From College Football to Business Coach: Katharine’s Path to Helping Health & Wellness Pros Thrive

Katharine Sawyer has built her business four times. Not because things kept going wrong — but because she kept getting clearer.

A decade in college football as an executive assistant. Then personal training and a local bootcamp. Then a toxic corporate role she stayed in longer than she should have, quietly building something on the side. Then an accidental agency that grew faster than she could manage. Then, finally, a group coaching programme for health and wellness professionals that she's spent the last four years scaling — and that, for the first time, feels like the thing she was working towards all along.

"I always had that entrepreneurial pull," she says. "I'd watch Shark Tank, read business books, start side projects. But it took a long time to figure out what I actually wanted to build."

What she didn't want, she figured out faster. She didn't want to guard a desk. She didn't want to coach people through fat loss programmes for a company whose culture ran on hustle and fear. She didn't want to run an agency where clients held her responsible for the outcomes of businesses she didn't own.

"I felt the weight of other people's results entirely on my shoulders. And by the time I was done serving clients, I had nothing left to build my own thing."

The pivot away from done-for-you work towards strategy and coaching wasn't immediately clean. She kept her existing service clients for stability while building a group programme alongside them — slowly raising prices, refining what she offered, and letting the clients who didn't value her work naturally fall away.

"I'm a big believer that the price someone pays determines how they treat you," she says. "The people who invest in strategy show up differently. They listen. They implement. They respect your time. The done-for-you clients often expected more than their scope and then complained when you said no."

The group programme she runs now is six months long and built for health and wellness professionals — nutritionists, personal trainers, functional medicine practitioners, counsellors — at any stage of business. It works through a 12-step blueprint covering foundations, marketing and client acquisition. But before clients touch any of it, the first thing they do is a journaling exercise that has nothing to do with business.

What do you love about your life? What brings you joy? What would you do for free? What are your values? What are your weaknesses? And then the final question: in five years, what does your ideal day look like — from the moment you wake up, in as much detail as you can manage?

"I had someone who was convinced they wanted to build a one-on-one coaching practice. But when they described their five-year ideal day, they were only working one hour. They hadn't connected those two things at all. So I said — yes, we can do one-on-one to make money now, but your model has to evolve, otherwise you'll resent it even when it's working."

The exercise exists because Katharine has watched too many people chase business models that looked good on someone else's Instagram rather than ones that would actually suit their life. She calls them accidental entrepreneurs: people who saw an opportunity and jumped without asking whether it was the right one for them. Her work is specifically designed not to produce them.

The bigger vision behind the programme is something she talks about with the particular conviction of someone who's thought about it for a long time: the largest collaborative community of health and wellness professionals in the world, built around the idea that there is no competition between people whose shared mission is to make people well.

"Each person can only help so many people. But together, our community has helped this many people and made this kind of impact. That's what I'm building towards."

She plans to host retreats, in-person events and conferences. The first small mastermind weekend is planned for early 2026 at her own home.

One of the more unexpected things Katharine has learned is how directly her own energy affects her sales. She runs webinars every Tuesday. Mondays are intentionally protected — light client work, movement, things that restore rather than drain. Tuesday mornings before going live, she gets outside, listens to music that lifts her, and keeps the hour before the webinar completely clear.

"I can see a direct correlation between the weeks I sell and the weeks I don't. It comes down to how I show up — and how I showed up the day before."

She's also stopped holding herself to a rigid idea of what energy management should look like. A colleague pointed out recently that if the longer morning walk brings you joy, do the longer walk — even if it means starting work at 9:30 instead of 9. The guilt of deviating from a self-imposed routine can drain more energy than the deviation itself.

"Stop selling your deliverables," she says. "People want you. Share who you are, have real conversations, and the right people will be drawn in. I've moved away from the high-pressure scripts entirely. Connection converts better — and it feels better for both of us."

She's honest about what's been hard. Hiring — finding people who show up with the same work ethic she brings — has never been straightforward. The isolation of building something that people in your immediate life don't fully understand is real. And more recently, buying her first home as a solo business owner has been a crash course in self-employed finance — the extra hoops, the documentation, the need to actually know your numbers.

It's also surfaced something she's still working through: giving herself permission to spend the money she's made.

"I've worked hard for this. But I've had to learn to invest in the life I'm building, not just keep it sitting in the bank for safety. Buying the house has been a reminder that it's okay to reward yourself."

Her advice to founders who feel behind is to read The Gap and the Gain by Dan Sullivan — the argument being that we measure ourselves against where we want to be rather than how far we've already come. And to stop watching what other people in their industry are doing.

"Put your blinders on. Don't let what other people's success looks like consume you and make you feel less than. Just focus on you."

To her younger self, she'd say something simpler: don't wait until you feel ready. Take imperfect action. Don't let societal expectations about what a career is supposed to look like stop you from building something that actually fits.

"You're allowed to want more. And you're capable of figuring it out along the way."