I’d like to welcome author Christy Strauch to the Reiki Awakening blog this week! Christy is on a blog book tour, and is seriously impressive in her ability to explain clearly how to start and grow a business. She wrote an article for my blog for you friends who wish to know how to develop your energy healing practice into a viable business. She has some really great practical advice! Get ready to be inspired!
Christy Strauch is the author of Passion, Plan, Profit: 12 Simple Steps to Convert Your Passion into a Solid Business. In addition she is president of Clarity To Business and has worked with over 300 small business owners, from artists to real estate agents, helping them do what they are passionate about – and make a profit. Her book is available at Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/Passion-Plan-Profit-Simple-Business/dp/0984055703. I encourage you to get her book and work through the process to plan and execute the growth of your business. I am grateful for her wisdom and glad to share it with you. Now, here’s Christy!
How Energy Healers Can Grow Their Businesses
by Christy Strauch
The first step in helping your business grow, no matter what it is (after you make sure you’re doing a great job at the products and services you provide), is to understand, at a deep level, who your perfect clients are, and what they want and need from you.
You went into this work to help people. Even though you might want to help everyone, you have to be specific about who it is you want to, and are most effective at, helping the most. Be ruthless about this. Who are you drawn to? Elders? Athletic boys between the ages of 12-18? Pre-menopausal women? Who are your perfect clients? Healers are lucky; to be an effective healer you intuitively know many things about your clients already. Take that knowledge you already have and talk to your clients to gather the rest. You need both the demographic information about them (things like their age, where they live, level of education) and psychographic information (what they like to do for fun, their attitudes about healing and medicine, what they read, who else they go to for help, and lots of other questions).
The second step in building your practice is to understand how to draw more people to you. Healing professions rely on trust. Although you could run an ad in a local newspaper, or show up to a networking event and hand out your cards, or even cold-call prospective clients (kidding, this is a bad idea); people go to healers because they trust them. And the best way for someone to trust you as a healer, is if someone else your client trusts, recommends you.
Now that you know your clients deeply, ask yourself: who else do they work with? Other healers such as acupuncturists, massage therapists, chiropractors, or? Where do they shop? Do they exercise at a specific place, or buy their food at a certain store? The most effective way to build your practice is to work with other people who also work with your perfect clients.
Visit the people your clients also work with and see if they would be willing to refer their clients to you (and vice versa: you would also refer clients to them). Use your intuition here also; you will only want to refer your precious clients to people you trust implicitly; the same is true for other practitioners and businesses. They will only want to refer their clients to people they trust.
The best referral relationships are ones based on deep mutual trust. These relationships need nurturing and communication to thrive, just like any other relationship that’s important to you.
Get deeply acquainted with your clients, and enter into meaningful referral relationships with other businesses. These are the two primary keys to success in the healing professions.