Ep 101 - Designing a Business to Support Your Lifestyle
Business Success + Life Coach, Debbie Shadid, is talking with you about how you can design a business that helps you live the lifestyle you want to.
The unfortunate truth is that so often we go into business and it ends up consuming our lives. We spend so much time fumbling around in the dark, unsure of our footing, that before we know it we’ve spent years in hustle without much income to show for it.
As a life coach, you have the opportunity to design a business that actually enables you to live the life you want to. We can get crystal clear on how much you want to work, how much you can work, and how much you need to charge in order to make those figures work.
Listen in on today’s episode for an overview of how you can design a business that will allow you to live the life of freedom you crave.
Transcript:
00;00;06;04 - 00;00;24;04 | Debbie
Welcome to the Business Building Boutique Podcast for new life coaches. If you are a newly certified coach who's trying to figure out how to grow your business, you're in the right spot. Join me each week to learn simple business growth strategies along with step by step marketing tips to get you seen by clients in your niche. I'm going to be your guide.
00;00;24;04 - 00;00;38;27 | Debbie
I'll tell you what to do so you can feel confident in your business. And here's the truth, ladies. You can build your dream coaching business without paid ads and without a fancy sales funnel. So if that sounds interesting and you're ready to get more paid clients, then let's get started.
00;00;41;12 - 00;01;05;25 | Debbie
Welcome to the Business Building Boutique. So much fun talking to you guys about this. I want to touch base with you about last week's podcast, wondering what you're thinking about that first pillar that you get to be the brand of the business. You get to attract your boutique clients by how you show up. If you guys haven't listened to that, go back and listen to it.
00;01;06;08 - 00;01;35;17 | Debbie
Today we're going to talk about pillar two. This is the second pillar of the six pillars that make up the business building boutique. All right, you guys, we're going to talk about this. It's a proven process that I've used for years to help you attract and grow your business. Now, I wonder, have you been thinking about coaching your boutique client? Have you been thinking about how your business reflects you or how it can reflect to you or represent you?
00;01;35;24 - 00;01;53;16 | Debbie
That's what I want for you guys. I want you to think about yourself as the most amazing boutique that you walk into and everything about it represents you. Now, look, you can have a boutique that has gym clothes in it. So it doesn't have to mean that it's like really designer High-End Clothes. Your boutique can have anything in it.
00;01;53;16 - 00;02;21;29 | Debbie
Your boutique is what appeals to your client. Before we get started on pillar two, I want to share a couple of wins from the Business Building Boutique clients. These are the same results that you would get when we work together. You guys, everybody gets results. People get stuff done when we work together. So one client who I have been working with, she had never considered selling a particular product before, and she had never considered even selling at this price.
00;02;22;03 - 00;02;43;25 | Debbie
But when we worked together, she became more confident and she became more sure of what she was doing, and she saw her value more and more. And that happens because I am the light that shows you your own brilliance. I can see things most of the time that you guys don't see about yourself. And when I help you see it, you know what happens?
00;02;44;05 - 00;03;09;07 | Debbie
You show up differently in your business and you attract people who are ready to say yes. So this particular person, she doubled her prices and then she sold a client and then she came back and said, you know what? I'm going to go up again. So that is what happens. You change how you see yourself. You change how you represent your business, and you will attract clients that will pay in full, just like this lady did.
00;03;09;15 - 00;03;27;23 | Debbie
All right. The second story I want to share is really fun. It's about a lady who left her job at the end of the year. She went from making practically nothing in her coaching business that she'd been working on, like for two or three years to replacing her income in the first month. The very first month that she went full time.
00;03;28;06 - 00;03;56;19 | Debbie
She grew her email list by 500 people. 500 people, which is incredible. And that is setting her up for even more success. So how did that happen? Well, I told her what to do. She had something that she was going to be doing, and it was a pretty exciting deal that she had been invited to do. But she hadn't thought about gathering email addresses. She hadn't thought about following up with those leads.
00;03;56;21 - 00;04;16;09 | Debbie
She had been offered this great opportunity, but because she has not been in business, she doesn't have the vision to see what to do in her business. So I said, Hey, do this, this and this, and gather those email addresses, and then let's follow up with them. And she did you guys. And she is having so much fun and she's doing so great.
00;04;16;09 - 00;04;41;12 | Debbie
So your story could be just like that, knowing the full time and making enough money to cover your salary in the very first month All right. So the Business Building Boutique is open for enrollment. We do have some bonuses, a limited-time bonus to save $1,000, and this incredible template packet valued at $897. Now, you might be wondering what is a template and why is that going to help you?
00;04;41;13 - 00;05;05;02 | Debbie
These are pieces that I put together, either in Canva or email or social media post, all things that you guys can take and use for your business. So if you're stuck while you're learning how to do social media, if you can't think of content, it's content that you can take and use for your own business. If you're not great at Canva and I am, then you can take the stuff that I've designed.
00;05;05;02 - 00;05;21;12 | Debbie
I'll show you how to change the colors and use it in your own business. If you're not a great writer, which most of us aren't, when we come into this business, it's like all you wanted to do is coach. And now, you know, geez, I have to write, I have to learn technology. I have to become a graphic designer.
00;05;21;12 - 00;05;52;03 | Debbie
All the things that go with marketing your business. So I have pieces put together that I'll give you the templates, and it will make things so much faster for you. All right. Okay. Let's dive into pillar number two. This is about business and life design. You get to design your business to support whatever your dream lifestyle is. So when I start working with clients, the first question that I ask them is about how many hours they have to work on their business.
00;05;52;17 - 00;06;13;29 | Debbie
Now, some of the people that I work with are full-time, very professional women in big jobs, you know, going to the gym. They're taking care of their kids. They don't have very much time and so their number of hours to work in their business is limited. And honestly, sometimes you guys, those people get more done than anybody because they have to get focused in their time But I want to know how many hours you have.
00;06;13;29 - 00;06;30;04 | Debbie
Maybe you've got kids at home, maybe you've got other things that you're doing. Give me a total count of hours and then we're going to figure out a business that can work for you. We're going to talk about how many hours you're going to work in your business; the "in your business" part is the coaching part, you guys.
00;06;30;05 - 00;06;50;17 | Debbie
That's the number of client hours. But let me just tell you, a lot of you guys and I'm one of them, I'm working on client stuff outside of the hour that they have. So it depends on what kind of access your clients have to you. If they have Voxer access or email access or text, which I provide email and text access in between our sessions.
00;06;50;29 - 00;07;14;03 | Debbie
And I do workshops in between. I do all kinds of stuff. So my hour, it's not one hour with a client, and then I'm done. I'm working outside of that time. So I don't know what that will be for you. To help your client, is it just one hour? That's what you need to know, how many hours you're going to work in your business, in your coaching. Then there are hours to work on your business.
00;07;14;14 - 00;07;37;22 | Debbie
Now, the on your business part really is going to vary because when you're in the beginning you're working a lot on your business. If you're working on your website, if you're doing it yourself, if you're learning technology, if you're learning how to be a writer, which again, we all have to do, if you're learning all these new things, there is doubt and overwhelm and indecision that comes with that.
00;07;37;23 - 00;08;07;12 | Debbie
And we have to really coach our own brain about not changing our mind because a lot of that goes on too. So it takes more time to work on your business. And I always say that you don't really know what you need to do until you're there. So I've been in business for many, many years, but you as a coach who's starting a business might be thinking it's as simple as I just need a website and I'm just going to put together my offer and I'll just tell people what I do.
00;08;07;12 - 00;08;27;21 | Debbie
And it's just not that simple. There are other pieces that are involved in growing a successful business, so you have the number of hours that you work in your business coaching and on your business building your business. Then when you're talking about designing your life, we want to talk about vacation time and holidays. I take six weeks off a year.
00;08;28;04 - 00;08;42;24 | Debbie
Those are built into my business. They're built into my contracts. I take two weeks off at Christmas, one week at Thanksgiving, and then I take a week in the spring, one in the summer, and one in the fall. You can do that however you want to do it. And a lot of people say, oh, I would never take six weeks vacation.
00;08;43;05 - 00;09;03;03 | Debbie
There's a high chance that you actually might because you might not want to work through Christmas. You know, that time between Christmas and New Year's, you might have other things you want to do. What about holidays? Are you going to work on holidays if your coaching falls on, you know, a national holiday or you going to work? All of those things are things to consider.
00;09;03;04 - 00;09;22;17 | Debbie
Do you want to work in the evening? Do you only want to work during the day? That will determine what clients you have because if you are going to have international clients, you might have to work your hours around all the time zones. So what is that going to be for you? What's going to work best for you and best for your clients?
00;09;22;22 - 00;09;55;09 | Debbie
So go back to that question about how many hours you have to work each week. How many hours total. If it's 20 hours total, then maybe in the beginning you're coaching for 5 hours and you're building your business for 15. But maybe you can go to ten and ten. It's just all going to depend. Also depends on how much self coaching you're doing and how much time you're spending with your own coaches and those kind of things too, because that is all part of the time that you are working on your business.
00;09;55;14 - 00;10;15;20 | Debbie
All right, let's talk a little bit about this lifestyle design and the clients that you get to work with. We're going to be talking more about that, too, but who is your boutique client? This is kind of interesting because when we talk about the lifestyle that you're going to create and the hours you're going to spend in your business, the client that you work with really does matter.
00;10;15;21 - 00;10;45;01 | Debbie
You want to find a client that will fuel you, one that really feels good to work with, one that you want to say yes to and that wants to say yes to you. You also want to find a client that can pay the price of your coaching that you want to charge that will support your lifestyle. Now, this, again, is a completely new concept that probably most of you haven't heard of, but I'm not talking about just deciding on how many weeks, like six months for $5,000, which a lot of that happens in the life coach business.
00;10;45;01 - 00;11;02;08 | Debbie
I'm saying we're going to decide how much money you want to make. We're going to figure out how many hours you want to work. We're going to look at whether you're doing group coaching or private coaching, and then we're going to work it all backwards to figure out how much you should be charging per hour for your coaching.
00;11;02;09 - 00;11;33;25 | Debbie
Now, I do a workshop on this and it is kind of step by step a little bit intense. But here's the deal. When you work your way around and I did this example, if you want to make $100,000, I worked with somebody, we worked out how many hours, and we came down to this number that she was going to charge $150 an hour for her coaching, and that was based on how many hours she was going to work in her business, the coaching, how many weeks she was going to work a year, how many clients she was going to have at one time.
00;11;34;08 - 00;11;53;16 | Debbie
And we came up with this hourly price I promise you, when you know a price that's going to support your lifestyle, it's going to be so much easier to sell. It's going to be so much easier for you to quote a price, because you'll really feel good about it if you know that, hey, I'm not out of line on this.
00;11;53;16 - 00;12;13;15 | Debbie
And you know, I know this is within the realm of what I would be earning on, you know, in a career in whatever kind of job that you might have had or you might have currently. It will really help you figure out your pricing. So what price will support you and what price will be the right price for your boutique client?
00;12;13;19 - 00;12;38;24 | Debbie
These are the questions and the things that we're going to dive into when we look at this pillar two to be designing a business that fits your lifestyle. All right, you guys. So you are the architect. It's your business. You get to design it any way you want to. We're not going to go about haphazardly. We want you to design it with full intention right from the very beginning.
00;12;38;24 - 00;12;54;13 | Debbie
All right, you guys, some of you guys might be in the place where you're like, geez, I think I need to do a redesign. I need to redesign my business. Either way, I would love, love, love to talk to you. If you are somebody who says I want my business to look good, I want to know what I'm talking about.
00;12;54;13 - 00;13;16;06 | Debbie
I want to look like I'm professional to my clients. I want to attract boutique clients. I love having things pulled together. Those are some of the things that you're thinking about your business, then we should talk, because that is all that I do. I love to make business easy. I love to make you look like a pro. All of those pieces go with it.
00;13;16;06 - 00;13;37;27 | Debbie
I'll help you with what to do and how to do it. And we do all of that inside the Business Building Boutique. If you want to grab the thousand-dollar savings and those templates, then we need to talk now. Head over to DebbieShadid.com/Schedule. All right, you guys, cannot wait to hear from you personally and want to know what you think about the podcast.
00;13;37;28 - 00;13;55;08 | Debbie
Leave me a review, let me know what your thoughts are, and let me know what you would like to hear more of. Join me back next week as we go through pillar number three of the Business Building Boutique. All right. You guys have an amazing week. Until next time. Bye-bye. That's it. Thanks for listening. Now it's up to you.
00;13;55;09 - 00;14;15;23 | Debbie
Put what you learned today into action. Do what you need to be seen and then hired by clients in your niche. And if you're ready to stop wasting your precious time and get your business finally booked up, you're invited to join me in the Business Building Boutique for new life coaches where you will learn everything you need to be a coach with plenty of paid clients.
00;14;15;23 - 00;14;18;19 | Debbie
All right. Have an amazing week. Until next time. Bye-bye.