So many great ideas are lost to the world because, so few people find out about them. Very early on in the starting phase of my first business I remember reading something about success. There was a picture of a land cap barely sticking out of an ocean with a person on it. The caption read something along the lines “what other people see when you are successful.” Beneath this was another image, it was an image of the entire land mass that this human had to climb to get to the top.
The message really struck me then as I think it is such an important one.
It is so easy to look at others that are more successful than you are and see their life and think wow, it looks so easy.
How does this pertain to business? The point here is that it is super easy to get lost in seeing what other people do whom are successful and emulating where they are now instead of what they did to get there. At the top of a mountain, things are still and beautiful and the bulk of the work is behind you. If you build a well-oiled business, you can build yourself out of it if you want to. But to get there, is usually like climbing a mountain, that no one really sees, until you are on top.
One of the biggest mistakes I see people make when building their business is trying to do it all themselves (or most of it). You can spend time learning every trick or trade in the book. And you can make major progress that way. But in the end, your success will be limited by your number one resource: time. Building a team of people that are better at certain skills than you are will not only free up your time to work on the most important tasks, but it will help you from jumping from task to task, which also takes a lot of brain power.
This is also where having a business coach comes in. Having the right coach will save you both time as well as pain.
This pyramid below represents areas of support that we offer in our business coaching for women online courses and group/individualized coaching sessions.
One of the things we see frequently in the women we coach is that many women are skilled in a few areas on this pyramid. Most frequently, the thing that is missed the most is a strategic plan that is the foundation of the pyramid. You can learn more about our Femme Meets Fortune courses here.
One of the first things that we recommend to women is that we really come up with a clear plan of where you want to go with your business as well as how to get there. Have you ever taken time to really analyze your life and your business to get clear on what you want three years from now? (Note that I am saying three years and not five years because so frequently we change so much over a decade that we want different things. Think about this, do you want the same things or have the same interests that you did 10 years ago?)
If you have taken time to think and visualize your future, you are off to a great start.
Here is my next question for you though: Have you thought about this largely in terms of what you need financially? If you have been thinking in numbers, I encourage you to also think in terms of what you will get with money. What will it provide you? The reason I encourage you to think in this way is due to a concept of end goals versus means goals. End goals are basically the goals we want. For example, perhaps we want to stay at a beach house for three months out of the year. We may think that we need a certain amount of money to buy this beach house, but this would be a means goal. Means goals are ONE way for us to get to our end goals.
In this example, we may be able to get to our goal of living at the beach three months a year by investing our money elsewhere such as real estate in an area with a better rent-to-mortgage ratio or in other forms of investment. It may be an easier goal to reach if we rented a beach house three months a year and paid for that by investing our money in other places. We may not need the same financial means to reach our end goal, we just need a different plan.
Obviously in business we want to think in numbers. It is said that a business that is not actively growing is dying. Seeing the financial improvement in your numbers month after month is an extremely important metric for analyzing the health and vitality of your business. So, by no means am I suggesting that we want to avoid working to increase our bottom line of our business. What I am suggesting is that part of planning is knowing where you are going very clearly, and this largely includes what you want your personal and work life to look like in a few years.
Once the vision is very clear, then it is time to really lay out the strategic plan that will help you meet those goals. When you are oriented to the end goals versus the means goals, this can help with strategic planning. Strategic planning involves laying out the step-by-step plan of what you need to do in order to get you to where you want to go. If you focus your vision on the end goal, you can analyze various types of plans (which will involve some means goals) to see which options are the best for you to get you to where you want to go the fastest while also enjoying the process. Can you see the difference in this sort of approach?
Once we have our plan laid out, it is then important that we have steps in place to analyze the plan along the way. Imagine spending three years hiking to what you thought was the top of a mountain only to find yourself three years later nowhere close because you took a wrong turn and never realized it. Putting into place systems and strategies on how to analyze your plan to see what parts of it are working and what parts are not, is essential. Most of the time it is not the whole plan that is bad, but only a small part or two, which is literally slowing down the whole business machine. Sometimes, I see people scratch the whole plan when there was only a piece that needed fixing. Other times, I see them not even analyze their plan at all.
Both of these solutions are devastating and not only can slow down the business but can really hurt your morale!
This is where having a coach can expedite your process by lightyears. Even with having a degree in finance, I did not know anything about running a business when I opened my first business over 12 years ago (I now own three and one is a 7-figure business). The reason I got to where I am today was a combination of putting in the effort, and having coaches teach me and train me how to run a business. When you are about to decide or try something with your business and you have a coach tell you both how to capitalize most on the opportunity and work you are putting in as well as how to make sure you protect from any risks that come with that decision can literally save your business.
Business Coaching Exclusively for Females
One of the reasons why at Femme Meets Fortune we focus on business coaching for women exclusively is that as women, there are some generalities that I see that tend to be more common in women than in men.
For example, testosterone tends to make the brain more focused, and estrogen tends to make the brain have a wider range of awareness.
Both of these tendencies have their strengths and weaknesses, and it is important in business that we are always working with our strengths and supporting our weaknesses (sometimes simply through awareness other times through action and hiring).
The other reason why we focus on women in our coaching programs is that another gift that we have as women is the ability to create from our pleasure body. For women in business, what happens frequently is that we can get stuck in our heads due to all the tasks that need to be attended to and the ability of our brain to see them all. This tends to get us out of our embodied pleasure center, which is the place where our greatest creative gifts can come from. Therefore, in working with women who want to grow and scale their business, we also help them achieve higher levels of body awareness so that as you are working and dumping your heart and soul into your work, you are doing it not just from the analytical side, but from the embodied creative side of pleasure and enjoyment.
After all, what is the joy of working so hard to create something amazing if you are not having fun and pleasure along the way!?
So our coaching programs are designed to look at many different aspects of women in business, from the analytical side that is helpful to embody, to how to build a team that is supportive to your vision, as well as how to be more confident, sexy, sensual and how to feel more pleasure in your day-to-day life. When we tune into our sensual pleasure filled side and create from here, often different work comes out.
This is not the only place we want to create from, but we want to be careful about not denying this part of our femininity. Since we work with women exclusively, we can address the tendencies and struggles that sometimes come up by not being fully embodied and not being as confident in our path and in ourselves as we want to be. This part is as essential to address as all the analytical/planning parts of business. It is not one or the other, it is focusing on a wide variety of aspects of your fabulous self, and really looking at how to use ALL that you have to offer and not just some of
Information about our business courses/ online programs: HERE.
We have the option of adding on group
and one-on-one mentorship as well!
