Expanding Sphere of Influence: Scaling Mindful B2B Services via Technology

Every one of us wants to have maximum results be the byproduct of our efforts to help make the world a better place... i.e. to extend and expand our sphere of influence beyond the reaches of our direct activities. Enter scaling... which isn't just good for the bottom lines of businesses, it's also what needs to happen if we each hope to exert lasting and sustainable impact beyond our own physical and temporal limits. Passive income is similar, as it's not just great because it's 'passive', it's even more great(er?) because it nearly always involves creating scaled impact beyond one's individual capacities.

There are two general ways in which to scale one's efforts: build teams or build products. Ideally, and over time, we'll want to build both.

Let's start with how technology can help to build a coordinated team effort. The key word here is 'coordinated'... in order to scale one's impact and activities alongside others, our operations need to be organized and repeatable; i.e. we need systems... ways of doing things that contribute to, and define the norms of our team/organizational culture. An organization, by its common root and definition, requires being organized if it hopes to succeed.

To help us scale our team and their efforts we need to be organized in how we operate, and using technology to make sure everyone is on the same page is essential... from onboarding, to file sharing, to handling finances, to scheduling meetings, to norms around communication, to how we engage prospects... each of these areas is scaled most effectively by using the many technological options on the market.

But technology alone is not enough... something else is needed!

Mindful Life, Mindful Work, Inc., as now primarily a B2B organization, grew in an organic way out of working with individual clients in the B2C space. How? As one example: each time a detailed and lengthy email was sent, it was then saved as a word document with the intention of using it again as a template for similar future communications. Over time, these saved emails were further refined and made more 'universally' applicable... i.e. in short, they were edited to be even more 'general' and thus useful to others in the organization needing to complete similar communications... this established norms of, and consistency in, our communications.

File sharing technology made this possible, and this is just one example of how technology can be used to coordinate the activities of groups of people, of teams, and of companies. If you find yourself sending the same or very similar emails over and over, follow the above practice to begin scaling your efforts! MLMW continues this practice to this very day.

If you don't already use Google Workspace, it's a great place to start coordinating your efforts! Search for 'Shared Drives'... they're much more useful than the standard 'My Drive' found in personal Gmail.

Now let's talk about how technology can scale mindful B2B services themselves, which is sort of like leaning these services in the direction of being products, as they can then become repeatable beyond an individual contributor or provider. There are some services that are easily scalable... things like assessments, self-paced trainings, sharing of content, and any other services that are mostly about the platform used to deliver it... to develop these sorts of scaled offerings all we need to do is pick the technology platform we want to use and then create and import our content.

But what about services that require a real person to deliver it in real time? How can we scale and coordinate our efforts in these instances? The most obvious answer for individual providers of mindful B2B services is to create large trainings or group delivery formats that enable many individuals to receive value in one fell swoop. Such efforts are more in the name of 'economy of time' rather than scaling, but they do accomplish some of the same results as other scaling-specific approaches. Why coach one person when we can coach 1000 at once?... of course something is gained and something lost whenever we dramatically modify the means or format by which we deliver real time services, but this is one method of scaling to consider.

Scaling 'proper' IS scaled, meaning that it is repeatable at scale... it is near to or limitless, or at least it theoretically has the potential to be so.

So how do we go about scaling a real time service like one-on-one coaching, consulting, or mentoring? How do we accomplish this when we have numerous coaches and clients, and doing so would involve tracking sessions, ensuring quality of delivery, issuing payments to coaches, etc? This is not easily answered, and most efforts involve creating a patchwork of technologies to make this possible. That said, we have seen several large-scale coaching companies emerge in the last decade that have accomplished delivering B2B coaching services at scale by building their own delivery platforms. But what about individuals or smaller companies that don't have a team of developers that can build out this sort of platform... what can they do to begin scaling these sorts of service offerings?

There is good news!... there is a new movement afoot that seeks to fill this gap so that individual providers of services can begin scaling in an organized way similar to that of larger providers of 1:1 services. The movement is just beginning, but with the increase in remote working it's likely here to stay... there are rumblings of new platforms coming out that will allow collections of service providers to come together in order to deliver coordinated 1:1 services at scale (please share any that you've discovered in the comments below)... Mindful Life, Mindful Work, Inc. would like to think that we are part of the cutting-edge of this movement (at least in our company design), and we're currently exploring partnerships with technology platforms in order to further scale our own efforts... what we are discovering looks very promising... stay tuned on this front!

Finding the right technology is essential... whether technology driven or people-driven services, technology is essential to scaling them!

Thus, in order to scale our efforts we first need to decide how to best go about scaling given our business design and our services... is growing our team the best method, building out a product line, or should we simply scale our existing services like we discussed in the individual to group coaching example? That said, if we really want to scale in a big way like technology companies can, we'll need to find the right technologies for our given initiative... to scale like technology, is to use technology to scale!

We wish you great success in your efforts to scale and to deliver at scale.

Please share your thoughts on this topic in the comments below.

Please also let us know if there is a specific topic you'd like to see addressed in a future edition of this newsletter.

And... for those wanting to grow mindful(ness) cultures in organizations, consider applying for the Mindful Professionals Mastermind (MPM) group. This curated and ongoing think-tank is limited to thirty (30) professionals, some of whom are internal to companies and some external, all with the common goal of growing how companies utilize and leverage mindfulness-informed thinking, practices, and services. Group Details Here

Join us on July 9th, 2022 for our Mastermind Group Informational Session

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Jonathan Reynolds is founder and CEO of Mindful Life, Mindful Work, Inc., a San Francisco based leadership development company providing services that address the intersection of self-awareness and team performance. Since 1997, Jonathan has trained extensively in the discipline of mindfulness, and his work with leaders emphasizes simple and practical ways to improve performance, efficiency, and workplace cultures by integrating mindfulness sensibilities.

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