Do you have 21 minutes and 53 seconds to spare?
I hope so. That’s the time you will need to set aside to listen to Jamie Oliver’s presentation about the obesity epidemic spreading throughout the world. If you are a holistic practitioner concerned about helping people live healthier, happier, longer lives — you need to watch this:
Coaching with Confidence!
Where did your last three clients come from? If you’re like most holistic practitioners (chiropractors, acupuncturists, hemeopaths, naturopaths, nutrition consultants, personal trainers) at least two of them came through referrals. They were referred to you by “active promoters” of your business, those clients for whom you got breakthrough results.
Wouldn’t you like to turn MORE of your clients into loyal and raving fans to get even more referrals?
I have a program to help you take your practice to the next level — Coaching with Confidence for the Holistic Practitioner — an eight-week, instructor-led online coaching training program to help you:
- Identify who you can coach and how you can’t so you focus only on those clients you can convert into active promoters of your business
- Help your clients visualize what they really want in life to inspire them to stick with your program
- Overcome inevitable frustrations and challenges your clients face as they make deep behavioral changes in their lifestyle
- Show your clients how to build support in their network (family, friends, co-workers) to maintain momentum
- Conduct critical conversations with your clients to smash self-limiting beliefs that lead to unhealthy behaviors
- Maintain on-going, mutually profitable engagements with your clients
To learn more about this program and register for upcoming classes, please visit me here!
Thanks, and I look forward to helping you take your holistic practice to the next level of excellence!
Is Your Holistic Practice Stuck in a Rut?
Over the last several years of working with holistic practitioners to help them grow their businesses, I’ve found that many of them are struggling to:
- Generate a steady stream of client referrals
- Keep clients in compliance with their programs
- Generate “passive” income – through sales of supplements and information products
- Create structured program with a predictable phases and sequences
- Market themselves, creating authentic and motivating messages about their services
- Keep themselves motivated and focused
- Identify and reach a profitable target market
- Deal effectively with feelings of frustration and overwhelm
- Create priorities and following through on commitments
- Ask for money from their clients – most practitioners are avoiding the uncomfortable “hard sell”
Sound familiar?
Let me ask you this: did you start your career as a holistic practitioner with lots of enthusiasm, then lose some of that momentum when you realized you needed to run a “real” business – for which you had little or no training?
I know this sounds weird, but take that as a good sign – every time you take on a new program or project, or even embark on a new career path, everyone goes through the same experience: initial enthusiasm, discouragement, until they finally get to a place of confidence and mastery.
I am here to help you get out of discouragement and disillusionment. I want to get you to that place of self-confidence that comes when you start delivering results because you are doing all the right things in the right way.
To begin working with me, I urge you to contact me for a free 30 minute phone consultation. I will give you Five Action Steps that you can implement immediately to get your practice un-stuck.
What have you got to lose? (except the rut!)
Got Focus? The Three R’s of Building a Thriving and Financially Successful Holistic Practice
Building a thriving and financially successful practice takes what every small business needs: patience, persistence, and – above all – focus.
In my experience coaching and consulting holistic practitioners, a lack of focus is the single biggest obstacle to building a thriving and successful practice. Many jump from client group to client group, never really defining their target market . Others put time and energy into building a website only to let it languish soon after. I’ve also worked with a few who wanted to do very complex, specialized programs but then felt pressured to offer more compact “general interest” programs (weight loss, stress reduction, etc.) to generate short-term revenues.
In other words, these practitioners are bouncing all over the place!
And continue to bounce they will until they focus on a few key areas of their businesses, especially when they are building (or rebuilding) their holistic practices.
In this article, I want to help you focus on the framework of your business, the strategic pillars that create the foundation of a thriving, financially successful practice. I will provide reflection questions to help you get started seeing the “big picture” of your business. I also have a free template on my site (see below) to help organize your thinking, and most important, to turn your insights into action.
Your business framework consists of three foundational strategic pillars. To make it easy to remember, I call these the Three R’s of Growing a Thriving and Financially Successful Holistic Practice:
The First R: Results
You have to deliver results for your clients. When clients get results, they build confidence in you and your process, but more important, in themselves. They will see first-hand how strong and resourceful they really are. And, self-confident clients are much more likely to develop the kind of self-awareness that leads to self-care.
So I encourage all my clients to focus on the 2-3 results they KNOW they can deliver to 90% of their clients. These results must be specific, measurable, time bound and realistic. Too many times, holistic practitioners promise nice-sounding but all-too vague results.
Reflection Questions:
What results are you promising your clients? Take a look at the results you are promising your clients. Are they specific, measurable, time bound and realistic?
The Second R: Reputation
Your reputation is built on how you deliver results to your clients. Some practitioners are known as being “all business” – they know how to get their clients into action and inspire them to keep going no matter what ; others are memorable because of the care and empathy they demonstrate; still others are great “health detectives” able to ferret out all kinds of information using their reason and intuition.
It’s tempting to want to be all of these things! But your reputation is built on your most memorable quality, that “thing you do” and the “style you have” that makes you stand out in a crowded marketplace.
Reflection Questions:
So, what do you want your clients saying about you? What’s the reputation you most like to build in the minds of your target market? What are you doing today and tomorrow to create that buzz, that reputation, that personal brand? If you put the first two R’s together, you get the third:
The Third R: Referrals
When you deliver results for your clients, you build a reputation. Consistent results and a strong reputation brings you referrals. And let’s face it, the easiest, most satisfying, and most profitable way to build a holistic practice is through referrals. You want your clients to be your own personal sales force. Studies have shown that up to 80% of revenues are generated by active promoters of your business, those clients-turned-sales-people who recommend you to family and friends.
You can also get referrals from additional sources: colleagues and peers in related specializations, allied medical professionals, supplement manufacturers and distributors, coaches and consultants in other industries, teachers and administrators from holistic training programs.
Reflection Questions:
What are you doing right now to make sure your clients are actively promoting your business after they conclude their engagement with you? Are you referring business to other health professionals? How are you managing your professional network? How are you talking about your business – the results you are getting and the reputation you are building?
To summarize:
You will build a thriving, abundant holistic practice when you follow this simple formula:
Results + Reputation = Referrals
It’s about that simple! Of course executing on this “simple” equation takes a lot of focus, which is what I’m encouraging you to do over the next six months. In my experience it takes about six months of consistent focus on a goal to make it a lifetime habit. I hope that after that six months, this simple equation becomes a mantra, or the background music to your practice.
To help you put your insights into action, I have a free downloadable template you can use to organize your thinking. If you need help filling it out, or planning your strategy to take your practice to the next level in 2010, please contact me!
Template! The Three R’s of Building a Thriving and Financially Successful Holistic Practice
Most holistic practitioners building a business struggle with their focus. So many times I hear practitioners complaining that they don’t know where to put their time and energies. They chase different opportunities. They end up with clients who don’t help them grow financially and/or professionally. They look for quick-fix solutions through Internet marketing strategies.
If you are in that boat, don’t worry! All of us have been there before. It’s just part of the game that you are in the process of learning how to play. The successful practitioners I’ve worked with just don’t stay in that boat forever! They learn from their “mistakes” and keep going.
To help, I’ve prepared this planning template to help you focus on the Three R’s of practice building: Results, Reputation and Referrals. To get some context before you use this template, I encourage you to read this article first.
Three R Planning Template (Adobe Acrobat Format)
Just a note: Don’t try to finish this template in record time. In fact, take your time. Spend a couple of days thinking about your answers. I think you’ll find the extra time gives you new and deeper insights that can then be translated into purposeful action.
If you need help setting strategy after you finish the template, or just have questions about where you want your practice to be in 2010, contact me for a free 30 minute phone consultation.
Building a Structured Program
The best coaches, the best teachers, the best businesses, the best organizations all have a process, a system for getting their clients breakthrough results. The kind of results that turn their students, clients, and employees into active promoters who have an emotional connection to the person or the organization, sometimes both.
Building a system that generates those kinds of results is hard work — it takes a lot of reflection and creativity. But consider the pay-off, you get a process that’s repeatable. You can see more clients in a month without burning yourself out. You can increase revenues AND lower costs which raises profitability.
That’s why I created this video, to show you how the “best” bosses and coaches and teachers and businesses get outstanding results for their clients. After you watch the video, I encourage you to download the template (below) to help you get organized.
I’d love to see what you come up with, so when you finish the template, send me a copy and let’s talk!
Building a Web Presence for Your Virtual Practice
(the first in a series of how-to’s and tutorials to help you decide what web-based technologies make sense for your virtual holistic practice).
What is a blog, exactly?
Blog is short for “web log.” Not the most elegant name, but it’s here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future.
A blog is a website, just like any other website accessible through an Internet browser. Blogs many of the same basic technologies as many other websites you’ve visited. They have pictures, buttons, fill-in boxes, hyperlinks, etc. You can embed video clips, process customer orders, have people opt-in for newsletters – all the things you would expect to find on a fully-functional, high powered website.
Blogs are unique in how they organize content, especially content created by the owner of (and visitors to) the blog. Blogs are highly interactive. As you may know, blogs got started and became popular because they were a simple, easy way for a blog owner to create the equivalent of their own personal online newspaper or magazine. In fact, I was introduced to blogs through my good friend Jim Pire about the time of the second Gulf War. Residents of Iraq who had Internet access started posting blog entries that were many times more accurate (and compelling) than the late, often-sanitized news dispatches from the Western new agencies.
Blogs allow visitors to the site an opportunity to post comments about an article that the owner/author has written. I’m sure you’ve seen this feature in many websites (lots of “traditional” newspapers now allow readers to comment on articles posted.)
Blogs became popular in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s because they are so simple to set up and make functional “out of the box.” Also, the most popular blogging software (Wordpress, which I use) is free. You just download to a server, install it (which takes about 5 minutes), apply a theme (of which there are literally thousands to chose from, many of which are also free), and your now blogging. Posting is easy, responding to comments is easy.
Then, of course, it gets a lot more complicated after that , depending on what you want your blog to do for you, your business, and most important – your clients.
Next Post: The Pro’s and Con’s of Using Blogging Software for Your Site
Got Strengths?
Of course you do, we all do. But how much time do you set aside every day to build on your strengths? Be honest!
For most people — myself included — building on their strengths is something they “should” do or do when they have the time. In reality, most people never do. They don’t even know how to talk about their strengths in meaningful ways: how to build on them, continue to develop them, see them in action. Perhaps most important, many people continue to engage in activities and pursue careers that do NOT play to their strengths, which leads to stress, disappointment, feelings of resignation (“oh well, that’s just the way life is.”)
If I had to guess, around 10% of the people in the US spend time working on their strengths. A 2008 study conducted by Marcus Buckingham (author of several books about strengths-building) noted that about 14% of employees believed they played to their strengths everyday.
The benefits of playing to your strengths, and continuing to build on them, are now well documented. People who focus on what they do really well report higher levels of engagement with their work, and greater overall satisfaction with their lives. They love what they do, and they do it very well. They don’t get caught up doing things they hate doing and aren’t very good at it — they figure out ways to manage around their “weaknesses” not just to avoid unpleasant tasks but as a way of eliminating distractions.
People who build on and play to their strengths make more money. They are experts, league-leaders, authorities in their field. They attract new clients and keep existing ones through what I call an “infectious enthusiasm.” People in their presence want to experience that inspiration, the belief that significant, meaningful change is possible — even probable.
People who know their strengths and take care of them are — happy. I mean think about it: if you were able to go to work (at a business or as a solo practitioner) doing what you love each and every day, and have others be grateful that you are — how would that change your life? The stuff you hate doing? You give it to people who love doing it, because it plays to their strengths.
There are several places you can go to identify and cultivate your strengths. I encourage you to read books by Tom Rath and Marcus Buckingham. The “godfather” of positive psychology — Martin Seligman — has also written extensively about the relationship between strengths and living a fulfilled life.
Here’s a list I came up with based on the work I’ve done helping people (especially leaders, managers, coaches and holistic practitioners) describe their strengths to themselves and other people.
Which one (or two) resonate with you?
- I’m a relationship strategist
- I help people get unstuck
- I get to the story behind the problem
- I get people to push themselves harder and further
- I help people get what they want
- I help people close the gap between where they are and where they want to be
- I help managers be better leaders
- I take the pain out of managing people
- I help people contribute and connect
- I get people to learn from their problems
Just like anything else involving growth and development, consistency and focus is key.
Online Client Intake Forms
I know many of you are interested in creating on-line Client Intake Forms. Working with clients in a “virtual” environment virtually (ha!) demands it.
But setting up online forms can be tricky, especially if you want to do it right (i.e., have your clients’ information saved to a database or spreadsheet for easy querying and reporting; have different kinds of inputs on the form itself — text boxes, multiple choice, list boxes, etc.)
Well, would you believe I created this simple online Client Intake Form in about 15 minutes, and it does all the “right” things — saves data to a spreadsheet, can accommodate different types of inputs, and you can choose from over 60 different “themes” to give the form itself a unique and professional appearance.
Oh — and wait, there’s more! It’s all free.
I’d love to create a tutorial that shows you how to do this — if you’re interested, post a comment! If enough people ask for it, I’m happy to do it!
And many thanks to Kristin Hoppe at Food Therapy, a San Francisco-based holistic nutrition coaching and education company for letting me use this Client Intake Form!