Hey there!
I’m Jessica Pantermuehl, founder of the Holistic Entrepreneur Association.
For more than a decade, I’ve been building businesses in the health and wellness space, teaching wellness professionals how to market their work, and creating tools and resources designed to make entrepreneurship feel a lot less overwhelming.
And if you’ve ever felt like becoming great at what you do somehow came with an entirely separate job of figuring out how to market it, sell it, and build a business around it, you’re in the right place.
I thought becoming a great practitioner would be enough.
Like a lot of wellness professionals, I didn’t get into this field because I dreamed of becoming an entrepreneur.
I got into it because I loved the work.
I trained in functional nutrition and holistic health coaching, started working with clients one-on-one, taught classes, and eventually partnered with an integrative medical practice. I loved learning, I loved helping people connect the dots in their health, and I was completely willing to put in the work to become a better practitioner.
What I wasn’t prepared for was how much of my time would have to go toward figuring out how to build a business.
Suddenly, it wasn’t just about being good at what I did.
I needed a website. I needed to figure out how to talk about my work in a way people understood. I needed offers, marketing, systems, content, follow-up, and some reliable way of actually bringing new clients through the door.
And everywhere I looked, there was another strategy I was supposedly supposed to be doing.
- Post more.
- Start a blog.
- Build a funnel.
- Create a course.
- Run ads.
- Send more emails.
I tried a lot of it.
Some of it worked, a lot of it didn’t.
And during those first few years, there were more than a few moments when I wondered whether I was actually cut out to run a business at all.
What made it especially frustrating was that I wasn’t afraid of hard work.
I just didn’t know which work mattered.
I didn’t need another list of things I could be doing.
I needed a way to understand where my business was, what it actually needed next, and what I could safely stop worrying about for now.
So I decided to figure it out.
I started treating business and marketing almost the same way I had approached learning functional nutrition: I wanted to understand how the pieces fit together.
I read everything I could get my hands on. I invested in business and marketing programs. I listened to trainings and podcasts, tested ideas inside my own business, paid attention to what actually produced results, and slowly started separating the strategies that mattered from all the noise around them.
Over time, things started to click.
My practice grew. I began running group programs and building new ways to serve people beyond one-on-one work. I was also doing more outreach in my community, and that work was recognized by organizations including the California State Senate, California State Assembly, and County of Los Angeles.
California State Senate- California State Assembly
- County of Los Angeles
- Congressional Recognition
As I got further into my own business, I started paying more attention to what was happening around me.
I saw other wellness professionals dealing with many of the same things I had struggled with: feeling overwhelmed by everything they thought they should be doing, piecing together business advice from a hundred different places, and not really knowing what deserved their attention first.
And the more I saw it, the more it bothered me.
These were smart, capable practitioners who had spent years learning how to help people. But when it came to building the business around that work, most of them were largely left to figure it out on their own.
There were plenty of general business resources out there, but very little that felt built for the realities of being a functional, holistic, or integrative wellness professional.
That was the gap I wanted to help fill.
And in 2015, that became the beginning of the Holistic Entrepreneur Association.
HEA was built to make the business side of wellness easier to navigate.
The original idea was simple: bring together the business education, tools, experts, and community that wellness professionals needed in one place.
And in a lot of ways, I created it for myself, too.
I interviewed practitioners about what they were doing to grow their businesses, brought in experts to teach what they knew, and paid close attention to the strategies that were actually working across different types of wellness businesses.
HEA became the resource I had wished existed when I was trying to figure all of this out myself.
Since then, HEA has served practitioners around the world, and the resources have evolved right alongside the way we build businesses.
Today, HEA is a place where wellness professionals can get personalized direction, create better marketing, build stronger brands, use AI thoughtfully inside their businesses, and get help figuring out what deserves their attention next.
And HEA has grown alongside my own work in the wellness industry.
Over the years, my work has taken me into a lot of different corners of this industry.
I’ve grown a private practice, built multiple wellness businesses, developed curriculum for organizations including the Nutritional Therapy Association and Sonoran University of Health Sciences, launched my own clean beauty brand, and worked behind the scenes with wellness entrepreneurs at nearly every stage, from brand-new graduates to multi-seven-figure businesses, on marketing, offers, systems, and growth.
That experience has given me a front-row seat to what building a wellness business looks like at different stages, and it continues to shape the tools, resources, and support we create inside HEA.
But the bigger mission has stayed the same.
I believe the people doing meaningful work in preventative, functional, holistic, and integrative health deserve businesses that are capable of supporting that work.
Because when great practitioners build sustainable businesses, they’re able to reach more people, do more of the work they came into this field to do, and contribute to something much bigger than any one practice or company.
That’s the mission behind HEA:
Helping shift the paradigm of our modern health care system toward a more preventative and integrative approach.
And we do that by helping the people doing that work build stronger businesses around it.
With love and support,
If you’re wondering what to work on next…
That’s a pretty good place to start.
The Holistic Business Blueprint Assessment looks at where your business is right now and helps you identify the areas that deserve your attention next.
A Little About Me
When I’m not building something for HEA or one of my other businesses, there’s a good chance you’ll find me somewhere in Florida with my fiancé and our Shiba Inu, Hugo.
A few other things about me:
- I grew up on a 600-acre goat ranch in Texas.
- Growing up, I planned on becoming a medical doctor before finding my way into nutrition and wellness.
- I can happily spend an unreasonable amount of time nerding out over business strategy, functional nutrition, or whatever new thing AI has learned to do this week.
- My Myers-Briggs personality type is an ENFJ, and it’s weirdly accurate.
- I love learning for the sake of learning, which probably explains a lot about how I ended up doing what I do.