The Conundrum of Busyness
Every coach, consultant, and mentor wants to be busy. When you’re busy with paying clients, you are earning revenue. It feels good to have that full schedule! Unfortunately, this also creates a problem. In this post, we’ll talk about what the problem is and what to do about it.
Remember those thrilling days when you first started your practice? You were fresh and bold and excited about the future. You relentlessly marketed. What else could you do? There wasn’t anyone sitting across from you in the office to pay your bills so you went out and grew your practice by telling people what you offered.
Fast forward a couple of months or a couple of years. What’s happened? All of your marketing paid off and you became busy serving clients. Then suddenly – ZAP – everything disappeared. Your busy business faded. Things slowed down. Your schedule opened up.
With coaches, it’s often feast or famine. The reason is because marketing and serving clients are two elements that compete for your time, but, because serving clients generates revenue and marketing does not, guess what gets unintentionally deprioritized!
Think of it like a set of scales weighing clients on one side and prospects on the other. When there are a lot of prospects (because you’re out marketing) and there are no clients, the marketing side of the scale tips. But your marketing will slowly generate clients and the scales will begin to tip in favor of the revenue-generating client side. Soon, without realizing it, there is little or no marketing because your schedule is full of clients.
Many coaches would be all smiles when this happens because it seems to be the optimum use of time: 100% revenue generation. Unfortunately, that is not the case. The optimum use of time is less than 100% revenue generation, with some time spent on marketing. To revisit the illustration of the scales, you need to find the balance between serving clients and marketing. It won’t always be 50/50 (the exact balance depends on your business and your ability to market and your niche and a thousand other factors). You might need to spend 25% of your time marketing and 75% of your time serving customers.
The bottom line is that you can’t aim for 100% client service and ignore marketing because that will create the feast or famine situation that every coach should avoid. Instead, schedule time each day to market your business. If your balance between clients and marketing is 75/25 then schedule 6 hours of your day with clients and 2 hours of your 8 hour day on marketing. Once you’ve scheduled your marketing time in, treat it just as you would treat a client appointment and don’t let anything eat into that time.
You can also consider hiring a Virtual Assistant to help you with marketing, or even help with some of your other business tasks that don’t have to be tended to by you.
Being busy is good. But being business to the point where it sacrifices marketing time will be good for now and then will hurt you in a couple of weeks or months. Striking the right balance between marketing and client serving will eliminate the feast or famine problem and keep a steady stream of income in your practice.
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