This article is the fourth post in a series about creating momentum for your new, emerging work and business by strengthening your foundation before you attempt large-scale marketing efforts.
Article 1: Honoring Key Themes as I Celebrate 30 Years In Business!
Article 2: How Mainstream Business Development Lets You Down, Steers You Wrong Article 3: When Business Guidance Triggers Business Trauma
Article 4: Read Below
Article 5: A Strong Business Foundation Creates Momentum in Your Emerging Venture
Article 6: The Best Way I Know to Create Momentum in Your Emerging Venture
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The Mainstream Approach I’ve written about in the last two articles (When Business Guidance Triggers Business Trauma and How Mainstream Business Development Lets You Down, Steers You Wrong ) consists of more than just program development and marketing strategies
Inherent in this approach are specific mindsets, perspectives, goals, and structures that have their roots in our culture. You may note the dominant definition of success, a premium on speed, and an emphasis on action.
These energies are deeply embedded in how we’ve been taught to build our businesses. It takes time, awareness, and determination to untangle and remove these influences from the way we think about business.
The gentle, organic unfolding nature of the approach I recommend for those who are bringing a new, emerging idea to the world taps into an entirely different culture with guidelines that are encouraging, nurturing, and nourishing.
It takes awareness and practice to remain grounded in these organic perspectives when mainstream messages keep seeping into our experience.
Business Development Approaches: Sensing the Differences
As with so many aspects of life, consciously seeing the patterns is the first step to creating change. To take in the inherent differences between these two approaches, read each of the themes below. Take note of how your body, mind, and spirit respond to each description.
Underlying Motivation
Mainstream Business Development Approach: Go BIG or go home! Earn a big income. Be an influencer with a big reach. Rock it!
Organic Development Approach: Create a viable business that supports your clients in creating change in ways that align with your values, uphold your integrity, and create meaningful results.
Purpose and Emphasis
Mainstream Business Development Approach: Get to market as quickly as possible, make as many high dollar sales as possible.
Organic Development Approach: Develop your work so that it is effective, meaningful, and honors your clients while generating a viable income.
Pace of Action
Mainstream Business Development Approach: Be bold, move fast, take action…NOW!
Organic Development Approach: Honor your timing and the timing of your unfolding work to evolve organically over time.
Development Cycle
Mainstream Business Development Approach: Use a template to build your program quickly so you can have a big launch that generates a big payday. (One downside with this approach: you often launch without knowing whether your program is effective or not, which creates a lot of stress and anxiety.)
Organic Development Approach: Use the needs of your clients and realities of your work with clients to create the best format for your work. As your work takes form, invite paying clients to participate. Interactions with real paying clients strengthen your understanding of your work, provide insights about how it feels to do your work, and show you how your clients experience your work.
Marketing
Mainstream Business Development Approach: Focus on large-scale, public facing marketing methods to get the word out as broadly as possible: podcasts, social media, alliances, and speaking. (Watch out if you don’t feel confident about your marketing message and its ability to attract your best clients.)
Organic Development Approach: Focus your outreach efforts on deepening personal connections and offering customized invitations. Use experiments to understand, strengthen, and enhance your body of work, your programs, your marketing messages, and your marketing methods. When you know you have a solid foundation you feel confident about, then expand your marketing to include more large-scale marketing efforts or continue with what you know already works.
Meaning of Hesitation
Mainstream Business Development Approach: Hesitation is a sign of weakness and failure to act. When you aren’t ready to act quickly, you may experience subtle (and not so subtle) messages questioning your lack of action.
Organic Development Approach: Your hesitation is a source of wisdom. When you understand where you are hesitating and why, then you have a sense of what’s feeling out of alignment and what you can do to resolve the issue. When you feel in sync with your vision and your plan, it’s easy for you to take action.
Your Personal Style
As a Change Catalyst, you have a very refined sense of consistency and alignment. It’s likely you have always sensed the energy of a situation. Your level of sensitivity has become even stronger based on your training and your experience with clients. As you develop and market your business, you naturally sense when something feels out of alignment or out of integrity for either you or your clients.
You want to put on the gas and make progress with your business, but you can’t overlook or ignore what you feel.
The way you are designed, you are compelled to take a step back to sort out what’s not feeling right.
Within the Mainstream Business Development Approach, stepping back to sort things out is not celebrated! You may walk away from the situation feeling blamed, shamed, or dismissed.
Within the Organic Development Approach, your finely tuned sense of alignment and integrity is a powerful ally in developing your work with clients and your business foundation.
When you proceed with this organic unfolding of your work, you create a strong foundation that supports your efforts to grow your business. In the next article, I’ll share why having a grounded foundation will shift your experience of sharing your work with those who will benefit most.
Learn more about the Organic Development Approach in my new eBook:
7 Vital Milestones to Turn Your Emerging Work into a Flourishing Business.