Flexible Business Strategy helpS your Coaching, Healing, Helping or Conscious Business Thrive
Let’s be honest: most Coaches, Helpers and Healers aren’t wild about the business-y aspects of entrepreneurship.
Spending your energy on marketing, networking, and concocting promotional strategies makes you feel forced and false.
Self-promotion leaves you feeling smarmy and disconnected from the true purpose of your work:
Using your gifts to ease pain, to increase efficacy, to reduce suffering, or to encourage clients along their personal journeys …. these are the tasks that resonate with us.
If you’ve ever asked yourself:
“Can’t my ‘business strategy’ simply be to help as many people as possible?”
Then, I’m speaking directly to you, dear. (And yes, it absolutely can!)
But if you don’t reach the right people or your messages fail to capture their attention, you can’t help them. No matter how much you might want to.
Your business that exists to solve problems.
Those problems are specific, and a specific group of people grapple with them. They’re googling solutions to those problems late at night when they can’t sleep. They’re buying services and products right now to help them with those problems.
When you promote your classes, products, and offerings to the very people who need them most, you’re actually doing them a tremendous service.
You’re not a plaid-suited car salesman shouting through a megaphone!
You, my dear, are a passion-fueled entrepreneur with unique and valuable skills who thrives on making other people’s lives richer and fuller.
To continue enriching lives in a sustainable, long-term, effective way, you need to strategize. Doing good work and hoping the right clients will “find” you simply isn’t enough.
Luckily, I’m here to tell you that building a business strategy can feel creative and rewarding, even fun. No, really! Here’s how.
Make it personal
Sure, some business tactics work universally:
Never over-promise.
The customer is always right.
If you don’t have a web presence 90% of the world won’t believe that you actually exist
These are general business truths these days.
But that’s where the general one-size-fits-all business approach to planning ends.
It doesn't work in most cases, and it certainly won’t lead to exponential growth and phenomenal prosperity for your unique, one-of-a-kind, unicorn business.
Your business is unique, which means you need to build a perfect-for-you strategy to help it thrive. Discover your own brand of brilliance and use it to fuel your business growth.
Whatever you do, chances are someone else does it, too. And although that may worry you, it’s actually, a very, very good thing because it means there is demand for your classes or skills or products.
To ensure your offerings rise above and reach their intended audience, making your promotions truly personal and bringing your Ideal Clients to your doorstep, tap your Unique Magic.
Your Unique Magic is where your talents, strengths, and skills overlap.
It’s a core skill set that carries through your life like a connective thread, a combination of native strengths, signature skills, and the values and views that drive you. Focusing your business strategy on your Unique Magic attracts perfect-fit customers and clients who recognize, engage and connect with you. It will enable you to differentiate yourself in the market, leverage opportunities for more success, and ensure you are fulfilling your purpose-driven work in the world. Identifying and leveraging the ways in which your Unique Magic makes you truly unique is the path to more meaning and more profit in your business.
And just how do you funnel your Unique Magic into marketing messages, carefully honed offerings, and community engagement that converge into an effective strategy for your business?
Focus on your niche
As a holistic entrepreneur—a yogi, healer, helper, coach, or wellness guru—you have a specific set of talents, skills and experience to share. You likely have services, products and helpful content related to what you offer. But there are LOTS of other [insert what you do] out there in the world, and differentiating yourself in the sea of other [insert what they do], is how you attract more soon-to-be clients to your business (not theirs). Differentiating yourself and defining your target market both help you figure out your place within the industry. Whether you’re a coach, a multi-passionate creative, a massage therapist, or a yoga teacher, chances are there are hundreds (thousands!) of other practitioners out there doing what you do. How do you stand apart from the crowd and effortlessly attract perfect-for-you clients?
Discover, then refine, your niche.
Niching asks the question, “How can I package my purpose, passions, innate strengths, and world-changing ideas into a platform that my Ideal Clients will recognize, identify with, and seek out?”
Part of discovering your niche is uncovering your particular combination of purpose, passion and strengths. When you embrace all of the above—taking your life as your path and your story as a compass—you can easily identify the perfect niche.
Another crucial element of your niche is what people are willing pay you for in the current financial climate. You may be the world’s leading expert in restoring antique clarinets, but if no one is in the market for a clarinet restoration, you will go hungry.
Finally, your niche must address a need in the world and be a reflection of your purpose. Like the example above, if the world has no need for your particular skill set—and it doesn’t light you up inside!—you won’t be able to earn a living. Nor will you be excited about growing your business.
Be flexible
Creating a business strategy is a very mindful, forward-looking, concrete activity, and that can make it feel daunting and immovable. But effective business strategies are NEVER set in stone. Planning the future of your business and how to help it grow should be a flexible, organic process to channel growth. Having a strategy in place is essential for long term success, but that doesn’t mean you must map out every minute step, chart every possible outcome, and refuse to diverge from a rigid set of self-imposed rules. Your business priorities will change, your client’s priorities will change, YOU will change. And if you can’t bend in the breeze and accommodate those shifts, you’ll break.
Focus on creating a personalized strategy, make the most of your niche, and strive to connect with and help your Ideal Clients. But remember that being agile and flexible will only help you. Build a solid strategy, then allow yourself to reexamine and reevaluate it as time goes on.
People like us—heart-centered healers, helpers and creatives—have good work to do in this world. The work that we do is important and needs to be shared. We must do this work because we see the need, we see how we can help, and we step up. But we also need to earn a living…otherwise, we can’t continue to share and serve.
By building a flexible, personal, long-term strategy for your unique business, you ensure that more and more people can benefit from your precious and much-needed gifts.
And since I love to propose solutions, head over here to check out the Holistic Business Blueprint —a step-by-step guide to creating your very own flexible, personal, long-term strategy for your conscious business.
