fbpx
8 Ways To Grow Your Audience

8 Ways To Grow Your Audience

by | Jan 24, 2024 | Audience Growth

“So much easier to aim for the smallest possible audience, not the largest, to build long-term value among a trusted, delighted tribe, to create work that matters and stands the test of time.”
~ Seth Godin

The cold hard truth is that you can’t succeed in business if people don’t know you exist.

A group of people who not only know you exist but who are interested in you and your work is what I call your business audience.

These are the people who follow you on social, the people subscribed to your newsletter, the people in your network, who you have some sort of business-related connection with. Essentially they are the people who are listening to what you have to say and are on some level interested in what you are selling.

Without an audience to sell to. It’s hard to build a thriving and sustainable business. It’s hard to get clients, fill programs and workshops, grow your list and create passive income.

Now I’m not saying you can’t succeed in business without 10,000 followers on Instagram or at least 2000 subscribers on your email list. I’m doing pretty well myself without either of those! But you do need people to sell to or your marketing efforts and launches will feel like shouting into the abyss.

If you’re feeling like one of the best kept secrets in your industry, I highly recommend spending time working on some or all of the following. many of the links below take you to further reading, so if you are serious about taking action on these strategies, feel free to go a bit deeper by clicking the links.

1. Content Marketing

I know, I know, everyone and their dog has probably told you how important it is to create content for your business and unless content creation comes naturally to you, it can feel like a real drag. However, it’s undoubtedly one of the best ways i know to grow and nurture your audience.

Two things are important here.

Firstly, you need a content marketing system. It’s no good creating content without a clear strategy or some intention behind what you create. I teach a create — repurpose — promote model, which moves you away from spending hours on one blog post only to post it, get a handful of views, for it never to be seen again.

No wonder content creation feels hard when we put in all that effort for little return. It’s not enough to create your content and share it once, you must make the most of everything you create and do your best to make it as visible as possible.

Secondly, if you struggle with content, it might be because of how you are thinking about it.

When we create content with the sole purpose of getting the sale or enticing people to buy from us, it takes all of the creativity and joy out of it for us (as well as the recipient of our content!). Reframing how you think about marketing is a must here. Focusing on how our content can serve our audience, feels much better to create and is in my opinion much more effective at resulting in a sale.

2. Authentic Outreach

If you’ve spent any time in my world at all you’ve likely heard me talk about authentic outreach. The art of reaching out to individual members of your network with the dual purpose of connecting and serving.

It might seem odd to recommend a 1:1 strategy for audience growth, but once your network is activated, you’ll have other people sending people your way on the regular. Besides 1:1 outreach is what can lead to a plethora of other audience building activities like being invited onto podcasts or guest teaching.

I recently did an interview with Sarah Santacroce on this very topic so if you want to go deeper, you can watch that here.

3. Market Research

I’m a huge fan of doing market research and I typically recommend that my clients do this by running what I call a market research campaign. This is where we pull together an invitation that describes our ideal client and the problem that we help solve for them (our niche!) and then invite those very people into conversation with us.

In that conversation you then ask them important questions about their struggle and what they need from a service provider like you and in return, if you want to, you can offer the person some guidance or help. I like to offer 60 minute calls and spend 30 minutes on research and 30 minutes on serving.

The great thing about these is that you can share the invitation far and wide, in relevant groups on social media and with your network, asking that they share it with anyone who fits the bill. As you’re not selling anything, people are much more willing to share and participate and in doing so, many more people get to know what it is you do in the world and who you serve.

4. Paid promotions

This is the third prong of my content marketing strategy and is the best way I know to get my content and, therefore, my business in front of new people. The key here is to stop using ads to sell your products and services to a cold audience and instead pay to promote your free, valuable content first to your warm audience and then to a cool audience. Warm being those who already follow you on social and visit your website and cool being people you’ve identified as possible clients based on interests and demographics.

In my business, for example, every week I spent 5–10 euros paying to promote Facebook text posts (repurposed content from old newsletters just like this one!) to my warm audience first and then to people who I have identified as likely to have an online business. It’s not a ton of ad spend but it definitely ensures more people see my stuff.

Serving rather than selling with my ads is how I’ve grown an engaged and loyal audience.

5. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

There’s so much more to say about SEO than I could possibly share here but if you already have a substantial backlog of content/blog posts on your website, but you’re not getting the traffic you need to impact your bottom line, it may well be worth looking into SEO.

I got serious about SEO when I started to get clients from a blog post I wrote years ago. Turns out people were searching for alternatives to discovery calls and my blog post about gift sessions was ranking on the first page for “discovery calls alternative”. If I can accidentally get clients via Google from a blog post, imagine what can be done if you are actually intentional about SEO!

Inspired by my accidental success, this year I took part in a 4 month SEO intensive program and although I did learn a lot of the more technical stuff, the biggest aha I had was to really take into account the topics and questions my ideal clients might be searching for online and integrating those into my website copy and content. Writing my titles and content in such a way that it answers those search queries has been huge for me.

If you’ve yet to get serious about content, you can skip SEO for now and come back to it when you have content worth optimizing. And if you are keen to learn more, check out Love at First Search for lots of great articles and free resources on SEO.

6. Collaborations

This is one of my all time favourites, which makes me smile because just a few years ago, the word collaboration made me cringe. I’ve always been a “go it alone” type but in recent years, collaborating in my business has been fun, rewarding and financially fruitful.

Collaborations can come in many forms but one of my favourites has been guest teaching for other people’s audiences. I’ve taught classes for free to many of my colleague’s audiences and as a result have always got more subscribers, applications to work together and sales.

I’ve been around the block long enough to be invited into some places where large numbers of my ideal clients are hanging out (places like Tad Hargrave’s membership) but years ago, when nobody knew I existed, I was the one going out and creating those connections, interviewing people, inviting people to teach to my audience and generally doing what I could to support my colleagues.

All of these helped to grow my audience and visibility and now I’m often the recipient of the invitation rather than the other way around!

7. Gift session campaigns

Gift session campaigns are one of my favourite strategies for getting you and your business in direct contact with your ideal clients. Time and time again, my clients report back to me that they have signed up new clients as a result of a gift session campaign they’re running.

Similar to Market Research Campaigns, the idea is to create an invitation that speaks to a specific problem and your specific ideal client, which you then promote and share far and wide, then watch as people who fit your ideal client description start to sign up for gift sessions with you. There’s no selling here, but when done well, you can get subscribers, testimonials, referrals and of course new clients.

8. Generous freebies

Traditional online marketing advice will tell you that the best way to grow your audience is to offer a free opt-in to your newsletter. Typically this is a pithy, PDF with something along the lines of the “5 Top Tips to XXX”. I believe that people got tired of this sort of opt-in years ago. It’s also much more common these days for people to sign up for a newsletter just to get the freebie only to unsubscribe straight afterwards. That’s why I usually recommend that my clients do something else.

This is what I call the generous freebie. Freebies that are actually worth sticking around for, demonstrate expertise and build trust and deepen relationships. Gift sessions are an example of this, as our other mini services you can provide like website or copy reviews or free classes or workshops. Others might include a free 5–7 day challenge — one that offers real value.

An innovative freebie I love is Lauren Van Mullem’s Craft and Copy sessions, where you go and do crafts with Lauren (online), whilst getting the chance to ask her anything about your website copy.

So there you have it, 8 of my favourite audience growth strategies, all of which are designed not only to add numbers to your list but to build meaningful relationships with your ideal clients.

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.

My Word Of The Year (+ The Story Behind It)

My Word Of The Year (+ The Story Behind It)

by | Dec 21, 2022 | Mindset

“When we stop growing, we stop living and start existing.”
~ Warren Wiersbe

This blog is a bit different, in that I’m not here to share a business strategy with you, more the personal story behind the word I’ve chosen as my theme for next year. 

My personal growth journey started back in 2010. I was in the middle of a nasty and toxic break-up, my self-esteem was rock-bottom and in a moment where I realised I needed help, I booked an appointment with a therapist. And thus my healing journey began. Those first few years were huge, I became celibate and sober, I started a blog, I quit my career, I sold everything I owned and bought a one-way ticket to Thailand. From there, I travelled, did hours and hours and hours of yoga, tried out various healing modalities, attended meditation retreats, found myself, learned to love myself and as a result met the love of my life.

From there we travelled some more, I built a business as a coach, lived off the grid in a remote village in Mexico for a year and finally returned to Europe to start a family. From 2016, I navigated the adventures of pregnancy, motherhood, and moving house, all while launching and growing my second business.

It’s safe to say that my personal and professional growth journey, during the decade 2010–2020, was truly epic.

And then something else happened. In 2018 after experiencing some level of burn-out (characterised by sheer exhaustion and chronic bouts of illness), I hit the reset button. I became all about doing less and finding ease. So much so that my word of the year for the past two years has been ease. But it hasn’t been easy, at the end of 2019, I gave birth to my second son, just as my business was booming, and there I was navigating being a mother to two boys while single-handedly managing a thriving business. It’s been a slog. 

And somewhere along the line, I feel as though I stopped growing and simply started existing.

A few days ago, I was unpacking boxes of books in my office and came across a box FULL of personal journals and notebooks from years gone by. I was blown away by what those notebooks contained. In my words, there was so much awe and wonder at the limitless possibilities there are available to us at any moment.

As I read them I couldn’t decide if my younger self was naive or my current self, jaded. After sleeping on it, I came down on the side of the latter. I realise that with the busyness of being a parent and a business owner, I’ve lost my connection to my own sense of personal (and even professional) growth. 

Given the huge leaps I made in that decade of growth, it’s almost as if somewhere inside of me, I had started to believe that I had reached my limit. Having hit so many of personal and professional goals, it’s like I had unconsciously told myself, well that’s it, job done, now you just have to maintain it. 

I know that part of this plateau has been complacency, especially in my business. After years of struggling in the feast and famine stage and then finally having my business take off, there has undoubtedly been a trend of sticking with what I know works, to stop experimenting so much and thus take my eyes off learning new strategies. 

On a personal level, another part of this has been hitting middle age. As a 45 year old woman, who has had two children late in life, there has been, for me, a gnawing sense that my best years are behind me. That my levels of fitness, capacity for adventure and ability to stretch myself have already hit their peak. 

When I caught this limiting belief recently, it was like a siren sounding. Since then it’s felt like a spark has been ignited once again. I’ve come to realise that over the past couple of years I have stopped growing, stopped learning, stopped having breakthroughs and insights, stopped having my mind blown by new ideas. I realise now that there’s been an unconscious script playing in the background that’s been telling me I’ve done all the growing I’m going to do.

What a load of BS! 

And that is why my word of the year for 2023 is growth.

G-R-O-W-T-H

It’s time for me to break out of the personal and professional plateau I’ve been on for some time now and re-engage my beginner’s mind. To allow myself to believe that new heights are possible in all areas of my life. I feel tentative and excited in equal measure. I want 2023 to be a year that I learn new things and grow in new ways. I want to ditch the feeling that I’ve peaked already, that the only way left is to stay the same (or slowly decline). I truly believe that there are new heights to be experienced, if I’m only willing to believe in the possibilities. 

And that’s why I am sharing this with you here. For my sake — to speak out loud the story I’ve been telling myself and to put in black and white my intention for the year ahead. 

And for you — in case you too are harbouring limiting beliefs about what’s possible for you in 2023. I’m excited for you to consider what could unfold for you, if you were willing to believe in the possibilities?

Have you set your word of the year for 2023? If so, I’d love to know what it is. 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.

5 Goal-Setting Mistakes To Avoid

5 Goal-Setting Mistakes To Avoid

by | Nov 30, 2022 | Business Growth, Planning

“A goal without a plan is just a wish.”
~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I want to share with you 5 common mistakes we often make when it comes to setting goals for our business (or our life!). I share these in the hope that they’ll help you as you think about your own business + life goals for next year. 

1. An absence of strategy

If you operate anything like I used to, around this time of year you may well be starting to think about all the things you’d like to achieve in your life and business next year. Before I came up with my own approach, I did this too.

Over the years, I tried all the business planning tools I could get my hands on (paid and free). Planners, goal-setting workshops, you name it I tried it. What I noticed, was that all of the guidance I was finding on business planning only ever seemed to talk about goals.

As someone who ran the business planning process for a former employer back in my project management career, I’ve been well aware for some time that goals (or targets) are just the way in which we state what we hope to get done in a period of time, but how we decide what needs to get done or how those things are actually going to get done is a whole other piece of work.

This is where we need to consider our big picture. The overall objective of our business for the year. This will differ greatly depending on your particular business and where you are at on the business growth journey. For some it might include streamlining your business model, whereas for another business it might be to expand your product range. I’ve had clients whose overall objective was to double their income whereas for others it was to maintain the income level they currently have. Once we know what we are trying to achieve, we can then set our priorities strategically and only then look at setting goals in service to those priorities.

2. Setting waaay too many goals 

Nearly every conversation I ever have with a business owner about their goals for the coming year, results in me telling them they are trying to take on too much. I don’t think I’ve ever had to tell someone that they should set more goals. 

Any of my clients will tell you that I often quote Bill Gates on this one: 

“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”

Having been working for myself now for over a decade and having been the person setting the agenda for my own workload, I speak with experience when I say that we can usually achieve far less than we set out to at the beginning of the year. Why? Well overestimating what’s possible is one reason and also because we suffer from a fear of missing out. Many business owners suffer from shiny object syndrome and look at what other business owners are doing and feel pulled to try something similar. 

For this reason, it’s hard for most people to choose just 1 or 2 key priorities to work on because there’s so much they want to do. But when we fail to focus and set ourselves too many goals, we inevitably fail in more areas than we would if, instead, we focused our efforts.

Personally, I’d much rather focus on 1 or 2 things. That way I can get those accomplished more quickly and create more space for the next thing, rather than overwhelm myself with a huge set of goals, many of which I’ll do some work on, but few, if any, I’ll be able to complete. 

3. Setting unrealistic goals 

I fell foul to this so many times in my early years in business. Undoubtedly swayed by all the noise in the online business world, I bought into the idea that I could make 6 figures in a short amount of time or go viral overnight with a winning piece of content. 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m always the first to say that anything is possible and there are always exceptions, but in my experience, making big numbers fast, whether that be in income, sign ups or audience growth, rarely happens in a way that is authentic, ethical or sustainable over the long-term.

Setting goals we are unlikely to achieve can also cause damage to our mindset and motivation. Many of us know, only too well, the disappointment that comes from failing to achieve our goals time and time again.

I used to wish for exponential results but these days my goals are rooted in sustainable and steady growth, “Slow and steady wins the race” is one of my favourite business mantras! 

I also base my future goals on past experience. I’ve taken the time to track my annual income over the years and can tell you exactly what my percentage increase in revenue has been year on year since 2017, what my average percentage growth has been over the last 6 years and therefore, what percentage my income and sales are likely to increase over the next year. Arming myself with this knowledge, gives me confidence in the financial business goals I set myself. 

4. Not sharing your goals with anyone 

You might have done this — set goals but not told anyone what they are, so that should you fail you don’t lose face. Whilst you might never have to deal with the shame of having to admit you failed, you also miss out on the power of accountability. Knowing that people know what we are planning to do, can actually be a strong motivator when it comes to following through on our goals.

I’ve definitely used this to my advantage over the years. I remember back when I started my first blog, I set myself some huge and scary life goals, one of which was to quit, not just my job, but my entire career to travel the world and create a new more fulfilling and rewarding career as a coach. I genuinely don’t think I would have achieved half the goals I did during that period of my life, if I hadn’t been talking about them every week on my blog. 

I’m not saying you have to share your goals all over the internet but sharing them with your partner, friend, business buddy or even your business audience can really help some people to dig deep when it inevitably gets hard to take action. 

5. Not creating systems for your goals

This one has been huge for me. When I first learnt of this idea from George Kao, it blew my mind. George has this to say:

“The more you focus on the specifics of the goal, the more you become attached to how it must turn out.

If the end result doesn’t happen in the way you visualized — or in the timeline you expected — it can deal a blow to your self-identity, and erode your sense of self-empowerment.

I prefer to look at goals in a different, perhaps healthier way:

I focus on my systems — my daily processes — rather than my goals. “​

So what does a focus on systems actually look like?

Well, let’s consider the goal of getting 100 new subscribers to your list. Most business plans would leave it there but creating a system for this goal might look like this:

Every other week on Friday afternoons, I will preview my Monday newsletter, by posting on my Facebook page what next week’s newsletter is all about along with a subscribe link for people who want to be sure to receive it. 

Even better, you would then schedule this activity into your calendar and focus on following through with the system rather than the 100 new subscribers goal. 

So there you have it, 5 goal-setting mistakes to avoid and what to do instead for a better chance of success with your plans next year. I’m curious, were these helpful? If so, please hit reply and let me know what your biggest insight was.

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 One Thing I Can’t Teach You About Business

The One Thing I Can’t Teach You About Business

by | Nov 3, 2022 | Business foundations

“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 want to talk about the one thing I can’t teach you in relation to growing a sustainable business.

Let me start by sharing what I can teach you.

I can teach you what to do in your business to bring about more growth. A huge part of how you apply this is, however, out of my control.

The part I can’t teach you about achieving business success is how to feel in your business.

Let me break down what I mean by how to feel in your business.

I’m talking about a few things, the energy you bring to your work, your attitude, the intentions you set (consciously or not), the mindset you have and so much more. It’s the intangible part of running a business and as many of you (as coaches and healers) will know, it’s what makes the difference between getting the results we desire and not getting them.

This is precisely why I never promise results in my marketing and why you shouldn’t trust anyone who does.

It’s why I could work with two clients and teach them the exact same strategies and whilst client A will succeed, client B won’t gain any traction.

How a person feels and shows up in their business has a HUGE bearing on how well they will do in business.

Now whilst this isn’t something I teach primarily, I do cover this in my work with clients. Not as extensively as a Mindset Coach or healer might, but it’s impossible not to come up against this when trying to apply business strategy.

Allow me to share some of what I’ve learned in this area over the past 10 years of working for myself and coaching hundreds of clients.

Your energy is everything.

One of the biggest issues I see when it comes to business is the energy the business owner brings to the work. In the early days of business when money and clients aren’t yet flowing, it can be easy to fall into a “grasping” energy. This is when you might feel so desperate to get the next client that as you put out your content and marketing and connect with potential clients, you unwittingly give off a desperate and grasping energy.

This is where I lose people sometimes because it’s a bit woo. But stay with me.

In my world energy is everything. It’s not something we can see or touch but it’s why you can get a bad or a good feeling about someone you’ve just met.

It’s how I chose the construction company for our house reno. Despite not having the biggest team or the most experience, the head builder we went with has good energy and I felt it the moment I met him. Within minutes of speaking with him (even in a second language!) I instantly knew that he would care for our home just as he would his own. It wasn’t anything he said, I could just feel it. And I was right, he’s been hands down the best part of this whole process. This is what I mean when I talk about energy.

Sometimes if we’re not careful and we’re not feeling especially confident about our work we can put out an energy that feels off. That’s why when we show up to our work desperate to get the next client, we may be subconsciously sabotaging our strategic efforts.

Something my first business coach taught me when doing gift sessions, was that whilst I might need a new client, I didn’t necessarily need this particular person to become that next client, allowing me to release all neediness and simply focus on being of service.

You may have experienced this, perhaps you’ve done a discovery call or gift session with someone and they expressed some interest in potentially working with you, but then they go quiet, as a result, you obsess over them, checking your email constantly to see if they’ve been in touch, counting the hours or days until you can message them again just to “check in” or follow up.

Even if you don’t actually tell the other person that you desperately want them to become your next client, your energy may well be sending that message. Nobody wants to hire a needy practitioner, so this is a really important one to watch out for.

Your attitude matters.

What’s your attitude like around business? Do you have a good attitude about the work or a bad one? I’m aware that terms like ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are crude, but bear with me.

If you constantly sit down to your work with an internal narrative that says: this will never work, this is hopeless or when creating content to market yourself, continuously hear a voice muttering what’s the point, no one is ever going to read this, then it follows that you’re going to have problems.

A negative attitude permeates everything (not least your energy!). When we feel and think negatively about our business, our subconscious looks for evidence to prove our point of view.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not one to tell you to suck it up and think positively and all will be well, but I have found that the more I focus on the positive, the more I feel grateful for the small wins, the better I feel and the clearer my energy is for my work.

This undoubtedly helps me to make better connections with potential clients, spot more opportunities for collaborations and just makes me a nicer person to be around.

The mindset piece.

Closely linked to attitude but not quite the same. Mindset for me falls into one of two camps. We usually operate from a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. I’ve written a whole piece about this before which you can read here.

To illustrate the point, I’ll use the words of Carol Dweck, Author of the book Mindset:

“When we have a “growth mindset,” we believe that our intelligence, creative abilities, and character are things that we can improve in meaningful ways. We can always learn and get better at what we do.”

By contrast, a fixed mindset describes people “who believe their intelligence, talents and personalities are fixed traits that cannot grow. They believe we are born with a certain level of ability (or special skills) and we are unable to improve our level abilities over time.” (From the Big Life Journal)

If you have a fixed mindset when it comes to your business skills, you will inevitably miss out on the many opportunities there are to improve your skills.

I hear people talking from a fixed mindset all the time. Often using sentences that start with the words “I’m just not someone who can…” and ending with things like: create content on demand, stick to a schedule, use spreadsheets, get to grips with technology, write web copy and so on and so on.

If you can shift from a fixed to a growth mindset, I have no doubt that it will benefit your business immensely.

Check your intention.

Something I see often is people getting tripped up by the intentions they hold as they put their work out into the world. In my work, I talk a lot about holding an intention to serve because I believe that when people feel truly served, they are more likely to buy from you. I also love this intention because for myself, and the types of business owners I work with, being of service is the main reason we’re doing this!

However, due to the need to make money sometimes this intention can get muddied. When we sit down to write a piece of content, rather than hold the intention that what we create truly helps our audience to overcome their struggles, we write from a place of hoping it makes them want to work with us or that it gets enough ‘likes’.

Or when we offer a gift session to someone, rather than holding the intention to serve and come from a place of generosity, we fall into the trap of focusing on the outcome of making the sale.

Of course, this is all perfectly natural and you’ll find no judgement here.

Holding an intention to serve has been a practice for me since day one. In the early days of my business when I was just starting out as a coach and it was easy to get caught up in wanting to impress the other person or come across as a good coach, I used to meditate before sessions so that I could get my ego out of the way just long enough to make my intention about the other person and not about me! My best sessions were always when I forgot about my “performance”.

How to improve how we feel in our business.

Having shared a few of the places that how we feel can derail our strategic efforts, I feel a bit bad about not giving you my best advice on how to work on this side of things, but here’s the issue.

There is no one way to improve how we feel about our business.

Personally, my journey with this has been long and complex. Over the years I’ve seen a myriad of therapists, coaches and healers.

Lately with all the external “stuff” going on in my world, feeling good both inside and outside of my business has been hard.

When this happens to me, I don’t hesitate to call in support. I book sessions with my most trusted healers, Laura Perkins and Megan Caper, I use my EFT sessions with Liesel Teversham to work on what’s coming up for me.

I lean on my favourite mindfulness practices like morning pages and taking walks in nature and most recently I jumped at the opportunity to get a customised flower essence made for me by the wonderfulTracy O’Meara Smith | Holistic Therapist.

I’m aware that not everyone might have the resources to hire help but that needn’t stop you. Some of the resources I mentioned above have come about from exchanges, i.e. swapping my business coaching skills in exchange for someone else’s skills.

In short, I do what I can to get back to a place of feeling centred and grounded and good in my mind, body and spirit. The effect this has on my bottom line is undeniable.

Your journey might look totally different, as it should do.

The point I’m trying to make here is that you can’t build a sustainable business without spending some time on the emotional and spiritual side of doing so.

I hope what I’ve shared here is useful to you, let me know what comes up for you in the comments.

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.

Is It Time to Consider the Big Picture of Your Life + Business?

Is It Time to Consider the Big Picture of Your Life + Business?

by | Sep 21, 2022 | Big picture

We are well into September and it’s precisely this time of year, as we near the end of quarter 3 and the start of 4, that I like to check in with my life and business to see if I’m on track to have the year I set out to have and more importantly to make sure that I am living the life, I want to live.

There are a few reasons I like to do this now. Firstly, the back-to-school vibe that’s in the air gives me renewed energy and excitement for the season ahead and also let’s be honest, trying to do our reviewing and planning in December (along with the holidays and all the stress that can bring) is sort of bonkers.

Instead, starting in September, I like to take my time and spend an hour here and there, looking at the big picture of my life and business with plenty of time before the holiday season hits. That way, when the year ends, writing up my goals and business plan for the year ahead is a pretty quick and simple task.

As I do this work, I thought it might be helpful to share with you what I’ve been up to.

Reviewing my offerings 

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been reviewing my business model and contemplating what, if any, new products and services I might want to birth in 2023. I also look at which products or services I may want to retire. 

I’ve already closed down my Back to Basics monthly subscription, to make space for new things I want to do next year. It’s always hard to let go of offerings you have created, especially when they’re bringing in money and have paying customers, but I learned many years ago that if I want to call in my true heart’s desires, I have to be willing to make space by letting go of that which no longer serves me. 

What has informed my thinking here is looking at my business model to figure out what makes most sense from a sustainability point of view. That means looking at my offerings from the point of view of how much time and effort they take versus the income they bring. If the former greatly exceeds the latter or I know that for the same amount of time, I could bring in more, I know that it’s time to make a change.

Tracking my finances

I track and review my finances on a monthly basis because I believe that, like anything, our finances thrive when we give them our loving attention and whither when we bury our head in the sand and pretend like they don’t exist.

Around this time of year, I can safely estimate what my end of year income and expenses will be. This helps me to set future financial goals that are rooted in reality rather than setting pie in the sky targets that I inevitably never reach.

Armed with this knowledge, I can do the maths to figure out what I want to make next year and how many of each of my products and services I would need to sell to make that happen.

Loosely thinking about my vision and goals for 2023 

I’ve also been giving myself permission to tap into my goals and dreams for 2023. Not just business but generally. Asking myself questions like: where do I see myself and my family next year? What are my priorities? What didn’t work this year that I would like to change? 

As I start to gently consider how I want my business to run next year, I can’t help but consider the life I want to live. That includes things like the number of hours I want to work each day and the number of days I want to work each week. How many holidays do I want to have a year and how much time do I need for my personal hobbies and fitness activities?

Given that I’ve been doing this kind of reflection for years, my business model is pretty well set up for having a healthy work life balance. However, it is very reliant on my 1:1 coaching practice, something that I’m giving more and more thought to is how to reduce my reliance on my 1:1 income and start bringing in more solid revenue from group offerings and digital products, thus allowing me to make more per hour of my time.  

Resistant to planning? 

I love doing this kind of thinking and nothing gets me more excited than a fresh page in a notebook and the intention to make new plans. I do know, however, that not everyone shares my same passion for planning.

With this in mind, if you are someone who typically avoids planning, I would encourage you at the very least to spend some time tapping into what isn’t working for you right now and what needs to change as well as what has worked well over the course of the year and how you can best make the most of that going forward.

Above all I would suggest that you give yourself permission to dream. I truly believe that we are all powerful creators and that when we put our minds to whatever it is that we want to create, magic happens.

Over the next few months I’ll be running several workshops on Creating a Sustainable Business model plus a 2-part Business Review and Planning Workshop. To receive dates and registration details, be sure to subscribe to my Soulful Strategies Weekly here.   

 

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.