset programme allowed Bonny to attend key Business Start Up workshops as well as Social Media and specialist Finance workshops.

“The workshops have been great, as I dipped in and out of the ones that the advisor thought would be the most beneficial to me, including Marketing and Advertising as these are some of the areas that I had little experience of. These workshops not only filled in the gaps for me, but they also provided me with some valuable insight that I have been able to put into practice in my business.”

Bonny’s budget for her business has been the biggest challenge that she faced. With limited funds, she has to be careful what she spends them on, and make sure that she is getting good return from the investment.

Her Outset advisor was able to advise her about marketing and advertising to ensure that she made the best use of her financial resources. Bonny has used social media and has given a few free talks on the subject of nutrition, “which helps to get my name out there and keep the budget down!”

Bonny’s vision as a health and wellbeing coach is to provide a service to individuals who wish to improve aspects of their health, focusing primarily on healthy eating and losing weight. She does this by combining her knowledge as a nutritionist with her expertise as a life coach, using these skills to educate her clients about the choices they are making in relation to food, whilst also addressing the real reasons why they might not have succeeded in the past.

“My business provides an alternative to the traditional ‘diets’ that people opt in and out of without much success; my model aims to fill the gap.”

Bonny offers both one-to-one and group programmes that are specifically designed to address her clients’ needs. Her goal is to educate people about nutrition and make them aware that traditional diet clubs are not giving them everything they need to succeed – but she will!

Once she qualifies as a nutritional therapist, Bonny plans to extend her service offering to help clients with other health problems or concerns.

Bonny’s next step is to expand her business into the Highworth area and she is already in discussions with the Highworth Holistic Health centre about working with them.

Following on from her talk at The Core about ‘Fraud in the diet industry’, she would like to set up ‘coaching cafes’ to offer group coaching sessions on a monthly basis.

In the longer term, Bonny is also researching opportunities to organise retreats in Spain when she would work with clients to improve their health and wellbeing over the course of a week.