fbpx
Balance Work Life

Balance Work Life

by | Aug 31, 2022 | Business Growth, Sustainability

“Life is a balance between what we can control and what we cannot. I am learning to live between effort and surrender.”
~ Danielle Orner

 

In this blog, I share with you my thoughts on work/life balance and a few practical strategies to better manage your business when life seemingly gets in the way.

Let me begin by sharing something I heard many years ago from Danielle Laporte.

Balance is a myth.

I remember being struck by those words and whilst I don’t remember everything she said on the topic I remember feeling the truth of those 4 words deep in my bones.

The idea here is that we don’t get to a place where work and life are perfectly balanced, without one taking up more space than the other. Instead the balance tips in favour of one or the other at different points in time. Allow me to explain. If you are sick or need to take care of a sick loved one, then for sure life is going to take priority. It has to.

If all is well on the personal front and we’re in the middle of a big launch in our business, then the scales are going to tip on the side of business for a while. That’s inevitable.

The liberating key here is to acknowledge that. To understand that the balance we often strive for is a myth. That then frees us up to figure out how to better manage things when the scales are tipped one way vs the other. I.e. how do we not drop all the balls on our business when life is feeling full on? And how do we not lose ourselves in our work when business is full on?

I can’t claim to have all the answers here, but for what they are worth, here are my thoughts for how to stay connected with your work when life is fighting for your attention.

Manage your expectations

Whilst on a call with a fellow business owner whose Dad has been seriously ill and who is herself recovering from a second bout of Covid, she shared that she hadn’t been feeling the ability to create content lately, which has never happened before and was asking how she might get her inspiration back. When I reminded her how much she is dealing with on a personal level and how normal it is therefore that she isn’t feeling creative, she broke down in tears.

I see some version of this all the time.

We don’t acknowledge what is going on for us and then on top of everything we might already be dealing with on a personal level, we have unreasonable expectations of ourselves to keep on keeping on. When we can truly acknowledge that our capacity for work may be limited, we’re better able to do the bare minimum than when we try to carry on at full capacity, which just adds more weight to an already unbearably heavy load.

On this same call, I was asked what I wanted to commit to for the next two weeks and without missing a beat I said: maintaining my business until our house renovation is complete. That means nothing extra, no big launches, no working on new things, no bold moves, or big steps. As boring and as safe as it might sound, my only job for the next month is to stick to my content schedule and serve my existing clients.

Even though that is more than enough, there still was a voice that whispered but you should be doing more.

It’s so important to be aware of that voice and to gently and respectively ignore her.

 Plan ahead

This one is a work in progress for me but making the most of the extra time I have in my business when things are quiet on the personal front is key to feeling less stressed when life gets busy or challenging.

That means that when I know I’ll be taking time off for a planned holiday, I can, for example, work a bit harder in advance to prepare content to be scheduled in my absence.

Much like it was in my old corporate life when I knew I had to take leave, there would also be a little bit of intensity ahead of the break, getting things set up for when I wouldn’t be there or handing stuff over to colleagues.

This doesn’t necessarily help when unexpected things happen like sudden sickness, but if you can endeavour to get ahead of yourself in for example your content creation, then you’ll have some leeway to work with when you suddenly find yourself busy with personal things. The trick is to be more productive when the space is there to do it so that you can step back when you need to, without dropping your business essentials.

Get help

Even though most of us work solo in our business that doesn’t mean we can’t recruit others to help take up the slack when we need to take a step back. There are several things you can do to find cover for while you are away that doesn’t require too much work up front for you.

You might, for example, invite a colleague to do a content takeover for your newsletter. This is something I’ve done for my dear colleague Eli Trier in the past. When she was busy getting married, she invited two or three of her most trusted colleagues to come in and write a newsletter on a topic relevant to her audience that she could schedule to go out while she was busy with her wedding. It was great for us as we got the opportunity to be exposed to a new group of people and could share links to our business and therefore get new followers and it was great for Eli, who had three weeks of quality newsletters she didn’t have to write or pre-prepare.

You can even do this with services. Years ago when I was on maternity leave with my first son, I was running a women’s circle with weekly calls. I invited 3 of my dearest colleagues to host calls in my absence and it was great, my women really appreciated that the calls continued while I was away bonding with my baby and my colleagues loved the opportunity to host a group call and share their skills.

And inside my mastermind program, I had a week off and had to miss one of the group calls, instead of cancelling it, I invited one of the amazing women inside the program to test out her new workshop on her fellow mastermind participants, meaning that the women benefited from her wisdom and she was able to get some validation and feedback on her new workshop. So it was a win win, with no extra work from me.

Give yourself grace

Always important but specifically relevant for those times when planning and calling in help just isn’t viable, it’s important to give yourself some grace when navigating difficult personal issues like illness, death of a loved one, birth of a child, children home from school, moving house (or house renovations!!) and all other big life events that inevitably mean our work has to take a back seat.

We would never be hard on a friend or valued colleague during times like these and would find it super easy to show empathy, understanding and love to someone else in this situation. Why then is it so hard for us to extend this kindness to ourselves?

Next time you find yourself in a situation where you’re dealing with some big personal life issues and catch yourself being hard on yourself about work, remember to show yourself some compassion. All being hard on ourselves does is make things even harder. In my experience, the more you’re able to lean into self-compassion, the sooner you’ll be ready to get back to doing what you can.

And there you have it, three things you can do to survive in business when your personal life is a struggle. Is there anything you’d add to this list? Feel free to let me know in the comments below.

SIGN UP FOR MY SOULFUL STRATEGIES WEEKLY

 

Once a week, in the form of an e-letter, I share the best of what I know about building a business with integrity for conscious business owners.

The intention behind these letters is to be a voice for integrity within your (undoubtedly) cluttered inbox. To be the one email you can count on to contain strategic and soulful advice for building a business without selling your soul.

If you want to receive the Soulful Strategies Weekly, simply share with me your name and email address below and you’ll start recieving emails right away.

Are You Doing This Often Enough?

Are You Doing This Often Enough?

by | Aug 10, 2022 | Business Growth

“A salesperson’s ethics and values contribute more to sales success than do techniques or strategies.”
~ Ron Willingham

In this blog, I talk to you about something that so many of the business owners I work with struggle to implement — regularly letting your audience know about your products and services. I plan to share with you an approach for sharing your offers authentically and to give you a suggested plan to make sure you do it.

A while back I asked members of my Mastermind, the following question:

How often are you putting your paid offerings in front of your audience (and how)?

And I was a tad taken aback by the response, the vast majority of the women said that they weren’t doing it at all or if so, were doing it rarely and infrequently.

Now I shouldn’t really be surprised because the kind of business owner that is attracted to my work tends to be so precisely because they don’t like the sales and marketing aspect of running a business. They like my work because I focus on generosity and giving versus manipulation and hard selling. I myself have built a successful business, selling as infrequently as possible AND…

It’s so, so, so important to be letting your people know what you have to offer on a regular and consistent basis.

A chilling parable

Years ago I heard a story that had a huge impact on me, I have no idea where or how I heard this story and despite searching online (many times!), I’ve never been able to find it since. So this is my version of it. It’s the story of a doctor who moved to a remote village.

He didn’t want to tell the villagers on his first day there that he was a doctor, lest he come across as bragging or full of himself. That first night, shortly after he arrived he heard a commotion in the early hours of the morning, but didn’t think too much of it. The next day, he awoke to find the village in mourning. When he asked what had happened, he was told that a little girl had come down with fever and died because the nearest doctor lived miles away and they couldn’t get to him in time.

Of course, the doctor was devastated, he had assumed that a doctor must already live in the village and by not letting the villagers know his profession, a young girl had died.

Now whilst people might not die as a result of your silence about what you have to offer, it’s my honest belief that when we fail to share what it is that we can do for others (on the regular), we are depriving the very people we are trying to help from accessing products and services that could help them to live happier and healthier lives.

So, with that said, how do you let people know what you are up to without feeling like a sleazy car salesman? It’s easier than you think.

A simple reframe

I want to offer you a reframe from the sleazy car salesman stereotype to the courteous waiter.

We’re all familiar with the sleazy car salesman stereotype. The slick salesman who will use every trick in the book to get us to buy a car, even when said car is not in our best interests to buy. We see him as pushy and aggressive in his use of sales tactics and for conscious business owners like us, the thought of coming across as even slightly salesy in this way leaves us feeling cold.

Now think about when you go out for a meal in a restaurant and those points in the evening when the waiter brings over the menu, first so that you can choose your starter and main course and then again later so that you can see the desert menu and, if so inclined, order some coffee.

Do you feel sold to in those moments? No of course not, you’re usually grateful if the waiter or waitress comes over without you having to make eye contact and wave across a crowded dining room. When they come to ask if we want desserts or coffee, we don’t think “uff, I wish this guy would stop trying to upsell me!” No, quite the opposite, we consider it to be a service, one of the very reasons we’re out for dinner in the first place.

But at the end of the day, the waiter is in fact simply sharing what is available for you to buy. Yet for some reason, we never feel sold to. Why is that? Because waiters don’t have a vested interest in how much we spend, they aren’t trying to manipulate us into buying the most food possible. They are simply sharing with us what is on offer and we feel this.

When we can embody the courteous waiter as we share what we have to offer, we too can sell without feeling salesy.

Creating a schedule

What I’ve done to get over my own resistance to sharing about my products and services is to create a schedule for it. I now recommend to all my clients that they too create a schedule of sharing offers, gentle invitations, if you will, to buy something they have created that could help the very people they are trying to serve.

What I recommend my clients do, is to create a schedule for sharing offers/CTAs (calls to actions) that incorporates both those things you have on offer that are paid for as well as things you have on offer that are free. I have a tab in my content schedule spreadsheet just for this purpose (see image below). In it, I have details of all of my offerings, such as my online trainings (paid) and also invitations to subscribe to my newsletter or join my facebook group (free) plus the copy that I would use to share the details with my audience.

I then have a slot for these once a week in my actual content schedule that details where and when I’ll share this information (usually on Instagram or Facebook). I recommend that you share one of your offerings after every 5–7 pieces of valuable free content. Given that I publish content every day and I alternate between sharing about a paid offer and a free offer, I can do this weekly.

If you are not sharing free content as regularly, then your schedule might be different. However, I would recommend not going more than a month without sharing details of one of your offers with your audience at least once. At this rate, you’ll only be letting your people know about your offers 12 times in the whole year.

The reason I love to have a schedule with the copy pre-populated in a spreadsheet is because it makes it easier to share. Given that most conscious business folks I know (myself included) have some resistance to “selling”, automating the process as much as possible really can help. If I have to write the copy every week when it comes up in my schedule, you can bet that I’ll skip over it as soon as resistance rears its head.

It takes a bit of work up front, but once created, a pre-populated, schedule makes the whole process of regularly sharing your offers so much easier.

Some advice about your sales copy

Speaking from personal experience, the hardest part of getting this system set up is creating the copy that accompanies each offering. Here’s my best advice on how to do that. Stop worrying about trying to make it sound enticing, convincing or exciting. That’s where we start to feel inauthentic and salesy and as a result, resistance comes up.

Instead, remember the courteous waiter and simply share clearly and transparently what you have to offer that might help your ideal clients. I like to include all the details (no hiding the price over here) and also say who it’s for and who it’s not for so that people can self select in or out.

The key for me is to always stay out of the realm of trying to convince people that it’s what they need and instead to present clearly what’s on offer so that they themselves can decide if it’s something they want to buy or do.

Of course, this doesn’t mean excluding the potential benefits of your offer, but that’s very different to some of the sales copy you’ll see on the internet that focuses on pain points and uses manipulation and inflated promises to try and get the sale.

My sincere hope?

That after reading this, you’ll see the importance of sharing with your audience, details of your products, services and other opportunities to go deeper with you, without a fear of coming across as pushy or salesy.

And that you can totally do it in a way that provides a service to your people.

SIGN UP FOR MY SOULFUL STRATEGIES WEEKLY

 

Once a week, in the form of an e-letter, I share the best of what I know about building a business with integrity for conscious business owners.

The intention behind these letters is to be a voice for integrity within your (undoubtedly) cluttered inbox. To be the one email you can count on to contain strategic and soulful advice for building a business without selling your soul.

If you want to receive the Soulful Strategies Weekly, simply share with me your name and email address below and you’ll start recieving emails right away.

10 Income Generating Activities To Try Out In Your Business

10 Income Generating Activities To Try Out In Your Business

by | Mar 30, 2022 | Business Growth

“If you want your income to grow, you too must grow.”
~ Idowu Koyenikan

In this blog, I want to talk about “income generating activities”, what they are, how you identify them and some specific activities you can do to bring more money into your business this year.

Let’s start with what I mean by income generating activities. These are the things you do in your business that generate new clients or more sales in your business. They are not the products or services themselves (because it’s absolutely possible to have a solid suite of products and services and not be making money) nor is it the creation of them. Instead it’s what you do in your business to generate more sales of the ones you’ve got.

Now before I start to share with you my suggestions, I want you to stop for a moment and consider what has previously worked in your business to bring in money. Because here’s the thing, often when I talk to business owners, they are in what I call the feast and famine stage of their business growth, meaning they make some sales and all is well followed by a painful period of no sales and therefore no income.

Typically they’re looking for a coach precisely because they need more consistent income. When I ask these business owners what has worked to generate income in the past, they almost always have an answer. Their feast phases can almost always be attributed to something the business owner was doing at the time.

Let me give you an example of how a typical conversation might go:

Me: So how did you get the last few clients you had?
Client: Oh I was doing a lot of networking at the time and several people sent leads my way.
Me: Oh so are you doing that sort of networking now?
Client: No I haven’t done it in a while, I sort of fell out of the habit.

Now we can replace networking for a wide range of activities, but the key here is that all of the income we’ve generated thus far in our business can be traced back to some specific action or set of actions on behalf of the business owner. That’s why for me, it’s super important that you analyse your own activities first and look back at how your previous income was generated.

ACTION: Grab a notepad and pen, yes right now, I want you to do this before reading on. On a clean sheet of paper write down the names of your last 5–10 clients. Next to each name write a few words about how they came to be your client and then consider the following questions.

  • Do you see any patterns, are there any obvious themes emerging?
  • Is there one person or platform sending you the majority of your leads?
  • Is there one blog post that people keep finding, that has them then book a call with you?
  • Do you even know exactly how people found you and are you keeping a record? This last point is so important if you want to deepen your understanding of your best income generating activities.

Often when trying to build or grow a business, we get so overwhelmed by all of the advice out there and all of the things we think should be doing that we end up wasting a lot of time on busy work, rather than focusing our attention on the activities that will bring us the most return on investment for our time and energy. Read on for some of my thoughts on where I recommend focusing your attention.

Income generation in a nutshell

If you were to ask me to share with you what activities I believe have brought in the most money in my business, I would say in a nutshell, providing value, solving problems and connecting 1:1 with people. I have done this primarily through consistently creating content that serves my ideal client gifting complimentary sessions. Of course, within that there are a whole load of specific activities and strategies one can do. But for those who like to keep it simple, this is the bottom line.

People buy from people they know, like and trust. When we provide value, solve problems and be in connection with the very people we hope to have as clients, we build relationships with people who then better know, like and trust us. This perhaps sounds more contrived than it’s meant to. In more everyday terms — be a good egg and help people out and they’re more likely to want to buy from you. It really is that simple. But how exactly do we do this? Read on for some specific activities I recommend.

1. Be in conversation with people

This is top of the list for a reason. It’s one of the most overlooked activities in business and one of the most effective in terms of generating new business. We’re all familiar with the term networking and the reason this concept is so popular is because when it comes to business being in conversation with people works.

Traditional networking is flawed in my opinion because it asks us to go in search of people to buy our products and services rather than look for people we can help. It has us in pitch mode rather than serve mode and in this day and age where consumers are being clobbered over the head for the sale at every turn, this approach to networking is no longer as effective as it once was.

Instead, I talk about something called authentic outreach, which has us connect with people in a more authentic and genuine way, with an intention to serve rather than sell. If this sounds like an activity you’d prefer to do in place of spending countless hours on social media, read here for some practical examples of what this might look like and/or watch this class.

2. Make personal invitations

Often when we are in sales mode, trying to sell a new product or service or trying to fill a group program, we put all our attention on what I call one-to-many marketing such as posting on social media or emailing our mailing list. Whilst these are important things to do when you’re in launch mode, a commonly overlooked activity is making one-to-one personal invitations to people in your audience who could benefit.

Oftentimes the thought of this makes people feel like they would be being salesy or pushy, but a genuine note to a person you have a relationship with already can go a long way. Something like: Hey I don’t know if you’ve seen it already, but I have a new group program (about xxx) starting in a week and I think you would be a wonderful addition to the group. No pressure at all, I just wanted you to know that there is a spot here for you if you want it. Let me know if you want more info or would like to hop on a quick call to discuss.

When I’ve done this from a place of genuinely wanting that specific person involved rather than desperately trying to get sign ups at all costs, it has worked. People have been pleased and even flattered to receive the personal invitation and oftentimes it’s led to a sale that’s a win-win for everyone involved.

3. Offer complimentary sessions

Anyone who knows anything about my work, knows that this is my all-time favourite strategy for creating clients and one of my favourite activities to do in my business. Why? Because it’s the most effective way I have found to build a strong enough connection between myself and a person interested in my work to have them asking me how we can work together.

I’m not a fan of sales pitches or asking for the sale in a conversation. For me it’s awkward and cringy and also makes it very hard for the other person to say no. That’s why people often come to me complaining that they get a lot of people saying yes on their sales calls only to then find they’ve been ghosted or the person has changed their mind later on.

This post goes into the why and how of comp sessions in much more detail than I can share here, but let me just say that whenever I’ve found myself short of clients in my business, I’ve simply opened up my calendar to offer complimentary sessions and within a few weeks I’ve had more money coming in.

4. Ask for referrals

This isn’t exactly what it sounds like. I’m not a fan of writing to people in your network and asking them to send you leads.

Instead what I teach is an approach to generating referrals based on generosity. Rather than reach out to former clients and others in your network with an ask, I suggest sending a note to these people, offering them the opportunity to gift a complimentary session to someone else in their network.

Ideally, it will be someone who knows a little about your work (that’s why former clients or former comp session recipients are a good idea) and in the note you’ll say something about the type of person you’d like to gift sessions to. To read an example of one such message I sent several years ago head here.

5. Increase your visibility

I’ve worked with many business owners who are highly skilled at what they do, get high praise from the few clients they’ve had but who can’t seem to get enough clients to make the business viable. Why? Because people don’t know they exist, they’re not visible to enough people to generate enough sales. An obvious activity to get more eyes on your business is creating consistent content.

We’re not talking any old content. I’m talking about high value, expertise demonstrating, problem-solving content. Content that has your audience better understand how your work can help them to achieve the transformation they so deeply desire. I teach a 3-stage process on this in my Kinder Content Marketing training which is CREATE — REPURPOSE — PROMOTE. You can read more about it in a post I wrote here.

6. Streamline your business model

Rather than something you do to get more sales, this is something to remove, which may be preventing sales. Something I see a lot of is convoluted and confusing business models. This is where a business has a LOT of products and services, with not enough distinction between them so that people are left wondering which one of these should I even buy?? Or sometimes there are just a few offers but the amount of purchasing options for those offers are highly confusing.

I’m a firm believer that a confused mind says no and that less is more. So why not make it easier for people to buy by getting rid of any confusion in your offers and eliminating those products and services (or purchasing options) that nobody ever buys?

7. Launch a new product or service (or repurpose an existing one)

I include this one with caution. Mainly because I see a lot of business owners suffering under the illusion that in order to make more money, they must be constantly launching something new. Nothing could be further from the truth. I launch my mastermind only once a year and for the rest of the year I use my content and outreach to keep my 1:1 practice full.

However, for some businesses, launching a new product and service might be exactly what is required to get that income flowing in, but don’t go gung ho on this one, make sure to talk to your audience first — I highly recommend setting up hour long market research calls with people in your network, where you ask research questions for 30 minutes and then use the second 30 minutes to be of service by coaching, teaching or healing. These audience research calls are great on many levels as they hit numbers 1, 3, 5 and 8 on this list and are nearly always a good idea, whether you are launching something new or not.

You can also use audience research to get feedback on existing offers to make improvements and changes that may very well bring in more sales.

8. Regularly let your audience know what you have on offer

Most of the people I work with are not doing this nearly enough. Even I don’t do it nearly enough and that’s because it’s hard to be in “sales mode”. No one enjoys asking for the sale and so I like to offer my clients a reframe.

Instead of feeling like the sleazy car salesman, instead, I invite you to embody the courteous waiter. Think about the last time you went to a nice restaurant. How did you feel when at the end of the meal the waiter asked if you’d like to see the dessert menu? Did you feel annoyed and like he was intruding on your meal and trying to upsell you? No of course not, the chances are that you felt pleased you didn’t have to spend 5 minutes trying to catch his eye and welcomed the opportunity to look at the menu even if you don’t think you could possibly eat one more thing (maybe that’s just me!)

Instead of feeling salesy, consider getting into a habit of gently letting your audience know what’s on offer, if your audience is engaged and interested you can bet that simply reminding people what you have to support them will generate more sales. I see this with my Back to Basics offer which I rarely share about, but whenever I do someone new signs up!

9. Put your prices up

This is another I share with caution. Too many business coaches use big price hikes as a way to get their clients more money. I’m not one of them, premium prices is not something I necessarily advocate. To read more about my approach to pricing you can read an article I wrote on the topic here.

That said it’s not uncommon for me to work with business owners who are undercharging out of fear or who haven’t raised their prices in years despite great feedback from their existing clients. Incremental price rises are normal and expected and can give a nice boost to your bottom line and most of the time people won’t notice or mind.

10. Invest in advertising

Although this links closely to point number 5, I wanted to spell this one out because many people who follow my content strategy are for some reason comfortable with creating content and even repurposing it and then drop the strategy at the promote part — advertising. And I think I know why, many of the people I’ve worked with have dabbled with FB or Instagram ads with little to show for it and to learn how to execute an advertising strategy effectively can feel overwhelming, but I invite you to reconsider.

When we put countless hours into creating valuable content that barely anyone sees it can be soul-destroying not to mention a real waste of time. Spending a small amount of money to ensure your best content is seen by your existing audience as well as people who would likely be interested in your offerings can definitely be an effective income generator. The best strategy I know for FB advertising in particular, comes from George Kao. I also teach a pared down version of his strategy in my content marketing training.

And there you have it, 10 activities or actions you can take to generate more income for your business this year. I hope you’ve found this list useful, if you have be a love and let me know, it’s always great to hear from my audience that what I’m creating is helpful.

SIGN UP FOR MY SOULFUL STRATEGIES WEEKLY

 

Once a week, in the form of an e-letter, I share the best of what I know about building a business with integrity for conscious business owners.

The intention behind these letters is to be a voice for integrity within your (undoubtedly) cluttered inbox. To be the one email you can count on to contain strategic and soulful advice for building a business without selling your soul.

If you want to receive the Soulful Strategies Weekly, simply share with me your name and email address below and you’ll start recieving emails right away.

A Story About Generosity In Business

A Story About Generosity In Business

by | Feb 9, 2022 | Business Growth

“Shifting your focus from getting to giving is not only a nice way to live life and conduct business, but a very profitable way as well.”

~ Bob Burg

In this blog, I want to share with you a story about generosity in business. Generosity is one of the fundamental elements of my approach to business success and I want to share the experience of one of my clients to demonstrate how it can work.

When this client came to me, he hadn’t been doing anything to proactively grow his business in some time, so one of the first things we did was to create a content schedule. In fact not long after we started working together, I ran my first 30 Day Content Challenge and of all the people who took part he produced the highest number of posts, writing an incredible 29 long form posts in 30 days. He went on to consistently send weekly newsletters and published meaningful weekly content on Facebook. The response to his content was phenomenal. To give you a sense, one article he wrote was picked up by another Facebook page and was liked 1.2K times and shared a staggering 746 times.

Alongside his content creation, I also encouraged him to start practicing outreach by being of service, offering support freely and where appropriate gifting people complimentary coaching sessions. The response to this, however was somewhat muted. Despite him making several offers in the early days of us working together, people just weren’t biting. (To read more about why I advocate that coaches and other service providers offer complimentary sessions to grow their business – head here).

In a session we uncovered why this might be.

Shifting from a mindset of getting to giving or, as I also put it, being of service rather than selling, takes some practice. Even if we know in our hearts that generosity and service are the way we want do business (and life), we also have needs, we want (or need) to make money and we’re so used to trying to get something from people to make our business work, that even when we are offering a no strings, complimentary session, there is a part of us that doesn’t quite believe it ourselves.

We either can’t see the gift in what we’re offering (we don’t yet believe in our skills and abilities) or we still harbour on some level a hope that when we give it will ultimately translate into getting the sale.

This matters. The intention with which we give to our audience can be felt. So even when we say this is a gift, if there is a part of us that doesn’t feel fully aligned with that truth, people won’t take us up on it.

As well as this, because so many people these days are using “giving” as a rouse for selling, people are understandably suspicious of “free” things. They don’t necessarily trust a person who is seemingly giving something valuable away for free. They don’t believe that there are no strings attached because they’ve been burned so many times already. Think now about how many free trainings or PDFs you’ve signed up for only to find that what’s actually being provided is a thinly veiled sales pitch amongst a whole lot of fluff. What a royal waste of time!

Now the reason I’m sharing this story, is because my client saw a huge shift in this area. After several months of being of service to his people, showing up and connecting with an intention to support and offering meaningful content, free from sales pitches, things finally started to shift.

Sometime after adopting these strategies he hit the 100 subscribers mark for his relatively new newsletter and as a way to celebrate and give back, he offered his audience 10 complimentary sessions. Unlike previous offers, which were met with the sound of crickets, these sessions were snapped up over the course of a day. Not surprisingly, by the very people who had been enjoying his content. 

There are a few lessons I want to pull out here.

1. As the quote at the top of this email states: Shifting your focus from getting to giving is not only a nice way to live life and conduct business, but a very profitable way as well. 

2. People can be mistrustful of generosity initially. Trust has to be earned over time.

3. The best way I’ve seen to earn that trust is to consistently create and share valuable and meaningful content, combined with consistent efforts to connect with and to be of service to our audience. 

4. Adopting generosity as a fundamental element of your business approach isn’t as easy as it sounds. It takes time to settle fully into that intention, to both believe that what you are offering is of value to others and also to learn how to give, free from expectation. Believe it or not, giving takes practice.

5. Because people buy from people they know, like and trust, the deeper your relationships get, the more profitable you become. Offering complimentary sessions is the primary way I enrol new coaching clients, not because I sell on the back of them (I don’t) but because people find value in the gift and naturally want more.

With time, my client started to appreciate that what he was offering to people was not only welcomed but deeply valued by many. This allowed him to give with even greater purity of intention and the results spoke for themselves. It also feels important to note that all of this happened before he even got his website live!

It’s been wonderful for me to witness how a combined approach of consistent content creation and meaningful outreach can move a business forward immeasurably.

SIGN UP FOR MY SOULFUL STRATEGIES WEEKLY

 

Once a week, in the form of an e-letter, I share the best of what I know about building a business with integrity for conscious business owners.

The intention behind these letters is to be a voice for integrity within your (undoubtedly) cluttered inbox. To be the one email you can count on to contain strategic and soulful advice for building a business without selling your soul.

If you want to receive the Soulful Strategies Weekly, simply share with me your name and email address below and you’ll start recieving emails right away.

The Invisible (+ Sometimes Painful) Side of Business Growth

The Invisible (+ Sometimes Painful) Side of Business Growth

by | Dec 15, 2021 | Business Growth

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

~ Thomas Edison

I can’t begin to tell you how many conversations I’ve had with business owners who are feeling deflated, discouraged and like they want to give up on their business out of sheer frustration. Why? Because they’re not yet seeing the results that they are both wanting and needing to see.

These are difficult conversations for me to have for a few reasons. Not least because I now find myself on the other side of this particular business dilemma and I worry that people think I don’t truly understand what they are facing and because in many cases there is no easy fix to this situation. Not what people want to hear when they are suffering.

My hope is that what I share in this blog helps to make this aspect of the business journey, at least somewhat easier to navigate.

The entire business journey in a nutshell goes from starting a business to succeeding in business with a whole load of stuff in between. I wrote a whole post about the various stages of business growth which you can read here but for the purposes of this blog, the stages themselves are less important than the problem that we as business owners face on our way to the goal of a successful and sustainable business.

The problem I’m referring to lies in the inbetween. It lies in the period of time during which the business is not yet working OR doesn’t seem to be working. Because here’s the thing, sometimes things are working even when they don’t look like they are.

Here’s another thing. There is always a period in any business journey when it looks like it’s not working. There is always a period of time when it feels as though success is eluding you.

The key is what you make of this information. Rather than think that the lack of tangible results is because you’re a failure, what if you just knew that this was an expected and necessary part of the journey?

The tricky part is that sometimes we’re not getting results because we are missing a crucial step or important part of the strategy and sometimes it IS working but we can’t yet see the evidence of it. Given that we rarely know which of these it is, being in this situation can feel both excruciating and frustrating.

Here’s what I recommend, regardless of the reason behind your lack of results.

Get curious and have faith.

Not sure if the lack of results is because you’re not executing your strategy correctly? Get curious. Ask your audience, do research, read up on how to get better results at the thing you’re trying, tweak things, test things but don’t give up. If you are consistently showing up for your audience with valuable content and offers, keep doing so. If you’re not, start doing so asap.

If you feel like you are doing everything you should be doing and yet you’re still not getting the results you desire. Have faith. These things take time. It takes time for social media algorithms to recognise your consistency. It takes time for people to realise that you are not just another flash in the pan, it takes a certain amount of regular new content on your website for Google to start showing it to people.

Now I’m not telling you to deny your feelings, pretend like everything is okay even when you feel miserable and pessimistic, but whatever you do, don’t stop. Don’t give up. Don’t allow your feelings of despair to result in you saying f*ck it, I’m not going to bother anymore! Because that’s the worst thing you can do. That’s when I begin to despair. When I see talented business owners allowing their feelings of doubt and insecurity to derail their business growing efforts.

It’s my belief that how you respond to your feelings about this phase of the business journey is what will determine how long or how quickly you will see results.

If you drop the ball on your consistent marketing efforts everytime you lose hope that anyone is listening, it will take longer to get the success you crave. If you retreat from your outreach efforts, everytime you begin to wonder if anyone even cares what you are up to then it will take longer to see results.

Maybe you are sat reading this and thinking, yes I get it and I still need things to move faster.

Are there shortcuts? Sure. A business owner I know started an Instagram account for a new business endeavour and started using a bot to follow and like other relevant accounts, while he’s eating dinner and sleeping, the bot is generating new followers for him. In the space of just a few short weeks, his business Instagram account went from 0 to 1500+ followers and he’s already getting enquiries about his product before it’s even ready to be delivered. Often when we see this kind of growth online and compare it to our own journey, we assume there must be something wrong with us.

On the other hand, I have had my Instagram business account for well over 4 years and I’ve just surpass the 1000 mark. Could I double, triple, heck even quadruple my numbers over the next month if I wanted to? Sure! Could I do it in a way that is in alignment with my values? Not likely. Could I do it in a way that generates the kind of trust and loyalty I enjoy from the people in my current, small but highly engaged audience? I don’t think so. That’s why I don’t subscribe to those kind of strategies.

Slow, organic and relationship-focused growth has been a conscious and intentional choice on my part.

I don’t underestimate the privilege that allows me to make this choice and in the first few years of my business I worked several side jobs to pay my bills while I waited for things to start working in my business. I did VA and online business management work right alongside my coaching business until my business started making the kind of money I needed it to make.

I’ve also been at this game long enough to know what works and how long it typically takes to see results from my efforts. It’s longer than you think! I also wrote a post about how long it really takes to succeed in business which you can read here.

To illustrate my point on this I’d like to share a couple of examples.

Those who work with me will have already heard my anecdotes about Medium, how it took nearly a year of publishing weekly content on there before I started to hear from several new clients, that they had first found me on Medium or how it was around the one year mark of publishing a weekly blog post before the people who were applying to work 1:1 with me started to say that they had found me on Google.

Many people will have also heard me share that despite consistently publishing on LinkedIn for the same amount of time, I’ve had nothing. No real engagement whatsoever. Despite the fact that I have well over 500 connections and I have it on good authority that the content I create serves people, there has been zero interaction. N-O-T-H-I-N-G. zilch.

Until there was.

Then one day, rather than get no likes and less than a handful of views, 2 of my published articles got 7 likes each and several comments apiece. To be honest I’m surprised, I had all but given up on LinkedIn and then as if by magic suddenly it seems like people are seeing my posts and they’re reacting positively.

Have I considered quitting publishing on LinkedIn over the past year or so? Yes, many times but I haven’t, because I know that success takes time. I know that success takes showing up consistently even when it seems like no one is paying attention. I know that there is a tipping point when all my effort adds up and I will start to see results.

Here’s the definition of tipping point:

“the point at which a series of small changes or incidents becomes significant enough to cause a larger, more important change.”

That’s what happens in business. A series of small regular and consistent actions that seem insignificant at first but then become significant enough to create a larger, more important change.

Whilst every business journey is unique, one thing I do know is that we all start at zero. Zero clients. Zero followers. Zero subscribers. Even those who today have tens of thousands of followers, subscribers and dollars in monthly or annual income, started with zero.

I also know that somewhere along the way to success those business owners, wondered if what they were doing was working. Wondered when or if their efforts would pay off and then at some point, there was a tipping point.

Mine came around 3 years in. That’s 3 whole years when it wasn’t yet working as I needed it to be. Three whole years in which I stayed curious and had faith that one day it would.

So if that’s you — if you are in that period of not knowing — that post-starting, pre-results stage, know that you are not alone. I’ve been there and so has every successful business owner you’ve ever followed (and admired or envied) online.

You’ve got this.

SIGN UP FOR MY SOULFUL STRATEGIES WEEKLY

 

Once a week, in the form of an e-letter, I share the best of what I know about building a business with integrity for conscious business owners.

The intention behind these letters is to be a voice for integrity within your (undoubtedly) cluttered inbox. To be the one email you can count on to contain strategic and soulful advice for building a business without selling your soul.

If you want to receive the Soulful Strategies Weekly, simply share with me your name and email address below and you’ll start recieving emails right away.

How To Get Your Business Out Of The Feast And Famine Cycle

How To Get Your Business Out Of The Feast And Famine Cycle

by | May 19, 2021 | Business Growth, Business model, Sustainability

“Sales is an outcome, not a goal. It’s a function of doing numerous things right.” ~ Jill Konrath

In this post, I wanted to talk to you about something I haven’t seen talked about too much online, but that is actually very common, especially amongst the kind of service-based business owners I work with and that is the feast and famine phase many young businesses go through.

You might know what I mean. One month you get a new client (or even 2!) and you have more than enough money — what a high! Then a few months pass by and nothing. If you have some lower priced offers, maybe you scrape by with a few hundred dollars or pounds but other than that you’re firmly in famine status. Then at some point down the line, bam a new client and all is well again. The only problem is that the income for this new client is needed to cover what the last few months of famine cost you and so you’re right back to square one again.

Before you read on, I want you to know that I’ve been there, several times in my years as a coach and business owner, and it’s hard. On one level we’re grateful to be getting any clients at all and on another, we can’t seem to figure out how to get to the holy grail of consistent and sustainable income. We have some idea how to get clients, but we haven’t yet reached that stage where we know deep down inside that if we do more of X, we’ll get more of $$$.

Getting clients still feels a bit hit and miss and, when we do, it can feel more like luck than by design. Having started two different business, one in life coaching and one in business coaching, I’m here to tell you that it is definitely possible and I’m going to share with you 3 key ways to make it happen in your business.

1. Identify what works

Despite the fact that getting new clients can at times feel like a lottery, if you take some time to examine how the clients you have already created came to be, you’ll see a pattern emerge.

For example, nearly every single one of my clients came to me, either because of a referral (someone else told them I was great!) or because of some outreach I did to deepen a relationship with a member of my audience. The bottom line for me is that no 1:1 coaching client I have ever enrolled was created outside of a conversation. Which means I know deep in my bones that if I need to make more money, I need to be having more conversations.

The key is to find your X. The one thing that you know if you do more of, will inevitably result in more sales. I’ll give you a hint, it pretty much always involves cultivating deeper connections with your audience, but the method can vary. For some it might be podcasting, for others creating videos, for others it might be virtual coffee dates, for me it’s complimentary sessions — there are plenty of ways.

2. Clear your paths.

We’ve all heard the term sales funnel. Personally I hate it, the idea of leading my ideal client through an increasingly narrow funnel — resulting in the squeeze (yes the squeeze is an actual marketing term!) is alien to me. The analogy I prefer to use (hat tip: Tad Hargrave) is that of a path.

Imagine your business as a house that sits in a thick and overgrown forest. In order for people to find it, there has to be one or several clear pathways to your front door and once people get there, you need a doorbell that works so people aren’t left on the doorstep wondering why you’re not opening the door.

How do you create and clear these pathways? You look at the journey people need to make from finding out about you to knowing and trusting you well enough to buy from you and you need to make sure that the journey (or path) is free of obstacles.

To give you one example from my business, one path that works very well for me is my content. I create, publish, repurpose and promote content regularly, which then gets shared and found by more people, as a result readers begin to engage with my content, which sometimes means they subscribe to my newsletter (which results in them receiving a welcome email from me with an invitation to have a complimentary session) or I see someone regularly liking and commenting on my content so I reach out to make a deeper connection, usually by offering my support which also will more often than not also result in a complimentary coaching session.

So can you see how I’ve identified my X (complimentary coaching sessions) and I’ve created several paths (content and outreach) for people to access them?

For more on paths, read this post: How Easy is it For Your Ideal Clients to Find You

3. Refine your business model

The third piece of this puzzle is to look at and refine your business model. To illustrate this for you I’m going to give you a concrete example of a change I made to my own business model early last year that has resulted in a huge increase in consistent income.

The income stream in question was my 1:1 coaching packages. 1:1 coaching was (and still is) my main source of income and something I had been steadily creating more clients in (as a result of working on 1 and 2), what I realised during the earlier part of last year is that as a result of my fixed length packages, I would see a boost in income for the few months while my new client paid their instalments and then that revenue would drop off.

This wasn’t working for me on a few levels. Firstly, the time I needed to truly help my clients make a difference in their businesses was significantly longer than the length of my most popular package (3 months) and I was only guaranteed income as long as I was enrolling premium clients every single month. This I realised was not only time-consuming but led to a lot of pressure to be constantly in conversation with people (something, that as a busy and introverted business owner, wasn’t serving me).

After a great deal of thought I switched to a subscription model. This is where clients subscribe to a rolling coaching program that (after a 3 month minimum commitment) they can cancel anytime. The price point is much lower but the income I am now generating from this service is dramatically higher. People are also working for me for much longer – on average between 6-12 months. A simple tweak to my business model (as well as some other key changes) has resulted in more consistent, sustainable and recurring income for my business!


So there you have it, three key ways to move your business out of a feast and famine cycle in 2021.

SIGN UP FOR MY SOULFUL STRATEGIES WEEKLY

 

Once a week, in the form of an e-letter, I share the best of what I know about building a business with integrity for conscious business owners.

The intention behind these letters is to be a voice for integrity within your (undoubtedly) cluttered inbox. To be the one email you can count on to contain strategic and soulful advice for building a business without selling your soul.

If you want to receive the Soulful Strategies Weekly, simply share with me your name and email address below and you’ll start recieving emails right away.