As we go through the life cycle of our business, we're going to come to all these different forks in the road. That's very normal. We usually wind up asking ourselves some version of the question, "Should I be branching out?" at different stages of our business.  People wonder if they should be trying out different marketing tactics, or create a new offerings, or deliver their services differently. And there is plenty of noise about what the current golden ticket is (podcasts! online courses! membership sites!) as we cycle through new trendy options. Rather than falling for other people's hype, this episode helps to navigate how to answer the branching out question for yourself through a process I call the Assumption Busting Question Tree. It's not a catchy name, sure, but it will help you surface the assumptions you might be making and get you to a clearer, more true-to-you answer about what your right next steps are.  https://www.simpleprospering.com/

Today I want to talk about the lifecycle of a healing arts business. I have been working on figuring this out for, oh… almost 24 years now… Both in navigating my own healing arts businesses (which have spanned many different business models, aka ways of delivering the service), and in helping many many other people to do the same thing. If that sounds like a snoozefest, the reason why it’s useful to connect all the dots in one place is that once you see the patterns, you can spot where you are within them (within your own business). And from there you can do a lot of things! Things like:  Understanding what is “normal” ups and downs, and what is cause for recalibrating things Assessing current challenges and knowing what will actually help to alleviate them rather than throwing everything at the wall and hoping something sticks.  Saving you from spending TONS OF TIME AND MONEY on things that will not help you because they are not oriented towards a tiny healing arts business, or because they are just not the right tool at the right time.  Feeling much more comfortable in your own skin, and in your own business, based on living up to the values and desires that you have for your work, rather than all the “supposed-tos” that float around. Basically, feeling less like you are “doing it wrong” in your business, and knowing that some amount of consternation is just normal when you are self-employed.  So… hopefully this mapping of the lifecycle of a healing arts business will help you to more quickly and easily alleviate unnecessary stress! Want some support in your business? Visit simpleprospering.com  

I’m emerging from a creative cave, and so I thought I’d talk a bit about the creative cave itself. This is when you know you want to focus thoroughly on one thing, and so you deliberately stop doing other things that will drain time energy and attention away from the One Thing.  But if you wear all the hats in your business, how do you decide what can be paused? And once you do, how do you make sure to put your creative cave time to good use?

When we work for ourselves, one of the things we are constantly engaged with is refinement.   In this week's episode I trace the journey of refinement for the Healing Arts Practice Incubator, complete with embarrassing tales of my early days in practice. 

Many of us come to self-employment through a side door. Meaning, few of us choose self-employment first, and then what it is we will do as a self-employed person second.  Instead, most people acquire some skill, and either right away or eventually, it makes the most sense to deliver that skill as a self-employed person. This means that many people wind up working for themselves without ever consciously asking themselves the question, “Do I want to be self employed?”  Oftentimes those of us who support self-employed or entrepreneurial types of businesses are caught up in cheerleading it as the best option for everyone. But in this episode, it's real talk time. Let's go through some of the pros and cons of choosing either self-employment or being employed by someone else. There is no one right answer, and, leveling with you here, there is no one perfect career path. So let's talk about it!  

We made it to the final building block! This week I’m discussing building block number 6: how to systematize your burnout proof business.  (If you missed building blocks 1 through 5, you can go back through the most recent episodes, and/or you can download the free ebook You Need a Holistic Business here.) Building blocks 1 through 5 are all about attaining liftoff, but most of what you will be doing in your business is running your actual business!  This is when the challenge becomes how to streamline and systematize the operations of your business so that you don’t wind up constantly in the weeds or constantly reinventing the wheel (I’m going to go ahead and mix metaphors here!). In this episode we cover some of the key places to set up your systems, in as simple a way as possible, so that you have more wind at your back than you have wind-drag.   

This week I am delighted to be joined by Michelle Warner, a business designer and strategist and an expert on the topic of relationship marketing.  The vast majority of what we see these days is traffic-based marketing, which is well suited to mass market brands, but not at all well suited to tiny service-providing businesses. What serves us well is strategic, generous fostering of relationships.  In this interview, Michelle Warner talks us through some of the typical misconceptions, pitfalls, and, most importantly, winning approaches to cultivate our own relationship marketing skills for our own businesses.  You can find more of Michelle Warner's work at themichellewarner.com You can find more of my work at Simple Prospering 

"Marketing" and "sales" are much loathed words and activities in the tiny service-providing business space. Most of us got into our work to help people out while practicing something we have a deep love for. Not to feel like we're shaking people down for money. That's totally fair!  Except... if a business is not bringing in revenue, it's not a business (call back to building block #1...). So marketing and sales become essential, but we don't have to do them in ways that are either overwhelming or which just feel gross. We truly don't! In this episode I discuss the simplest definitions of marketing and sales for our purposes, and the simplest and most effective (and non-gross) ways to engage with them. 

In building block #4 from You Need a Holistic Business, I'm talking about how branding (done right) puts a lot of wind at your back.  I also talk about what branding is NOT, particularly when it comes to small service-providing businesses. You don't need an iconic logo the way mega corporations do- If you're listening to this podcast you probably aren't thinking about opening up "flagship" stores, or buying a Superbowl ad, or generally "dominating market share" like an 8-figure company.  In our cases, branding is about the cohesive voice, vibe, and flow of how your business is presented in the world. In this episode, I go through each and walk you through how you can give yourself a brand refresh if you need one.  You can download the free ebook here: https://www.simpleprospering.com/free-trainings

We are going through the 6 essential building blocks for a thriving small business. This week is number 3, about how you can craft your business model in a way that is thoughtful about your strengths, your clients' true needs, and your revenue goals.  One the one hand, sometimes we assume that we need to tolerate a certain level of burnout, when we don't! And on the other hand, sometimes we seek self-employment nirvana to our own detriment, and jump from one business model to the next too quickly.  In this episode we discuss how you can think through crafting your model for yourself over both the short term and the long term.