Sarah Lakhani Consulting

Where Brand and Business Come Together This is the space where ambitious women come to bring clarity to their ideas, structure to their growth, and meaning to the businesses they’re building.

Business Foundations

Your Business Needs a Strong Foundation to Grow

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Here’s why… and how to get there.

In today’s online world, where more and more businesses are either expanding to online services, pivoting to become fully online or are launching as an online business from the get-go, having strong business foundations for your online business is key to secure your growth and longevity.  

There are 4 essential building blocks to an online business, and in this article, we’ll dive deep into each of them.

The four building blocks are:

  1. An aligned Business Model
  2. A strategic Offer Suite
  3. Magnetic Marketing
  4. Feel-Good Sales Strategies 

Business Model

Online business models vary – there are many tried-and-tested business models out there that you can use as is or modify in a way that works for you, your business and the lifestyle you desire. The important piece here is to find a business model that resonates with the type of work you want (and like) to do and deliver.  Some things to consider are whether you’re a natural content creator and would prefer to spend your time bringing in new leads and clients, after which the fullfilment of their purchases is highly automated or low-touch, or whether you’re more of a “deep dive into one client/project” person who would prefer to charge higher fees and have less clients. 

1. Subscription-Based Model

This model is usually based on a monthly or annual fee.  

Examples of this in the online expertise-based world are masterminds, miniminds, and memberships.

And you can get creative with this business model by offering subscriptions that give your clients access to paid masterclasses (or a set number of masterclasses per month), access to you or your team (like a retainer) or a combination of these services.  

2. Commission-Based Model

This model is built on taking a percentage of the deal/contract that you help materialize – or a percentage of the eventual revenue or profit that is generated from your services on the project.  

Examples of this in the online expertise-based world are kick-backs or referral fees if you generate business for a partner/colleague/other business, structuring a program at a low(ish) fee and adding on a percentage of the revenue or profit growth due to the expertise you provided in your service.

You can get creative with this business model by incorporating it into your 1:1 coaching, consulting or DFY services, by structuring the price as a base price + percentage of revenue/profit growth.

3. Freemium Model

This model is built on offering a free version of your product/service with an option to upgrade to a paid version for more access.

Examples of this in the online expertise-based world are offering a free lesson from an online course so your potential clients can get a feel for your course and teaching style before making a full purchase of your course.

And you can get creative with this business model by incorporating it into DFY (done for you) services by offering a free audit or assessment, with the option to then purchase your full program or services to bridge the gap between the client’s desired goals and the audit/assessment findings.

4. Agency Model

This model is for DFY (done for you) services, where a client pays you to have something created specifically for them.

Examples of this in the online expertise-based world are in areas such as social media marketing and other digital services such as website development or systems set-up.  It’s also used by consultants who offer DFY services such as taking on and completing projects end-to-end.

You can get creative with this business model by creating a team of freelancers, other businesses or service providers to offer a larger array of services to your clients, as a one-stop stop.

5. Value-Add Model

This model can be added onto any of the other models simply by providing additional add-ons that your client can choose from and add onto purchased services.

Examples of this in the online expertise-based world are having a “menu” of add-ons that you offer clients such as additional 1:1 time, access to paid-for resources or additional time on a retainer or program (e.g. extending the support timeline).

You can get creative with this business model by providing an additional support upsell within a group program or self-study course or offering on-going support for a set duration e.g. 3 months after the closure of a group program or 1:1 package.  

Offer Suite

Whichever business model you choose, the next step is to ensure you have a strategic offer suite.  This means choosing an offer suite that works best for your strategy.  

Typically this looks like having 3-5 offers that clients can “move through” as a customer journey within your business services.  The offers are priced at different price points, in alignment with the work/content provided and the transformation or results delivered.

This allows clients to make repeat purchases, increasing your customer lifetime value (i.e. allowing you to make more revenue per client) because once they’ve purchased one of your services/programs/offers and had a great experience with it, they’re likely to then make another purchase for another one of your services/programs/offers. 

What’s most important here is to make sure your offers don’t canibalize off of each other.  This is a common mistake in offer suite development, and results in potential clients not being able to easily decide which offer is right for them – which ends in them not making a purchase at all.  

Marketing

Most people don’t enjoy marketing.  I personally have a love-and-hate relationship with it myself.  However, if there’s one thing that’s the most important thing when it comes to creating consistent growth in your revenue, it’s marketing.  

So, how can you make marketing fun – or at least more tolerable?  

The first thing is to change the way you look at marketing.  Marketing doesn’t have to be showy at all.  It’s allowing your potential clients to see how you can help them by guiding them to change their perspective on what they’re currently stuck on, sharing a new perspective with them (i.e. what you do and how you do it) and taking them behind the scenes to see how this works, and what results you’ve been able to generate for others.  

Marketing is more about connection.  It’s not necessarily sales, although the two get blended a lot in the online space.  Marketing is about sharing your business and services with your audience, but making it about them – not about you.  

Your goal is to get people to see themselves in your marketing, to help them build a connection with you, see you as an authority and begin to trust you.  

Most of the time, people get stuck on marketing because they don’t know what to share or talk about.  This is where content pillars and filters makes marketing much easier.  By having topics you consistently talk about, and ways in which you talk about them, you can easily create content for 2 weeks, a month, or more in advance.  

So think about what you offer, what the key pillars are, and the different angles in which you can talk about these topics.  Create a table with pillars down the rows and filters (angles) across the columns, and spend an hour or two popping in ideas.  Not only does this simplify marketing for you, but it also helps you maintain a cohesive set of topics that you regularly talk about, making it easy for new potential clients to easily understand what you do, who you do it for, and what your take in your industry is.

Sales

Lastly, we have sales.  There is no business without sales.  If you’re struggling to make sales, it’s time to change what you’re doing on the sales front because your business needs to make money to survive – and ideally from there, to thrive.

Like marketing, many people dislike sales.  But sales doesn’t have to feel “sales-y” or “icky”.  Sales is actually a service to your ideal clients.  By reframing the way you look at sales, from it being a “I’ve got to try to get a client” mindset to “I have something that I can provide that someone else really needs” mindset, you’ll eventually come to realize that not doing any sales activity is actually selfish! Your potential clients need what you offer.  There is something they are struggling with, and you have the solution for it – whether it’s coaching, consulting or DFY services.  

When it comes to sales in the online space, there are two main categories of sales strategies – live launches and evergreen funnels.  I always recommend having both set up.  A live launch allows you to show up fully, take your audience on a deep dive of your current offer/service/program and get them excited about it and ready to buy!  On the other hand, an evergreen funnel allows your sales system to be fully automated, typically detonating from a freebie through to a series of emails that ends in a pitch for one of your offers/services/programs.  Having both these sales strategies in your business allows you to continue to make sales even when you’re not live launching (i.e. through the evergreen funnel) and also allows you to reap the excitement of a large revenue influx (i.e. through the live launches). 

So when it comes to sales, you’ll have a situation where your marketing tees up demand, with a live launch then taking your audience through the full sales experience, or you’ll have a situation where your marketing has CTAs (calls-to-action) to grab your freebie, which then denotates the evergreen funnel.  

Choosing one over the other is a matter of preference, and there are many business owners who skew one way vs doing both, but I implore you to consider having both in your business.

Want to Work on Your Business Foundations?

If you’ve recently launched your business and are looking to have the foundational business elements in place in a strategic way, check out Business LaunchPad.  This program covers all the above topics, in a 3-month timeframe so that you can develop the powerful and strategic foundations for an online business that thrives! 

Finding Your Niche

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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

Reframing Questions to Drive Success

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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.  

Did this help you? Share it with others who might get insights out of this, too!

The 3 Business Success Factors

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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:

  1. 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.
  2. Reward yourself for completing your action.  Save that piece of chocolate until after you’ve completed your task. 
  3. 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! 

Did you find this helpful? Share it with someone who needs it, too!

What does it really mean to be unique?

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As the online business world continues to boom, many new businesses are sprouting up that are eerily similar to other, larger, more established businesses.  There is a thin line between learning from the success of others and flat-out copying them.  The former is recommended, the latter is not.  You want your business to be different, to be unique, to deliver something no one else does.  So then that raises the question: What does it really mean to be unique?  

Competing: The two factors

In the world of business, you’re only ever competing on one of two things: price or value.  

When your business offers nothing different, nothing unique, nothing that sets it apart, you inevitably end up competing on price.  The only way to continue to get customers to purchase from you is to drop your prices lower than the competition.  And the reason for that is because there is no other differentiator.  Your product or service and your competitors’ products or services are the same.  So the decision factor becomes the price.  

On the other hand, when you offer something that others in your industry do not offer, then you have the opportunity to compete on value.  Essentially, customers will choose you because they want that additional value, or that value that is different from others.  Will all customers choose you?  No, of course not.  But those that will are the ones that you should be targeting anyway.  They are the ones who fit the description of your ideal customer.  And so because they appreciate the additional value you provide, they will be willing to pay for it.  And so the decision factor here is the value, not the price.

The link between value and price

You might be thinking that there is a decision that is made between the additional value and the additional price.  And you’re right.  The additional value you provide must be in line with the additional price of your product or service.  Customers absolutely do have a threshold of how much they are willing to pay for the additional value.  So before you price your product or service, it is highly recommended that you get a feel for this.  

So now that you can see the benefit in providing a product or service that offers additional or differentiated value, how can you make sure that your product or service is created that way?  Well, this is where we talk about being unique.  The idea behind building a product or service that is unique is that it offers something that others do not offer.  

There are three ways you can do this

The first way is to have a product or service that is so unique that no one else offers it.  This is known as product innovation.  For example, when the iPod came out, this was its edge.

The second way you can do this is to have a better product or service – something that already exists in the world, but which you provide incremental value around.  So for example, lifetime access to courses was one of these, but since becoming popular and more “the norm”, they’re not a differentiator anymore.  Providing better customer care, a higher level of service, a longer guarantee, a better quality product, a product that does not contain any toxic chemicals – these are all things you can include to differentiate your product or service and elevate it from the competition.  If you’re a coach or a teacher, this could be your unique method or your unique point of view.  

And the last way you can do this is to make your product or service available in a market in which it currently does not exist.  This is a great way to ensure you don’t have any competition. However, it requires plenty of research and an operating model designed to support a business in a place or space that others have avoided.  My favorite example of this is Carmike Cinemas which operates only in towns of 200,000 inhabitants or less.  Their entire business model is built around this, which demonstrates how a large cinema group would not be able to turn a profit in these areas, if they were to use their existing operating models.  

What makes your product or service unique?

So where does this leave you?  Well, whether you have a product or a service, it is critical in this day and age, more than ever, to know what makes you unique.  Spend some time figuring it out.  If you’re a service provider, do you provide something that others in your industry don’t?  Can you leverage that and make it a centerpiece or a highly marketed point of differentiation?  If you’re a product-based business, what features or aspects of your product are not available in your competitors’ products?  Again, you’ll want to look at leveraging that and making it a highly marketed point of differentiation.  

What if you can’t find anything unique about your product or service?

Now, what if you can’t find a point of differentiation?  Well, the only way to truly know if you are offering something that is different is to compare the features and characteristics of your product or service with that of your competitors.  So grab a piece of paper, list out all the characteristics, and create a comparison.  Now, what’s different?  If there STILL isn’t anything that pops out that makes your product or service different, it’s time to go back to the drawing board.  Find a gap in the market and fill it.  Find something that no one else is offering, and offer it.  Find something that your soon-to-be customers want and provide it to them.  

So, what does it really mean to be unique?

Having a product or service and saying it’s unique doesn’t have to refer to it in its entirety.  A unique product or service can be something that exists in the world, but with a different set or combination of characteristics.  It’s always great to have and to know what separates you from the crowd, but that by no means requires you to fall into the product innovation category.  Remember that there are other ways to stand out.  

5 Ways to Stand Out as a Service-Based Business

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Oftentimes, when we think about businesses that are unique and stand out, we tend to immediately bring to mind innovative startups such as Tesla or Amazon.  But the truth is, every business has the ability to stand out.  Not only that, but every business should stand out from its competitors.  To shed some light on how to do just that, read on for my 5 ways to stand out as a service-based business.  

The service industry is booming.  Many small businesses are now in the space of “knowledge brokers”.  These tend to be based on personal experience, such as people who lost weight teaching others how to do the same.  Or a mother who helped her child overcome allergies or intolerances now sharing that information with others.  Most business coaches teach things they, too, have accomplished.  As do many life coaches.   

But it doesn’t stop there, many talented individuals have created their own businesses around their talents.  Photographers and videographers, artists and musicians, teachers and motivational speakers – to name a few.  

Regardless of which industry you’re in, there are likely many similar businesses.  And so, to carve out your own space with your own target audience and elevate yourself from the competition, you need to find ways to be unique.  Below are 5 ways to stand out as a service-based business.  You don’t need to do all of them – just pick one or two that resonate and put your effort and energy behind them.  

Standing Out Tip #1: Target an under-served audience

A great way to stand out in your industry is to target an audience that others are not serving.  If you know of hairstylists who specialize in curly hair, or life coaches who specialize in building confidence in women, then you’ve seen examples of this.  

But to really push yourself to explore this option, consider your regular audience, and then brainstorm as many other groups of people who could use your services but are very different from your regular audience.  

Here’s an example: I help entrepreneurs and small business owners build, develop and scale their businesses.  If I went through this exercise, I might go down the path of identifying children as a target audience, because they’re great learners, very creative and might one day want to start their own business.  Using that train of thought, I’d probably end up with the idea of an entrepreneur school for children.  

Standing Out Tip #2: Create a unique and delightful customer experience – before, during and after your service

Quite often, we consider the customer experience starting from parts of the customer journey that are within our ecosystem.  But really, that’s limiting your potential for making an impact on a potential customer.  And more than that, it’s limiting your potential for making a huge impact on a potential customer because you likely will be the only business engaging with them at that point in their journey.  

So I encourage you to consider your customer or potential customer’s entire journey, starting much earlier than their engagement with your brand or business.  At these early points, is there anything you can do to position yourself as a leader in your industry?

Also look at the other end – after your service and engagement has concluded.  Some service-based businesses have already started looking at post-service experiences, such as sending flowers, chocolates or a gift after the service, or even following up a month or 6 months after coaching, for example.  

The powerful thing that comes out of these suggestions is not only that your customer might choose to purchase another service from you, but, probably more importantly, that they would recommend you to their friends because you’d be top of mind and would have delighted them with your extra service.  

Standing Out Tip #3: Talk about your values and your beliefs

A great way to connect with customers and potential customers is to have shared value and beliefs.  Often, we hesitate to share too much, but there are bonds that can be formed almost immediately between people who share similar values.

I have recently come across many service-based businesses who speak openly about their religious associations and views.  This may be a taboo topic, but it works well for attracting like-minded people into your world.  Someone who shares the same values or beliefs would very likely be more drawn to working with you versus someone else because they would feel bonded or connected with you over that value or belief.  

If you’re not comfortable getting too personal in your business, a great way around this is to find a value or belief around your business and anchor to that.  For example, I am a business coach who specializes in strategy.  I talk about strategy all the time, and I showcase the value and importance of it throughout my content.  I offer a completely different service to another business coach who might be more focused on marketing, for example, or sales, or “quick wins” instead of strategy.  

Standing Out Tip #4: Create powerful alignment between your brand visuals and the feeling you want to invoke in your clients

Something I love doing is ensuring my clients have visuals that match the feeling they want to invoke in their clients.  Brand strategy is all about invoking specific feelings in customers.  And so you want your branding, and particularly your visuals to invoke those feelings within your customers.  

If you were to go to the websites of social media accounts of some of your favorite brands, you’d find that just by looking at their content and their designs, you would feel certain emotions: calm, excited, happy, relaxed, inspired, motivated, pumped, energized.  

Try this exercise: go to the social media accounts of some small and corporate businesses.  Write down the feelings invoked in you.  Ask someone else to do the same, and see if they match.  A good brand strategy and well-design visuals should result in the both of you having similar (if not the same) feelings written down.  Now do this with your social media account or website.  What feelings do you want to invoke?  What feelings are currently invoked?  If needed, how can you change that?

Standing Out Tip #5: Niche down

We all know we need to niche down, but how far can you go?  I remember when I chose my makeup artist for our wedding, she asked me how I found her and why I chose her.  My answer: I wanted smokey eyes and she was the most talented from what I had seen.  Her response?  That was her speciality.  She was focused on creating smokey eye looks, and had spotted that opportunity because no one else in Italy was particularly great at it.  She has since also added to her niche with being an eyeliner queen, but the point is that she is known for specific things within her industry.  It’s not just make-up, it’s also not just being a wedding and fashion make-up artist.  She was known for something even deeper than that.  Similarly, my friend picked her make-up artist because she did the best “natural” looks.  What can I say? We’re clearly opposites.

The same applies with art, photography, videography, coaching, teaching… there has to be something within your industry that you niche down to so that you become known for that specific thing.  

How to Stand Out 

Like I said earlier, you absolutely don’t need to do all these at once.  Choose something you feel comfortable with and try it out for a few weeks.  See if you get more service inquiries, more engagement, and more sales.  If it works, stick with it.  If it doesn’t, try another suggestion.  Remember, there is no failure, only lessons.  

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Plan versus Action

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Somewhere along your business journey, I’m sure that either you or someone around you has brought up the question of spending time putting a plan together versus taking action and figuring things out along the way.  It seems to be a dichotomy.  But it’s not.  In the question of plan versus action, the truth is simple: there should be a continuous ebb and flow between planning and taking action. 

Entrepreneurs are known for taking quick action, versus traditional corporates where planning, exploring different strategies and ensuring perfection before moving forward is the norm.  But neither extreme is the right way forward.

As entrepreneurs, we often come across the advice to “take messy action”.  And yes, taking action early on is absolutely necessary.  You learn by doing, not by thinking.  You validate your business idea, your product/service, your offer, your marketing, your branding and messaging – all of it – by taking action and gathering feedback.  But that’s not to say that you should take action without thinking things through.  

What goes into planning?

Planning is the first step in your business.  When I talk about planning, I don’t mean to immediately jump into a business plan.  Nor do I mean anything detailed like a content plan.    Initial planning is about getting clarity on your business idea.  Initial planning is getting clear on your vision, the problem you’re solving, how you’re going to solve it, the solution you’re providing, who your ideal customers are, and how you’re going to monetize your idea.  It involves a lot of research and results in capturing your business idea in the structure or framework of a business model.  Again, this won’t be as detailed as after you’ve taken action, but what it does is it allows you to be able to articulate your product or service and create prototypes or beta versions to test and gather feedback on.  

What goes into action?

Once you have your business idea, you absolutely should start testing it.  If you have a product, gather feedback on it by offering some free samples, or a discounted initial price.  If you have a service, begin a beta phase, again either free or at a discounted initial price.  In this phase, you are testing your product or service, gathering as much information and feedback about it, and deciding on the changes you will make to it.  Your changes will include adding, removing, upgrading and downgrading elements of your product or service.  At this point, you will also gather important information on the messaging you will later on use in your marketing.  Once you have made the changes, depending on how big they are, you can either test again or move into your launch.  

The cycle between the two

Often, we’ll find that there is a cycle back and forth between the two, particularly when the product or service being created is highly innovative.  So you’ll do some planning, then move into action, and then go back into planning, then back into action, etc.  The reason this happens is because in each cycle, you’ll make changes that are larger compared to if the product or service had already existed in the market.  You might, however, still want to go through a second round of planning and action, even if your product or service exists, depending on what it is and how many changes you’re making. 

How much time to spend in planning before moving into action

The question of plan versus action is not black and white.  It’s a balancing act that you need to figure out for yourself, your business and your product/service.  And there are several things that will drive where that point of balance is for you.  On top of the questions I suggest below, it’s important to factor in what makes you comfortable.  If you prefer to spend a bit more time in planning, then do it! It’s your business and your decision.  But always check back to make sure you’re not procrastinating because of a hidden fear driven by a mindset block or a limiting belief.  

How innovative is your idea?

The more you’re pushing boundaries, the more you’ll want to get out and test your idea.  This might be a bit counter-intuitive, but the reason behind it is that it’s going to be very difficult to find existing data on a product or service that doesn’t exist.  So if your product or service doesn’t currently exist in the market, then you’ll need to generate that data yourself.  That is why the more innovative your idea is, the more quickly you’ll move onto action.  And in this case, your action will consist of prototyping, testing, collecting feedback, making changes as needed and then re-launching.  And the faster you can get through these, the more quickly you’ll have a product or service that you can sell.  

How many similar businesses are out there (who have already validated your idea)?

If, on the other hand, your product or service exists in some form in the market today (and makes money!), then you will probably spend more time on collecting information that will shape your specific business, your product/service and your offer.  And the reason for that is because data exists.  So instead of having to go out and generate data and feedback yourself, you can easily leverage the information that is already out there.  And you 100% should!   

How much is it going to cost to create or set up?

Another factor to consider is how much your new business venture is going to cost you, not just in terms of money, but also in terms of time, resources, and other lost opportunities.  If the cost is high, then you’ll most likely want to make sure you have a solid understanding of your customer needs, struggles, likes and dislikes (with regards to your product or service), the value you are providing and how it’s going to solve the problem that your customer has.  This is, of course, dependent on whether information exists for you to tap into.    

How much time do you have to spend on research and planning before you absolutely must begin bringing in revenue?

Lastly, your planning phase can be stretched out if you already have an existing income stream, are not in a hurry, and would prefer not to hustle and push yourself to get your business idea implemented quickly.  I love to see people spend an allocate amount of time to building their business (or a new revenue stream within their existing business) while still working a 9-to-5 job or delivering their existing products and services.  The great thing about this is that you don’t stress yourself out, you don’t allow yourself to get overwhelmed and you don’t burn out.  The flipside, however, is allowing yourself to take too long or never getting it off the ground.  

Plan versus Action

Once you have an idea of where your business idea stands and how much time you should spend on planning before moving into action, you’ll need to figure out just what the planning stage entails and also, what the action stage entails.  So it’s time for you to decide – plan versus action?  How much time should you spend in each phase to generate the highest benefit for you and your business?    

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My Client Success Journey

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Before working with a coach, I think it’s helpful to know what their client success journey looks like.  This helps you decide whether their roadmap is one that will benefit you and maximize the results you’re looking for in your business.  

Introduction to My Client Success Journey

My client success journey consists of 5 phases.  Over the past few months, I have found this to be the best way to get results for your business.  These 5 phases help solidify your unique proposition, your competitive advantage, your differentiating factors.  They also build on each other, culminating in a business that has a solid foundation.  We cover every element of your business, from the vision to the customer acquisition strategies.  We talk about your business model, your brand strategy, your positioning, your business strategy and we create a roadmap of action items to guide you to your goals.  

You’ll notice I use a lot of strategy in my client journey.  I whole-heartedly believe that any person in business should spend some time figuring out what is going to work best for them and their business before jumping in.  That doesn’t mean I don’t believe in taking imperfect action, because I absolutely do.  In fact, I’ve pivoted my own business several times.  But it’s important to have a plan, to be positioned a certain way, to develop strategies across brand, business and customer experience that work together to reinforce your brand and your business.  

Phases within my Client Success Journey

My clients have found my easy-to-follow, step-by-step and practical approach immensely helpful in uncovering opportunities to leverage and identifying areas to improve within their businesses.  And so I’d like to share my Client Success Journey with you today.  

My Client Success Journey

  1. Vision, Mindset
  2. Business Model
  3. Brand Strategy
  4. Business Strategy & Roadmap
  5. Customer Strategy

Phase 1: Vision and Mindset

When we start working together, I encourage you to spend some time understanding your future vision that you have for yourself.  It’s important for your to have an idea of where you want to go and be really clear on what that looks like.  The more clear your vision is, the easier it’s going to be for you to get there.  Your future vision can be broken down into a long-term (e.g. 10 year) vision and a short-term (e.g. 1 year) vision.  That’s what I find works well for my clients, as well as for myself.  

Your vision and your mindset are closely related.  When you can picture your vision, and you spend some time every day, whether by working with me, or working on the activities and exercise we would have talked about, you reinforce your direction towards that goal.  

There is some magic that happens when you have someone in your corner, reminding you every day that you have this vision that you are going to accomplish, and that you absolutely can accomplish.  Whether you believe in mindset or not, and whether you work on your mindset regularly, having someone motivating you along your journey is a game-changer.  Often, I find that when people work alone, without a business coach or a business partner, they lose sight of their vision.  Their days become filled with their day-to-day tasks, and they lose the momentum and the ability to take leaps and bounds towards their ultimate goal.  It is so easy to get bogged down in your daily tasks, and to forget about your ultimate destination.  The unfortunate thing about this happening is that it becomes increasingly difficult to get to your destination when your mindset isn’t in the right place.  

Phase 2: Business Model

Once we have the vision and the mindset in place (the mindset work is continuous, and carries on throughout our engagement), we focus on developing your most aligned business model.  When it comes to business models, the possibilities are infinite.  At this point, it is most important to design your business in a way that suits you, your vision, your dream lifestyle, your strengths and your skills. 

We use this time to hone in on the ideal customer for your business, and we develop an irresistible product or service offer that really and truly solves their problem or gives them the desired outcome they are looking for.  We also take the time here to make sure the delivery mechanism is optimized for your strengths and delivers a great experience to their clients.  And lastly we make sure to explore different profit models and choose the one that aligns to your vision.  

Phase 3: Brand Strategy

Once we have the vision, mindset and business model in place, we can begin working on the brand strategy.  In this phase, we start putting together the positioning, and the ultimate look and feel of your business.  This is an in-depth exercise involving plenty of research on your ideal customer and your competitive landscape.  

At this point we also dive deep into the offer you have in place for your clients, and we optimize it for outcome, effectiveness and positioning.  This ensures that you have something in place that will attract your most ideal customers and give them the results they are looking for (and more!). 

And lastly, we ensure that all customer-facing platforms such as social media platforms and your website are in line with the brand strategy, both in terms of look and feel we well as content.  

Phase 4: Business Strategy 

By the time we get to the business strategy phase, you will have so much clarity on your business, covering your business model, your profit model, your brand strategy and positioning, your irresistible offer, and the value you provide your clients.  

At this stage, we put the final touches on positioning.  We make sure we are clear on the unique and desirable position that you and your business will occupy.  If there is anything that needs re-positioning, this is when we identify and make those tweaks.  

An extremely helpful part of this phase is getting your roadmap together.  This roadmap is broken down into your strategic pillars and outlines all the actions that need to be completed to get you from where you are today to that future vision we had outlined earlier in our engagement.  You will find this activity to be extremely useful as it alleviates the stress, anxiety and overwhelm that comes with running your own business.  The actions within the roadmap are prioritized so that at any given point, you know exactly what you should be working on, and can focus on that instead of your entire to-do list.  

Phase 5: Customer Strategy 

In this final phase, we explore all the different ways you can delight your customers.  In business, there is nothing more important than keeping your customers coming back for more.  And the best way to do that is to ensure you have an incredible customer strategy.  

This strategy covers acquisition, in-service, post-service and every existing or potential touch-point that your client does have or could have with your business.  I believe that the majority of businesses do not spend enough time on their customer strategy.  This is a huge missed opportunity, because your customer experience can make or break your relationship with your customers and your potential customers.  

Expected Outcome

Once we go through all 5 phases, and even as we work through them in our time together, the clarity, focus and direction you build up starts creating ripple effect in your business.  Your messaging becomes more clear.  Your content becomes more consistent.  You start understanding who you are serving and why you are uniquely positioned to offer them what they want, need and more.  

Your business starts taking a more defined and clear position, which makes it more magnetic to your ideal customers.  You will find opportunities to leverage that will help you get to your ultimate goal.  And you will find it easier and easier and a lot more exciting to work towards that goal.  

And more than that, having someone in your corner, guiding you through your strategic decisions and cheering you on, is absolutely priceless.

I hope this client journey inspires you. If you know someone who would benefit from this, please share!