Start Your Business: Blossom with Confidence
If you are an Emerging Change Catalyst, it’s likely you’ve only worked with a few clients.
You might have worked with practice clients through your course work, but you aren't yet comfortable asking people to become paying clients.
You may have worked with a handful of low-fee or full-pay clients, but you don't have a sequence you can replicate to bring on more.
You have been focusing on completing your training and getting certified, but now it's time to get a handle on the business side of your new profession.
You had some clients in the past, but now you are restarting your business after a pause.
If you want to understand what you need to have in place to be ready to work confidently with your first / next wave of paying clients, this program will be a good fit for you.
A Brief Preview of This Program
During this program you’ll create (or refine) your first offer, determine your most aligned pricing for this offer, prepare to talk with possible clients, and enroll new paying clients.
In addition to designing what will work best for you, you’ll receive guidance and mentoring as you practice new skills, receive feedback from your experiences, and tweak your client systems to make them stronger.
Your Path Thus Far
At this point you know you want to start your business or practice. You want to share your expertise to help your clients in some way.
You aren’t completely confident that you are ready to start, nor are you sure which steps to take to get your business off the ground.
In recent months, you may have experienced one or more of these modes:
Am-I-Really-Ready Mode: You keep questioning whether it’s time to start your business. You may think you need more training, so you register for more classes. You may think life is too busy, so you wait for the right time to get started. There might be a bit of fear swirled into the mix as well.
Do-It-Yourself Mode: You try to find your way on you own. Maybe you watch videos or listen to podcasts to find strategies you can use to increase your clients. You may find yourself going in circles trying to follow too many strategies at once without seeing much progress. Although this route requires no financial investment, without having the necessary knowledge to evaluate the viability of your plans, it’s difficult to set your priorities and find your way forward.
Creating-Your-Work Mode: You feel drawn to weave your experience and expertise into a robust program or experience for your clients. You are excited! You love to dive deep and pull your body of work together. You are making progress, but it’s taking longer than you ever imagined. You feel like you should wait until your new work is framed out more clearly before you think about taking on clients. What you may not realize is that you can’t create your body of work in the vacuum of your own mind. You need to be working with clients in order to refine and strengthen your work in ways that will best suit your clients.
Mainstream-Training Mode: You register for workshops on building your business. On the basis of what you learn, you are scrambling to put together all the pieces you need to be successful. Your checklist seems endless: build a fabulous website with professional branding photos, create a full complement of social media profiles, develop your free taste eBook or experience to build your list, and launch a compelling podcast and blog to spread the word about your work. What you don’t know is that marketing workshops and coaching programs are typically designed to help Seasoned business owners expand their existing business. As an Emerging business owner, you will struggle with this journey because you and your business are not ready for this level of marketing…yet.
Reconnecting-with-Your-Business Mode: You attempted to start your business a while ago, but you didn’t have much luck. You managed to get a few clients, but you aren’t sure how and you didn’t really know how to build in any consistent systems to help you. Eventually you got discouraged or life stepped in with a detour you had to attend to. Now you are ready to reconnect with your business and get over this hump you’ve been stuck on for a while.
Thankfully, I can assure that you don’t have to have a perfect vision, a short, sexy, soundbite marketing message, or a fancy website to bring on your first clients.
Certainly there are pieces of your client process that you must have in place before you bring on clients, but..
You don’t have to delay starting a small business that matches your current capacity.
You don’t have to spend a long time feeling lost and alone as you figure out the right path on your own.
You don’t need to wait until your work is fully established before you start working with clients.
You don’t need to spend vast amounts of time or money to get set up to start your business.
You don’t have to conquer your fears to become a social media maven, speaker, or podcaster to promote your work online.
The Benefits of Starting Now
There are a number of distinct benefits to creating a system to bring on paying clients even though you are still in the process of sorting out the details of your business.
1. Turn down the volume on fears associated with starting your business. With a little knowledge and perspective, you’ll see the series of small steps you can take at your own pace to start your business. As your fear dissolved, your focus and results will become stronger.
2. Focus specifically on the key elements you need to have in place to bring on paying clients. Know which advanced strategies you can implement as your business matures.
3. Practice new skill to build up confidence in yourself and your work. When you have a safe place to review what worked and what didn’t, you can integrate feedback and iterate details more quickly than when trying to get through this process alone.
4. Working with clients now feeds YOU and your work!
You get immediate feedback that your work works!
You get feedback that helps you inform, refine, and strengthen your work. This piece is essential if you are trying to create your own body of work!
You confirm you are on the right track or you discover you need to redirect your business to serve your clients.
You get more insights about your ultimate business (you might even see things that aren’t on your radar yet).
You learn more about your clients – who they are, what they need, how they live — which means you have a firsthand understanding of how you can best support them.
5. Generating income now! No matter what your path looks like going forward, it’s a powerful gift to know how to bring on clients when you want to make more income or have extra time in your life to help your clients.
The sooner you work with paying clients,
the sooner you get real, on-the-ground information
that informs and enhances your business
in the short run and long run!
Assess Your Readiness
For the best return on your efforts and investment, I recommend the following prerequisites.
You must feel comfortable with your Idea with Potential. Excited, curious, and ready to move forward with your idea.
If you feel like you are on the fence or unable to commit to a particular idea, reach out to me. I can share another program that helps you synthesize your favorite skills and interests into a viable Idea with Potential.You must have relevant training or experience to do the work you envision. It’s okay if you are a bit nervous about working with your first clients. That’s normal!
You must have a general sense of the kind of business you want to create. Additional details and clarity will come through your interactions with clients.
Don’t worry about figuring out your own readiness. That’s hard to do for everyone! We’ll do that together in our conversation before you register. See details at the bottom of this page.
Start Your Business: Blossom with Confidence
This mentoring program is designed to provide you with personalized and community support as you step forward to bring on your first / next paying clients.
This program is inspired by what I’ve learned from the Emerging Change Catalysts I’ve worked with over many years. It’s rooted in the Organic Way of developing and growing your business.
Picture This
Imagine being in a small group of Change Catalysts who are working toward the same goal of starting their business.
Imagine receiving personalized support based on your business, your style, and where you are in your journey.
Imagine gaining insights and then implementing each step with guidance and mentoring from Carol.
Imagine receiving support and insights from other pod members.
What’s Included
Relevant Information. Understand what’s actually required to bring on your first/next paying clients. You’ll discover you need fewer elements in place than you may have been told in the past. I’ll share this information through a combination of interactive Zoom calls and relevant content posted on our online platform.
Personal Reflection. Ponder and explore prompts, activities, and assignments to develop the offer, pricing, description, and sequence for talking with potential clients that will work best for you and your clients.
Personalized Mentoring during the Zoom Sessions. This is not a one-size-fits-all program! You will create a system that feels naturally engaging for you and your client. You’ll take your personal style, your work style, and your clients’ needs into account as you create your plan. Together we’ll brainstorm, create, design, and discover the ways that work for you!
Community Support. Be inspired and lifted up by interactions with your pod. Learn from each other, brainstorm new ideas, discover ideas you haven’t seen before, notice what works and doesn’t work for others, and choose which ideas you want to incorporate into your business. Receive moral support and celebrate with people who understand you and your journey. Be assured, you are not alone!
Knowing, without a shadow of a doubt, that you have a tested way to bring on paying clients will be such a relief. As that layer of angst dissolves, you’ll step forward confidently with more energy to devote to your work with clients.
Details at the Heart of the Journey
Each step of this journey supports and strengthens the results you get in the next step.
Month 1:
Develop a starting point offer that is easy to implement now or very soon. Think of this as your low hanging fruit offer. This isn’t your last or only offer. Your offer will naturally evolve as you know more from your work with clients.
Explore several pricing ideas to discover what feels most aligned for you based on your offer, your personal style, and your financial goals.
Sort out your initial pricing for your starting point offer. You can change it any time, and you will! Start with what’s easy for you to stand with — without hedging, feeling uncomfortable, or fumbling your words.
Think through who to invite to try out your new offer. Learn several ways you can reach out to people you know and trust.
Month 2
Practice delivering your service to one or two clients at a super-easy-to-say-yes-to price.
Decide how to describe what you do and your offer in straightforward terms in conversation. (No need for fancy sound bites and slick marketing language at this point.)
Practice describing your work for people you feel safe with
Create a process for how to bring on your first/next paying clients
Month 3
Practice your process with people you trust
Refine your process and expand your conversations with other people
Bring on your next paying clients!
Mix of Activities
Two Zoom Gatherings each month with the small group of participants. Each session will be a mix of information to move you forward and mentoring support.
Prompts and relevant content-rich posts for each month posted on online platform
Weekly Check-in Updates on online platform to share your intentions and celebrations. This is how I stay in touch with you between our Zoom Sessions. By reading what you are doing and how you are feeling about what you are doing, I can respond with support, questions, and possibly additional insights you can work with between our Zoom sessions.
Membership in Organic Wisdom Community is included while you are in this program. In this larger group, you’ll explore and gain additional insights about the perspectives, strategies, and flows of the Organic Way. (Coming Soon. Value = $40/month)
Two Payment Options
$200 per month for three months.
OR $600 in one payment.
Here’s How to Join Us
Before you join the Start Your Business program, we’ll schedule a conversation to verify that you are in the right place in your journey to make the most of this program. In our conversation I’ll ask you a few questions, and then we’ll collaborate to discern where you are in your business journey.
I look forward to our conversation.
Click here to Make
your appointment.
If you aren’t quite ready for this program or your goals are beyond the scope of this program, I’ll point you in the right direction.