Here's the No Hype Truth this morning ~~ most private practices in the healing arts flounder NOT because the counselor, ND, or coach doesn't take insurance, is fresh out of school, poorly trained, or delivers bad service.
Most solopreneurs fail to put the same level of daily commitment into building their business that they put into getting their education. The harsh fact is that you cannot develop a thriving, self-sustaining, self-employed business if you don't ruthlessly focus 50 - 70% of your time in the beginning on marketing.
Any successful business coach will tell you that spending 4 hours A DAY on marketing is absolutely necessary in the first year if you want to be breaking even or doing better than that. Sounds like a lot? Don't worry, there's plenty to do to keep busy -- it may not even be enough!
And, you want those 4 hours to be spent on the most client-attracting tasks possible. Those include:
- creating a sticky, value-providing website, and continually updating it
- blogging, Tweeting, and other traffic-driving activities
- listing yourself in online locator services and/or doing Google Adwords
- monitoring your web-presence and search engine rankings
- writing articles for local, hard copy publications
- outreach to referral sources with personal visits, and follow up materials that give valued info
- networking interactions where your ideal clients are
- scheduling, preparing, giving signature talks and / or workshops
- developing and tracking email marketing campaigns
- writing auto-responder series and special reports
- evaluating your efforts, eliminating what doesn't work, maximizing what does
There's more that can be done, but these are the can't-do-without basics.
The trick to making all this easy is to be methodical in getting your foundational pieces in place first, because they will then work for you on auto-pilot while your attention is on more advanced marketing tasks. In the beginning, or when struggling, if you want your business to survive and thrive, it's crucial to spend the needed 4 hours a day and be laser focused with self-discipline, commitment to success, and accountability to the health of your business.
I can't emphasize this enough -- being methodical means to have a marketing map and work on one or two things at a time until they are running smoothly, then move on to the next.
The scattered, unfocused, headless chicken approach is a successful, guaranteed method for business failure.
Yesterday I was talking with a coaching colleague when one of us used the phrasing of being in business by yourself. That stopped me, and I couldn't quit thinking about how big a difference a simple little word makes to one's empowerment for success when self-employed.
Being in business BY yourself -- it seems to me -- is how many solopreneurs in the healing arts approach tackling all the systems and support structures necessary to getting and serving clients. We see it as a lonely, isolated, almost defeated position to be in. For those of us who are more naturally extroverted social creatures, the circumstance of doing anything by ourselves is distressing and grinds down our enthusiasm for being accountable for the tasks that promote success.
No wonder we then have trouble making our practices thrive.
Being in business FOR yourself -- in my perspective -- is a more empowered mindset. It's knowing you have complete autonomy for daily decisions, long range directions, development of the strategic vision, generating motivations, and harvesting of rewards. It's having total choice about what to do ourselves, to what degree, and what to outsource to others, and when.
Yes, that CAN be scary at first. It can feel overwhelming and intimidating to accept that much responsibility and wield that much control.
But try it, won't you? Your confidence will grow, and you may just come to love it.
A coaching colleague has been telling folks that it takes 4 or 5 years to get a solo practice really profitable. That's true for a lot of self-employed people, it seems. But the questions to me are, why and is that timeline the only reality?
You may have already been asked -- are you running a business, or a hobby -- and not realize what that means. Here are my rules of thumb for making that distinction:
You're dabbling at a hobby if you:
- tell a few friends and ask them to spread the word
- send a few fliers or postcards to names out of the phone book
- design a website that talks all about you
- put a few "articles" on a blog, call it a website, and never update it
- try to appeal to everyone with every problem because you "can't afford to turn away clients"
- spend more time getting organized than doing marketing tasks
- change your pricing too often, or give away your services, or use sliding scale too much
- use less than 4 hours a day for marketing in the first year (or more)
You're seriously running a business with a commitment to succeed if you:
- create do-able business and marketing plans before ordering business cards
- schedule 4 hours a day, 6 days a week to accomplish tasks on your marketing plan
- hold yourself accountable for keeping those appointments with your business
- isolate an ideal client niche and use the language they do in describing their problem
- work methodically in developing the foundational pieces of your marketing message
- be systematic in pursuing your marketing strategies for connecting with those ideal clients
- create many ways to give valued help as a relationship-building strategy that gets clients
- develop an emotionally compelling, helpful to clients web-presence
- lead with your personality strengths in determining the right marketing activities for you
- pull together a support team that includes professionals with expertise you don't have
Sounds like a lot of work, doesn't it? It is.
Being in a self-employed business is like having several businesses going at once. You have to do the all the work that corporations have multiple departments and many people to accomplish. Yes, some of the work can and should be outsourced to those who can do it better, faster, and cheaper than you can (after factoring in trial and error).
If you aren't ready to eat, breathe, and sleep your practice, you've got yourself a hobby.
SP = solopreneur. That's you if you're self-employed in a one-person business, as many of my counselor, coach, and naturopathic doctor colleagues are. And having the confidence to promote yourself is about the biggest problem I'm hearing about these days.
Isn't it curious, this lack of confidence? What happened between the moment we make the decision to pursue all that training, believing that we could do it, and the moment that we graduate and start in with the anxiety of, am I good enough? How does that initial confidence evaporate?
One very likely cause is that we stopped believing our own "can-do" inner voice. We gave away little pieces of our confidence power when someone else had a different idea, or challenged our view, or required evidence we didn't yet know of.
In becoming educated, we learned how much we didn't know. And perhaps that scared us. Then we got out in the world, opened a practice, and realized, holy cow, no one ever taught us how to get clients.
Fear, doubt, need, recognition of our lack of knowledge -- all these erode belief in the self, and a confident can-do attitude.
Here's a hint: if you think you lack confidence for promoting yourself (meaning your skills, your knowledge and training), then don't promote yourself.
What do you / can you have confidence in? That you have a desire to help? That you know more than your clients? That you can interpret or reframe their suffering or problem in a way that will help them?
Promote that.
To paraphrase the famous movie line, If you build on that, they will come.
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