All Posts by Chris

How to Make Business at Leisure!

The Romans had two words to describe the relationship between home and working life: Otium and Negotium.  These delineate the relationship and help us answer the question: is it possible to make business at leisure?

This first post in a sequence about work-life balance, focuses on Otium and I shall consider Negotium in a future post.

What Do You Want?

Otium is often translated as leisure.  However, this is not a good translation because it separates home life from working life.  It is perhaps better translated as what happens in private in preparation for working life.

Another interpretation might be self-development.  This is closer but perhaps still misses the point.  Self-development is sometimes tied to work.  What training do I need to do my job properly?  This is important but I would argue it is Negotium – a part of your public life.

Otium is much more about accomplishments and experiences that make you the person you are and equip you with something to share.  From the business perspective the question is not so much what you need to do to meet the needs of your business as what you uniquely bring to your business.

For example, my background is in community development.  Now I offer coaching in marketing.  I occasionally get told by more experienced business people that this background is not professional enough.  Maybe there is some truth in this but actually, it is my life experience that adds value to my offer.

I have experiences to draw on, skills I have practiced over the years, which are of great value to my chosen business.  When you work in a situation where there are too few resources, you have to be resourceful.  Running a small business and community development are not that far apart.

Flourishing

So, the question becomes: what do I want from my life?  Imagine you have a rose-bush in your garden.  The worse possible outcome will be for the buds to wither and drop off.  What you want is the buds to open and the bush to flourish.

As a gardener you need to carry out various activities, eg feeding, watering, pruning, weeding to help the bush to flourish.  The same applies to life.

There are three dimensions to this in constant flux.

1. You need a cause, something to commit to, a change you want to see in the world. Your business is likely to be your main cause and so this is Negotium.
2. You need a vision of your own personal future, the person you wish to be. This may be a range of activities and interests that help you become this person.  This might include activities such as sport, hobbies, music, reading, religion, etc.
3. Your relationships, again moving towards the public. This includes family and friends but also things like public worship, political activities, etc.

However, there is a fourth dimension, serendipity (and of course its opposite, the unhappy accident).  Life throws up opportunities and disasters. Our triumphs and tragedies can all transform into something of value.

Formation

The Catholics call this experience formation and it has both dimensions – activities of our own choosing, disciplines, and those that we have to take in our stride.

Seen this way the boundaries between business and leisure are less clear then perhaps we believe.  The question becomes: is the aim of your life to achieve your business aim, your financial aim or your forgotten aim of becoming a human being fully alive?  Are all three possible?

We aim solely for financial success at our peril.  Many business owners understand their business aim is integral to financial success.  How many forget the human being at the heart of it?

The challenge is to unscramble what we want out of our lives and businesses.  This will be the topic of my next post: what is my business offer to myself?

Visit my new website, Market Together to sign up to my list so that you don’t miss any posts and hear about the exciting plans I’m working on to promote an alternative approach to marketing.

Please comment and let me know what you like about this post.  What would you like me to write about further?

Something to Remember when Positioning Yourself

Positioning yourself in the wrong way is easy.  Your focus needs to be on your market and their needs.  Forget your market and you position yourself according to what you enjoy doing or to distinguish yourself from your competitors.

Your Identity

The big challenge is not so much finding a position as maintaining a consistent identity once you take up the position.  Your market will not necessarily hear or understand you the first time.  Or the second!

This does not mean you have to say exactly the same thing every time but you need to deliver a coherent message over time.  Your offers evolve as your understanding of your market and its desires increases.  But your overall message to your market must remain consistent over time.

So, today is as good as any other to start delivering a consistent message to your market.

Questions about Your Position

1. How successful have you been in delivering a message that is both distinctive and consistent?
2. How does your message show empathy for your market?
3. Where you have a clear position, what are the opportunities for collaboration with competitors?

How to Focus on Your Market

Nothing beats knowing your market.  Make a list of their needs or desires.  Remember you are listing the needs of a particular market, not the needs of people in general.  Choose two of those needs and draw them as axes on a graph.

See if you can place yourself on these axes.  Where do your competitors fall on the graph?  Do you have a degree of separation?  Note your competitors aren’t really competing, they serve a different group of people.  If there is little or no separation, change one or both axes.

Find a couple of needs that give you separation from the rest of the marketplace.  Position yourself so that you stand out from the rest for a particular market.  Aim to get your message across to those people so they know you are addressing them and like what they hear.

Following this sixth post to encourage coaches to reflect on relational marketing, take this opportunity to sign up below.  You get a weekly round-up of my posts and a pdf about how to make sure you are charging what your business is worth.  Most weeks you receive an email with helpful news or pointers to how you can tackle these questions.

Who Else Benefits from Financial Success?

You start with a financial vision, reflected in your pricing and marketing.  This results in benefits for your clients, your outputs.  But actually, your clients’ experience includes outcomes beyond immediate benefits.  The client who solves their immediate problem experiences improvements in the rest of their lives.  They join their vision to yours and see their vision realised as they improve their performance.  But who else benefits from financial success?

The real value of financial success is to see your business purpose realised through changes in the lives of people around you, your business outcomes.

Other Businesses

Your success inspires others, gives them hope.  These do not always become competitors.  If you increase prices, you are likely to need fewer clients and so there will be more people in the market than you can handle.

It is possible your success will increase the market.  Your response could include:

Your vision is important here.  You don’t want your market flooded with fly-by-night coaches who do not understand it and discredit your approach.  Supporting those interested in supporting your vision can result in greater expansion and benefits to all involved.

Investment

Investment is not limited to money.  With more money and time, you can invest in causes; into the vision behind your business.

Your reputation and expertise becomes valuable to others and various causes welcome association with your business.  In the early days you are likely to have credibility without being well-known.  You can choose what you support and present your credentials when you need to.

Should you invest for free?  Investment implies payback and I always advocate working out of self-interest;  remember the basic rule of mutuality: “I help myself when I help others.”  So, yes, by all means choose causes that support your business aims, including financially but remember generosity is your aim.

Family and Friends

Others who benefit from financial success are family and friends.  It’s not that you have more money to spend on them.  Your success is likely to be modest in the light of claims made by many marketers.  Remember the Pareto principle, 80% of the money made through business will be held by 20% of businesses.

This partly accounts for business failures.  However, you don’t have to be in the top 20% to be viable as a business.  Just aim for sustainability.

The value to family and friends is your presence, being there for them and not an absent benefactor.  Your aim is to find an equilibrium, where you balance work and lifestyle to be able to help others do so too.

This post brings my posts about the second, financial aim of businesses to a conclusion.  But it opens up the path for further exploration of your third lifestyle aim.

Visit my new website, Market Together to sign up to my list so that you don’t miss any posts and hear about the exciting plans I’m working on to promote an alternative approach to marketing.

Please comment and let me know what you like about this post.  What would you like me to write about further?

Use Positioning to Target Your Offer

A couple of weeks ago, I invited you to answer questions about your promise.  Last week we looked at empathy with people with different and similar worldviews.  This post is about positioning and relates to your niche.  Even if you are one of many making a similar promise, you can position yourself to distinguish your offer from all the others.

From the Old Things to the New

The aim of positioning is not to sell something new but to encourage your prospects to think about their problem in a new way.  This is not selling a new cure-all solution, so much as suggesting your prospects benefit from thinking about their problem in a different way.

For example, I provide coaching in local marketing.  Many marketers offer technical support, so their clients can learn and apply a new approach to their marketing.  I have opened a new position by arguing new technical methods are not always the answer.

So, does it help to think about marketing as self-expression, getting my unique message across, as opposed to competing directly with everyone else who shares the same offer, message and technique?

Seeing Things Differently

1. What is distinctive about your offer? What makes you stand out in the marketplace?
2. Complete this sentence about you and your competition: “The one thing that separates me from my competitors is …”
3. Think about your best clients. Why do they stick with you?  What could you change so that they stick with you?

Doing Things Differently

Consider making one change to your business that will position you in the marketplace.  Remember, if you open up a new position, there will always be people who prefer the old.  This is not a problem; so long as you have enough people who prefer your position, you have a business.

Following this fifth post to encourage coaches to reflect on relational marketing, take this opportunity to sign up below.  You get a weekly round-up of my posts and a pdf about how to make sure you are charging what your business is worth.  Most weeks you receive an email with helpful news or pointers to how you can tackle these questions.

How Your Client Benefits from High Prices

Can you list benefits from high prices for your clients?  They boil down to how you structure your business.

Business Structure

How do you understand the way finance works for your business?  There are many possible financial objectives and your business may adopt several as it develops.  You can choose to maximise sales, revenue or profit, for example.  Your choice determines how you market your business.

So, when you estimate the money you need, decide the financial structure to meet that objective.  For example, if you seek maximum sales, you must increase traffic to your business and consider how quickly you convert as many as possible.

If you maximise revenue, seek clients who can afford your high-end offers. This may mean reduction in traffic and increased conversions.

Your clients receive a better service from you if you know what you are doing!

Their Confidence in You

When your client trusts you, they are more likely to share openly with you.  Price tells them how much you value your offer.  If they don’t think you value your offer, why should they trust you can help them?  Furthermore, if they see you as successful, you are likely to have inside information to help them be successful too.

This applies to all types of coaching.  Say you coach people for stress reduction.  If someone faces a crisis, they look for someone with a proven track record so they have confidence their coach can help them.  At a time of crisis they may want to meet more often or have access to their coach as things develop.  They will expect to pay more for this level of service.

The same applies for resilience coaching.  Someone in a responsible position wants a coach to equip them for the inevitable crises.  They expect to pay for an effective service.

It is easy to see why self-confidence is important.  If you do not believe you are worth a high price, how do you persuade your high-end clients you are worth hiring?  If you make a first offer of a high-end product, you can always downsell to a low-end product.  This establishes your worth and so long as the low-end product is clearly a lesser product, you establish your credibility.  Someone with fewer resources to commit can be reassured by the prices they cannot afford.

More Time

Your aim is to create more time for your clients as you increase prices.  With limited hours in the week, knowing how much you need to earn, work out how much you need to earn per hour.  Offer high-priced products and you need fewer clients and have more time to devote to each client.  This is true for both preparation and face-to-face time.

More Resources

With higher prices you have more resources to devote to your clients.  So long as you budget for resourcing your offers, there are many ways to improve your client experience:

Self-Confidence

Over confidence is a possible downside.  What happens if success goes to your head?  There is a species of arrogance, sometimes among successful coaches and consultants.  Many business owners see this and do not want to be perceived this way.

The main thing to remember is most people lack self-confidence.  Being under-confident is more likely to be your problem.  They ask: “What if I am not as good as I think I am?”  To which the obvious response is: “What if you are better than you think you are?”  It is possible low self-esteem deprives the world of your unique, valuable contribution.

Pricing is not the sole criterion for the successful entrepreneur; arguably it is the least important.  But reality dictates without sufficient income, other advantages of success are unlikely if not impossible.

Next time, I share ideas about other positive results from financial success, beyond satisfied customers.

Visit my new website, Market Together to sign up to my list so that you don’t miss any posts and hear about the exciting plans I’m working on to promote an alternative approach to marketing.

Please comment and let me know what you like about this post.  What would you like me to write about further?

Your Business Thrives on Empathy

This post sequence encourages you to explore relational marketing in-depth.  It builds into a questionnaire to help coaches, consultants and freelancers prepare their relational marketing strategy.  This focus here is empathy in marketing.

Relational Marketing.

In the last three posts, I asked questions of your business about vision, market and promise.  If your vision includes genuine help for others (and why are you coaching if it doesn’t?) then you must understand your market so you make a promise that really helps.

Empathy is where you stand in someone else’s shoes and see the world from their perspective.  It is not easy.  For example, you may need wealthy clients who can pay for your high-end services.  How do they see the world and understand money?  But your next prospect may not be so affluent and may need the same service.  How can you help both?  Or do you aim to help only one?

In some ways the prospects furthest from you may be easiest to understand.  Their difference, forces you to build a world different from the one you know.  Someone who’s worldview is close to yours can be more difficult because you may overlook their differences.

Empathy in Your Business

1. Think of a real person, maybe a client or prospect, whose worldview is like yours. Where do your worldviews differ?
2. How many reasons can you think of why understanding affluent people helps your business?
3. Consider people who would benefit from your promise, occupy your niche but do not share your worldview? Would you find it difficult to work with them?  Why?  Which worldviews do you find particularly difficult?

Bridging the Gap

Are worldviews important?  There will always be major differences beneath the surface.  None of us are immune to this.  We may not and should not change our views for a contract but we can keep track of our own behaviour.

When you listen to clients and prospects, keep an eye on your response to what they are saying.  Is it awakening strong feelings and if so, how do you deal with them?  You can’t avoid these issues coming up but you can learn a more empathic stance.

This is the fourth post in this sequence. Sign up below to make sure you don’t miss any.  You get a weekly round-up of my posts and a pdf about how to make sure you charge what your business is worth.  Most weeks you receive an email with helpful news or pointers to how you can tackle these questions.

Should You Reduce Prices When Marketing?

You set a price for your offer and the next challenge is how to market it.  You need to consider how you manage your prices while marketing.  Specifically, should you reduce prices?

Do You Display Your Prices?

One frequent question is whether you should display prices when marketing.  If you look at coach’s websites you will see some do and some don’t.

I believe it is better not to make your prices public, especially when you are starting out.  Here are some reasons:

As you become more popular and increase prices it might help to display your prices.  This means people who cannot afford the prices displayed will not contact you.  Do this if you find a lot of people turn you down for reasons of price but you still find enough customers.

If you become incredibly high-priced, I understand it can be better to hide your prices again.  This projects an aura of exclusivity.

Should I Reduce Prices?

Should you reduce your prices globally?  Usually, this is not a good idea.  You need to control the number of clients you can handle.  Lower prices mean you need more clients.

It may be better to introduce some low-end offers, especially if you find most warm prospects back out when they hear your prices.  This gets them on your books and offers an opportunity to check you out before making a bigger financial commitment.  Remember, if someone wants something enough, they will find the money.

If you believe your offers are not good enough for the price you charge,  consider the price you charge indicates something of your confidence in your offer.  To offer a lower price undermines your offer’s credibility.  If you are right it is the offer that needs improvement.  Something brilliant will always be easier to sell than something indifferent.

Should I Offer Discounts?

No, unless there is a real reason to do so.

During an enrolment conversation, you may find someone claims they cannot afford the offer that best fits their needs.  Here are a few ways to respond:

In the end, consider a downsell and leave your prices alone!

Marketing Prices

A lot hinges on marketing.  If you are clear about the benefits and believe you can work with the prospect, then the offer should sell itself.  Remember, your credibility hinges on your confidence and sense of self-worth.

So long as you deliver and exceed the expectations of your client, this will communicate in your favour.  Next time I shall look at how high prices benefit the client.

Visit my new website, Market Together to sign up to my list, so you don’t miss any posts and hear about the exciting plans I’m working on to promote an alternative approach to marketing.

Please comment and let me know what you like about this post.  What would you like me to write about further?

The Power of Your Implicit Promise

This post sequence aims to encourage  in-depth relational marketing for coaches, consultants and freelancers.  It builds into a questionnaire to help them prepare their relational marketing strategy.  This third post builds on the first, about your vision or business purpose and second, about your market.  Elements of your promise are explicit but an implicit promise can be powerful.

Your Explicit and Implicit Promises

Your promise is at the very heart of marketing.  Whatever you say or do to promote your business or cause, it comes back to your promise.

Your explicit promise is sometimes called the benefit.  It is essential you understand the distinction between features and benefits and you must make sure your market understands your benefits.

Your implicit promise is not something you allude to directly.  It relates to your Vision and the psychographics of your market.  They see something in your vision and so trust you will deliver it.

Your implicit promise is: you will see it through and meet the unvoiced expectations of your customer.  This is why it is important coaches choose their customers carefully and listen to them.  Together you are weavers of dreams.

Your Promise

1. Consider one of your products or services. What is its explicit promise?
2. What is its implicit promise? Consider both emotional and intellectual aspects.
3. Does your promise need to be bigger, more specific, less specific?

Making Your Promise

Taken together, your vision, market and promise make up your identity as a business-owner.  Review your answers to the questions in this and the last two posts.  Decide on changes when you consider them together.

One valuable insight from the implicit promise is, it allows you space to over-deliver.  You may find you need to support your customer over periods of upset when their business does not go in the anticipated direction.  Consider: how far are you prepared to go?  Remember as you take on more customers, you have less time to devote to each of them.

Are there bonuses you can deliver, once they have signed up, that will begin to deliver your implicit promise with minimal effort from you?

This is the third in a post sequence to encourage coaches to reflect on relational marketing.  Sign up below to get a weekly round-up of my posts and a pdf about how to make sure you are charging what your business is worth.  Most weeks you will receive an email with useful news or pointers to how you can tackle these questions.

How to Set Credible Prices for Your Offers

Your business purpose should include credible prices for your offers.  But what is a credible price?  Here are a few things to consider:

Your Confidence

Your prices increase as your confidence grows.  You need to understand the value of your offer and it is possible, when you start with a new offer, your prices will be lower than you would necessarily choose.

But your confidence may not be a reliable guide to the value of your offer.  You may be better (or worse!) than you think.

There is no upper limit to what you charge and something I ask my clients to do is design an offer for which they can charge £100K.  I don’t expect them to sell one of these! It helps to think about what you could do for someone able to pay that amount.

Most businesses have more than one offer.  Getting the right price structure in place, so that customers can try you out before committing to a high price is part of the challenge.  I’ll return to this in my next post.

This is about confidence because you need to get off the hourly rate and charge for the value of your expertise.  If you charge an hourly rate you effectively tie your business to your competitors’ rates.  You also do not account for preparation time or the training and development you’ve paid for in the past.

If you don’t think your offer has value, why should your prospect?

Your Business and Lifestyle Needs

You need to cover your costs.  Say you set out to make £25K per year.  To do this you need more clients and so you aim to maximise sales.  Soon you hit the most clients you can manage.  You are still way off your target income.

What are the options?  You can

You can see your pricing strategy is bound to evolve as your business develops.

Value of Your Offer

This is the other side of the problem.  If you know how much you need to charge, is this something the market will bear?  This depends somewhat on what your competitors charge but remember customers choose you for a variety of reasons.

Each needs consideration as you set your prices.  As these factors change, they present opportunities to increase your prices.

Your Competitors

You need competition because if there is none, you probably don’t have a market, unless you have found a new market.

The knack is not to compete for exactly the same market but deliberately seek to separate your prospects from the rest of the market.  You do this through the stories you tell and the worldview you promote.

Competitors can make brilliant collaborators.  You can work together to increase size of the pool of prospects and then fish for the prospect who finds your offer attractive.

Do not be worried by competitors who undercut you.  They won’t be around for long.  Your market is the people who can afford your prices.

Marketing

A lot depends on how you market your offer and manage your prices.  I shall go into this in greater depth next time.

Visit my new website, Market Together to sign up to my list so that you don’t miss any posts and hear about the exciting plans I’m working on to promote an alternative approach to marketing.

Please comment and let me know what you like about this post.  What would you like me to write about further?

Use of Psychographics to Understand Your Prospects

This sequence encourages you to explore relational marketing in-depth.  The first post was about your vision or business purpose.  These posts build into a questionnaire to help coaches, consultants and freelancers prepare their relational marketing strategy.  If you want to understand your prospects, you need to understand your use of psychographics.

What are Psychographics?

We often think markets in terms of demographics, things like sex, age, race, location – all things most people are unable to do much about.  Perhaps these are more accurately described as your niche.  So, you may offer solutions to the problem of stress at work.  Your market is naturally those who experience stress but you can choose your niche based on sex or location, etc.

Psychographics are a better way to describe your market, it’s desires, frustrations and personalities.  There is a closer tie into your market through psychographics than demographics.  (When you follow the second link, please note I did not use the word psychographics, using demographics to cover both demographics and psychographics.  This is fairly common usage.)

Your Market

1. Describe your market in terms of their psychographics. Consider their desires, frustrations, hopes, personalities, dreams, interests, career, culture, education.
2. Do you use demographics, eg age, sex, location, etc to further niche your market? If so, why do this?  Remember this is not necessarily wrong but it should be intentional.
3. Prepare an avatar for your market. Focus on what they believe and why they believe it.

Finding Your Market

Be aware, often the best market is the one that finds you!  You can anticipate the kind of people likely to be interested in your offer.  You might decide to target business owners.  As you find customers, work out what they have in common.  Why have they chosen you?

Markets are in constant flux and people who choose you today may lose interest tomorrow.  However, if you find people who know like and trust you, they are likely to listen to what you say.  Be alert to changes among your followers and respond to them.

Never forget markets are communities.  Consider how you can encourage conversations between your followers.

This is the second in a post sequence to help businesses reflect on their relational marketing.  Sign up below to get a weekly round-up of posts and a pdf about how you can make sure you charge what your business is worth.  Most weeks you will receive an email with useful news or pointers to how you can tackle these questions.