When you need more than a cheerleader

This post comes hot of the heels of my business strategist mentor Tara Gentile’s last blog post You don’t need another cheerleader. This week I officially became a licensee of the the Quiet Power Strategy Strategist Training program. It was a big investment and risk but has given me all the tools I need to turn entrepreneurs into business owners. I’ve been preoccupied with learning strategies for a few years that are guaranteed to help entrepreneurs understand business.

The challenge is that most of the tools are too complex for the type of passionate entrepreneurs that I meet. Instead they are for venture-oriented high growth startups. The Business Model Canvas (tool), the Lean Startup (book) and The Lean Launchpad (course that brings it all together) are three of the main resources that any investor will want to see a startup working through before they would even think of giving them any money. The concepts are amazing; however, when I start talking about hypotheses, customer discovery and channels, my clients look like deer in headlights.

Now I have a suite of simplified, more intuitive tools to help my clients create resilient business models. They are still based in the same goodness but they take a more personal approach. They use our collective intuition and inner wisdom.

Now I’ll call myself a strategist more often than a coach. These are two very different things.

As a business strategist I use a framework of tools that are proven to help businesses grow, I hold my clients accountable to their goals, they hold me accountable to supporting them through to their goals and my clients sometimes feel as overwhelmed as empowered. They know the tasks ahead of them are not easy and it’s going to take more than a positive attitude to complete them.

Being a coach is about opening up my clients mind to thinking differently, it’s helping them see what they have already accomplished and what they are capable of doing. I help them build healthy habits and systems for productivity and taking action. It, too, is a powerful role. Some coaches come with robust strategies and training. Some are excellent cheerleaders.

All of these roles are important. You need to feel good and supported to take the steps. You also need very clear information on what the next steps need to be for you. You need to understand who your one best customer is, what they want to receive from you, how you come across to them. You need marketing strategies that resonate with customers, pricing that creates profit in your business and a natural way to trigger a transaction (sell).

All of the above can be authentic and natural and completely unique to you. That’s the whole point of quiet power.

It’s not to say that I won’t be giving my clients all the love and support they require move through growth with ease, I still have a whole lot of that.

You need both a mindset shift and an understanding about business which is the thesis of my ebook. Here’s a short excerpt from Soul Strategy – the conscious entrepreneurs guide to earning & creating value.

“Successful entrepreneurs have mastered two things – a resilient mindset and a genuine understanding of value.

A resilient mindset looks at challenges with impersonal curiosity and recovers quickly from setbacks to work out the next step. Value is the cornerstone of business. It’s the fuel that ignites the transaction and determines whether or not another one will take place.

The good news is that both of these attributes can be accessed and implemented with our own spiritual wisdom. I will show you how you already have the capability to see situations objectively and impersonally. You do it all of the time.

I will also invite you into a world where you can discover how you create outstanding value when you serve your customers. Value that fits naturally with their needs and yours. Using your own spiritual wisdom is the missing piece to creating fulfillment in the New Economy. “

Check it out here.