How to move from employed to business owner with mentoring – case study

There have been great results for those who are in the start up phase of their business and have been mentored by me. But sometimes I can be reluctant to work with new business owners as it’s a hard old slog going from employed to self employed and many often don’t appreciate what’s involved in that transition process.

For success, you can almost guarantee you’ll:

• Work evenings and weekends until you get the business off the ground and bringing in any money.
• Have periods of huge self doubt
• Need to step outside your comfort zone immediately – procrastination just prolongs your time employed
• Need a real desire to do this for you. A business shouldn’t be a hobby for a bit of pocket money.

My most recent mentee, Marianna, was persistent and insistent on working with me, and she has a cute dog, so I thought this might be a good opportunity to reflex my muscles back in the start up market.

Marianna signed up for my 1:1 mentoring programme with a goal to get her in a position where she was able to see she could leave employment and start bringing in some real money.

We started with the foundations. I always say, if the foundations aren’t right, everything else will not stack up – just like a house.

The foundations are the customer journey, what services you offer and your pricing. Marianna’s pricing, I am sure won’t mind me saying, reflected what she needed to earn a month to leave her full time job and her services didn’t really explain what the investment return was for those buying it. Suffice to say, she’d sporadically sold a handful of things but nothing near what she needed to really feel like leaving employment was achievable.

Together we revamped her pricing and discussed exactly what the buyer gets for their investment. If this isn’t clear people just won’t part with their money. At the end of the session, Marianna updated her website with the new pricing models, detailed what her services provided and made the customer’s journey on her website; easy. Enabling those who landed there to be able to see and say; ‘Yes, this is what I need’.

We also made sure her social media platforms were projecting what she did in the right way. No fluff and nonsense just straight to the point bios – our potential clients are all busy.

Our second session was spent thrashing out the client demographic based around the pain points her services solve. I always do a the demographic with my mentees and write a few pain points with them, but they then go away and write more for their homework (Marianna loves homework!) and we review on our next session.

By writing down the pain points your services solve it helps you to get into the mindset of your potential buyers and write the social media and website content you need to, to get their attention. Three birds with one stone there.

From this session Marianna was completely clear on her offering and we’d not only created about fifty or sixty social media posts for her to use again and again, but we’d enabled potential clients to see exactly what she did and why they needed to invest in her.

If you’d like to have a go at writing your own pain points download my easy to follow workbook here for just ￡5

The wheels were now turning in the right direction.

Over the next few weeks, Marianna started to become known as the one to go to for the services she offers.

• Fellow business owners were tagging her in posts
• People were investing in her services
• People were talking about her – in a good way!
• She was getting more enquiries
• She was selling more services
• She was bringing in more money!

Marianna could now see that with the right foundations in place, the right content and a consistent presence on social media it could well be possible to leave employment.

In our further sessions we worked on building her audience, because you need to be constantly doing this too. You can’t keep selling to the same people, you need to always be bringing people into your world.

We’ve achieved this by; creating a lead magnet for her to;

• Promote what she does
• Get known as the one to go to
• Build an audience away from social media

And I also set her a challenge to get a further 1,000 relevant people into her connections on LinkedIn. I can’t tell you how we find ‘relevant’ people – some things have to remain secret!

But what I can tell you is; Marianna has brought in ￡3086 since we worked together and had her highest earning month EVER! Oh, and she’s going to be working a four day week in her employed role so she doesn’t have to just work evenings and weekends!

Employment will soon be a thing of the past!

I think it’s safe to say working with hard working new business owners is okay.

PS… Here’s Joey the dog, oh and Marianna – told you he was cute!

Ready to work with me too? Let’s do this > www.catherinegladwyn.co.uk/grow