Category Archives for "Caring"

How to Promote Your Purpose through Business Outcomes

In this post, we complete the sequence about business purpose, from vision to offer to marketing to outputs with business outcomes.  This progression is sequential although there can be loops, especially between offer and marketing. Sometimes things happen at once, eg outputs and outcomes can develop in parallel.

What is a Business Outcome?

Outcomes result from your client’s outputs.  So, when someone completes your package and begins to meet their goals, their context changes. Perhaps as they intended, although there will be surprises too.

Outcomes can be hard to identify because they are usually qualitative.  Mostly outputs are easy to measure but measurements lack meaning.  You get 20 people to a training session, they all complete it and say they’re happy with it.  How have things changed as a result of their training?  It is sometimes possible to follow-up but they will present evidence as stories.  Stories are not easy to summarise as evidence and so trainers are likely to neglect this step.

Let’s say your client wants to change management in their industry for the better.  You address this by coaching the client to be a better manager.  If they are a better manager, this should be reflected in their outputs.   But how has management improved generally in their industry?  There could be a delay of several years, before the client shows their approach works better than the industry standard, assuming nothing knocks them off course.

Not all outcomes are difficult.  Wider benefits can happen instantly and so long as someone takes note, they are easier to capture and prove.  So, let’s take a look at some examples:

Outcomes for the Client

The relationship between outputs and outcomes can be straightforward.  Your client gets more clients or better results from working with their clients.  They see their business growing and the changes that follow to their lifestyle.

Are these positive or negative changes?  Increased numbers of client increases income and this may result in positive changes for their family.  But if it means the client spends more time working, this may affect family relationships adversely.

It is not uncommon to meet outputs and find the outcomes are not as comfortable as predicted.  Underestimating the work that goes into increased outputs may be one reason.  This is why many promises made by coaches are misleading because the cost of their delivery is not considered.

Not all outcomes relate to lifestyle.  If the client has a business purpose, they expect to see it met through their outcomes.  So, a business coach’s client wants to see change in the management culture of their organisation.  They learn to become a better manager and use their example to show others the way forward.

They will be judged under the prevailing culture of their industry.  Does their new approach deliver what the industry needs to deliver, usually profit?  The pressure will be to use tried and tested approaches, especially if early outputs are disappointing.  The result can be entrenched positions.

This does not take into account unexpected outcomes.  Something unpredicted that in retrospect is caused by the changes.

The coach must help the client understand likely outcomes.  The line between genius and folly can be very fine.  The coach helps the client anticipate issues and consider how to handle them.

Outcomes for the Coach

The client’s outcomes are also the coach’s.  There is a risk in depending on someone else’s behaviour to generate your outcomes.

Positive outcomes are not infrequent and usually clients, delighted with them, become supporters of their coach.

Negative outcomes are not infrequent and the coach must not deny responsibility for them.  They should take on clients, who take responsibility for their own decisions.  The coach helps clients make decisions but they must not be the coach’s decisions.  To return to the coach and say “I tried what we discussed last time and things went pear-shaped – can you help me work out what to do next?” is ideal.  The world is essentially unpredictable and trying new things is no guarantee of success.

The return of the client chastened by circumstance for more help is a brilliant outcome for the coach.  It demonstrates trust.  The client understands their business and need for an informed sounding board during a crisis.

For the coach, this is an important outcome because it shows a change in the client towards a calmer, better informed worldview.

Outcomes and Vision

Is this enough to meet the coach’s vision?  The knack is to see the outcomes of your work and compare with your original vision.  Ask how the vision manifests in the changes you have caused.  Real life is always messier than visions of possible futures.

A negative outcome might contain elements of the original vision.  There may be clues that show how the vision may to be modified.

If you intend to change your vision in the light of outcomes, ask whether the change covers up failure.  Or have you identified new needs and so need to change your vision so that it is more relevant?

The pathway from vision to offer to marketing to outputs to outcomes is not set in stone.  It should be malleable as you learn more about the changes you want to see.  Your vision in five years’ time may be very different to today’s and yet you should be able to see the path you took. So each revised vision is more relevant, informed by similar values.

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?

How to Use Your Outputs to Promote Your Business Purpose

Outputs are the direct benefits your clients experience.  Align your marketing plan to your vision and offers and to deliver your marketing promises, then you will see outputs.

Potential Benefits to Your Clients

Consider potential benefits for your client.  Some are more important than others and what’s most important depends on the client.

Coaches, consultants and freelancers have many different outputs because their reasons for being in business vary.  Here are a few possibilities:

Measurable Outputs

Outputs are measurable or it is possible to point to evidence something has changed.

You or Your Client’s Responsibility?

There is another dimension to outputs and that is who delivers them.  You need to be clear about expectations:

Expert Consultancy

Expert consultants deliver outputs.  This can be simple.  You deliver a website, that’s an output and you’re finished.  A good website designer can offer a more effective service.

Some offer to design a website and optimise it for sales.  If you increase income from the site, you can agree a share of profits.  A designer, working with a business with potential, can make a lot of money that way.  Some businesses pay huge retainers to designers to keep their site optimal.

This is a big responsibility for the consultant and requires a good relationship with the client.  The rewards can be significant.   If you can do this, you have a big advantage in the marketplace.

Non-Directive Consultancy or Coaching

Here the responsibility is with the client.  Typically, client and coach work together on some problem; the coach helps or challenge the client to meet their goals.

Be clear from the outset, the responsibility to meet the goals is with the client.  The coach does not profit directly from the client’s success but charges fees that reflect the value of their support to the client.

Remember, the client may not understand this approach and so be clear where responsibility for outputs lie.  I tell my prospects they remain in the driving seat, they make the decisions.  My role is to challenge what they are doing, make suggestions and help them progress and stay focused.

Coaches help with some tasks but no-one is good at everything and the client must understand they may need additional assistance.  I work with my clients to identify what needs to be done, how to do it and who does it.  Sometimes a client needs help to brief and supervise someone who works for them.

For a coach, lack of knowledge of their client’s business can be a big advantage.  It removes the temptation to take over their business and it is easier to build a relationship of equals.  The coach brings coaching skills and specialist knowledge and the client brings their specialist skills.  The coach presents them with options, helps them choose and may help carry out their choice.

What Do You Think?

Remember, outputs or benefits to the client are one dimension of the benefits of the coach or consultant’s work.  Next time, we’ll look at wider outcomes.

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?

How Your Marketing Plan Makes Your Business Purpose Real

In previous posts, I have shown how your vision leads to your offer.  This next step is once you have your offer, you market it.  “Vision to offer to marketing” is the logical sequence; an observer would conclude.  However, for practical purposes your marketing plan comes before development of your offer.  How so?

Prepare Marketing before Your Packages

It makes sense to prepare marketing copy before you design your offer packages.  The big mistake many entrepreneurs make is to prioritise service delivery over marketing.  The fact is without marketing you do not have a business.

Look at this way.  There is no point developing any package until you know how you’re going to market it.  You need to test the market, check out it exists.  And to do that you need to know how you are going to reach your potential market.

So, prepare your marketing plan first, including draft marketing copy.  It is possible, once you prepare your offer, you shall want to tweak your copy.  But if you find your offer is completely different from your draft copy, the chances are you have designed the wrong thing!

Indeed, some business people do not prepare their package until they have customers.  I don’t necessarily recommend this.  You could plan a workshop far enough ahead to allow you to sign people up and allow a week or so to develop the package, once you know you have the numbers.

Another possibility is to design a basic package you tweak each time you market it.  This means you experiment with marketing campaigns, to find the most effective ways to promote your package.

Align Your Vision and Marketing

The challenge is to develop a marketing campaign that aligns with your vision.  Then your offer becomes part of your marketing campaign.  Your offer is what you deliver to further your vision.  Your marketing campaign is how you make your vision a reality.

So, usually we think of a vision leading to a package, something to offer the world.  This is then marketed to the likely people who will consider buying the package.

An alternative is to design a marketing campaign that implements your vision.  Your customers are the people you recruit to further your vision.  You collaborate because you share the vision.  Your prospects share your vision and may help you further it.

Your vision is close to the promise your offer makes to your customers.  You help them solve a particular problem.

Let’s say you worked in an industry for several decades and experienced a variety of management approaches, some good and some bad.  Your vision is to improve management in your industry.  Your prospects are managers in your industry, who share your concerns and believe in your approach.

You need to establish yourself as the industry leader in your approach to management.  This way you become known to managers who value your guidance.  They may begin to request coaching or suggest workshop opportunities.  You may find your marketing generates requests for packages you had not considered before.  Your packages are one way you realise your vision through marketing.

Most freelancers stumble upon this, having started by designing something in line with their vision.  Usually, you revisit your offers as your marketing develops, adapting them to whatever opportunities present themselves.

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

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.

Use Your Offer to Promote Your Business Purpose

Your business purpose is primarily your vision for the changes your business makes to your clients and their wider community.  The next step is to ask: what is your offer and is it aligned with your vision?

Hourly Rates or Packages?

Many coaches make the mistake of offering an hourly rate to clients.  There are at least two issues you need to consider.

1. An hourly rate encourages the view your work is entirely face-to-face with your client. In fact you put in many hours of work not visible to the client; both direct work on preparation and follow-up and indirect work, including marketing.  A package charges for the benefit to the client.  The client does not see your hours and is not encouraged to convert your charges into an hourly rate.  After all they are hiring you for your expertise and you need to be rewarded for the hours you have put in over years to get there!
2. Whatever the change you promise, it is unlikely you will make any significant difference in a single session. To offer a package, says it takes this long to get the result you’re after.

How to Align Your Packages with Your Vision

Your packages flow from your vision.  The way you name and present them shows the expected outputs and outcomes.  You are asking the client to work with you to achieve your vision.

The client may agree with you, work needs to be done to improve the quality of management in their industry.  They work with you and so you both work for change with that goal.  The customer wants to see benefits to their specific problem but also their wider context.

Website Design as an Example

Let’s say you are coaching someone in website design.  They expect to be better website designers as a result of working with you but they also need to consider the wider context in which they work.  What changes must take place in their business or industry, to accept the approach to online marketing your client learns?

Website design has never been solely a technical skill.  In the past the technicalities were difficult to master.  Now it is easier and the focus has moved towards organisational issues.  If the website changes, how will the organisation rise to the challenge?  What you don’t want is a website that works and is never used by its owners because it is not understood.

Whatever your packages do, these days they need to be interdisciplinary, offering a systemic approach because if they don’t they won’t work for the client or anyone else.

This may be a daunting task.  “I’m a website designer, I don’t know anything about organisations!”  But your client may know something about organisations.  This is the value of working together, to solve problems.  You get the credit even if the client solves the problem!  Chances are they would not have understood the issue without you.

Your package should give you both permission to work on the implications of what you are doing, not solely on acquiring technical skills.

And then, of course, you need to market your package and that is another things altogether.

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?

How Your Vision Promotes Your Business Purpose

Every business should have business, financial and lifestyle purposes.  Together they equip your business with the vision, means and energy to make real change.  This is the first of five posts that look at how your business purpose plays out.

You are a coach, consultant or freelance; just starting out or perhaps an old hand.  To be effective you need to know yourself.

It is possible to set out in business without a purpose.  I did.  I decided to give business a go about 6 years ago and had no idea what I was going to do.

My story

I was made redundant in 2011 and attended a few workshops about self-employment.  My background was 30 years as a community development worker and it was hard to see at the time what I could offer.

What attracted me was the lifestyle of self-employment.  My priority was to find something I could offer.  My first thought was to offer website design to community and voluntary organisations.  I found this did not work for me.  Website design was no longer viable as a career owing to growth in platforms like WordPress.  Also I soon realised the reasons websites don’t work are often nothing to do with the website.  Organisations are often behind the failure of websites and other marketing initiatives.

This led me to study marketing and I soon discovered much of it was very familiar, similar to stuff I had done with community groups over 30 years!  As I became more familiar with marketing, I could see the same patterns as I saw when I developed community enterprises.

For example, transplanting an idea from one place to another, without appreciating the change in context.  Context is everything in community and business development.  Many businesses market without self-knowledge and desperately need to deepen their understanding of what they are doing.

What is Your Business Purpose?

Your business purpose is the benefit your business brings to your clients and to the wider world.  One concept I used as a development worker was the distinction between outputs and outcomes.  An output is an immediate result of an intervention, usually recorded as a quantity.  It may be something like the number of people interviewed or attending a training course.  An outcome is a more long-term achievement, usually recorded as a quality, a story.

A business coach may find their client’s business becomes more successful financially, while the quality of life for the client also improves.  But the same coach also has outcomes.  What is their impact on their client’s clients, families or neighbours?  If your client becomes a better business owner, the chances are your benefits go way beyond the immediate value to the client.

If you aim to reach people in one industry then your purpose may be to improve the quality of some aspect of that industry.  It should reach beyond the immediate benefit to your clients.

You are saying to your clients, I understand your business and I’m committed with you to improve the overall quality of that business.  Why?  Because this vision will improve your overall profile in the eyes of your market.  You show you understand what they are up against, know what works in their field and can provide the means to make the necessary changes.  When you can point to real and substantial changes, you can show the impact your vision has had on the world.

Your Vision and Theirs

Your vision should stimulate your target market’s imagination.  When you speak, you should be able to capture their attention and hold it.  You are inviting them to join you in making your vision a reality.

On its own this is not enough but as you’ll see in later posts, your vision is a necessary foundation for your marketing and indeed delivery of your coaching.  Your vision must inform all the decisions you make about your business; its purpose, its finance and even your lifestyle.

So, we shall return to vision in a few posts times when we look in more depth at finance.  Next time we shall turn out attention to how you express your business purpose through your offer.

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?

Can Coaches Halt the Decline of Caring?

We hear a lot about the troubled history of capitalism but perhaps should be more concerned about the decline of caring, especially as coaches or consultants.

There is no need to worry about capitalism.  It is in fine health and is likely to be until a nuclear holocaust or catastrophic ecosystem collapse.   So-called anti-capitalist movements are on close inspection, different approaches to how we practice capitalism.

This blog advocates co-operation (scroll down to item 5), where capital is owned collectively.  The Soviet Union practiced state capitalism.  People do not have to own capital; it is still capital whoever or whatever owns it.

Western capitalist democracies advocate private ownership.  On closer examination, this is not always what its advocates claim it is.  Does salting huge sums of money in accounts offshore in the name of various corporations really count as private ownership?

Coaching and the Decline of Caring

I’m more concerned about the decline of caring.  And by this I mean trends accounted for by denial of the needs of other people.  Businesses ignore these trends at their peril because businesses that don’t care cannot thrive.  Decline of caring is particularly challenging for coaches and consultants.

I don’t plan to write about the role of major caring professions such as health, social services or education.  I oppose their privatisation because it is not possible to deliver these services through private enterprise.  If you don’t believe me, look at health services in the United States.  Governments should offer a well-funded, universal safety net.  There will always be gaps in provision to be filled by private enterprise or voluntary sector projects.

Businesses that don’t care may have a short-term advantage but most businesses, if not caring from the outset, soon understand there is money in genuine caring.  Coaches must base their business on genuine care for their clients.  The client takes on the coach because they need help with some issue.  The coach must care about the issue because failure is as much theirs as their client’s.

The problem is most business models focus on income generation at the expense of business purpose.  The coach who does not aim for significant change for the better, is unlikely to offer a credible service.

Circulation or Accumulation?

As soon as businesses understand their role is to keep money circulating in the economy, they see caring is important.  Damage to local economies and ultimately to community happens when there is less money in the economy.   Money circulating is common wealth, available potentially to everyone.

Nobody setting out in business as a coach, consultant or freelance, will make much difference to their community, however financially successful their business becomes.  But together many small businesses can make a massive impact.

It can be hard to see this impact because it is hard to attribute change in a locality to one particular business.  Sometimes we don’t know what to look for.  Maybe we must say, “We did this” and not “I did this”.  How can coaches increase awareness of their contribution? How can they use their outcomes to market their business?

Starting next week, I shall take three aims every business should have: purpose, financial and lifestyle and show how they can be aligned with your offer, marketing, clients and wider community.

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?