CAM Coach

YEAR ONE: SURVIVING AND THRIVING

A UK start up business is 50% likely to fail in the first year. For holistic therapy businesses, that figure rises to 70%. Mark Shields shares how to make sure your start up doesn’t become a shutdown…

LETS start with some scary numbers. In the UK, somewhere around 390,000 new businesses were started in the last year. Only half will make it through the first year. After four years, only a quarter are left. After ten years, only 10% of businesses are still going. That means 90% fail. Keep in mind that these are just the overall figures for all types of business, some, like restaurants and, sadly, holistic therapists, have lower success rates. The trick is to make sure that your business is not one of those that falls by the wayside.

The congruence principle

A proven business principle is that success comes down to an individual having an equal balance of confidence, competence and commitment. Holistic Therapists are often highly academic bright students with oodles of great ideas and the commitment to succeed, but they often lacked the business experience and knowledge and personal confidence to make a success in private practice.

It’s not practice that ensures good performance, but perfect practice that ensures perfect performance - “the difference that makes the difference”, as I call it. By definition this meant that newly qualified holistic therapists were highly knowledgeable in their chosen coaching modality but lacked the business knowledge and skills to ensure they achieved commercial success in private practice. These are things that can be learned.

Why do holistic therapists fail in business?

When Simon Martin and I were researching our book, The CAM Coach, we discovered there were eight main reasons that holistic practitioners failed in business.

1. They adopt a ‘can’t do’ mind-set. It has been proved successful practitioners think differently than unsuccessful practitioners. 2. A lot of practitioners work generically across the whole market, fail to identify who their ideal client is and subsequently don’t niche market or brand their business to match the market segment they plan to work in 3. Many practitioners are very subjective when designing their business model. It’s important to always adopt a successful business model achieved by modelling success. So doing your research and finding a similar business to the one you have in mind and model their success.

It’s a golden rule in business, “never run an unproven business model” If you do you increase your chance of failing in the first year by 900% 4. A lack of competitor analysis. 88% of holistic therapists fail to do any competitor analysis at launch. This results in uncompetitive and disadvantaged pricing of products and services especially client packages 5. No business plan. 90% of holistic therapists businesses launch without a business plan increasing their chance of failure by 1000% 6. No website. On average holistic therapists don’t invest in a website until they are a year into their private practice 7. The majority of holistic therapists go into private practice without understanding proven strategies or processes of attracting and retaining quality clients.

The main reason is they don’t have a proven advertising process or logistical process to recruit new clients 8. They believe they “will build it and they will come” Unfortunately they build it and they, new clients, don’t come. Once again most holistic therapists adopt zero proactive activity when running their business day to day.

8 strategies for success

1. Build a ‘can do’ mind-set. Learn to develop your business knowledge. 90% of success comes from confidence. Knowledge is power.

Building your knowledge increases your confidence, change your beliefs and unlock your potential. Take action and increase your results. Overcome your fear or blockages by accepting results, being flexible, try new things and build on outcomes. 2. Begin your client recruitment activity by making a decision on who your ideal client is and working backwards from there. This will drive how you brand your entire business and how you market your ideal client. For example, older clients buy differently than younger clients and use different social media platforms. 3. It’s important to always adopt a successful business model achieved by modelling success. So doing your research and find a similar business to the one you have in mind and model their success. It’s a golden rule in business to never run an unproven business model. It always fails. Don’t be afraid to approach the owner of your chosen business and ask how they’ve achieved success.

You’ll probably be surprised with the help they offer. Business owners love talking about their success. 4. Ensure you complete as much competitor information as possible. It’s important to know and understand the logistics of who your main competitors are. In particular focus on pricing, packages, services and products. 5. Ensure you have a detailed business plan outlining your outcome focused goals and actions for the first 3, 6, 9 and 12 months. After that reverting to 1, 2 and 5 years. So short, medium and long term business planning.

Ensure all goals are realistic and achievable and make sure you clearly display your business vision, mission, philosophy, goals and actions. An idea is just an idea until you write it down 6. Ensure you have your website built as soon as you can so it’s ready to go as soon as you graduate. It can take up

to 12 months to build and get a site to feature on google. Unfortunately the average holistic therapist doesn’t start building their website until 5 months after graduating, thus substantially delaying their start of attracting the majority of their clients 7. It has been proven in the business world of holistic therapists the number 1 strategy for attracting quality clients is online using google ad words or organic google SEO. In fact 78% of private clients confirmed in a CAM COACH survey conducted on 2011 their first port of call when looking for a therapist was google. 8. Even when your website is live and you’ve launched your business in the first 12 months it will still be difficult to reach your clients. It’s important to remember it takes 12 months for your website to reach the top of google and it’s important you attract paying clients from day 1. This is done by setting yourself a target of at least 1 proactive marketing activity every day.

This can take the form of approaching others EG gyms to joint venture with, letters to private GP surgeries to offer your services for potential referrals, offering free talks at networking events, posting on various social media forums, and finally monitoring your campaigns on google.

Believe in yourself, do your research and build a business model, plan and client acquisition methodology that maximises your chances of succeeding.

iMARK SHIELDS is amongst the UK’s leading NLP and Coaching experts. Mark is known as the CAM COACH named after his book of the same name.

He works with delegates from all corners of the world who choose the Life Practice

Academy to learn the powerful Life Practice Transformational Coaching Methodology.

Find out more at https://courses. thecamcoach.com/p/home