“Begin It NOW!”
By Andrew Ferguson
“Begin It NOW!” says Andrew Ferguson
Thinking about a professional training? START YOUR BUSINESS NOW!
Learning your trade? START YOUR BUSINESS NOW!!
Nearing the end of your skills training? START YOUR BUSINESS NOW!!!
Got the qualification? START YOUR BUSINESS NOW!!!!
I’m not suggesting you do brain surgery before you’ve done the anatomy; but I am strongly recommending you set things up so you hit the ground running the minute you are ready.
Here are 12 practical steps to get you up and running. You may notice that ‘Write a Business Plan’ is not one of them! This is because you can’t write a realistic plan without doing it - it’s like trying to learn a language with your nose in a book! A Plan will eventually be very useful, but it’s not the first priority; you have to find out what to put in it! If you do these 12 things, the Business Plan will take care of itself - you’ll sail through it, instead of creating yet another time-consuming barrier or displacement activity.
“Life” remember “is what happens while you’re making other plans.”
THE 12 PRACTICAL STEPS TO GET YOU STARTED
• Start talking to people about your new career NOW! Tell them what you’re studying, why, what it’s done for you yourself, why it’s brilliant ... and when you’ll be in business. Set a date when you’ll be calling them up to book in a session and give you ‘referrals’ (names of other people you or they will contact to give you a try). The great thing about talking ‘too soon’ is that you’re not expected to have all the answers! Memorise this phrase - “I don’t know. Why do you ask? I’ll find out and get back to you.”
• Start listening to people! How do they respond? Who’s genuinely excited for you? Who get’s their diary out? And who raises worries and concerns? Do not take this as unfriendly or unsupportive criticism. Thank them for their concern, and invite them to expand, “because this will be really helpful to me”. Then ask them how they (or you) can overcome the problem. If you show you’re realistic about the risks, they could become your strongest allies.
• Experience your therapy. Go to several practitioners of your therapy for treatments - the best you can afford. Tell them what you’re doing and why. You want to experience first hand how different practitioners work and how it feels ... and how this changes and deepens over time. You’ll discover how to describe what you do in terms your potential clients will relate to ... and buy. In the process you can also be seeking out a mentor, someone you could join as a junior partner, someone who’ll get to know you well enough to endorse you. One very good way into business is piggy-backing - you find a really successful therapist with more work than they know what to do with ... and take the surplus off them.
• Brush up your personality. People buy from people they like ... especially early on when we don’t know if you’re any good. So get your 6 best friends to tell you a) 6 things they most like about you, b) 3 things they respect you for, c) 3 things they admire you for and d) 3 reasons why they think you’ll be successful in your new career. Record the answers and see the pattern that emerges. Offer to do the same for them.
• Practise being positive. Everything that happens is for your personal benefit and learning. (Please listen, because if you ignore the tap on the shoulder, you get the 14lb sledgehammer between the eyes.) Learn to respond to everything with TWO positives - your monkey mind then gets bored and you don’t get snared in its negativity.
• Take your brakes off! Everyone else will tell you to push harder and pump more gas; but the truth is that if you just find your handbrake and release it, you’ll take off like a rocket. The key to success and fulfilment in business is personal growth. So extend those sessions with your 6 friends to find out your growing edge. Once they’ve told you how wonderful you are, most people are more comfortable about telling you how you let yourself down ... if you ask them. Ask for 10 ways you could improve; then work from the bottom of their list up! Be brave - ask what’s so awful they can’t bring themselves to tell you! This ‘shadow’ stuff is the main barrier you face; the sooner you work it, the sooner you’ll have a happy business.
• Discover what it takes. You do these first 6 things and you’ll have found out what it takes. Business is about people - full stop! Your ‘job’ now is being authentically the best you can be, engaging deeply with others, listening profoundly, sharing your passion and putting it into practice. It takes 2 or 3 years to get your practice to first base, because it takes 2 or 3 years to develop relationships of trust and affection with potential clients and allies. They have to get used to the idea, and undo whatever solution they’ve come up with so far, even switching their allegiance from someone else.
• Map your worlds. Got an address book? Started a database on your computer? These people, and people like them, are your first client groups. Build these lists, and make certain the people you know really well are listed too. Now take a huge sheet of paper and put a photo of you in the middle of it. Unload your address books onto this map, with any visual images that bring it to life for you; put your closest friends closest to you on the map, and so on out to friends of friends of friends and people you barely know (yet!) or met once on holiday 10 years ago - they go at the edges. It is significant what sort of people you have attracted to you in your life - they like you, and that’s why they’ll buy from you! As you do this, circle in red those who will become clients, and in green those who will refer others to you or open doors to other worlds; dotted lines for ‘maybes’. These are the next people to go talk with - to check your assumptions and add dozens more names.
• Harvest your past. Review your life to date. What jobs have you done, what experiences have you had, what are your origins, what languages do you speak, what worlds do you inhabit, what are you passionate about, what natural gifts and acquired talents do you have, what skills - including those you don’t acknowledge yourself for? What resources do you have that can be brought to bear on your new career? All this defines your unique niche in the market - a nurse, a musician, an accountant, a Russian scientist, an actor will all appeal to different people. Work out who you are and who you are becoming and who will therefore choose you in preference to all others. These are the next people for you to go talk with!
• Be a go-giver. Now you’ve ‘broken the sound barrier’ and got out there in the marketplace, learn the only secret of networking. Give! Give with no expectation of receiving back. Give your total attention, encouragement, ideas, experience, information, contacts, a new perspective, a helping hand, a smile. The glow this gives you makes your light shine bright. Go to wherever the sort of people you’ve identified above congregate ... and give.
• Countdown to launch. As your launch date approaches, start mailing your lists of contacts 6 months ahead (if poss) ... every month ... with a different offer/benefit/idea each time. This means writing up what you’ve learnt from all your hundreds of conversations. Focus on the result they will get from receiving your treatment - the pain that’s commonly removed, the pleasure engendered. Then - you guessed - try out each message on a few people in your target group, before you mass-mail; if you use email, keep it VERY short with everything in the headline, and check that email is how your target group prefer to communicate.
• Prioritise. You only have time to do 10% of what’s really important. You’ll always be deciding which 9 great things you’re not going to do! What I’ve suggested here is that the priority is to put yourself about in productive directions ... and equip your allies so they can put themselves about for you.
Don’t read anything else until you’ve done at least one of these 12 things - the one that takes you the biggest step towards where you most want to be.
There’s lots more really excellent information and ideas in the articles on this website and the books featured here. Check out especially ‘Ten Steps to Success’ which tells you how to turn these ‘12 Practical Steps’ into a Business Plan that has some relevance to the real world, and ‘Take The Brakes Off!’ which covers the crucial topic of getting out of your own way.
Some of the contributors to this website are available to speak to your group, to make inputs/visits to training courses and/or coach you 121 over the phone or in person. What you have here is what you will find you most need - objective, expert support and a friendly point of contact.
© Andrew Ferguson t: 020 7473 5544 www.lifeshift.co.uk
Andrew Ferguson - The Wise Old Owl
t: 020 7473 5544
e: info@thewiseoldowl.co.uk
www.thewiseoldowl.co.uk
www.lifeshift.co.uk
This article was posted by Andrew Ferguson
