Client Appointments Slowed to a Trickle? Try One of 4 Ideas

Are you like my friend* Julie, whose business as a life coach has taken a nose dive in recent months?

Maybe you're in the same boat with my colleague Arty, whose counseling clients are getting fewer and farther between?

Or, is your situation more like my client Dr. Genefer, who is considering closing down her naturopathic medicine practice and working as a natural supplements sales rep?

There's no question that the recession is impacting the bottom line of the solopreneur in the healing arts. But before you start cleaning houses, flip burgers, or throw in the towel altogether, ask yourself if you have tried enough creative, alternative ways to generate income in the field you love.

If not, here are 4 low cost, quick to start, in your field ideas to consider. BTW, these aren't as much for generating quick cash as for consistently keeping your pipeline full.

1. Start a Group

• Pick a dire need that your clients are desperate to end, improve, or achieve
• Make sure the target market is viable enough to be willing to pay for group membership
• Be direct and grounded in how you market the group
• Do it in person, by phone, connected to a networking organization, or sponsored by a company

2. Write a Self Help E-book

• Focus on a specific, definable problem with easy to describe steps to end, improve, or overcome
• Limit profesional jargon, maximize step by step instruction, and keep length to 15-50 pages
  
• Include pictures or clip art, and worksheets
• Include a plug for your regular services at the end
• Be assertive and persistent in how you market the e-book, whether as a free tool, or for a small fee**

3. Produce One or More Downloadable Self Help Audios

• Use a free conference call service on the internet if your computer isn't capable of recording
• Script out what you will say and rehearse it with a friend before recording
• Be clear in your diction, simple in your words, and slow-ish in your speaking
• Invite several friends or clients to participate in the recording with their questions
  
• End with a call to action for buying your e-book, or making an appointment for regular services
• Capture the wav file and save to your computer, then load onto to your website
• Market via social media

4. Develop a Creative Payment System

• Borrow and adapt from concierge or boutique practices
• Offer bonuses or discounts if clients will pay for a package in advance
• Seek out private contracts with small business owners to serve their employees
• At the least, get a shopping cart or PayPal buttons on your website and start taking credit cards
  

*Of course these aren't the real names of my friend, colleague.

**Check with your state -- in some places electronic products like ebooks and audio downloads are now taxable when sold.

SP* Seeks Confidence for Self Promotion

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.

Projecting Expertise

Last week I spoke to two groups of naturopathic medical students about marketing their practices after graduation. As expected, there was some resistance to the concept of marketing themselves as an expert when just out of school. This is a normal and appropriate concern.

And it's not just my ND clients who have trouble with this claim. My counselor clients also feel inhibited about calling themselves a specialist. Naturopathic doctors and psychotherapists alike are trained to be generalists, and marketing as a specialist rubs uncomfortably against that.

Plus, let's face it, a lot of us in the healing arts are recovering from poor self-esteem and low confidence. It stretches our own belief in ourselves to say out loud that we have expertise in anything. If I could give us all a pill for that, the magic med would erase all the early life programming we've experienced that damaged our self-concept as relates to the joyful quality we naturally have in childhood when we KNOW we can do anything.

But I digress. One way around this marketing need to project expertise, while still staying in integrity with the truth, is a very simple language shift. In the examples here, do you spot the difference?

• I'm an expert anxiety counselor. Or, My expertise is in eliminating anxiety and depression.
  
• I specialize in helping women with anxiety gain confidence and freedom from debilitating worry.

In the first example, the claim implies a high level of experience, extra rigorous training, or something beyond the average accumulation of education and years in business. (It also is rather egocentric, and just begs to be proven with statistics or some other quantifiable method).

The second example defines a narrow scope of interest and merely says this is where I put most of my attention -- it's what I like doing best. The focus remains on the client type, their problem, and the result they want, rather than staking a claim about myself. It directly states that my role is facilitation of the client's work.

The second example is much different in that it doesn't claim to know everything about anything. It simply states what is true from day one after graduation -- I'm a helper.

If you are graduating this spring as an ND or a therapist and you can't say you're a helper -- well, why did you choose this profession?