You are not personally responsible for your clients’ results, your process is. Yes, you’re good at what you do for your clients because, in part, it comes naturally to you. In fact, you’ve been doing this for so long that it’s most likely an intuitive process. The problem is, this intuitive process lives largely in your head. It requires you, your time and your focused personal attention. Which means that it’s not necessarily scalable.
But a proven process is scalable.
The way for you to get out of your current business model and leverage your business is to document every single step of the process by which you currently create reliable results for your clients. (This is a different documentation process than the systems and operations we talked about earlier regarding how your business runs.)
Again, you may be thinking, “No, a documented process won’t work in my business. Every client and customer of mine is different, they have different issues and they all need highly customized solutions. A one-size- fits-all model would never work for me!” You wouldn’t be the first to think this. In my experience, many business owners have the initial belief that, without their highly intuitive role in the process of creating highly customized solutions, clients can’t get positive results.
Yes, it may be true that all clients could benefit from highly customized solutions, but it’s not the only path to predictable results.
Here’s what I mean:
In my first business, a holistic health and nutrition coaching business I called Natural Transformations, I helped people eat more whole foods and, when possible, helped them with their chronic health concerns by changing their diet and lifestyle choices.
One day, a woman came in with elevated cholesterol numbers and wanted to change her diet to aid her recovery, along with what she and her doctor were doing together. Up until that point in my business, I had mostly helped people lose weight and gain energy by consuming whole foods. That being said, I’d never specifically treated a cholesterol problem before and wasn’t yet familiar with what particular foods to recommend, which I admitted to her. She was still interested in getting my help.
Undeterred, I pulled from my bookshelf an encyclopedia-sized naural healing book, with health concerns listed from A to Z. We flipped to the cholesterol section and I handed her the book and asked her to read the food recommendation paragraphs while I took notes for her, including how to source these foods and cook them in a way to make them taste good.
The book recommended reducing the consumption of meat, dairy, sugar, processed foods, soda, and caffeine, among other things. At the same time, it recommended consuming more whole grains, organic vegetables, leafy greens, beans, sea vegetables, and water.
After she confirmed this with her doctor who gave her a thumbs up, we both went to task, me teaching her how to cook brown rice without making it stick to the pot, how to steam kale and dress it so she would like it, and make better lifestyle choices overall. Every two weeks, she came in for our session and grew a repertoire of healthy food preparations and “cleaner” living.
Over a short period of time, she was happier, clearer, she slimmed down considerably and got positive news about the cholesterol from her doctor. We were thrilled.
Not too long afterward, a client came in with anemia, another health concern I hadn’t experienced or treated before. I grabbed the book again and we flipped to the anemia section, and among other things, the book recommended reducing the consumption of meat, dairy, sugar, processed foods, soda, and caffeine, and recommended consuming more whole grains, organic vegetables, leafy greens, beans, sea vegetables, and water. She too got better.
Then, another new client shared with me that she’d just been diagnosed with a brain tumor, and in addition to working closely with her doctor, she wanted to increase her chances of recovery with positive food changes. We looked in this book and the recommendation was to reduce the consumption of meat, dairy, sugar, processed foods, soda, and caffeine, and increase the consumption of whole grains, organic vegetables, leafy greens, beans, sea vegetables, and water.
She dutifully came to our sessions, our group cooking classes, our visualization and affirmations workshops and increased her yoga and meditation practice.
Within months, she giddily shared with me that her brain tumor had vanished, likely with the course of action her doctor had given her, and perhaps also because of the shifts she made with her food and lifestyle choices. Her doctor had been surprised by how quickly the brain tumor had shrunk.
It dawned on me that a pattern was emerging here.
As I flipped through the book, apart from some very specific recommendations that pertained to the particular health concern, practically every entry in the natural food healing book recommended the same thing, as you can now guess: reducing the consumption of meat, dairy, sugar, processed foods, soda, and caffeine, and increasing the consumption of whole grains, organic vegetables, leafy greens, beans, sea vegetables, and water.
Coincidence? Probably not.
I began to see a pattern (in life and business) and noticed that just about everything could be improved with a particular set of “remedies,” a system of common denominator steps that would create results for most everyone. I applied this “reliable results process” in my holistic nutrition business, with great success, even for people who simply wanted to shed those last five extra pounds.
Having this reliable results process allowed me to start thinking and moving beyond solely providing customized solutions for individuals and into also offering more leveraged group programs that were also more affordable for my clients because they didn’t involve as much one- on-one time with me.
It wasn’t until I started my first company, now called Boldheart.com (the parent company of our many programs, originally called ClientAt- traction.com), that I saw the same thing happen again.
I had discovered as a result of my own experience in filling my first two practices, and in witnessing hundreds of my clients’ success stories, that practically every business owner could attract a consistent stream of new clients by understanding 1) what interests their ideal client, 2) what their major struggles are, and 3) what will make them buy their services.
After just one year of working with dozens of individual clients, I noticed a consistent pattern. All my clients, without exception, needed to master the following steps to attract and sign on ideal, high-paying clients:
- Make client attraction a priority.
- Strategize their unique positioning in the marketplace.
- Craft their ideal client profile.
- Construct their compelling marketing message.
- Package what they know, offer and charge.
- Create pull-marketing materials.
- Get out there in a big way.
- Create their marketing action plan.
- Become a master of closing the sale.
- Implement systems for consistent action and results.
That’s when my Proprietary System, The Client Attraction System®, was born and it helped hundreds of my clients get tremendous results from our private coaching.
What I never imagined in the beginning of creating this Proprietary System is that it would eventually allow me to go from working solely with one-to-one clients, to then working with small groups over the telephone, to creating home study products that generated multiple Six Figures a year, to teaching the system during three-day workshops with hundreds of attendees at each workshop. The system also solidified my reputation as a respected business mentor.
In the end, it became the bones of a complete education for business owners working toward making their first 10K a month consistently, which then morphed into the marketing process we now teach in our initial program, before a business owner is ready to leverage.
The process of leveraging one’s business that I’m describing in this book (and what is now the Leveraged Business program) was created in the exact same way: based on unending research and experimentation, and documenting the process by which I leveraged my own business to Seven Figures, while gaining my life back. This Reliable Results Process is made up of the Eight Activators within the program (a taste of which is now in this book).
The program has since helped hundreds of entrepreneurs at the Leverage level to confidently turn their yearly revenues into their monthly revenues, while gaining their life back and being able to spend more time with their children or traveling.
That being said, your own Proprietary System, once documented and put in place, replaces the need for extreme customization. It is about documenting the common denominators needed for success and shifting your business model to provide that. It has the potential for reliably predicting positive future results for anyone who follows it, while allowing you to leverage your business even further because it can be duplicated or handled by others. This is leverage and it works across all industries.
The solution for cloning your (formerly intuitive) process is to examine every client case study you have worked with, and look for the pattern (formula) you used with the client to reach their desired goal. If you look closely enough, you will notice the similarities and common denominators.
The next step is to document these common actions into a process, step by step, in chronological order. We’re talking about getting the essence of what works across the board for all clients, without the customized part, and putting it down on paper.
We look at Content (the steps), Context (the delivery) and Culture (the experience clients receive) to create the reliable results clients will get every time. By nailing these down, you’ll begin to see a very distinctive pattern that will emerge.
NOTE: There is an important distinction between this Reliable Results Process (Content, Context, and Culture) vs. your Operations Manual (administrative procedures). This process is the documentation of the steps through which you currently take your clients so they create the results they’re currently experiencing with you. It’s the answer to the question, “What must my clients and customers learn, do or experience to get positive results, in a predictable, reliable way?”
Your process must be (practically) guaranteed to work. Even in the early days of my first coaching business, I knew in my heart that, if someone followed all the steps to my proprietary system (the ten steps I laid out above), they would get new clients consistently. To me, it was impossible not to, if you trusted the process and followed the formula in earnest. I believed in its efficacy so much that one of my early taglines became, “More clients, in record time, guaranteed.”
Having a money-back guarantee attracted a lot of attention at networking events and on the speaking circuit, primarily because I believe that business owners are often skeptical of anyone who says that they can help you increase your results very quickly. But when I offered a guarantee along the lines of, “Try this and if it doesn’t work, you will get your money back,” they became very intrigued and many hired me.
I didn’t want to attract tire kickers, chronic skeptics or whiners who wouldn’t be willing to do the work. So, mine was a conditional guarantee, meaning, to be eligible for the money-back guarantee if it didn’t work, they would have to apply all the steps, fill out all the worksheets provided, complete all the assignments, follow the instructions, etc. If they did this and didn’t get more clients, I would refund their coaching investment in full. The people who hired me agreed that this was fair.
Despite offering a conditional money-back guarantee, I was very nervous at first. I was wary of being taken advantage of, probably just as much as the clients originally were wary of investing in their business growth. There was a silver lining to this slight discomfort on my part.
I had to create a Client Attraction System that was truly foolproof, that worked every time. Not only was my name on it, but now there was a money-back guarantee.
The money-back guarantee offer pushed me to further improve my system to create a verifiable, repeatable process that gave my clients (practically) guaranteed results. It had to work or my business was on the line. And so the more I learned and experimented with new strategies for attracting ideal clients in my own business, the more I tweaked the program to make it even better.
Whenever I found a new way to improve the closing of the sale process, I immediately added it to the scripts my private clients received. When I believed that having access to the recordings of our coaching calls helped my clients implement better, I added this as a bonus to my offerings. When I understood that daily accountability increased my cli- ents’ results, I implemented systems and practices to make the program even better, without charging more.
When I realized how much better their results were once I incorporated mindset teachings, I wove those into all of our processes in the program.
Although we are past the days of getting the attention of business owners by offering a money-back guarantee, we have kept tweaking our system for over twenty years to continually make the process better (and we still do.) This has allowed the process to morph into a Reliable Results Process for our clients, without the need for extreme customization. Because of this, now other people can teach this trusted process, other coaches coach our members, and content delivery can be automated.
Even though you may not have a business coaching company, the same can be true for you.
Consistency and reliability is scalable, whereby customized solutions aren’t. When you build your Reliable Results Process so that your clients’ results can be (practically) guaranteed, then you will be able to systematize, automate, or outsource your process into a more leveraged business model than you have now.