Carl Dickson

Sometimes we get in our own way. Sometimes we assume. Sometimes we put ourselves in a box. And sometimes the many ways our thoughts can go wrong or be limited can hold back the success of our business. Mindset matters. I find the act of inquiry, or simply asking questions, to be profoundly important for, well, basically everything. But if you want to be mundane about it, inquiry is at the core of discovering what to write, how to build your processes, uncovering the truth about anything, knowing what to do, figuring out what’s causing your feelings, and so much more. Philosophically, it’s so much more that it can be overwhelming. We’re going to bring it back to Earth, make it practical, and see how it can guide us to improve how we bring what we offer in our business into alignment with our customers. Inquiry can help us become prosperous. As well as philosophical. But there’s a big, fat, ugly problem with applying inquiry to exploring the true nature of what you sell. You have to know what questions to ask. For this, I share a simple, humble technique that has helped me in many different ways. Start your inquiry with “who, what, where, how, when, and why.” Repeat it until you have it memorized. Repeat it until it becomes a mantra. The Inquiry Mantra The Inquiry Mantra is one of my favorite techniques for understanding and communicating. Here’s how it applies to aligning with your customers: Who? Who is the decision maker or buyer of what you sell? Who are the stakeholders in the decision-making process? Who benefits from the purchase? You need to know who before you can explore how to best engage with them. What? What does the customer think they are buying vs. what you think you are selling? What needs will be fulfilled by what you sell? What is required for someone to become a customer? Before you take action, you should thoroughly explore what the impacts will be. Where? Where are you and where are you customers? Does location matter? Should you move and where should you move to? Where can you find what you need? Where do you customers look when they need what you sell. Where will your customers expect to find things? You need to know everything about “where” in order to transact. How? How do you get in front of potential customers regarding what you offer? How do you help people complete the journey from being a stranger to being a customer? How do you ensure customer satisfaction? How do you maximize the total lifetime value of your customers? How to do things is often followed by discovering what you want to do. How is the method for what you want to do. When? When will it start? When will it end? Is there a pattern? Is it seasonal? How long will it take? When should you invest? When will someone else act? Timing matters and it can change both what you do and how you choose to do it. Time is money and every moment counts. Why? Why is often more important than what you sell. Why should the customer care? Why should they trust you? Why should you wait? What should you rush? Why does what you sell matter? Why you do things shows your judgement, reliability, and value. The reasons why we do things often matter more than what we do. How to use the Inquiry Mantra The answers to your questions should matter. If a question doesn't matter, it's not worth asking. You want to align with your customers, in ways that matter. The Inquiry Mantra gives you a tool for discovering what matters about you and your customers. This is important because if you don't matter to your customers, you literally do not matter. But if you can align with your customers in ways that matter, then you matter to your customers in ways that benefit you both. This technique can be recursive, which the programmers in the audience will appreciate. When you get an answer, you can apply it again to the answer. If you start with “How do I improve my marketing” you can discover the who, what, where, how, when, and why of it. Then you can apply the Inquiry Mantra to the answer for each question. You can do this forever, drilling deeper and deeper. It’s okay to stop when the answers no longer matter. When you apply the Inquiry Mantra to your business, focus on discovering what matters to and about your customers, and how you do business with them. When you conceptualize your questions, look for questions with answers that matter. These insights are precious. Takeaway Who matters? What matters to them, about them, because of them, or related to them? Where do things take place, come from, or get you to? Where do you find customers that you align with? How can you increase the impact of things that matter? When does it matter? Why does it matter? Keep going. Because being a part of what matters is a good way to become prosperous. Bonus tip: Apply this to website design, interviews, customer alignment, strategic planning, copy writing, lead qualification, quality assurance, process development, and so much more..,

A lot of people get started in business by jumping in and selling. Then they look for better techniques. Whenever things get tough, they look for better techniques again. I love bootstrapping and have done more than my fair share of this. What I’ve learned is that most of the “techniques” out there are completely valid --- for someone else. The things you hear about the latest paradigm-shifting revolutionary techniques that sound so appealing, probably don’t apply to you. And if they do, they probably won’t work “out of the box.” I can say this with confidence because people project what works for them onto everyone else. Only the circumstances and customer preferences are always different. This is partly because for a business to fulfill its potential requires differentiation. You can blindly stumble across your approach to differentiation, or you can strategically develop it. You can’t copy the same techniques as someone else and differentiate at the same time. Not only that, but copying the same techniques as someone else almost guarantees that they will not be optimized for what you are trying to sell and who you want to sell it to. Here's how this impacts creators, coaches, and consultants. Creators Creators might sell craft goods on Etsy with digital marketing. They also might make furniture, with special challenges related to delivery that makes it easier to sell locally. Or they could renovate kitchens and bathrooms, possibly to people who want affordable luxury, people who live in historic homes of a particular period, or maybe in another market. Creators might 3d-print things people need, selling on their own website, and advertising on Google and other platforms. They could be artists, who often struggle to find the right story, platform, and audience to sell. Or they might offer customized, bespoke products where each one is unique, selling to people who want something tailored specifically to their needs. Every one of these is marketed and sold differently. All creators do not market the same way, or to the same people. All furniture makers and 3d-printers do not market the same way, or to the same people. Etc. Successfully marketing the combination of what you do, what you sell depends on the nature of what you sell and the customers who might purchase it. Coaches Those who Coach CEOs must be able to market to reach them, and blindly calling or emailing as a stranger or waiting for them to discover your shiny website has a non-zero but very low chance of success. Coaches who are trainers have to market to those who need the kind of training they provide. Or coaches might focus on health, productivity, finding clarity, or something else. With each area requiring a different style of marketing. How many different markets are there for coaching? How many different approaches to marketing might a coach take? Do you see a pattern emerging here? Just like creators, the best way for coaches to market themselves depends on the nature of what they sell and the customers who might purchase it. Are they selling solutions, improvement, success, wellness, or something else? Are they selling to individuals, groups, consumers, businesses, specific demographics, or broader markets? Every single coach is different. It’s kind of the nature of being a coach. Consultants Some consultants sell solutions to problems, requiring credibility and proof. Some provide advice to companies who must trust their expertise. Some sell software development or technology support, where how to best market depends on who is doing the buying. Some consultants deliver entire teams and some consultants are solopreneurs. The same pattern applies to consultants. Perhaps even more. Takeaways In each case, who to market to and with what kind of messaging is different. How they fulfill their customers’ expectations is different. And how they close the deal and get paid is different. There is a lot of overlap between creators, coaches, and consultants. And there is even more overlap within each of those categories. Some creators, coaches, and consultants sell to other creators, coaches, and consultants. Watch out for the ones who treat them all the same. One of many possible examples is the way some digital marketers sell like that’s the only kind of marketing and that it should be everyone’s top priority. That is as demonstrably untrue as is the fact that digital marketing is something important to understand. The lesson to be learned is that marketing techniques don’t apply to everyone equally. And to understand whether the next marketing technique you encounter applies to you, you should first make sure you understand the nature of what you sell and the customers you are targeting to purchase from you. If you position the wrong way, you will be less successful. Sometimes what you need to study isn’t marketing or advertising techniques. It’s how to match the nature of your offering to the customer’s buying journey.

Building a business that is bigger than you are means going after work that you can't do yourself. In services like coaching and consulting, it means engagements that require more people than yourself to fulfill. When you bid alone, how much can you charge? How much value can you deliver? How much is the opportunity worth? How does that compare when you pursue efforts that require an entire team of people? Instead of coaching or consulting one-on-one, building a business larger than yourself means coaching or consulting many-on-many. Imagine a team of five coaching an organization of 50, with at least five times the revenue. This can happen by pursuing larger organizations or by providing greater subject matter coverage than you can provide on your own. It can also happen by having more customers than you can fulfill yourself. Imagine having 10 gigs going on at the same time, with multiple coaches doing the delivery. And 10 or more times the revenue. A solopreneur delivering services has an upper limit on what they can earn. An enterprise does not. A solopreneur delivering tangible products has an upper limit on what they personally can make and deliver. A solopreneur delivering electronic products has a limit on the amount of content they personally can generate. The number of hours you can deliver in a year is limited. This means the amount you can earn as a solopreneur is limited as well. For some, that limit is high enough that they can be happy. But this article is about growing larger than yourself and hitting the really big numbers. Building a business larger than yourself means needing others to close the deal. It means: Having a team. Not being ad hoc about everything and making it all up as you go along. Being well coordinated and managed. It means having a process for responding and performing to keep everyone on the same page. Being deliberate. It means not just being intentional, but being willing to invest in the effort it will take to win. Most of that effort goes into thinking things through before you act. Having priorities and being able to commit the time required. It means carefully managing the expectations of everyone involved. Sharing the rewards. It means being willing to take a smaller slice of the pie, but having a much larger pie. Getting past the hump. The hump is having enough revenue to pay others in addition to yourself. It means being able to sustain the much larger pie required forever. Being an enterprise means finding projects and recruiting and partnering to staff the work. But it also means institutionalizing what you do. Your enterprise can remain small. But it must have the ability to keep everyone on the same page. This becomes the work of the leadership. Deciding what the enterprise should be, where it will find the projects to fuel its growth, and how it will staff and fulfill them. But doing business with others involved is different. It's so different that you should decide whether you want to grow into an organization with staff and payroll, or whether you want your organization to be an extension of yourself. You can be successful with either, but the more clarity you bring to what you want to become, the better you will be able to target your efforts. Keep in mind what building a business that is larger than yourself does not mean. It does not mean that you have to become corporate. There are reasons why you might want to, but that’s not where you have to take it. You can be you if you know how to work with others. You can partner, you can outsource, you can avoid hiring, or you can embrace hiring. The reasons people tend to embrace hiring is that it lowers their costs, improves their control, and is more stable. Sometimes. Sometimes outsourcing is cheaper. And control can be an illusion. Another important consideration is exit planning. Are you trying to build a company that can be sold, can go public, or that you can pass on to your heirs? Or are you building a lifestyle endeavor that you can do for the rest of your life? Is running your business forever your retirement plan, or is selling your business your retirement plan? Having some clarity can help you make decisions, even if you change your mind in the future. If you get the chance, you can take a really good offer and immediately launch a new business. The value of a business that is based on you, your network, your image, and your production is less than the value of a business that is larger than you are and can conceivably be operated by others. But the value of your lifestyle is priceless. Only you can decide between them. Are you more comfortable staying solo, or are you ambitious enough to want to grow large? What have your experiences been? There are no right or wrong answers, but it is something that impacts all of us. Let’s discuss it. CreateCoachConsult members network, collaborate, and share insights with each other.

The most important ingredient in growing your business is to understand what matters to your customers. If you understand what matters to your customers, you’ll know what to sell, how to sell, and how to market. But first you have to understand how to apply your insights. Discovery Before you build your business around what matters to your customers, you have to be able to articulate it. Before you can articulate what matters to your customers, you have to discover it. If you have sufficient empathy, you can imagine what matters to your customers. But there is no substitution for discovering that directly through interaction with your customers. Don’t skip this step or assume you already know what matters to your customers. You may have a lot of experience, but your customers are living their own experiences, and they often think differently than you do. You need to learn to see the word, and your offering, through their eyes. Whatever you think matters about your offering, you need to be able to channel what matters to your customer about your offering. You need to be able to do this before you start applying your insights. If you jump straight into application based on your own perspective, there’s a high probability that you will be wrong. And even if you’re not completely wrong, you probably won’t have a full picture, and your decisions will suffer as a result. Application Applying your insights about what matters to your customers is how we make better decisions. It’s how we build our business around what matters to them. Application for creators Creators make things. Mostly tangible things. Things that have to be picked up or delivered. Possibly things that have functions. What matters about them to the customer will depend on the nature of what you offer. For example, does durability matter to the customer? Do choices matter? What about the pick-up or delivery experience matters to the customer? What about the thing itself? Or how it is used, consumed, presented, cherished, or possessed? How do the things that matter about the thing impact the customer’s expectations and the sales process? What matters to the customer becomes what interests them, what concerns them, what they need to know, and what they do. All of these are key to marketing and making decisions. Application for Coaches Coaches help, improve, and guide people. What matters depends on the people being coached. Logistics like when and where matter. But things that are far more subtle like how to look at things matter even more for coaches. And the customer, especially at the beginning, does not look at them the same way the coach does. Coaches have to market to the “before” version of the customers to help them become the “after” version. And the sales process depends on the customer’s intangible clarity and motivation. A coach has to go beyond understanding what the customer believes matters and discover how they turn belief into action. Some coaches have a gift for this and do it subconsciously. However, there is value in coaches being fully aware of it so that they can bring it into their decision process and structure their marketing and sales processes deliberately and intentionally as an extension of what they offer. Application for Consultants Consultants overlap with coaches quite a bit, but tend to be more focused on specific goals or outcomes. Sometimes a consultant’s customer is a company and not just a person. It depends on the consultant and the nature of what they offer. Some consultants specialize. Some have a process they guide customers through. And some conduct discovery and develop solutions to unique problems that their customer has and may not even be fully aware of. As a result, some consultants start off with clarity about what matters to their customers and some do not. This is why the sales process for consultants can be long and require personal interaction. Even when there is clarity about what matters to the customer, consultants may benefit from personal interaction in their marketing and sales processes. Tailoring the application The nature of what you offer and your customer relationships determines how you apply what matters about your offering. Creators, coaches, and consultants who read the above may see themselves in the other sections. This is good. Because creators, coaches, and consultants are not firm categories. Creators can provide coaching and consulting as part of their offerings. Consultants can include their own creations in what they offer. Coaches often package their offering like a creator. And other combinations are certainly possible. The takeaway for this is that the differences between creators, coaches, and consultants described above go all the way down to the individual level. Building a business around what matters to your customers means creating something as unique as they are. And that is how to discover the best form of differentiation for developing a competitive advantage. To explore the nature of what you offer, how to determine what matters about it to your customers, and most importantly, how to apply it to making better decisions about your business look for our course announcement coming soon…

Instead of studying techniques, I’ve learned that in business it is better to understand things on a deep level. This is because insight is better than intuition in business. Your intuition about marketing and sales is informed by social media and from watching commercials. Marketing has a deep level to it that goes beyond techniques, and when you understand the nature of what you sell, you make better decisions about how to bring it to market. The nature of what you sell impacts how you market, sell, and operate your business. The nature of what you sell impacts creators, coaches, and consultants. What you offer is deeper than the name you give it. The name you give your offering does not tell you the true nature of how it impacts people, what matters about it, or what people have to do related to it. The nature of what you offer is a combination of aspiration and vitality. If you treat what you offer as something ordinary, then that is all it is. But if you discover what makes it extraordinary, that changes everything about how you bring it to market. It changes the entire direction of your business. Just make sure that your customers agree about it being extraordinary. Business ideas that sound good fail all the time. If your approach to marketing is based on what sounds good, you are setting yourself up for failure. Instead, focus on the nature of what you sell. Is it a simple transaction or is it a solution to a problem? Is it an ongoing service? What defines the scope or limits? Will it change people’s lives forever, or will it bring them a simple moment of happiness? Is it a long sales process or a short one? What does the customer need to do or think about before they consider it? How many people are typically involved in making the purchase decision? Is schedule or speed important to the customer? The same offering in two different markets could answer questions like these completely differently. And at this point we’re just talking about the nature of your offering. The nature of a particular customer is another important set of considerations. But we start by projecting out based on ourselves and what we do. When you use techniques that don’t match the nature of what you offer, everything will be a constant struggle. There are so many techniques for discounting, website design, pricing strategies, ad copywriting, content marketing, relationship marketing, all the names you have to come up with, pitches, value propositions and so much more. Most of the techniques that you run into will be for other people’s offerings and offerings that have a different nature than yours. Instead of struggling to make the techniques work, take a step back and let the nature of your offering guide your decisions. Do you know the nature of what you offer? Do you know what you want the nature of your offering to become? Let’s discuss and figure that out together. When you understand the nature of what you sell, you’ll find making decisions easier and you’ll make better decisions as well. When you understand the nature of what you sell, you’ll find that your customer interactions go smoother and your business will be more successful.

Meet Hev, a transformational life coach and Human Design guide dedicated to helping people unlock their true potential and align with their soul’s purpose. She's been a member from the beginning and you may have already met her since she's a very active networker. Teaching comes natural to her, and like a lot of us, she blurs the lines between being a creator, coach, or a consultant. Hev works with clients who feel they’ve been on a journey of personal growth + self-development for a while—reading books, attending seminars, and exploring different healing modalities—yet still sense there’s something deeper to discover. She specializes in supporting spiritual entrepreneurs by empowering them to connect their natural gifts and wisdom with what they bring to the world. Her clients learn to monetize their unique gifts + talents and free themselves from societal constraints around earning a living. Hev helps them break away from traditional work expectations, allowing them to embrace a path that feels authentic and fulfilling, without “selling their soul” to a business or employer. As someone who is comfortable working in a corporate environment, I love working side by side with Hev and sharing our different perspectives. Partnering with her brings out the best of both worlds. Hev's personal journey is fascinating, and she brings some interesting experience. Her very first go at coaching was wildly successful. For about a year. And then it crashed because it wasn't sustainable. There was also the problem that it wasn't aligned with what and who she wanted to be. After about a year of reflection, she was ready. But building her new business took another year of hard work to get off the ground. Now all the relationships she builds align and reinforce each other. Hev has not only integrated CreatCoachConsult into her new business, she's integrated all the insights she's had along the way. Integration has become a major theme. It's how she's tied together all the research she's done, from how to raise the bar on instructional design to her studies in Human Design. She's also changed her life, bringing her work into alignment with her aspirations and vision for how she wants to live. All of this in turn is driving new approaches for her coaching business to share it all with others. In her business life, she offers a variety of accessible resources. From 1:1 coaching and consulting sessions to self-paced e-books, an audio course podcast to community networking events. She also helps other people launch their offerings and find clarity and a sense of fulfilment while they're at it. She's all about aligning your passion with your lifestyle. She'd love it if you'd reach out, either to learn more, just to have a conversation, or with a collaboration in mind. One of her many posts on CreateCoachConsult is a free Human Design chart to help you understand your own blueprint and take the first steps toward a life and business that feel truly aligned.

By the time a child graduates from high school, they may have seen 360,000 ads. When we grow up and need to promote out interests, it’s really hard to not be affected by that. When people try to find the words that will convince strangers to become our customers, the familiar words that come to mind are from all those ads we’ve been exposed to. And they are the wrong words. I moderate groups on LinkedIn with over 100,000 combined members, so I see a lot of people posting what I call "drive by" ad bombs. They make no attempt at engagement. It's basically a spam strategy. They know it will be ignored by nearly everyone, but if "just one" person pays attention and they get a sale, it's all worth it. There are two things they don't realize: They missed an opportunity to make numerous sales because they don't know how to post for engagement. I delete all those posts in the groups I moderate, so no customers ever see them. When an entrepreneur is posting, the last thing they should do is go straight to a sales pitch based on ads designed to avoid substance. Entrepreneurs need to engage with their customers. They need to demonstrate their value, differentiate from other alternatives, and prove their trustworthiness. They should want their customer conversations to revolve around substance. Leading with advertising copy does more to hurt your credibility than it does to improve it. Here are some examples of ad inspired copy so you see how harmful it can be: Do you need something [that I happen to sell and am about to tell you about]? I’m excited to announce that [I’m now offering…] Do you have this problem [that I just happen to sell a solution to?] I’d like to introduce you to [something so that I can sell it to you?] Yeah, I’m being a bit tongue-in-cheek. But only a little bit. When you start the first sentence sounding like an ad, it’s blatantly obvious what your motivation is. And that your trustworthiness is a bit suspect. Right from the beginning your making it harder to close the sale. Entrepreneurs need to unlearn advertising. They need to learn how to engage with their customers in ways that reinforce the buyer’s decision making process in order to get better results. Let's discuss this important topic: Have you caught yourself writing copy that sounds like an ad and instead of engaging like a human? What kinds of pitches do you find annoying? What do you post to demonstrate your competence and trustworthiness? Let's discuss unlearning advertising so we can get to customer conversations based on something real.