Sarah Lakhani

7 Essentials for a Powerful Brand

December 21, 2022 by Sarah Lakhani Leave a Comment

Real quick – having a powerful brand is key to ensuring continuous growth in your business without the hustle.

Now that we have that out of the way (and agree on it!), let’s look at the 7 essential elements to have in place when you’re developing your brand.

Because here’s the thing… you already have everything you need to stand out in whatever crowded online space you’re in. I fully believe that. All you need to do is find a way to extract your uniqueness, develop your brand around it, and then embed that brand across your business – from your products/services to your marketing, sales and your end-to-end customer experience.

You see, the one BIG mistake you’re making that’s hurting your business and keeping you from bringing in higher levels of revenue (I’ll be honest, I made it, too), is that you’re hiding in the “safe space”. You’ve got to get out there and really showcase your brand in order for it to work for you. And yes, a lot of that is in your marketing, but you’ve got to also have the products/services and the experience to back it all up.

But we’re not getting into that here. Right now, we’re focusing on the elements you need to include when you’re building out your brand. And I’ve got to really stress on this here – you need to know this before going to a branding agency to get your branding done. This is brand strategy, and while there are some branding agencies that will help you develop this, it’s always a lot more powerful if you’ve had the time to intentionally think these through.

So without further ado, the 7 essentials for a powerful brand:

Brand Essential #1: The Brand Statement

Your brand statement is your anchor. It sums up what you believe in as a business, what the real reason is behind the products/services you decided to create and sell. I love to start my brand statements with the words “I believe” or “We believe”. Even if you hire a branding agency and they edit this, have something in place before you go. Ask yourself: What belief do you want your customers to connect with?

Brand Essential #2: Your Vision

Think of your vision as your ultimate North Star. It’s something aspirational, and truth be told you might never achieve it. For example, “to help a million women build their own scalable online businesses”. Ask yourself: What impact do you want your business to have in the world or for your target audience?

Brand Essential #3: Your Mission

Your mission is different to your vision in that it describes the “how”. It’s how you intend to accomplish your vision. What will you do to get to where you’re headed? Is it by providing specific services, providing access to resources or creating affordable products? For example, your mission could be “to provide a variety of business support services at different price points that allow women to lean into the containers that work best for them”. Ask yourself: What will you be doing or providing on your path to your North Star?

Brand Essential #4: Brand Values

You’re going to need about 4 to 6 brand values. These should include elements of what you promise to live by as a business, and what you intend to demonstrate internally and externally. Try to get creative. We’ve seen enough “customer centricity”, “respect” and “trust”. Ask yourself: What do you want to be a leader in?

Brand Essential #5: Your Brand Personality

Your brand personality comes through in your communications more than anything. But if you do it well, it should also come through in your sales, your actual products and services and in the channels you choose for your communications. Ask yourself: If your business were a person, how would you describe them?

Brand Essential #6: Your Brand Language

Your brand language, also known as your brand voice is developed as an answer to how you want to come across in your written and spoken communication. Think back to your brand personality and make sure these two match! There is nothing more unnerving than expecting a type of brand language after interacting with a brand and receiving something completely different. Ask yourself: Are there specific words you want to use that can eventually be associated with your brand?

Brand Essential #7: Visuals

Visuals – the thing most people start with when it comes to your brand is actually the last thing you should work on. Visuals refers to the colors and the graphical elements that you’ll use consistently (consistency is key!) across your online and offline content. Colors and visuals have emotional impact, so you want to be intentional about this. Ask yourself: What colors and graphical elements do you want to use to bring out everything you’ve developed as your overall brand?

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Stop listening to other people!

July 27, 2022 by Sarah Lakhani Leave a Comment

Why is it that when you’re ready to start your business, all of a sudden everyone has so much input and advice to give?

And why is it that something works so well for someone else, but just doesn’t seem to work for you?

Perhaps it’s time to stop listening to other people… and I’ll tell you why in the video below!

Finding Your Niche

June 16, 2022 by Sarah Lakhani Leave a Comment

This Coaching with Sarah session is on finding your niche. For anyone who’s a service provider, this is a HUGE topic – and something many people struggle with. But you don’t need to struggle anymore. I got you 🙂

And if you’ve got a product based business, then defining your niche might be slightly easier, but not always a breeze.

Knowing your niche is the first step towards building your positioning and then your messaging. And these are immensely important when it comes to attracting your ideal customers to your business. So grab a coffee, tea or any other beverage of choice and hit play!

And when you’re done…

Grab my Discover the Right Business for You workbook (& mini-course) totally free

Journaling Practice

June 15, 2022 by Sarah Lakhani Leave a Comment

This Coaching with Sarah session is on my absolute favorite journaling practice. Whether you already journal or don’t, I am certain you’re going to love the structure of this particular practice.

You can use this journaling practice whenever you feel stuck, need to make a decision, feel anxious, have lots of thoughts in your head, are hitting fear, and more. It’ll help you sort through your fears and worries and come out the other end feeling calmer, more inspired and ready to take action.

Having a good journaling practice is so important for personal growth, especially as you build and grow a business. And this specific practice has been a game changer for me and my clients. So grab a coffee, tea or any other beverage of choice and hit play!

Overcoming Fear of Failure

February 9, 2022 by Sarah Lakhani Leave a Comment

If there’s one thing that gets in the way of kind-hearted, soul-lit people starting their own businesses, it’s fear of failure. So in this article, I’m going to break down the four steps to overcoming fear of failure.

Step #1: Identify your fears

There are many ways to do this, but the simplest and the most effective is to just spend some time on your own, sitting in silence, center yourself, take a few grounding breaths and then just ask yourself “What am I afraid of?”

Sometimes you’ll get a whole host of things come up, and sometimes it’ll be something very specific to your current circumstance (for example, related to a launch if you’re in launch mode). Let all your fears surface. You might find that some of your fears are related to your abilities e.g. “I fear I won’t be able to get my clients the results they want”, or they might be related to things seemingly outside your sphere of control e.g. “I fear no one will pay this price for a candle”, or they might be related to deeply ingrained limiting beliefs e.g. “I worry that I won’t be able to make the money I desire working the hours I want to work”.

At this point, you might choose to write down your fears. You can create a list, “I fear…”, “I worry…”, “I’m concerned about…” etc. Alternatively, if you’re not into journalling, you can continue doing this in a meditative state.

Step #2: Take away your fear’s power

Continuing from Step 1, whatever fears come up, take them one at a time, acknowledge them, thank them for making an appearance and let them go. You might say to the fear “I see you, I acknowledge you, I thank you for everything you have done for me in the past, and I release you.”

You see, the key is to acknowledge that the fear you feel is coming up because it once served a very important purpose – to keep you safe. But if you’re looking to create something new in your life and your business, staying in the safe zone won’t get you there. You need to break through. You need to let your fear know that you see it, you acknowledge it, and you’re still going to go ahead anyway.

And before you move onto Step 3, you’ll want to create some trust in yourself. What proof or evidence do you have that you can take the action that’s causing the fear? Where have you done something similar in the past? Who around you has done something like this? Build up your evidence bank. Also think about what you would do if it really did go horribly wrong. You would likely figure it out, right? How would you do that and what evidence do you have of handling situations that went wrong in the past?

Step #3: Create safety to lean into

Your fear is just trying to keep you safe. That is its job. So instead of fighting the fear, work with it. In the previous step, we released it. In this step, we’ll take it one step further by creating a Plan B (and C and D and E if you need it) to calm the fear down.

If we look at the example of fear that comes up when promoting your products and services, we can break this down in the following manner:

Fear: I’ll promote and no one will buy.
Fear’s Power: I’m going to look stupid and people will talk about me behind my back.
Taking the Power Away: I will learn what works and what doesn’t, and I will prove to myself and others that I am willing to do the work to achieve my goal.
Creating Safety: If promoting via Instagram doesn’t work, I can adjust my strategy. If that doesn’t work, I can try another platform. If that still doesn’t work, I can hire a Social Media Coach to teach me how to make it work.

Other examples for creating safety might be working on your business while holding a corporate job so you can keep the steady income until you know you can make it work. Or launching your products/services to a test group first and collecting feedback before launching to the world. Or finding a coach or mentor to guide you through the areas you need help with. Or knowing that you can always go back to doing whatever you were doing earlier if this new direction doesn’t work (this worked really well for my clients in corporate).

Words of encouragement

So in conclusion, don’t let your fears stop you! You were made for great things. And your fears are evidence of you stepping into that vast field of possibility. Learn to manage your fears instead of your fears managing you and watch as you smash your goals – and more!

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Can you learn to love sales?

January 5, 2022 by Sarah Lakhani Leave a Comment

Ah, sales. You can’t have a business without it and yet, many business owners despise it. What type of person are you when it comes to selling and – perhaps even more importantly – how can you learn to love sales?

Sales is a fundamental activity for your business success

First, we have to acknowledge that sales is an incredibly important activity in any business. Without it, you literally don’t have a business. As many people have said before me, if you’re not making sales in your business, you’ve got an expensive hobby. In order to have a business, you need revenue coming into it – and without sales, that just won’t happen. Sure, you might have some word-of-mouth and referral traffic, but even then, particularly when it comes to services, there is still a good chance you’ll have to get on a call to pitch your services and close the sale. And, something to be aware of is that referral traffic may dry up eventually, so you always want to be able to generate your own sales so that you’re not dependent on an outside source for it.

So… what do you do if you’re not the amazing salesperson you want to be?

Let’s look at the three types of salespeople that exist

Type #1: The Believer

This type of salesperson loves to sell because they believe in their product/service and they want to serve as many people as possible

Type #2: The Anti-Salesman

This type of salesperson hates to sell because they’re repulsed by the idea of being salesy

Type #3: The Snow-to-Eskimos Salesperson

This type of salesperson wants to sell their products/services to whoever will listen, no matter whether they’re a good fit or not

What type of salesperson is The Believer?

If you happen to be a Believer, then hats off to you, keep doing what you’re doing. The reason why the Believer sells so easily is because of their perspective on why they’re selling. They focus on serving rather than selling. They understand that when someone purchases their product or service, they receive something that they have been wanting or needing. If you like to think of things in terms of push and pull, they don’t push their products to their customers, they allow their products to be pulled by their customers. This is easier said than done, but we’ll get into some key principles in just a little bit. But before that…

What type of salesperson is The Anti-Salesman?

If you relate to this type of salesperson, you definitely feel resistance to selling, and most likely equate selling to being “salesy”. You don’t see a middle ground, and likely just put your offer out there and tell yourself that if someone wants it, they’ll buy it. But the issue with this perspective is that very often, we intend to purchase something but we get distracted, or we need to feel better about the purchase, or we have questions that haven’t been answered, or a whole host of other reasons that get in the way.

What type of salesperson is The Snow-to-Eskimos Salesperson?

You hopefully don’t really relate to this type of salesperson, but it’s likely that you are repulsed by the idea that you could be perceived as this type of salesperson. If this sounds like you, then you’re The Anti-Salesman above, but let’s explore this type of salesperson, too, and dive into the persona of the salesperson you don’t want to become. The Snow-to-Eskimos Salesperson is on a mission to sell their product or service to anyone. This is the pushy salesperson with the morally questionable tactics. You shouldn’t want to be this type of salesperson. And the good news is that you don’t have to be! You can conduct sales activities without becoming a Snow-to-Eskimos Salesperson.

The question, therefore, is: how can you feel good about selling?

That is, essentially how you’ll learn to love sales, right?

Remind yourself that you’re not taking anything away from your customers. You’re not forcing anyone to buy. You are simply offering your product or service – which they have decided they want – in exchange for money. Break it down like this and you’ll soon start seeing this as the fair exchange that it is.
Have a way to gauge interest and ask those who’re interested to “raise their hand”. You don’t want to be The Snow-to-Eskimos Salesperson, so make sure that whoever you’re selling to is genuinely interested. There are so many ways to do this: you can host a free event (on a topic that relates to your product/service) and ask people to sign up, you can invite people to a discovery call (if you’re a service provider), you can sell via your own channels (social media and email) giving those who aren’t interested the opportunity to unfollow or unsubscribe or you can open up a waitlist or pre-sale as part of a campaign. There are probably plenty of other ideas too, but these are some to get your creative juices started.
Learn more about peoples’ buying habits. More often than not, we need to be reminded of something several times before we actually hit the purchase button. This is true even of things we already know we’re going to buy. It’s not about convincing someone to purchase. It’s about providing them with multiple opportunities to make the purchase. Study your own purchasing behaviors – and those of the people around you. And then remind yourself of these behaviors when the time comes to sell.
Understand – deeply – how your product or service benefits your customer. If you understand this, you’ll be able to explain clearly, concisely and with conviction, why someone should purchase your product or service. And this changes the conversation from being a situation in which you feel like you’re trying to sell something to someone to a situation in which you’re able to demonstrate empathy and provide a solution to someone. It’s a very different energy.
Lastly, build a relationship before selling. Create marketing content that speaks to your ideal customers. Connect with them via comments and DMs on social media. Set up free events that they can attend to become better acquainted with your products and services. Have a website and social media accounts that provide the information your ideal customers are looking for. Selling in the 5th or 10th encounter with your target customer is much easier than selling in your 1st or 2nd encounter. Create a community or a customer journey that your ideal customer goes through before you ask for the sale.

Learn to love sales: The Conclusion

Essentially, everyone can learn to love sales. I truly believe that. It’s a skill and a change in mindset, and if you’re not there yet, follow the 5 steps above and you’ll see a shift in your sales. After all, you have something to share with the world, and the more people you get it to, the bigger the impact you’ll make. This is about more than just you and the discomfort you currently feel about selling. It’s about serving and creating an impact in the world.

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Reframing Questions to Drive Success

December 8, 2021 by Sarah Lakhani Leave a Comment

At a young age, we learned about the power of questions – unknowingly, perhaps, but the seeds were planted. Who? What? Why? When? Where? And… How? When you think about where you are now, where you want to be and what you need to get you there, reframing questions opens up your mind to ideas and possibilities that would otherwise be dormant, driving your chance for success up.

In this article, I’m going to share several critical question to ask yourself as you work towards your goals. And in addition to that, I’m also going to share some ideas on how to structure your questions moving forward, so you are constantly expanding your thinking and developing new ideas. Sound good? Let’s get started!

The questions you ask yourself today

Typically, we tend to ask ourselves the same questions over and over again. People unhappy at work will ask themselves, “When will be life be different?”, “What do I need to get through the day?”, “How many days until the weekend/holidays?”. Entrepreneurs getting their businesses off the ground will ask themselves, “When will I start making money?”, “Why can’t I attract more customers?”, “When will I be where I want to be?”. Take a minute and think about the questions you ask yourself every day. If you’re ready to make changes, you can even write them down on a piece of paper or type them into a new document.

The trouble with the questions we ask ourselves, are twofold. One, they usually place more emphasis on the outside world than on things we can control ourselves. And two, they’re the same questions, so logically, we’re going to keep coming up with the same answers. And so, we have the same questions, same answers, and not much we can do about them. That’s not a great place to be.

Tip #1: Flipping the distribution of power through your questions

So let’s first look at flipping the questions around so that they’re more empowering. Instead of wondering when things will happen to or for us – a change in environment, an increase in leads, a more supportive peer groups, etc. – let’s change the questions so that they put you in the driver’s seat.

“When will life be different?” becomes “What can I do to bring more joy into my life?”
“When will I start making money?” becomes “When can I launch my service?”
“Why can’t I attract more customers?” becomes “How can I attract more customers?”

And so on.

This one little change in your questions will open up your mind to plenty of new ideas. Why? Because our brains love to solve problems. But when you ask yourself “When will life be different?”, your brain comes back with “When I’m not stressed out/When I have more money/When I have more clients.” etc. It’s a dead end, and the ball is in the outside world’s court. But now ask “What would make me enjoy my life more?” or “ What can I do to reduce stress in my life/make more money/attract more clients?” and you’ll get completely different answers which put the ball back in your court, empower you and open up your mind to new ideas.

Tip #2: Increasing the quality of ideas generated through reframing your questions

Secondly, as I mentioned earlier, by asking different questions, your brain will look for different answers. So if you’re currently asking a lot of “why” questions, try changing them to “how” questions. If you’re asking mostly “when” questions, change them to “what” questions. There is no secret formula – just ask different questions by exploring the many types of questions you can ask.

For example, “Why am I not attracting the right clients to my business?” can become any of the following questions:

“What can I do differently to attract the right clients?”
“How can I attract the right clients?”
“How do my competitors attract their clients?”
“Who are the right clients for my business?”
“Who can help me attract the right clients for my business?”
“Where are the clients that I would like to attract to my business?”

As you can see above, there are plenty of different questions you can ask yourself about the same topic. And depending on what you ask and how you ask it, you’ll get different answers, and ideas. This is key because it changes the pattern you have formed in your mind and it introduces new things to explore, which in turn will introduce even more new things to explore.

A complete revamp to demonstrate the impact of reframing questions

So let’s take one scenario and see how asking different questions produces a different outcome.

The question we’ll start off with is: “Why isn’t my audience engaging with me on social media?” This is something a lot of small business owners struggle with, so I hope it’s an example that not only demonstrates the power of questions but also provides you with immediate questions to start asking yourself.

I would imagine, having been in this place before, that the response to this question that plays in your mind is something along the lines of poor content, the wrong audience and a topic that doesn’t resonate with your audience.

Now let’s ask a few new questions and see what happens.

“What can I do to encourage my audience to engage with me on social media?”
“When can I expect my audience to engage with me on social media?”
“How can I encourage my audience to engage with me on social media?”
“Where can I place calls to action to encourage my audience to engage with me on social media?”

With these three new questions alone, you can expect to develop ideas around:

content that would be interesting to your audience
calls to action to use
placement of calls to action
checking insights to find the best times for audience engagement
creating simple prompts to encourage engagement

None of these were responses to the original question, “Why isn’t my audience engaging with me on social media?”. And so, as can be seen through this example, asking different questions, and hopefully better questions, leads to new ideas that help shift you out of your current situation and towards your goals.

The key takeaway

We often ask ourselves the same questions every day, particularly around things we struggle with. To move out of your current situation, you need to prompt new ideas through new ways of thinking about the situation. This is accomplished through reframing your questions. Two ways to do this: flip your question to give you the power and ask different questions about the same thing so you can view the problem from different angles. Questions are extremely powerful and will give rise to plenty of incredible ideas, as long as you use them in the right way.

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The 3 Business Success Factors

November 10, 2021 by Sarah Lakhani Leave a Comment

I love strategy just as much as the next management consultant, but as a business owner, I’ve got to say, there are 3 business success factors, and strategy is just one of them. The other two are action and mindset. And more than ever, when you’re starting/running your own business, you’ll notice the (negative) effects when you’re focused on only one or two of these areas. They may not all need equal amounts of your time, but they do all need your attention.

Why these three factors?

How did we get here? What makes these three things the areas that everything else falls into? Well… it’s quite simple really:

Strategy keeps you moving in the right direction.

Mindset ensures you’re removing your own blocks and moving forward in a way that feels good.

And action keeps you moving.

Lack of Strategy

Most of my clients come to me for strategy. And that’s totally understandable. Strategy is deciding where you want to be, how you want to position yourself and mapping out a roadmap to get there. It covers your overall business strategy, brand strategy and all the pieces that fit into them, such as your marketing strategy, your sales strategy and your customer strategy.

When you have a gap in this particular business success factor, you’ll find that you’re either lost, not taking any steps forward because you just don’t know what to do or you’ll find yourself jumping from one strategy to another. You’ll likely also be listening to multiple people, maybe multiple mentors or business coaches, and consuming all their free content. Piecing all this free content together to form a strategy is near impossible. Why? Because each piece is part of a different strategy.

Instead, what you need to do if this sounds like the situation you’re in is to commit to one strategy. One way of making money, of selling, of marketing, of moving people through your customer journey. Define that one way and then map out how you’re going to get there. Commit to that. And stop listening to and being swayed by other strategies. The truth is, many strategies will work. The trick is to find the one that suits you and your strengths the most.

Lack of Action

It goes without saying that not taking action is going to result in not getting anywhere, right? Logically, this makes sense. But many of us (myself included, once upon a time!) love the strategy and mindset elements and just end up spending most of our time there. Action is moving your business along the roadmap that you’ve created from your strategy work. It’s moving the needle every day, taking action, implementing a part of your strategy.

When you have a gap in this business success factor, you’ll notice that you have lots of great ideas, an incredibly well defined strategy, but nothing that others can see. It’s all virtual, or in documents, but nothing has been implemented. To be honest, I’ve seen a lot of strategy work end without any action being taken. And the truth is, no amount of strategy work is going to helpful if you don’t take the required action.

So if you find that you’re the type of business owner who loves to spend time in strategy mode and not enough time implementing, here are my three recommendations:

Take small action. Any action is better than no action. So break things down into bite-sized chunks and do a small bit every day.
Reward yourself for completing your action. Save that piece of chocolate until after you’ve completed your task.
Remind yourself how far you’ve come and put things into perspective. It wasn’t as difficult as you imagined it would be, right? And the benefits of taking action far outweigh the benefits of not taking action. Read that again if you need to.

Lack of Mindset

Ah, mindset. The one thing no one thinks they need until they realize they need it. Personally, I try to impact mindset through sharing my positivity, my energy and my way of thinking with my clients. But that’s not enough. Mindset includes figuring out why you are resisting certain things that you know you should be doing, and then working through those reasons.

When you have a mindset block, you’ll most likely be living out one (or a few) limiting beliefs. Perhaps you don’t believe you’re ready to take action. Or you don’t think you deserve to make money. Or you think sales is icky. These beliefs then drive your subconscious and you’ll live them out without realizing it. You’ll give a less-than-stellar strategy call or pitch. You’ll be too busy to do any marketing. Or you’ll spend minimal amount of time, if at all, “selling”.

Watch out for your thoughts. What do you tell yourself frequently? “I am terrible at marketing”? “I don’t want to be that type of sales person”? “Sure, she’s making $50k a month, but I could never”? Your thoughts drive your beliefs which drive your actions. If you think you can’t, if you think you shouldn’t, if you think you don’t deserve it, etc, you won’t do it or get it. You might not realize it, or see it happening, but your thoughts literally drive everything you do – in life and in business.

Now you know the 3 business success factors. What’s next?

Now that you know what the 3 business success factors are, I challenge you to take the time to really watch yourself. Find out where you’re falling short. And then use the tips above to fill in that gap. When you do, you’ll see the changes start to unfold right in front of your eyes. These 3 factors literally drive the success of your business. You’ve got this!

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