Hi there, wellness entrepreneur! Welcome back!
Today, we’re going to talk about a very important skill as a business owner, as an entrepreneur, and this is a skill that is perfect if you’re just starting out. In fact, the sooner that you build this skill, the sooner you’ll fill your practice and the sooner you’ll be able to get more clients in the door or booking with you online.
This episode is also great if you’re an entrepreneur, practitioner, who’s been at it for some time because it is normal to have off weeks where maybe you’ve been fully booked for months, several months, and then all of a sudden, a bunch of people complete their packages with you, complete their programs with you, and they feel that they’re complete and decide not to renew. It’s totally normal.
It happens for me where I’ll go through periods where my one-to-one practice will be fully booked, bursting at the scenes, I’ll have a wait list, I’ll be starting my new one-to-one clients, sometimes a month out or more because that’s when I can get them into the schedule the soonest, and then all of a sudden, I’ll have some, a handful or a few one-to-one clients who finish with me and they decide they’re going to take some time off or they’re going to transition into the Awaken Mastermind or they’re just complete with me and that is fine.
And so I’ll go from being fully booked with a waitlist, clients renewing, 100% client renewal rate, to looking at my schedule and be like, “Oh my goodness! It’s almost half of what it was just a couple of months ago.” And when that happens, I feel my nervous system start to ramp up. I feel my primal brain start to go into scarcity and kind of freak-out mode, maybe even impostor syndrome. Who am I to teach all this business when this happens to me? Or money scarcity, money insecurity, all kinds of things happen.
So if you’re a practitioner, entrepreneur, and you’ve been at business for some time, you’ve been fully booked, your bank is abundant, and then all of a sudden, you make big investments, and your schedule decreases, the number of clients you’re working with decrease and you start to freak out, nothing has gone wrong. This happens.
And maybe it’s not investments like Masterminds. For example, I just invested in another Mastermind, The Six-Figure Liberation. I’m very excited to get into this community and learn from other six-figure earners and multiple six-figure earners, those who are scaling towards a million. I’m very excited to be in this room because I too, have those off days and moments. I have the skill of being able to sign a client today. That’s what we’re going to talk about. The Ability To Sign A Client Today.
Why Is The Skill to Sign A Client Important
A few weeks ago, we talked about the Four Steps To Fill Your Practice. Now, let’s dial down, make it a reality, and get into a more specific question that you can ask yourself. And this is personally what I ask myself when I feel my nervous system start to ramp up. When I look at my client load, I’m like, “Huh, okay, I don’t have as many one-to-ones as I used to. My bank account is a little bit leaner,” because I just made some investments, or I hired some VAs, or for you, maybe you’re hiring some staff if you’re multiple six-figure.
It’s important to have the skill to be able to ask yourself when you wake up, first thing in the morning, checking in with yourself and asking, okay, what do I need today? What do I need to feel today to support myself so I can confidently and clearly answer the question, how can I sign a client today? And your brain might be like, “Well, you know, my scheduling system doesn’t work that way. I can’t get a consult book today. They can book later in the week or next week.”
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But how is it true? We’re going to get into this more, but right off the bat, how is it true that you could sign someone today? I encourage you to really stretch your brain and investigate and answer that question.
For me, I know that I have clients who reach out to want to renew working with me at any moment. I’ll have a client who had ended their program with me, and they told me, “Well, I’m going to come back. I just have to figure some things out of the timing,” or this or that. And I say, “Great!” And I move on to the next client, focusing on the next people while they figure out what’s going to work for them. And in the meantime, all of a sudden, they reach back out and say, “Okay, I’m ready. Can you send me the payment link? Can I schedule my first call?”
That can happen for me today. Sometimes, more than one client will reach out saying that in one day. So for you, maybe you’ve sent out consult links in the past, maybe you’ve sent out payment links in the past, maybe you’ve had consults that were a maybe, that they could reach out to you today, maybe you have clients that have ended working with you, but then something new has come up or they miss working with you and realize, “Oh, geez, actually, I’m not seeing that same progress without working with her. I better go get back in her schedule.”
So right now, right off the bat, how is it true that you could sign one client today? And we’re going to get into more of this right now.
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The Belief Scale
So, as you begin to answer that question, how is it true that you can sign one client today, I also want you to check in with your belief on this. I teach my clients what’s called the belief scale. And that’s whether they work with me one-on-one or in the Mastermind. And quite frequently, we’ll tap it through because there are often layers of this. But let’s get curious about what’s going on with your beliefs right now for you.
And it’s so that you can currently honor and recognize what it is that you are feeling, even if it is a bunch of money scarcity or money insecurity or insecurity in your entrepreneurial skills. Or maybe you’re just feeling disappointed or defeated because you did have an off week or an off month. You really want to learn what you’re feeling and why.
And that is part of the process to begin to shift out of this energy to more comfortable emotions like confidence and certainty. But if you just try to resist and block those uncomfortable emotions like disappointment or failure or defeat or imposter syndrome or any of those and just try to sweep it under the rug or resist or avoid it, that’s when it comes back to bite you in so many ways because either it can stay in your system and pressure can build up, or it can cloud your judgment and your decision making, not to mention that you are a human being.
So you do really want to get curious as to what you’re feeling and why. Because no one, no entrepreneur, has 100% amazing days every day. Every entrepreneur goes through different challenges and struggles. In fact, there’s a saying that is going around as an entrepreneur that says when you fix one problem, another problem appears. So you might fix the problem of filling clients. Hopefully, this blog will help combined with the last blog of Four Steps To Fill Your Practice, and then another problem will appear.
And that’s also the benefit of having a coach to help you gracefully transition and solve one problem to the next problem. But I’ll tell you personally, the way I am more seamlessly able to get myself out of a hole or a funk or a down day or a down week, is really to get curious and acknowledge what I’m feeling and why.
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Three Beliefs in Relation to Your Business
So, there are some questions I have here to help with this process for you. We’re going to check in with three different beliefs in relation to your business.
I want you to put down on your piece of paper a scale of 1-10, 10 being amazing, 100%, zero being well, 0%. And just trust your intuition, trust your gut with what comes up, what number comes up here when I ask you about these three beliefs.
And we’ll take it one at a time, and you can get curious about all of them, and let’s uncover what’s really going on for you.
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The First Belief
So, number one is the belief that I can create a consult today. Write it down. Is it 6 out of 10, 4 out of 10?
Then ask yourself what makes it that number. If it was a four, what makes it a four? Write down all the things. These should be positive. For example, I’ve sent out a lot of consult links. I’ve been doing a lot of direct messaging and welcoming my Instagram followers. I’ve gone to a lot of networking events and talked to people. I’ve gotten some referrals this week. So, a lot of positive things, write those down. Then ask yourself, “Why is it not a 10?” Now here’s what’s going to stir up your nervous system, so be prepared, but write down the reasons why it’s not a 10.
Now, the point of this part is not to send you into a dark spiral but to really uncover the truth of what you’re feeling and why. So you can write down the emotions, you can write down the circumstances as to why it’s not a 10. Write it all out.
And then what I want you to do if there are certain emotions that you’re feeling is to tap through them using the Emotional Freedom Technique. This is what I work through with a lot of my clients. Or you can do breath work, just pausing and acknowledging what you’re feeling, or you can do a meditation or whatever process you have to work through the emotions.
Now, this is where I feel that I’m different than a lot of business coaches out there, because I do take the time to process through these emotions so that we can create space for the emotions that you want to feel. So we’ll be getting there in just a moment, but you have to first acknowledge what it is that you are feeling and give space to that. Whatever process you have to work with your emotions, do that now.
And then I want you to problem-solve and write down solutions for all the reasons why it’s not a 10 that you could create a consult today. And this is going to be challenging for your brain, because your brain is going to want to hold on to a lot of the stories as to the reason why you can’t create consults today. But if you can problem-solve for each of those reasons, then guess what? You have some action steps that you can literally take today to sign a client today.
And I’ve been there, I’ve done this work before, and I revisit it again and again and again through my own entrepreneurial journey. And every time I problem-solve through reasons why I don’t believe that I can create a consult today, I shift the energy, and I start taking action from belief, even if it is 4 out of 10, doesn’t have to be 10 out of a 10, then sometimes I do end up signing a client that day, or at least getting a consult for that day or that week, which then turns into a client. So remember, it’s all about those consistent seeds that you’re planting, because you just never know when one is going to sprout.
So some examples to troubleshoot or solve for all those reasons why you can’t sign a client today. Maybe you can send an e-mail to your list today. And if your brain tells you why, maybe how can you problem solve for that. If you don’t have the time now, maybe you can fit it into your schedule tomorrow. Tomorrow is better than not at all.
Maybe you don’t know what to say. Okay, can you bring that to your coach? I literally work on this with my clients in my one-to-one program and the Awaken Mastermind, different levels of that, depending on if they’re just starting out or multiple six-figure earners. But we work on the messaging. It’s totally possible for you to send one e-mail and sign a client, or at least get a consult.
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Maybe you have a thought that says, “Well, e-mails take me too long to write. It takes two hours, four hours, sometimes six hours. I don’t have that much time.” Well, how can you problem-solve for that? Maybe it’s just giving yourself a 90-minute time block. For sure, you can write an e-mail in 90 minutes, and if you can’t, you definitely need to hire me. But give yourself a 90-minute time block and send it out. After that point, know that progress is better than perfection. And every time you send an e-mail out, you’re going to learn from that.
There will be thoughts like, “Oh, people opened this one. That subject line worked,” or, “People actually read through this one, and I know because they clicked on the link,” or, “People scheduled consults off of this one, or people didn’t,” or, “This email didn’t get a good open rate. This e-mail had no clicks.”
Okay, that’s knowledge. What can you refine from that e-mail for the future? It’s all knowledge. And guess what? The more e-mails you send, the more chances you’ll have that someone will sign a consult off an e-mail.
Maybe one reason you say you can’t get a consult today is because you haven’t shown up on social media in a while. Okay, well, get over there on social media. Do a story. Do a post. Just rip off the band-aid. Get it done.
If social media is one, go back to the previous episode, The Four Steps To Fill Your Practice, and maybe if social media is one spoke that you’ve decided to be in your marketing wheel, then you got to rip off the band-aid and get back in there and do it. If you need to reevaluate if social media should be in your marketing wheel, now that’s another conversation you need to have for yourself.
But the quicker that you decide and commit to your spokes of the marketing wheel, and even if you fall off the wagon, the quicker you get back on again, the more seeds you’ll be planting.
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The Second Belief
Okay, here’s the second belief. You want to figure out where your number is and troubleshoot and problem-solve through and acknowledge what you’re feeling. And that is the statement, “I can create clients today.”
Now, this is different than consults. The previous one was I can create consults today. This next one is actually getting a paying client, like the fact that you can have a client who pays and starts their program with you today. Where’s your belief on that today? Then ask yourself, why is it that number? Ask yourself why it’s not a 10? Acknowledge what you’re feeling and why. And then problem-solve through that.
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The Third Belief
And then the last belief is, I can create money today, which is slightly different than creating consults, slightly different than creating clients. It’s actually having money being deposited into your bank account.
Where is your belief on that? So, just asking yourself different flavors of these similar beliefs will uncover where some of your unconscious limiting beliefs are. They can wiggle out any lack of belief in a certain area.
So then you know what to work on to create more belief so that you can have more certainty and so confidence, because that’s what’s going to fuel your action taking. And it’s going to be productive action taking, not action taking from hustle or fear or scarcity, which is much different.
What’s Next While You Problem Solve Through The Three Beliefs
Now, as you problem-solve through those three beliefs and troubleshoot and write outline items, I want you to pick out two to three actions that you can take today or this week. So it could be sending an e-mail, engaging and welcoming new followers on Instagram, make a story, making a story on Instagram, highlighting your consult, so the value of the consult and why they want to book it now instead of later, highlighting your program, and the results that you get when people work with you and pick one, pick one that as soon as you finish this blog, you’re going to get off and do.
And your brain is going to be like, “Is it enough? Is it the right one? It can’t be that simple. I can’t just send an e-mail and get a client,” but it’s true. You can. It is enough. You chose right. You believe in your decision-making capabilities as an entrepreneur, believe that you can choose the right one, and it can be simple.
Actually, simple is best. So just choose one that you’re going to get off the blog and you’re going to do today. And then you’re going to keep repeating that process until you actually sign a client. It’s that simple so that you can get a client today, this week, definitely this month. It can be so simple.
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What I Do When Someone Isn’t Signing Despite Taking Lots Of Actions
And so when someone isn’t signing a client, for example, if they start their one-to-one package with me and they say, “Okay, I’m taking a lot of action, but I’m not signing clients.” Then I start to get into other areas by asking them, “Okay, so how many hours a week are you dedicated to working in your business? Are you actually showing up and working in your business when you say you’re going to be working in your business?”
So for example, if you say you’re going to be working in your business, 9AM to 2 PM, are you actually working those five hours in your business, or are you kind of showing up at 9AM, and then all of a sudden you see your dishwasher, and the kids aren’t home, what a great time to go through their toys and get rid of them without them crying and screaming about that.And next thing you know, it’s one o’clock, and you put in another hour. But in reality, you had five hours to work, but you really only worked two. Is that happening?
Without any shame and criticism, this is just to create awareness, to make sure, because the problem is, is if your brain thinks you’re working those five hours and then you’re failing at creating a client, working 30 hours a week, it’s not the truth. And your brain might be beating yourself up saying, “I’m spending all this time working in my business. I’m spending all this energy working in my business and I’ve been in business for three years and I still haven’t hit six figures.” And then you start doubting if you should be an entrepreneur or not. That thought process is not going to serve you. And it’s not even the truth because the truth is, okay, you work a little bit in your business, but you’re not really working that whole time in your business.
So get honest with yourself, do a schedule and time on it. Are you really working the hours that you say you’re working? And if you say, “Yes, I’m actually showing up. I have my butt in the chair. I am working nine to two in my business, even if I don’t have clients.” Great.
That’s amazing. Now let’s get into what are you doing in between those hours of nine to two? Are you doing actually client-creating activities or are you hiding behind the computer screen fiddling with your website or constantly changing your niche or changing your pricing, and then you have to go back and change your pricing in all your emails and on your website and in your confirmation emails? And then you have to tweak your client delivery funnel, but you actually have no clients in that client delivery funnel. What are you actually doing between the hours of nine and two, write them down, be honest with yourself, and look at that list.
Are they truly client-creating activities? Meaning that are you actually talking to a real live human being, AKA going to a networking event, meeting people, coffee chats, being people, not cold spam messages, copy and paste, none of that, but actual following up with people who have maybe come to your workshops or following up with past clients that you haven’t talked within a year or so, or following up with people who had reached out to you six months ago and then all of a sudden fell off or ghosted you.
How about following up with people who may have engaged with your posts and just checking in with them, keeping the messages short and simple? And if you look at your list and be like, “Oh my goodness, actually, I’m not talking with human beings. I’m working on my logo. I’m working on my website. I’m taking four hours to write an e-mail. I’m taking a couple hours to write a post, and then I don’t post that post, and I try to write another post, and I don’t post that post.” This is such good awareness. This is such a good problem to have because, guess what, It’s fixable as long as you are aware and honest with yourself.
Okay, so if you think about you’re like, “I am actually kind of hiding in my business. I’m not talking with real people online or in person.” Why? Why aren’t you doing that? Maybe it feels uncomfortable. Maybe you don’t know what to say. Write all that down, what you’re thinking and you’re feeling. Get it all out of your head, and again, acknowledge what you’re feeling and why. Use your process to support your nervous system, support your emotions.
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Here’s The Next Step. What Do You Want To Feel When You Show Up And Engage With Human Beings?
Because here’s the thing, if you don’t ever engage with human beings, you’re not going to have a business. If you’re an entrepreneur, that’s the whole gig. Engaging with human beings doesn’t just mean e-mail and posting, especially if you haven’t hit six figures yet. It means you personally going out there and doing uncomfortable things like networking events or starting conversations with people, sending e-mails with people. And a lot of the times, people don’t respond back. They don’t book a consult right away, but you have to keep going. You have to keep at it, not from forcing yourself, not from hustling.
But here’s the question. How do you want to feel when doing that? I want to feel, for me personally, I want to feel in belief. I want to feel like I’m in service when I reach out to someone. I want to feel like I’m helping them.
I know I have the solutions to their problem. I just want to check in on them and see how they’re doing. I want to feel confident. I know I have the solution to their problems. I feel certain that I can help them. I feel calm. I feel grounded. I know what I need to do in my business, even if my business is slower than where I want it to be. Even if I hadn’t hit a certain goal in a timeline that I wanted it to be.
What Happens When You Believe in Your Beliefs
I haven’t hit six figures, and I’m still three years in business. It’s okay because I believe in the big picture of my goals. And guess what? I had a business, some of you know this story, that I hit six figures a few years into my brick-and-mortar year, now don’t use that and compare and despair and use that against yourself. I’m just giving a time frame.
It was somewhere between the second and third year. And not that that really matters, but some of you will ask, and I know, and then I switched a whole lot of things in my business, and the pandemic hit. And I went through some health challenges and struggles. So I went backwards for a year or two where my revenue was not at six figures. It was okay, but it wasn’t at six figures. I went backward for one or two years, which is a long time to stay backward.
But guess what? I did this process again and again, and I got myself out of the hole. I hired Masterminds. I hired coaches. I kept doing the work from belief. I had no evidence to support the fact that I would succeed again, even in my new business model. I had no evidence because a lot of things I was doing were different than what I did before.
I let go of my yoga teacher trainings. I let go of the workshops that brought in clients. I started working out of my she-shed, which does have a bathroom to support my patients that were coming here. I did a lot more work online. I changed my niche. I changed my offer. I do not recommend changing all of that at one time. It will impact your income unless you’re prepared you consciously made that decision and you thought through it, and you had adequate savings, which I did not have when I did all these changes.
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The point is, I had no evidence to support that all these changes and all these action steps that I was taking would pay off. I just had to keep showing up day after day, believing in myself, and supporting myself on the days when I didn’t believe. I had to keep putting one foot in front of the other. I had to keep asking myself, “How is it possible that I could actually sign a client today?”
And guess what? Now I’m on the other side of that. At a certain point, all those seeds that I had planted, it just clicked, and I doubled, I think, even tripled my revenue in one year. And now I’ve made the most money that I’ve ever made in eight months, not even a whole entire year. In eight months. And now I still have four months to go for the remainder of the year. I’m going to have one of my best years yet, even in an economy where a lot of other businesses are suffering. I’m having one of my best years yet.
And I have so much room and capacity for next year. I’m so excited for next year and all the ways I can support my people. I have so many ideas to bring into my programs, both the Awaken Program and the Mastermind, to help people fill their practice and hit their six figures and support my multiple six-figure owners being the CEO and the leader of their team.
And I’m not a special unicorn. I didn’t have a trust fund. And if you do, good for you! I didn’t have a lot of savings. I have to pay a lot of the bills in my house. I have to make difficult decisions and have difficult conversations with my husband that I’m going to invest in a Mastermind, and I need to do this because I want to grow my business. I have to have difficult conversations with my husband about my business expenses my take-home and my big-picture goals. Even though again, I have no evidence to support my big-picture goals. I have to believe in them first and then talk to him so he’s on board next.
I had to build my selling skills to transition from being a shy introverted self to being an introvert still but confident and loving to get out there and talk with people and lead presentations and lead workshops and do podcast episodes.
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Conclusion
In that I had to build a lot of skills. And most importantly, during the year or two when my numbers were down, I had to continue to believe, I had to do trial and error where I tried many things, and they didn’t work out first and I had to keep going and pick myself up and say, “Okay, what is it that I can do today to sign a client today?”
And the work, the effort, is all worth it because now I have a business working way less hours than I did in the past, making more money and helping more people, and you can do it too because I’m not a special unicorn and I don’t have any special skills that I was magically born with.
So here’s the next question that you can ask yourself to help you get into that action, taking that action that can help you to sign the client today. And it’s this: what is the emotion that you need to feel to take some of that action?
That might feel vulnerable, it might feel icky, you might feel like imposter syndrome, you might be at risk of failing because I’ll tell you, when I was in those down months, I had to show up a lot feeling really icky, feeling really uncomfortable to turn my business around, to get things back on track.
I had to be really vulnerable teaching workshops that I’ve never taught before, and I knew other studio owners that I worked with were saying things about my new niche, were saying things behind my back about my offer because people would tell me. So I had to do it anyway and not care about their criticism and their judgment. I had to do it for me, I had to do it for my clients, I had to do it with belief, and I had to know that things would come back around, and it did, and people changed their minds.
So, for me, I had to feel vulnerable, I had to learn how to support myself in times of failure, I had to learn how to feel failure and disappointment and feel like the world wasn’t going to end or that I wasn’t cut out to be an entrepreneur.
So what emotions do you need to feel? Maybe it’s vulnerability, maybe you need to feel shaky if you’re sending a personalized e-mail or direct message, if you haven’t talked to that person in a while, but you’ve been nervous to talk to them, maybe you need to feel nervous to teach your first workshop and actually interact with the students after the workshop, feel nervous to have a call to action like if you would like to work with me more then come talk with me after class to book a consultation. Something very clear and confident.
You probably will feel vulnerable and nervous making a strong call to action. Maybe you need to feel imposter syndrome, maybe you need to feel defeat or failure and know that with all these emotions that you need to allow and feel, that’s what’s going to allow you to sign the client.
Those emotions do not mean that anything has gone wrong. Those are the emotions that are needed to allow you to sign a client. So, write down what emotions that you need to feel. How are you going to support yourself during those emotions? What are you going to make those emotions mean?
For me I just say, “Oh I’m feeling disappointed because I failed,” nothing has gone wrong. I support myself. I have various ways to support myself like going to a very luxurious restorative yoga class. Maybe I take a few minutes to tap, maybe I take a few minutes to cry. It seems that this year, I’m crying a lot because of certain personal family circumstances that my family is going through. Maybe it’s just giving myself the luxury of space and time to process all that. Reaching out for coaching from my coaches, getting into my own mastermind. Those are all ways that I support myself. I ask for feedback on how I’m feeling and why to make sure I’m not getting caught in a story.
There are so many ways that you can support yourself during those uncomfortable emotions. By doing this, you’re going to increase your capacity to feel and endure those motions more and more. By doing that, you are going to be a badass resilient entrepreneur who keeps going even though the timeline or the goals don’t work out exactly how you imagined.
If you keep going, I promise you, then at times it will work out like you imagined. Or how could it even be better than you can ever imagine? Let’s end with that question. How could things be, maybe it’s in three years, maybe it’s in one year, but how could things be actually better than you ever imagined?
Alrighty, I’ll see you next week. Get out there and sign a client today!
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