Jenn Givler, is an Intuitive Business Coach. She teach healers, alternative therapists, coaches, and spiritual teachers how to effectively market their practice using her Mindful Marketing Process. For more information about the process, her background, and informative marketing articles, check out her web site and blog at http://www.CreateAThrivingBusiness.com

We asked Jenn for a case study from her client work, and she readily agreed. When I suggested “something different”, she definitely delivered. Enjoy! -Dan

The Client

Mandy Miller has an affinity for animals. She provides animal healing and communication services and is particularly drawn to working with rescue animals and helping assimilate them in new, adoptive homes.

She’s great with the animals – her clients repeatedly tell her so. But her practice was growing at a slow, frustrating pace. She wanted to have enough clients to pay the bills and live feeling supported. But, despite her efforts to get her name out there, and her love of the work, she just couldn’t seem to get the client flow moving.

The Process
When Mandy and I started working together, she had been officially in business for 6 months. The first thing we did together was look at what she was currently doing to market and promote her practice.

Her strategy consisted of posting fliers in various places around town, telling “certain” people about her business, creating a web site, attending a few networking events, hoping, and praying.

I told her that she had a good start, but she needed a couple of foundational pieces, and that she needed to add some active marketing activities in order to balance the more passive things she was doing.

When clients first meet your business, they need to feel a connection to you. The way to do that is to speak their language. In other words, find out how your clients talk about your work, and then talk to others using those same words. So, Mandy surveyed her current clients to find out how they thought of her business. She was surprised because her clients talked about her work quite differently than she did. And she realized that the language she was using in her marketing materials wasn’t making a true connection with other people that needed her.

The next thing that Mandy needed was a way for people to stay in touch with her – such as a newsletter or blog. This way, if she met someone who felt connected to her, she could ask them to become part of her subscriber base, and could continue to stay in touch with them, and they could get to know her and her work.

Mandy and I then talked about active marketing activities. Active marketing activities include things like writing articles, and attending events. Active marketing activities are those activities that put you actively in front of people.

Mandy immediately thought of two publications that she could submit articles to, and a couple of holistic fairs, and a pet event that were coming up.

Mandy was able to easily set up the foundational pieces – changing the language in her marketing materials and on her web site, and she was excited about starting a newsletter. But when it came to the more active marketing pieces, we bumped up against some resistance.

Mandy procrastinated contacting the editors of the publications. And at her first event, she sat behind her table and when someone approached, she didn’t really say a whole lot.

This is not uncommon. When we think about our practice in the energetic sense, we get excited. We see possibilities, we’re open to opportunities. But sometimes, when we’re ready to take our efforts from the energetic, to the physical, we get stalled. Fear comes up, and we sabotage our efforts.

For Mandy, the articles and the events were scary because if those efforts brought her clients, she would have to take responsibility for someone and some other being’s healing. Not only that, but putting herself out there made her an “official animal communicator” as she called it. She would be facing her family, her friends, and anyone she met with that new title and she was afraid of what that might mean – rejection, abandonment. And what if she really couldn’t do this work? What if she failed?

Mandy and I had a few healing sessions together to work through these fears. Along with being a business coach, I’m a Reiki Master and an Intuitive Healer. We got to the root of the fear, we were able to see how it was operating in her life and keeping her stuck, and I was able to support her as she moved forward through the fear and out the other side.

The Results

Once Mandy took charge of her fear, got to the root of it and could see how it was operating for her, she was able to move forward with some of the more active marketing strategies. She was able to fully step into the responsibility of being a healer and an animal communicator.

At the events, she began talking to people when they approached her table. She changed her signage so that it was easier to read from a distance. And she actively asked people to subscribe to her newsletter.

She wrote her first article and submitted it for publication. Not only was it accepted, but she has gotten clients from it as well.

Mandy is starting to see steadier stream of clients building in her business. She has increased her weekly client load by 50% and that continues to improve as she actively gets herself out in front of new people.

Jenn’s Best Advice

One of the best things you can do in your promotional efforts is to develop and maintain a marketing strategy that contains a balance of active and passive marketing activities. The passive strategies become much more effective when you partner them with active activities.

For example, if you post a flier in a health food store, that flier will work much better if you also do talks at that store, or regularly attend events at the store.

Remember, we’re healing arts practitioners, but if we treat our practice like a business, it will be so much easier for our practice to support us, as much as we support it.

Thanks Jenn!

If you’d like to learn more about Jenn’s services or subscribe to her blog, be sure to visit Create a Thriving Business.

Coaches and practitioners: We’ll be featuring a series of case studies over the coming weeks. If you’ve got a practice growth story you’d like to share here on AHP, let us know!