What happens when you make your clients’ goals your own?
You end up creating value that goes far beyond the product or service you’re providing.
As the founder of Root & Leaf Wellness, I’ve spent years helping people improve their health through nutrition education, personalized coaching, and sustainable lifestyle changes.
Over that time, I’ve coached more than 400 clients who wanted to lose weight, improve their blood sugar, address cardiovascular risk factors, and make healthier dietary choices.
But one thing I’ve learned through this process is that people rarely have just one goal.
Someone who wants to lose weight might also want to have more energy to play with their kids. Someone who wants to improve their blood sugar might be worried about the long-term cost of managing their health. And someone who wants to eat healthier might be struggling to figure out how to do it without spending a fortune at the grocery store.
These things are all connected.
And if you really want to help someone succeed, you need to understand what they’re actually trying to accomplish.
The Financial Cost of Poor Health
Health is personal, but it also has a significant financial impact.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American consumer unit spent $78,535 in 2024. Approximately $10,100 of that went toward food.
And that’s before we get into the cost of healthcare.
For people struggling with excess weight, insulin resistance, or cardiovascular risk factors, the financial burden can extend to medications, doctor visits, lab work, and other medical expenses.
The CDC estimates that diabetes is associated with approximately $4,668 in additional annual medical costs per person in the years following diagnosis, compared with people without diabetes.
Now, I’m not suggesting that every person who improves their diet will save thousands of dollars in healthcare costs. There are too many variables to make that kind of claim honestly.
But it does raise an interesting question.
What if helping someone improve their health could also help them improve their finances?
That’s something I’ve thought about a lot in my work with clients.
Eating Healthier Doesn’t Have to Cost More
One of the biggest misconceptions I’ve encountered is that eating healthy means buying expensive specialty foods, supplements, and products.
But some of the most nutritious foods you can buy are also some of the most affordable.
Beans, lentils, oats, potatoes, rice, fruits, and vegetables can form the foundation of a healthy diet without requiring an expensive grocery bill.
And when people start preparing more meals at home, planning ahead, and cutting back on restaurant meals and convenience foods, they may find that their grocery budget actually goes down.
Let’s say a household makes a few changes and saves $50 a month on food.
That’s $600 a year.
If they save $100 a month, that’s $1,200 a year.
These are hypothetical examples, not savings I’ve calculated across my entire client base. Actual results depend on where someone starts, their family size, and the cost of food in their area.
But the point is that small changes can add up.
And when someone is already worried about their health and finances, finding a way to improve both can make a real difference.
My job wasn’t simply to tell people what to eat. It was to help them figure out how to make those changes work in their actual lives.
Because knowing what to do and actually doing it are two very different things.
What I Learned About Customer Success
When you’ve worked with more than 400 clients, you start to see patterns.
You realize that giving someone information isn’t enough. You have to understand what’s standing in their way, help them work through it, and find a solution they can realistically stick with.
And the more I think about it, the more I realize that these principles apply to just about any industry.
1) Understand What Your Customer Actually Wants
Sometimes the goal a customer initially tells you about isn’t the whole story.
A client might tell me they want to lose 30 pounds. But after talking with them, I might discover that their real motivation is to have more energy, feel better about themselves, or reduce their risk of developing a chronic condition that runs in their family.
Understanding that bigger picture changes how you approach the problem.
The same principle applies in customer success.
A business might purchase software to improve efficiency, but what they really want is to save their employees time, reduce operating costs, or increase revenue.
If you don’t understand the underlying objective, it’s difficult to know whether you’re actually helping them succeed.
2) Make Success Practical
You can give someone the best nutritional advice in the world, but if they can’t afford the food, don’t know how to prepare it, or can’t fit it into their schedule, it isn’t going to help them very much.
I’ve learned that success often comes down to making the next step manageable.
Break the problem down. Identify the obstacles. Find a solution that works for the person in front of you.
In a business setting, that might mean helping a customer navigate implementation, improving product adoption, or finding a better way to integrate a solution into their existing workflow.
The goal isn’t simply to deliver information. It’s to help the customer get results.
3) Focus on Results, Not Just Activity
It’s easy to measure how many coaching sessions you’ve completed or how many emails you’ve sent.
But those numbers don’t necessarily tell you whether you’ve helped someone.
What matters is whether the client is making progress toward their goals.
The same is true in customer success. Meetings held and tickets resolved are useful metrics, but they don’t tell the whole story.
Are customers actually using the product? Are they getting the value they expected? Are they achieving their business objectives? Are they staying because they see that value?
Those are the questions that matter.
4) Make Your Customer’s Success Your Own
This is probably the biggest lesson I’ve taken from running my own business.
When a client wasn’t making progress, I couldn’t simply blame them for not following the plan. I had to ask myself what we could change to help them succeed.
Maybe the plan was too complicated. Maybe we hadn’t addressed the real obstacle. Maybe we needed to approach the problem differently.
That doesn’t mean you can control every outcome. You can’t.
But you can take ownership of the process, listen to feedback, and keep looking for ways to create value.
And when customers see that you’re genuinely invested in helping them achieve their goals, it builds trust.
Applying These Lessons to My Next Challenge
Building Root & Leaf Wellness has taught me how to listen to customers, solve problems, communicate complex information, and help people turn their goals into actionable plans.
I’ve also learned that the value of a product or service isn’t determined solely by what you deliver. It’s determined by what the customer is able to accomplish with it.
That’s the mindset I want to bring to my next role in customer success or account management.
I want to understand what customers are trying to achieve, help them overcome the obstacles standing in their way, and make their success a priority.
Because at the end of the day, when your customers succeed, you’ve done your job.
