Hi there, Wellness Entrepreneur! Welcome back!
Today, we’re going to talk about how to adopt an entrepreneurial mindset. This is the mindset that you want to commit to when you make the decision to start your own business – whether you decide to be a solopreneur, Incorporated, LLC, any of these titles. It’s just when you’re going off on your own, even a yoga teacher as an independent contractor, and you’re not an employee working in someone else’s business, you need to embody an entrepreneurial mindset.
Entrepreneurial Mindset = Discerning
Having an entrepreneurial mindset does not mean forcing yourself to work or overwork. It doesn’t mean shoulding yourself to do certain things to get your business exactly right. However, entrepreneurial mindset does mean discerning.
When you’re indulging in, for example, the drama of making a decision, and maybe, you crowd source or you avoid uncomfortable work. And how you avoid it is by not doing it, and scrolling on Instagram for example. Or maybe you hire that marketing assistant before you even truly marketed for your business yourself. Or you get sucked into shiny object syndrome – meaning you’re doing one-to-one, someone else launches an on-demand program and you’re like, “Ooh, that looks nice. I think I want to do that in my business,” even when it wasn’t part of your one, two, or even three-year plan. Or you don’t take responsibility to be the leader in your business, which is important, whether you have your own employees or not. And lastly, it can also mean not knowing your business numbers or paying for too much business expenses or thinking that there should be no expenses in your business in the first place.
So we’re going to talk about all of these, all of these indulgments, I guess you could say, overlap and influence each other and show up in a variety of ways in your business. So we’ll talk about each of those and mindsets to have instead.
Here’s What You Can Do If You Want Freedom To Work With Your Clients
I think the common mistake is that when you start your own business, you want the freedom to work with your clients, your students, your patients in a certain way where maybe you felt constricted before as an employee or maybe you would like a little bit more freedom over your schedule, or maybe you want the potential to have unlimited revenue, right?
As an entrepreneur, that is available to you, all of those are available to you. The path to get there, however, is the combination of yes, doing the work that you desire, fulfilling your purpose by working and helping, serving your clients, your students, your patients, and, you have to also do the work on your business as well. Sometimes this is labeled admin tasks, which just sounds cumbersome.
Right now, you have a choice if you only want to work with the people, meaning you just want to show up for your day-today and just teach classes or just focus on the people and you don’t want to do any of that other business stuff, the admins – paying attentions to the numbers, the expenses, learn how to market, learn how to sell effectively if you don’t want to have anything to do with any of that other stuff.
Here’s the truth. You might want to be an employee in someone else’s business and there is nothing wrong with that. We need an employee or else other businesses won’t thrive as well. You can choose. You can be an employee and maybe communicate with the owner so you can get your treat and work with your people the way that you would like. So you do fulfill your purpose and find freedom.
Otherwise, if you decide to go on all in, in being an entrepreneur, you asked to also have to go all in on all the components of owning a business, even if it’s the stuff you don’t necessarily like to do. I’m not saying that you have to love all that other stuff. However, you do have to do it.
All businesses have parts of work that you’ll love to do and parts of work that you just have to figure out how to do it and get it done. That’s the nature of being an entrepreneur, part of the mindset behind it.
Importance of Learning How To Market and How To Sell as a Wellness Entrepreneur
For me personally, I consider learning how to market. I consider learning how to sell, which I did not know how to do at all when I started my own business. I mean, I had glimpses of it because both of my parents are entrepreneurs. So I grew up stuffing envelopes for my dad, going door-to-door, distributing flyers for my mom. I had a sense of what it entailed, but I didn’t really know tactics.
And truthfully, those are tactics from the eighties and the nineties. So, they may or may not fit a current business in the 2000s. I had to learn it just like you because we aren’t taught this in massage school, in yoga teacher trainings, in physical therapy or healthcare provider schools. I learned in my physical therapy school, the extent of our business skill knowledge, was learning how to create a business plan, which is so outdated and really is only applicable if you’re going to take that business a plan and apply for a loan to the bank. It didn’t really teach anything about marketing and selling. Yes, we went over numbers and rent and that sort of thing, but it was fair minimum, I would say maybe 2 to 3% of the knowledge base that’s actually required to grow those other skills of your business.
And for me, my mindset personally is I’m going to learn how to really love marketing and selling, which first the marketing came first for me. I used to dread it. In fact, I hated showing up on social media because I’m an introvert or public speaking because I didn’t like being the center of attention. I didn’t want to be boastful and talk about my business and the work that I do because I considered it to be more boastful. Instead, I had to switch all of that and consider marketing as a way to serve my people, consider marketing to be a creative aspect of my business. And now I love to market. I do it all the time.
Same with selling. I did not like or even know how to sell before. It felt icky, slimy, uncomfortable, gross. It would trigger my nervous system into a either a freeze, a flight response. And now I’m growing to love selling as well and you can too.
So it’s just considering that these other components, these other facets of your business can be part of that purpose, part of that mission that you are so driven to help and serve other people. It’s making all the facets of your business be under the umbrella of that mission of your values. So you show up in an aligned way and you’re able to navigate through the discomfort of the growth edge of learning, the skills of all this, of showing up as a new person, getting transformations yourself, and just acquiring the skills necessarily to do some work, which sometimes you just have to show up and grind it out.
Doing Things You Hate Doing In Your Wellness Business - Switching Your Perspective
For example, as I was looking forward to an event, I’m going to be launching later in a few weeks here for the end of the year event planning. We’re going to create your 2023 vision and you’ll know exactly how to make it a reality and believe it to be true.
I was looking at all the work I had to do in the backend for this. Write the e-mail, set up the registration page, link it to the funnel, set-up the thank you page, all the things, right? And as I was getting coached on, maybe on why I was procrastinating on this and delaying the start of this work, so I wouldn’t feel a ton of pressure as the event junior, I wanted to start it ahead of time. I noticed it was because my brain considered some of that work boring.
So that’s what I mean by grinding it out. Your brain might consider some of the tasks that you need to do day to day boring as well. And there’s so many ways to approach this word, meaning how can you just learn how to be comfortable with being bored and get stuff done? Or maybe it’s just learning how to switch your perspective and you’re thinking about a certain task you need to do.
So like for example, if I think about writing nine e-mails and social media posts, which essentially are invitations to come to this event, when I think of the word like “writing out nine e-mails,” that just sounds boring, and a task that doesn’t sound joyful or fun at all. However, if I think of that nine e-mail sequence or invitations to invite you to the end of the year event as love notes to you, or sprinkling little seeds of information and value throughout those e-mails, if I can be creative with the sequencing of those e-mails where I lead you through an entrepreneurial journey where in the beginning, maybe you just get to know me and then by the end you’re excited and relieved to find someone like me and enter this event and plan in a way that you never had before, that sounds super fun.
I can get creative with it and have fun. So it may be the combination of yes, sometimes learning how to be bored with some of the tasks in your business and sometimes learning how to make some of those tasks that you might consider boring, more fun and how can they be joyful? So truly embodying, embracing what it means to be a wellness entrepreneur means planning, setting goals, visions, doing the marketing, doing the selling, yes, and working with your people and ensuring they get results, knowing your numbers and so much more.
So how can you find flow with this? How can you find joy and fulfillment with all of the components of being an entrepreneur and sit in the discomfort of some of the things that maybe you don’t find so much fun or noticing when you feel fear and working through that and other negative emotions?
So how can you find flow with this? How can you find joy and fulfillment with all of the components of being an entrepreneur and sit in the discomfort of some of the things that maybe you don’t find so much fun or noticing when you feel fear and working through that and other negative emotions?
If you need help with stress make sure to read this blog:
https://igniteurwellness.com/stress-management/
Bringing In Money To Your Wellness Business
Let’s talk about the fear for a moment. Often, I find the fear is associated with failure, meaning you don’t think that you can succeed as an entrepreneur or it’s more of an acute fear that you need to get in money, bring in money right now. And there might be times when you have both of those in your business, but it’s learning how to become aware of it and shift out of that. And it’s also making sure as an entrepreneur that you always have money coming into the business.
This is where I think I see entrepreneurs go wrong when thinking that working on their website or working on that e-mail sequence or working on their brand colors and logos is actually doing great work for their business. But what it is, is stalling the money coming in because those aren’t truly money making activities.
Money-making activities, especially in the beginning of the business, is just getting out there and talking to people, networking. And this can be online or in-person and it’s believing that the more people you talk with, the more areas where you show up and you’re visible and you connect with people and you develop relationships. It’s trusting that that work over time will compound upon itself and more and more clients will start to consistently and reliably come in.
But bringing money into your business, whether it’s making offers for one-to-one or that on-demand program or a group program, whatever your offer may be, it’s remembering that if you’re going to plan a launch for example, you decide you’re going to let go of one-to-ones and do that on-demand or group program and you’ll be launching three or four times a year, then you need to have appropriate savings. This is especially true when you are learning how to launch a group for the first time.
Because people always underestimate the amount of work that goes on behind the scenes to fill a group or an on-demand program over and over and over again without those one-to-one people taking you up on your offer and trickling in. So either you have to have a lot of savings for that regardless, you have to plan for that time that maybe less revenue is going to come in while you learn how to do that. And you’re choosing launching the group and on-demand over potentially keeping your revenue the same or even decreasing some while you learn a new skill to scale and go forward for the future.
So as a wellness business owner, it’s knowing that every year, every six months, every month even, isn’t always growing years financially. Sometimes you grow in different ways by hiring a team. When you hire a team, then you might chew into your profit until that team stabilizes and is trained and then the revenue will jump when you do have that team on-board or if you are going to scale your business in other ways. Again, the growth might look different year to year, quarter to quarter, depending upon what you choose to prioritize.
If you want to get more clients from social media read this blog: https://igniteurwellness.com/get-clients-from-social-media/
Don’t Let Anything Distract You From Your Plan
Only you know what to prioritize when you have that plan. Which is why the shiny object syndrome, meaning you see something that someone else is doing in their business and you want that immediately in yours, is a distraction because it diverts you from that plan.
So then, you end up taking 10 steps down, 10 different trails instead of leading to nowhere. Instead of doing 10 steps down one trail, which conserves a lot more energy for you, especially because you’ll see a lot more progress. So that becomes a positive feedback cycle because also, if you don’t follow that plan, then that can impact your finances as well and your ability to save so you can scale in these different ways of hiring or maybe changing your offer to a scalable offer for example.
And not to say you always have to go to that scalable offer if you have one-to-ones, you can always scale in different ways there. There are so many hybrid options and there is no one right way, but you do have to have a plan of sorts. And this plan also has to have a degree of flexibility as well. So it is this art and balance, but you don’t always want to jump ship quickly and act on impulse. That is what I’m talking about here.
The other thing in regard to money is making sure you are allocating a certain amount to the expenses of your business, but not so you’re overspending. For example, hiring employees, which isn’t a business expense and is great to help leverage time at an appropriate time, but not hiring again on a whim or just because you feel that you don’t have time for something in your business yet you don’t have the revenue to support that employee or hiring an employee because you don’t like to do something in your business.
If you want to grow a business within your ideal lifestyle then make sure to read this blog: https://igniteurwellness.com/wellness-business-growth/
Getting Into The Work Itself Before Hiring And Training Someone Else
So let’s talk about some examples here. Often, I find that entrepreneurs are extremely stressed out because they’ve hired an employee, for example, to help them with certain tasks because they don’t have the time in their business and then they end up overworking to pay the expenses. Or another example is an entrepreneur hiring a marketing assistant because they don’t like marketing or hiring a salesperson because they don’t like selling. There is a difference when you hire a marketing assistant, when you’ve gone through it enough that you know how to accurately train a marketing assistant and utilize the marketing assistant’s experience in marketing.
Same with selling where it’s built into your plan, where you have enough revenue to support those staff and then you’re able to leverage your time and scale, versus hiring because you don’t have the time or you don’t like to do something without the revenue. When the latter happens, you end up hustling and scrambling and that person doesn’t become adequately trained because you’ve never done those tasks in your own business. So you don’t know how to train them for your business specifically.
The key to this is get into the work yourself, which might not be the answer that you want to hear, but I can tell you personally, because I’ve worked through both of these myself, where I thought I didn’t have enough time to do all the tasks needed in my business to make it “successful.” I got coached, I had to learn how to change my schedule and find the time in a shortened schedule to do all the things. And I did. And I am so grateful for that because now I am so much more efficient with my time and I don’t feel like I’m scrabbling and overworking to pay for employees who aren’t using their time as efficiently only because I didn’t train them well.
So it becomes much better when you learn how to manage your own time first and prevent burnout yourself before hiring. And same again with the marketing. Really learning how to market and sell yourself before hiring people in those areas. Learn how to manage your numbers and your finances first, keep track of your numbers from day one of your business, so then when you hire the CFO of your business, it’s easier to transition and work with their systems because you already had your own system. And then it becomes a hybrid approach. And when you are spending less money on employees who are not as efficient only because they were hired at not the best time, then you have more money to either invest back into the business, to develop savings, to give yourself more personal freedom. So you give your own self some profit so you and your family have personal freedom.
Now, careful here because you do want to make sure that you invest back into your business to learn the skills to get you to that next level. For example, coaching programs, other things like that, you want to make sure that you have enough money there and you’re not quickly adapting this lavish lifestyle before your business has adopted the capacity to sustain it.
Developing Leadership Skills
And lastly, let’s talk about leadership. This is important whether you have an employee or not. Leadership comes to trusting yourself and the ability to make decisions yourself.
So there is a time where you want to empty your brain and get coached. But coaching does not mean that a coach will make a decision for you. The coach will help you see your brain in where you may be making a decision from lack of information or bias or emotions, but ultimately, it is always your decision to make whatever decision you want to. And often, I find that people get stuck in indecision because of fear or failure, meaning they’ll choose the wrong decision. It’s knowing that failure is part of the gig, as an entrepreneur, it’s just going to happen.
And the more that you can trust yourself to know that if you do get it wrong, you’ll be able to get back up and try again. And when you have staff on your team, you’ll be able to admit that you were wrong and explain the learnings from that failure and help them direct to the new path. You can’t get through the gig of being an entrepreneur, getting it exactly right a hundred percent of the time. I don’t know an entrepreneur who has done that yet. You can’t try to escape failure by crowdsourcing on Facebook to find the right answer or hire gurus and coaches to help you avoid failure.
In fact, sometimes failure just catches you by surprise or you don’t even realize that you’re failing in desperation to try to avoid the failure. And how do you know? Because you’re not evaluating, you’re not looking back on previous years, you get stuck in a plateau. Often that comes from lack of evaluation. So you make different decisions with the awareness of what went wrong, so you know how to choose differently in the future. So part of being a leader, even as a solopreneur, is learning how to make decisions quickly and trust yourself that no matter what the outcome is, you’ll figure it out, you’ll get through it.
Conclusion
So there you have it, some entrepreneurial mindset, which really comes down to trust in yourself, staying the course through discomfort, navigating uncomfortable emotions, developing yourself concept all while using tools, resources, coaches, gurus to help you to keep going. Because truthfully, even if you fail as an entrepreneur, which again will happen, there’s no way you can truly get it wrong so much that your business won’t succeed unless you quit or really run out of money, then of course you may need to get a job. But even then you can still get a job and still work your business on the side and keep going. So truly, the only way your business won’t succeed is if you do decide to stop.
To reiterate, as an entrepreneur, know that there might be some things that you may necessarily don’t enjoy to do all of the time, but there are ways that you might find the process to be creative and actually enjoyable when you get into it. When you spend enough time examining your own mind regarding those specific tasks or fear, working with yourself on why you’re experiencing fear, exactly what’s happening in your nervous system, then you can grow your capacity to handle more, to work through those challenges and make plans, stick to them and achieve the goals so that way you can have the time freedom you want, you can work with your students and patients the way that you’ve always desired, you can feel fulfilled and purposeful while making that unlimited income as you grow your business. It all is available to you, but you have to keep going.
And if you want help with any of this, whether it’s finding more time in your schedule, getting more energy, learning how to make decisions quicker with more clarity, develop that plan and more, this is all work we do one-to-one. Right now I’m working with people one-to-one in The Awaken container.
To find out if you’re a good fit for this program, just sign-up for your free consult call. Or if you want help on getting more clients, you can download the free training or sign-up for the 2023 end of the year planning event. I will see you in either or any or all of those areas. You can read more about Awaken here: https://igniteurwellness.com/one-to-one-business-coaching/
Get more clients with the free training, Get Clients Blueprint here: https://igniteurwellness.com/get-health-coaching-clients/
