5 Top Tips for Running Your Own Business... Your Way!
My business turns 5 this month!
There are several things I did prior to developing this business, like producing arts projects, facilitating training and my various beadwork shenanigans that still feature, but the coaching and online courses only came into being in the last 5 years. It’s also the first time in my career I’ve pulled the whole portfolio of my work under one banner (www.sarahlongfield.co.uk).
In the past 5 years I’ve tried a lot of different paths, experimented with what works and what doesn’t and worked out how to do things resolutely in my own unique style.
The gentle rebel in me won’t have it any other way: I’ve got to work out how to do it the Sarah way and then it’ll work for me. If I follow someone else’s format or advice to the letter, I’ll get bored and rebel against it. Some might call that childish, maybe it is, but working with myself and my quirks rather than against is the successful path for me.
So, with 5 years under my belt, here are 5 top tips for running your own business, your way, accepting the rebel within and nurturing your creative spirit!
- You are not starting from scratch
Your previous life experience is extremely useful and it is all too easy to forget that and discount all the skills, wisdom and learning you have gathered along the way. You may have taken a rather squiggly path to get here (you are not alone) but every twist and turn has taught you something that you can use in your business in some way.
- Radical generosity nearly always pays off
I’ve worked with people who have found themselves in a place of stuckness because they’re scared someone else will steal their idea. I’ve also experienced people overthinking narratives around giving stuff away for free and how that might then devalue their business. Both of these worries are, to an extent, justified: people do steal others' ideas and free things are rarely valued as highly as expensive things.
However, I’ve taken a different approach: I give lots away for free and if anyone is silly/mean enough to steal things from me, I am confident in my unique quirkiness (or maybe my ego is large enough) that I reckon their version won’t be as good. I also firmly hold the belief that what goes around comes around: if you nick stuff from a small business, karma will catch up with you eventually.
Holding these principles dear, frees my head up considerably and, perhaps this is the most important bit, it also massively helps my business. The free gifts I offer, like my OOMPH course which is just under a year old now, has brought some fabulous new people into my community. Several have now paid me for a course or coaching, others will in the future, and others won’t work with me but will be amazing referral agents. That’s worth its weight in gold.
Plus, in terms of positive psychology, giving useful resources and courses away for free is a kindness and being kind to others actually makes you happier. (I’ll not bombard you with a whole heap of evidence here as you can google that for yourself, but safe to say there has been a lot of research on the personal impacts of prosocial acts of kindness).
- Embracing uncertainty is vital
This is perhaps the most important skill you can nurture in running your own business. Being able to accept and even enjoy the uncertainty of it all makes you far more likely to succeed at it. Sure, there have been times when I’ve craved greater certainty, especially in the early years, but certainty is an incredibly rare commodity to find these days and whilst quitting the business to find a stable 9-5 might feel like a sensible option, actually achieving that stability is often harder than I might think.
In fact, in the 5 years I’ve been running this business, I’ve come to realise that I’m actually in a more certain position now than I’ve ever been as it’s entirely within my control. If I want to earn more money, then I need to sell more courses or get more lovely clients on my list. It’s not rocket science!
And, as I say, it’s all on me: I’m not having to wait whilst senior management decides the outcomes of yet another restructure and no one gets to tell me what I should be working on. That’s an incredible bit of certainty.
The only thing missing is the guaranteed pay packet at the end of the month. But, with 5 years under my belt, I’m now really knowledgeable about who my ideal clients are, what sells best and where my strengths lie which means I can predict my cashflow in a reasonably accurate way. And the variables in all that just make it more exciting - the good-feels dopamine hit of a new person signing up to something will never fade!
- You can learn by doing
There are a whole heap of “shoulds” that we can tell ourselves when we set up a new business that, quite frankly, we can pop straight in the bin.
In the coaching world, one of these shoulds is that you should have a clearly defined niche right from the beginning, being crystal clear on the very specific potential customer group your business is for. When I was starting out this felt impossible; I just wanted to coach humans! I was deeply in love with the coaching process and just wanted to support folk, whoever they might be.
Without heaping pressure on myself, I started to hone that through learning on the job. I found creative people naturally gravitated to me because of my skills and experience in the arts. I also found that coaching entrepreneurs, freelancers and solo artists was hugely rewarding, so that became my niche, at least in marketing terms: these are the people I’m angling my stories to on social media and in the free gifts I offer.
But these aren’t the only people I coach: for example, I’ve a current client who is an auditor seeking a more fulfilling social life and I support a Gaelic officer with strategic thinking. The golden thread is that the folk I work with are all creatively minded people who don’t want an off-the-shelf coaching approach, and quite like spending time in my company.
- The soil might be poor but the plants can still flourish
My 5th point might be particularly relevant to my business as it emerged during the first Covid19 lockdown in the UK. It felt, at that point in 2020 that things couldn’t get much worse. *[Cue gallows humour laugh]*. As we all know, things actually can get a lot worse.
I’m not going to get into the awfulness and atrocities going on in the world right now in this blog, but living in a VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) makes it really tough to run a business.
For several years in my emergent company, I was perhaps too quick to blame the external turmoil for leaner times. I also expended a lot of energy on an optimistic outlook. Now, with hindsight, I can see that it is a far better use of my time and energy focusing on what is within my control and remembering that my business has flourished, despite the difficult conditions it’s operating in. It’s all still possible, harder work maybe, but possible!
