29 October 2021

Z is for Zest

        The A to Z challenge and writing about woman entrepreneurs. You may read the previous posts here. 

B is for Business Plan




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Z is for Zest

The average customer is looking for a specialist, not a vague offering from a generalist. There are too many offerings in the market which are substandard and not up to par. This often lead to disappointment with the products or services that have been purchased. The expert is who they hunt for through word of mouth recommendations within their friend circle.  That expertise is what the customers are willing to spend their hard earned money on. 

This means you need to be an expert at whatever you are offering. This involves have a great zest for the business that you are building.  To train yourself and practice till you are truly the only person who can offer your potential customers what they need. And even that is not enough. Your offerings need to be simple and clear for easy accessibility. The message should be clear for your potential customers to pick up. 

How you position yourself will have a huge impact on your success as an entrepreneur. A common mistake many newbies make is trying to be everything to everyone. While it may seem like a good idea to make money instantly, in the long run your mission statement as a business owner will be completely muddied and there will be no clarity among potential customers regarding what you actually offer. The confusion that results from this ambiguity will harm your bottom line.

Even if it goes against your grain, try and position yourself as an expert in one area as you enter the market. Subsequently as your customers begin to know, like and trust you enough to try something else that you offer, it will be easier to convert them. This brings us to the question about projecting yourself as an expert. What exactly do you need to do here? You can start by providing free content to your customers on your own website. When they perceive value in what you are sharing, they will retain you as an expert in their minds.

Make yourself more accessible by being available in many places online. Besides your own social media pages and the company website, you may consider going on other websites as a guest contributer. Be it a blog posts or a podcast interview, continue to provide high value content to the customers that showcase your knowledge and boost your expert status. If possible write a book. It's one of the easiest ways to claim credibility. 

We have established that creating expert status involves providing your customers with quality content. This will differ from industry to industry. In the exercise there are pointers on how you can develop the kind of content that will provide value to your customers. 

The Exercise 

What You Will Need: Paper and pen, some time to introspect

Decide what you would like your primary focus to be in the business. This will depend on who your intended audience is. What you sell to children, will not be the same as what you sell to their mothers. At the same time what you sell to a working woman will not necessarily be the same as what you sell to a grandmother.

It is helpful if you have profiled your ideal client as it will allow you to know what they want. Once you have understood their requirement and then seen how you can meet it through your business offerings, you need to gain a deep knowledge of the topic. Being willing to improvise after listening to your customers is very important.

Think of what you have in common with your ideal client. What special interest do you share? Have you been through what they are struggling with? How can your experience and knowdelge benefit them in the current scenario? Now work out how this can become a unique offering. 

Enhancing your expertise is something that can be done at every stage from novice to old hand. Updating your skills by attending new courses, or reading up about new findings and research can both help in getting you to improve your knowledge. The more you know, the easier it is for you to find the perfect solution for your customers.

Once you know who you need to get in touch with, what they are looking for, and how you are going to provide it to them, all you need is the zest to keep on going!

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28 October 2021

Y is for Yes

       The A to Z challenge and writing about woman entrepreneurs. You may read the previous posts here. 

B is for Business Plan


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Y is for Yes

In your journey as an entrepreneur the essence of your experience should involve feeling happy and abundant. The act of running a business should make you feel free and uplifted. If all that you feel is driven to slog due to anxiety to make it all work, you are not in alignment with your life purpose. If the only thoughts that come to your mind when thinking about your business are causing you to feel burnout, you definitely need to change what you are doing.

It is time to sit down and think about the reasons why you are trying to run a business in the first place. What do you want to create? The ultimate goal of running a successful business needs to be defined for you. What is correct for you need not be correct for someone else. 

Take for instance life coaching. One coach may be happy to help two people in the month, another may have the desire to work with ten people in the same time. However, in order to achieve that goal, they may be burning themselves out, while the person coaching just two people in the month is feeling aligned and satisfied.

Are you feeling the burnout because you are saying "Yes" to others so often, that you are scattering your energies. If there no flow to your work because you can't say "No" to people who want something from you. Your business may have been created to serve a certain purpose for your clients, yet, you need to feel happy and fulfilled when devoting your time and effort towards this goal.

Learning to say "No" is an important skill in keeping yourself rejuvenated. Unfortunately you have been socially conditioned to accept and fulfil unrealistic demands. Most people need to learn how to say "No" politely and without burning your bridges at a chance of working with the same client in the future.

The Exercise 

What You Will Need: Clarity and Practice

It takes courage to say no to a potential client. You will need to practice this as you will feel as though you are letting people's expectations down. It helps with the process if you can let potential clients know in advance just what they can expect and no further. A pre-emptive "No" can be worked into your interactions with them through previous conversations letting them know what you are currently preoccupied with.

When it's something you don't do:

  • When a client asks you to do something that exceeds the scope of your work, be polite and firm with your denial. You can say something like "I am sorry, but I'm afraid that won't be possible." Then you can go on and explain the scope of what you can handle and why it won't be possible for you to do what they are asking.
  • Offering an alternative is also a good strategy. If you can't take on a task that a client wants you to, it helps to collaborate with others who are offering similar goods and services to yours who will do what the client requires. This way, you are not saying a definitive "No", instead you are redirecting them to someone who can do the work for them.

When you don't have the time to do something:

  • If the client is extremely pushy, you need to work on maintaining the original "No". Some people simply don't give up easily, and this gives you an opportunity to practice staying resolute with what you have said. You can say something like "I truly appreciate your confidence in my abilities, but at the moment my plate is full and I simply will not be able to take on a project of this size for another six months."
  • Be prepared to miss out on the opportunities in the future. If the client can't wait for you, they will find someone else to accommodate them. This means that they may not return to you in the future. So, you should be willing to take the risk of losing their business altogether.

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26 October 2021

X is for Xenial

      The A to Z challenge and writing about woman entrepreneurs. You may read the previous posts here. 

B is for Business Plan



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X is for Xenial

Being Xenial is just a fancy way of saying being hospitable. The word comes from the ancient Greek practice of being hospitable to foreigners by showing them friendliness, kindness and compassion. The old times actually involved gifting physical items to these strangers, so that they felt welcomed to the land. All qualities that any successful woman entrepreneur knows will help develop customer relations with existing and potential customers.

While I may not have heard of it before I began research into an appropriate word starting from X for this series, I do appreciate the sentiment that the word carries. It is necessary to stay professional in your interactions with the strangers who come in contact with you via your business. Your very reputation will depend on it. At the same time, you need to be open and welcoming to them. Make them feel the need for your offering and help them to purchase it.

It can be quite the balancing act as you try to show them empathy for what they are going through, build their trust in you as a person and the solution that you offer, be sensitive to their triggers, use your awareness to help them get the best deal that you offer, and continue to build a lasting relationship with them, which stays in the realm of professionalism. 

The good news is, that's much easier to do as you go along. Yes, you will make a few errors of judgement along the way, but you will learn from each one of them. Don't waste copious amounts of time rerunning the errors in your head and belittling yourself for them. Soon you will become an expert on how far you can go, how much you can share and just how much vulnerability you can show them. In fact, being Xenial will become second nature to you.

The Exercise 

What You Will Need: To understand your boundaries

Any good relationship, be it personal or professional, needs well defined boundaries. While being Xenial, you are creating a space for these strangers to walk into. A space where they have the freedom to peruse whatever you are selling, without any obligation to purchase it. Here you are hospitable and available, but not crowding their freedom or free will.

It's a good idea to ask yourself a few questions about the products and services that you would like to offer to your potential customers. For instance, you may create awareness about the uses of a particular product that you sell, however you may not offer free samples to them. If they want to try it out, they need to purchase it fair and square. 

Another boundary could be related to the after sales process. It may be necessary to provide some after sales support to people depending on what you are selling. However, there may be tendency for them to exploit this option by demanding more than you are comfortable giving. Here it would help if you had a clearly defined policy on what you are able to help them with and what they need to figure out on their own. 

Don't get suckered into providing more than you are being paid to do. You need to honour your power and respect yourself, so that the clients understand exactly where you stand. At the same time help them congenially with whatever is within the scope of the goods and services that you offer. You can be a sounding board, but you are not there to make major life decisions on their behalf. As you begin to define your boundaries, it will help you greatly in being Xenial.

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25 October 2021

W is for Workshop

     The A to Z challenge and writing about woman entrepreneurs. You may read the previous posts here. 

B is for Business Plan




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W is for Workshop

 A single tool which has made it's importance felt over the last couple of years is the Workshop. This is anything from an actual physical event which allows your customers to interact with you in person, to a webinar which allow powerful content to be  disseminated to them. The purpose of a workshop is usually the same - to inform and educate the ideal client.

Your content needs to be related to the product or service that you are offering as an entrepreneur. It should have powerful content which is of great interest to the person who you profile as your ideal client. It should motivate them to spend the time and the money that you are asking for in the workshop to learn these new skills or understand the information that you are going to share with them during the workshop session.

It helps to have a core message that you should focus on during the workshop as well as the promotional material that you put out. Have no more than four points to follow up and support the core message that you are trying to provide. Always have activity based learning as afar as possible. People tend to remember things better if they have actually done the deed rather than just been informed verbally about how they can do the deed.

At the end of the workshop you must always sum up everything that was covered. The main take away points need to be highlighted, as do the new knowledge and skills that they have picked up. The clients should go home feeling satisfied that they have indeed improved their skill set and know more than they did before they attended the workshop.

The Exercise 

What You Will Need: Design a workshop and market it to your ideal client

If you have never designed a workshop before, you need to understand the steps that will be involved. We start with the core message that you wish to deliver. If your product is related to living a healthier life, then you need to focus on that. If you deal with a service that allows people greater freedom of time, you need to focus on that. The goal of the workshop is to get people interested in the business offering via the core message which resonates with it.

You should already have a description of your ideal client as a business owner. In case you don't, you need to work it out now, so that you can figure out who will be attending your workshop. Remember that you may not always have the end user attend the workshop. For instance, you could so a simple hour long parenting workshop with mothers, for a service related to children to get them to understand how their children will be benefited from the service.

Once you have the audience you need to be pitching the workshop to, you need to begin marketing to them where they hang out. Both online and offline. 

Make sure that you have some consistency regarding the venue and the time. When you repeatedly hold a monthly workshop at a specific location, the word of mouth reference becomes easier to access. Your consistency will pay off rich dividends in terms of creating trust and validity in the eyes of your potential and existing clients. Thanks to the pandemic this is easier to do online these days.

Always have a feedback section in the workshop to find out the true needs of your clients. This information comes directly from the people who will invest in your goods or services. Listen to what they really need and then tailor your offerings to meet these needs. Forging a collaborative environment in the workshop helps to keeps things interactive and interesting for the participants.

Be in the moment. Yes, it is important to plan out the different steps of the workshop, but be flexible to the energy of the group. In every Level 1 Reiki workshop I have conducted, the core content stays the same, yet each group learns something new, which is not part of the main course, based on the energy I perceive with them.


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13 October 2021

V is for Viability

    The A to Z challenge and writing about woman entrepreneurs. You may read the previous posts here. 

B is for Business Plan



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V is for Viability

Is it possible that the value you provide to your customers is viable over a long time period? In the initial days of setting up a business, women entrepreneurs tend to be extremely enthusiastic about their work. Then as the pulls and pushes of various other aspects of the business and life in general begin to take their toll, that sense of enthusiasm begins to dwindle. The work that had cheered and excited you previously, now begins to feel like more effort than it's other.

This is a typical case of reaching burnout because you have been trying to do too much, too quickly. The long term goals for a successful business include being professional, being consistent and being unique. There is a lot of choice in the market today, no matter what your actual niche is. This means that your customers need to be treated with respect and provided the same level of value that you start out with consistently, with every single purchase they make.

Also your customers come to expect a certain quality and standard when they buy from you. If this is unavailable the next time they come back to you, there is a good chance that you will lose them forever due to being inconsistent. In addition, the same old things tend to get boring. As a business owner, you need to find something that keeps the customer interested and coming back to shop with you. This can be anything from new products or services that you offer, an add on to something that you already consider a best seller, or even contests.

The more your customers value what you provide, the easier it is for your business to become viable. Which brings us to what you need to offer your customers to keep them coming back. Very often small business owners make the mistake of assuming what their customers want, rather than speaking with them and actually ascertaining what they want. Don't make the mistake of wasting time and limited resources coming up with offers no one is interested in. Instead do your due diligence to find out what actually interests them.

The Exercise 

What You Will Need: Some questions and some customers

Come up with a few ideas of offers that you think are adding value to your customer's shopping experience with you. It can be anything that gels well with your current offerings. Initially brainstorm about two dozen ideas. Then discard the ones that are not viable over time, or will cost too much in terms of resources. Then focus on the five best ones that are possible to do quickly and repeatedly.

Here are some value added suggestions for a physical product such as handmade soaps. 

1. Offer limited editions soaps during the holiday season.

2. Make gift packs with the soaps and an additional skin care product. If you don't make one you can collaborate with someone who does. Both of you can offer the gift packs in your outlets.

3. Consider a subscription model. There is a monthly product delivered to the subscriber, at a slight savings than purchasing the regular soap.

4. Offer 3, 6 or 9 month soap subscriptions as gifts for their friends and family members. Include personalized birthday greeting or wishes from the client.

5. Set up a customer referralgift for those who bring in their friends and family to shop with you.

6. Have a bi-annual flash sale to clear old inventory. As well as give your customers to pick up soaps at a good discount. Although there are some schools of thought which say never offer a discount, instead add value before you increase your rates.

7. A contest with a surprise giveaway is also a good way to drum up publicity on social media.

Keep in mind your ideal customer and demographics when you make up your questionnaire. Then poll your existing customers on what they would prefer in terms of these value added services. Once you know what they would prefer, get the deal sorted out and offer it to them.

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05 October 2021

U is for Utilize

    The A to Z challenge and writing about woman entrepreneurs. You may read the previous posts here. 

B is for Business Plan


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U is for Utilize

As you go about setting up your business, you will begin to collect tool, enhance skills, and network with people. Having all these resources is just half the story to becoming a successful entrepreneur. The other half is what you do with them. The bootstrapped entrepreneur is often cutting expenses and saving resources, so when you begin to see some success, instead of trying to capitalize on this and moving forward, you retreat.

Don't hide behind old deadlines that you found difficult to meet when you were just starting out. You have become much faster and time efficient since then. Do away with limiting beliefs around the budget and how you need to save every penny. While it may have been true before you had regular customers, this definitely doesn't limit you now that you actually have people showing up to buy from you repeatedly.

There may have been constraints on how much funding you could pour into the business, initially, but now you have other funding options such as pre-sales, soft loans, and standing orders. Your support system is also likely to have grown to help you deal with the time constraints that you initially faced with launching and running the business. In addition, you can collaborate with other people in the industry.

Up selling to your own customers will only take you so far, but cross selling to another friend's customers will help both of you boom your business. Tie up with businesses in your field to offer gift certificates and discounts when they buy from them. It's a fantastic way to gain new leads, that will actually convert.

The Exercise 

What You Will Need: Use your available resources to their full potential

Here the idea is to unite with the other small business owners and harness all your resources together. Remember that old tale where a single stick could be easily broken, but when a bunch of sticks was tied together it was much stronger.  It's pretty much the same principle of strength in numbers that we are striving for here. A single store owner may bring in a few customers, but when a bunch of you get together and combine your marketing skills, all of you will be able to attract and sell to more people.

Here are some small things that you can do regularly to foster goodwill amongst your potential business allies.

  • Share an even that a competitor is promoting with your social media accounts and tag them.
  • If you have used and liked any of their services or products, share your genuine experience with your fan base.
  • Reach out to the people whose work you admire and ask to collaborate with them on a project of mutual gain.
  • Maybe organize a speciality workshop and have them come in as a guest speaker. This could even work out as a series of posts for your own social media accounts.
  • Find ways to help each other if they are going through a rough patch, get in touch monthly via a meetup, either physically or virtually.

The idea is to be available and visible to your network. That way when you need their help, they will be much more likely to extend it to you. Again, remember not to abuse their trust. You can always ask them to reciprocate the things that you have already done for them.The idea is not to make a single killing and be stuck, but to foster relationships where you all get to grow together as individuals, entrepreneurs and businesses.


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03 October 2021

T is for Training

   The A to Z challenge and writing about woman entrepreneurs. You may read the previous posts here. 

B is for Business Plan






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T is for Training

Very often women entrepreneurs start out a business without any formal training. It's usually a passion or a hobby which gets converted into a business, of sorts. The processes are made up as you go along, with a high learning curve. There are almost as many disasters as there are successes to celebrate. The challenges can arise in using the appropriate technology, or simply being unaware of the facts. 

There's a lot of time that can be saved with the appropriate training. The right training allows you to increase your limited knowledge, develop a new set of skills that will help you be more efficient, and eliminate the energy drain that you currently feel while struggling to put everything together comprehensively. Yet, on a routine basis, I come across women entrepreneurs who will be highly reluctant to get trained.

Despite understanding the fact that the training would help them be more productive and efficient, there is a tendency to prefer using the trial and error method. This hit or miss strategy often ends up costing more in terms of materials, money and manpower than a course which they refuse to invest in. So do yourself and your fledgling business a favour, get trained in the aspect of business that you are struggling with.

No one is denying your expertise in producing what you do, but there is more than simply creating a perfect product to running a business. If you do not understand terms such as ROI (return on investment), intangible costs, and KPE (key performance indicators), it may do you a world of good to find a good business management course and train yourself to run your business perfectly. 

The Exercise 

What You Will Need: Do a Time and Energy Audit to determine the training you need.

Start with making a list of activities that need to be done as a part of your running a business. Make this as comprehensive as you can. Doesn't matter if it only needs to be done once a day, week or month. As long as you spend time and energy doing the activity, you need to write it down along with the time it takes you to do it. 

Here please be brutally honest with yourself.

If you are regularly struggling with an activity, it's time to check just how long it takes you to get it done from prep to follow up. From gathering the resources you need, to the work you need to put in, till you actually complete it, add all the minutes and hours it takes. Including travel time if there is any involved. Or awkward packets of time where you can't seem to get anything done and simply end up wasting it. 

Identify where your energy leaks are. 

What's taking an unreasonably longer time to accomplish? Also mark out what would help this to go faster? This is a good way to find out if you can learn stuff on your own in self paced courses, or if you need expert help. In the end, there is no one size fits all solution to your personal training needs. While you may be benefited from the opinions of experts, it is only you who can determine what training you can afford to take, and what you can afford to learn through trial and error.

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