OUR BLOG

You’re smart.  You’re knowledgeable.  You have the requisite professional skills to be great at the work you do or the service you provide … and you care.

Congratulations.  You’ve got the whole package.

Or do you?

There’s another key success factor … a personal attribute … that’s less tangible.  And it can be just as important to what you’re able to accomplish in your business … and to the quality of your personal relationships … as intelligence, education, experience, positive intent, thoughtfulness, etc.

What is this mysterious intangible element?

When and how do you follow up with a prospective client … and how do you decide when to stop pursuing a prospect?  Good questions … ones I see my business coaching clients struggling with fairly often.

You wanna know the sad part?

Many small business owners end up leaving money on the table, because they don’t follow up with folks in a timely manner.

You is.

Sounds funny, doesn’t it?  You is.  But I’m not talking about you personally.

I’m talking about the pronoun you.

Too often, business owners fall into a trap … quite unconsciously.

Human beings, corporations, countries, and entire civilizations can be thought of as operating in one of two basic modes … growing and expanding or static and complacent … maybe even declining.

What does that have to do with you? 

To everything there is a season … and a time to every purpose under heaven.

It’s funny, we all know this bible verse from Ecclesiastes, because of a pop song.  But I’m thinking of it now in the heat of July, because it definitely relates to your business.

It’s summer … time to take some time off and have some fun, right?

Absolutely … but for how long?  That’s the question.  I see clients who really hurt themselves by really throttling back in the summer for an extended period of time.

I recently had the honor of speaking to the Greater DC chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners … or NAWBO … and I came away with a heightened appreciation for a critical success factor in business.

It’s one I’d always given a lot of weight to, but hadn’t talked about much, at least not exactly in the way I want to in this newsletter.

It’s so easy to think in either/or terms … black and white.  But sometimes there are ways to get a little creative and find a way forward that splits the difference.  What am I talking about?  Something this longtime business coach has recently figured out for herself.

I often hear service-based business owners say they don’t offer prospective clients a complimentary consultation.  “I’m not going to give away my services for free!”  

I get that.

And, I’d like to give both newer professionals and seasoned professionals some perspective on this.  This applies to you whether you’re a coach or any other service-based professional who’s selling the results and benefits of your service.  (It’s not so focused on those of you who are product-based.)

Who? … What? … Why? … When? … How? … How much?  Where? …As a business coach, I ask clients these questions all the time.

Of course, the exact nature of the questions changes somewhat depending on whether someone is just starting a business or they’ve been at it a while.

Let’s break it down.

You’re a nice person who wants to help people and you’re a business owner, who needs to make a living.  You’re a businessperson who needs to make a living and a nice person who wants to help people.  I just repeated myself!  Why?  Because I’ve learned, as a business coach, a lot of how well you do with your business depends on what comes first in that sequence.

Here’s the practical takeaway, and then I’ll elaborate.

I have two profound messages for you in this newsletter.  Let’s go with the second most important message first.  It’s a simple message.  I tell it to business owners all the time.  Invest in your own personal development.   And, as a life and business coach, I need to walk the talk.  That means I have to invest in my own personal development.

So, when I got the offer to attend a Tony Robbins online seminar, I enrolled.  The investment required?  Roughly 12 hours of my time.  The event itself was free.

Was it worth it?  Oh yeah, very much so.  It delivered way more than I expected.

There was a wealth of useful guidance, of course, but a great deal of the value came from watching a master at work …  witnessing an extraordinary human being giving everything he had.

Tony Robbins exemplifies two things that are critical to the success of a business, especially a service-based business.