Podcast - Mentoring With Geraldine

mentoringwithgeraldine.com/contact/

Get a Taste for What’s Coming Up:

We’ve got to think about. When are we going to connect with our people, with our followers, so that we do create that thriving community? Where can they find us? How easy is it for them to find us? Where can they find our community? To be with us, to connect with us, to communicate with us. So, really think about it.

Where can you create your community? And how are you going to create that community? Because it’s going to enhance your practice and it’s going to support you as a practitioner.

Podcast Introduction:

Mentoring with Geraldine is a bite-sized practitioner podcast for Naturopaths, Nutritionists, Herbalists, Coaches and Practitioners. This podcast responds directly to the needs of you – the practising Natural Therapist. With interviews during the holiday season, and business and mindset support each week, so you’ll get the variety you need to enjoy, and stay motivated, in your practice.

Don’t forget to subscribe to receive the weekly episodes, and if you want to connect with me, always check the show notes, because that’s where you’ll find the links to book appointments, and of course to join “The Academy”, the membership group where there’s constant connection and community, with like-minded practitioners.

Now let’s get started.

The Global Retreat Adventure

Hello and welcome to Mentoring with Geraldine and the Bite-Size Podcast. How the devil are you? So there’s a lot going on for me right now. As you know, I recently got back from Europe. I’m finally only just over the jet lag, which killed me. I’ve got to say, it’s much harder coming this way than it is going that way.

That was pretty quick. But November is huge for me. And so I wanted to talk to you about cultivating your business, your people, and everything that’s going on with you to create that thriving community. So what’s going on for me in November? Well, on the second… In a couple of days time is the actual in-person retreat that I’m hosting here in Adelaide.

So I did one last year, and it was an amazing success. So I’ve planned another one for this year, which has been much more difficult to plan and organize because I was away in October. So last year I was doing all of the things in preparation. I had a good few weeks lead up. I haven’t had a good few weeks laid up.

I’ve had a good few days because of jet lag. I was looking at it and thinking, Oh yeah, it’s fine. I’ve got a week and a half. No, I didn’t because of jet lag. But anyway, so when we’re cultivating the community, I’ve had no problem selling the in-person retreat tickets at all. The house is full and then there are locals coming as well.

Because the house filled immediately, there’s a few locals coming, and it’s going to be amazing. But my academy also has a virtual retreat, and that isn’t for a fortnight. So there is still time, about 24 hours after you listen to this, to join the academy before it closes for the year, and come to the retreat.

And the only reason I close it is because I post everybody a gift, and I don’t want anyone to miss out. So, I close it, and then. It stays closed over Christmas when it’s mostly email support and lots of content that people can use over the summer rather than having to create their own. So I’m creating this community.

Crafting the Thriving Community Blueprint

How can you create a thriving community that means that if you turn around and say, yeah, okay, time for an in-person retreat, there’s really no selling involved because people are like, yes, I’m coming. I’ve created that community, that thriving community. I’ve created the group people want to be part of.

Retreat is here in Adelaide, which means there’s a lot of work for me to do. And I can totally understand now why people have retreats in Bali at a retreat center where everything’s done for you and you’re just planning with the company, with the retreat center itself, rather than having to, like I’m doing everything.

I had to find everything, do everything, organize the people, everybody that’s coming, they’re getting facials, photography, they’re, you know, the whole thing’s happening. But I have to organize. All of these things. Whereas if you do it at a retreat center, it’s all done for you. Yeah, not sure if I’ll do another one next year.

They are quite exhausting. But this is what I’m talking about when I create that thriving community. We have to engage with our clients to retain those clients. And how are you engaging with your clients? What is it that keeps them connected to you? Now, some people are just connectors. They’re communicators.

And you look at them and you’re like, wow, you know, they’re catching up with you. They’re checking in with you. They’re asking you how you are, and you’re like, wow, this person’s incredible, you know, so many, you go to a party and the place is packed, and it’s because they’re a connector. They are someone who creates community.

Establishing Boundaries in Community Building

But that’s not all of us. I’m okay at it. I’m pretty good at it. But I know, you know, people are way better at it than me. And is to do with, you know, if you’re that introvert, and my husband’s an introvert, so he doesn’t have a big community, he doesn’t want or need a thriving community, he’s employed by somebody else.

So. When we create that community for our business, it has to be structured, there has to be a why and where are we going for this, you know, why is it here? So that has to do with our niche when we create that thriving community. So I have the Academy as the community. I now, as you may or may not be aware, there’s the membership site here in the podcast.

So there is the clinical side. of the podcast available. So make sure that you’ve had a look at that. That’s um, rather than joining the academy, you can just do that podcast. So with this community, how do we create it and engage with them? And where are you engaging? Are you emailing your clients? Do you have an email list?

Mastering Email Engagement

Now MailerLite has a free component that is apparently very good. I pay for my email provider. But MailerLite is apparently the best free provider. So have a look at that if you haven’t already. Now, to email your clients, you have to ask them if it’s okay to do so. So that should be part of your intake form.

Are they ticking the box that says yes, you can email them? They need to tick the box about sharing their email address because you’re sharing it, if you’re not the distributor and you’re sharing it to a distributor, how is the distributor using that email? They might then be emailing that client and sending them information and offering them over-the-counter products that might not correspond with what you’re doing.

So, I mean, I use ARIA and. Oborn, as my two Australian providers, and neither of them email my clients, okay? They have their own email list for their own people, and they will email me as a practitioner, but they will not email my clients. And so we need to check. We don’t want distributors emailing our clients and offering them products, because it might not align with what we’re doing with that client.

Building Digital Spaces for Community

So how are we creating that thriving community? What are we doing? Do you have a Facebook group for them? If you’re doing weight loss, there’s no problem with having a Facebook group. You’ll have lots of other people join. You just need to make sure it’s really structured and really controlled so that people aren’t immediately offering, “Oh! Buy my essential oil and you’ll lose all the weight you need,” or whatever it is, the bandwagon that they’re on. You don’t want bandwagons in there; you know, you need to say specifically no multi-level marketing, no those things, so that the community feels supported and protected.

If you’re part of Strictly Practitioners or Strictly Education and Support, two Facebook groups that I run, then you know that you feel supported and protected. We don’t allow bullying; we’re really strict in there, that’s why it’s called Strictly. We don’t like misbehavior and we will stamp on it. We’ve actually backed away from all politics because people get so emotive and it can cause so much upset. So there’s lots of things you’re not allowed to post in there.

To create that thriving community, we’ve had to be very firm about what you’re allowed to do and not allowed to do. And that’s something you need to do within any community that you create. Community is fantastic. It really supports you as a business. It supports your mindset. People will reply to you.

People, I know, you email me now. It’s good. Reply to me. When we create that community, we create these memberships. If you have a paid membership or a free one. Um, we create that group, we create that sense of belonging for our clients. They know that they can come to us, they can share us with other people.

They can tell their friends about us. If you create a Facebook group for your practice and share it with all your clients, the ones who are on Facebook will join it. And then we’ve got the email that you send out. Once a fortnight, any leave it longer than once a fortnight and they’ll unsubscribe, have it.

Once a week is absolutely fine. Less than once a week will be too much for them. So even if you alternate Wednesdays or something, Wednesday lunchtime is a good time to post. A good time to send. Cause it’s midweek. People are looking at other things. I mean, my… Email goes out on a Friday, but that’s because I have my live and Strictly Education and Support.

My Hashtag Training Tuesday, which never happens on a Tuesday, might often happen on a Thursday. And I need to put that in the Friday email to say, Hey, it’s gone out. Here’s the link. Come and watch. So we’ve got to think about when are we going to connect with our people, with our followers, so that we do create that thriving community.

Where can they find us? How easy is it for them to find us? Where can they find our community to be with us, to connect with us, to communicate with us? So, really think about it. Where can you create your community and how are you going to create that community? Because it’s going to enhance your practice and it’s going to support you as a practitioner.

Conlcusion

So I hope this has helped, just a short one today. Look after yourself, and I’ll connect with you when I’m back. See ya. Thanks so much for joining me today. Don’t forget to rate, review, and subscribe to the podcast for the weekly episodes. If you’d like even more support and learning, then the Academy is for you.

Here you’ll find part two of the herbal discussions, more clinical learning and case studies to support your clients in practice. Bye for now.

272. Scaling Your Business

23 October 2023

When you’re thinking about scaling, it all starts with understanding your current capacity. Are you able to do it now, or is this the planning stage? Where and what are you going to scale?

In this episode, Geraldine delves into the secrets of successfully scaling your natural therapy business. Discover how to maximize your capacity, efficiently use resources, and strategically plan for growth.

Join her for invaluable insights and practical tips to help your business reach new heights!

Work with Geraldine:

mentoringwithgeraldine.com/contact/

Get a Taste for What’s Coming Up:

So when we’re thinking about scaling, what is your capacity? So how are you going to do it? Where are you going to do it? Can you scale from home? Can you scale from your lounge or your basement or your garage? Can you scale from there with what you do?

When is the next one? When are you gonna do this? Do you have the capacity to do it?

Podcast Introduction:

Now let’s get started.

Balancing Business and Travel:

I’m actually traveling on the date of publication of this one, so I’m recording this one in advance, but as you know, I have been on a journey.

So what I wanted to talk to you today about was scaling and the reason that that has come to me, you know, here I am, I’m traveling, I’ve talked to you about collaboration, maximizing your online presence, diversifying and thriving within your business.

When we think about scaling, we think of all sorts of things, all sorts of things come to mind. When we trained, we had a vision of what we wanted to do, the people we wanted to work with, where we wanted to be.

Might have been that we wanted to work in a multi-modality clinic, and then you got pregnant, had babies, and now you’ve ended up with one hour a week working from home.

Visualization and Planning:

When we think about scaling, we have to think about where am I now in my business and what is my capacity now? What is my capacity in six months, one year, three years, five years, and 10 years time?

When we look at scaling our business, we have to look at how we can scale it within our capacity. Because the last thing we want to do is burn out, right?

We need to know where we’re going. We need to know what our niche is to be able to take that next step forward to scale and increase what we’re doing, the capacity that we have.

So you’ve been mind mapping up until now, I hope. You might just be mind mapping in your mind without writing anything down because you’re listening to me.

Looking to the Future:

But what we need to think about with scaling is how, where, and why. So how am I going to scale my business? Now, scaling takes many forms.

It might be that you want your own practice, your own multi-modality practice, and that’s how you’re going to scale. It might be that you just want to see more clients.

It might be that once you work child and childcare, you can see more clients, but at the same time, you have a program on the side. When we’re scaling. We have to think about the long-term implications of that scale and where it’s leading to.

So number one is that visualization that we’ve had in the past that is in, I think, Strictly Education and Support, and is certainly in the Academy for Academy members.

So we need to think to the future. What is it that we’re heading towards and how do we scale towards that? What is my capacity now? I just said, what is my capacity now?

And what I mean by that is I am able, I have a newborn baby, my capacity is one person a week because I have a newborn baby.

And so I’m feeding every couple of hours because I’m doing demand feeding. I have a toddler. My toddler is in childcare or in kindergarten or whatever it is, three mornings a week.

But I don’t have that capacity then because I’m with the friends. So I only have Monday. And so far, I’m spending that time with my mother and my child, except for shopping.

So you’re going to have to sit down with whoever the other carer is and go, can I have this X amount of time carved out so that I can see clients? And they’re going to say, yes, they’ve got your child.

They’re going to say yes. So when we think about scaling, we have to think about. Time, commitments, and where that time is going to come from.

Adapting to Family Dynamics:

As your children get older, you get more and more time, and then you go through a period where there’s no time at all because you’re doing the running around, they’ve joined all the sports teams, and you have to get them there and do all the things.

So, when my son turned 14, so my daughter was 11, yes, I could leave them at home alone. They were totally capable of looking after themselves, they were totally capable of not cooking dinner.

I’d shown them how to cook pasta, and then they boiled the kettle, they put the water in the pot and they put the pasta in, but they didn’t turn the gas on.

So they had hard pasta. They were like, mom, we got this really hard pasta. And like the sauce was cooked and everything. I was like, yeah, you need to turn the burner on.*

So that was their first foray into cooking their own dinner when they were 14 and 11, when they should have been totally capable of doing so. Hilarious.

Adapting to Changing Schedules:

But anyway, so when we think about our capacity, when he was 14, he’d started rowing. And so I had a lot of driving to do, so the school took them to and from rowing when they were juniors, but then he’d missed the school bus home, so I had to get him home from school.

So I still had to go and get him at 4:30 instead of at 3:30. My daughter was 11. And she was a bit too far to walk by herself, so she was on the school bus home, which she couldn’t always get because some nights she’d have tennis or whatever it was, so I would still have to go and get her.

So although my day increased a little bit by an hour, because suddenly there was 4:30 pickups, there were still 4:35 o’clock pickups during rush hour, so they hadn’t really extended my client capacity.

However, I had a late night from the moment I started in naturopathy and my late night was always full. So my capacity beyond that to scale and increase my business became. I was only in school hours for the rest of the week.

Now, how am I going to scale? How am I going to increase my capacity? How am I going to scale to change and to bring in more money?

Well, we’ve got more time, so we can see more one-to-one clients. We’ve got groups. Perhaps we can put people in two groups. We could work with somebody else. We certainly could learn another modality if we wanted to.

But that might just be throwing more money at something when, in actual fact, what we need to do is work where we have the qualification now.

Building a Team:

So when we’re scaling, we need to look at how can I do more, and scaling often involves hiring ATMs. seminar, symposium that’s coming up in November, and I’m going to be talking about hiring VAs and hiring people to help you out.

So when we scale, we take on more people, but we, and we take on more capacity, we’ll take on more things.

And when I say things, I mean, I, I pay Podia to hold my site. www.geraldinehedley.com where all of my content is, so I pay for that.

I pay to host, um, videos in Vimeo because I bought that when YouTube went through a bit of a stage of saying people couldn’t have private videos, so now they’ve gone back to it’s fine you can have private videos, but, so I had to purchase Vimeo.

So I’ve got all these things I’m paying for, so as we scale our business, we end up paying out for other things. We end up paying for other people because we want to be actually earning the money.

And I’ve got a bookkeeper. I have to pay the bookkeeper, but that takes a lot of time. I don’t have to, as far as I’m concerned, waste on invoices and doing this, it’s something I hate doing.

So when we look at what we dislike, those are the things we hand off to other people so that we can scale and work more productively.

Collaboration and Support:

So that we can, if we’re doing well, we can pay someone else to organize our advertising. to promote our business to post for us in social media, because then we’re not spending that time.

If it’s something we don’t enjoy, what we want to be doing is the things we enjoy. And to scale our business means handing off some portions of our business.

What are you going to hand off? How are you going to Increase business within your capacity and to promote your business so that you’ve got clients coming in so that they’re purchasing on a regular basis so that you’ve got other things to sell them.

It might be that you open your own, it might have been your dream to open a multimodality clinic and now you’ve got that opportunity to do so because you’ve got a regular income so you can apply for a loan and they’re going to give you a loan to open up your small business.

It might be that you can not only apply for a loan, but there’s also small business grants from your local government. Check them out. Make sure you’re looking at business grants as well because they want you in a shop front.

They don’t want you working from home. They want the community vibrant. The more people are in the shops, the more vibrant the community, the more happening the community, the safer the community. So they want you out there.

They don’t want you sitting at home. Working behind a computer screen, like I do.

Reflecting on Scaling Considerations:

So when we’re thinking about scaling, what is your capacity? So how are you going to do it? Where are you going to do it? Can you scale from home? Can you scale from your… Lounge, or your basement, or your garage, can you scale from there with what you do?

So where and what, what are you going to scale? Are you going to be scaling your one-to-one appointments? Are you going to be adding in other products that you sell and you can scale from there?

So how, what, when is the next one? When are you gonna do this? Do you have the capacity to do it now? Or, now while your children are little, is this your planning stage?

Have you got time because you’re pregnant and so you’re nesting, but you actually have time as well to plan and create that program for the future? Something that you could sell while you’ve got that baby on board.

We’ve got the what’s, the when’s, the why’s, the how’s, and the who. Who are you going to scale it with or is it just going to be you?

So we’ve got lots to think about, and I’d like you to have a good think about where your business is going in the longer term. Who you’re going to need to help you scale and take your business to the next level, to the next summit, to the next place that you need it to be within your business. Who’s going to help you do that? How are you going to do it?

Who is going to support you, that part of those who’s who is going to support you to do this? Who is going to be your advocate, your cheerleader, and who’s going to be the cheer squad?

Is there a cheer squad? If there isn’t, because your partner cannot concept what you do, cannot understand what you do because they do something totally different.

They work for somebody else in a totally different environment doing absolutely, you know, they’re an architect working for an architecture firm. They’re not going to have the understanding of what you do.

You love them because of who they are. But they might be really, really risk-averse, whereas that’s why you get on so well because you have a lot of risk-taking behaviors, they’re risk averse, and so you get on really, really well.

Recognizing Diverse Strengths:

I don’t know why I picked architecture. Who knows? I don’t even know an architect. Yes, I do. I do know one. It’s my husband’s dot one.

But we’ve, it’s probably because I’ve been in Europe. All the architecture is amazing, but we’ve got to think, who is our support team as well on top of all these other who’s?

Who’s going to be there with me? Who’s going to be there following me? Who’s going to come and see me? Who am I promoting to? Who am I sharing with? We’ve got lots of who’s when we think about scaling, we’ve got lots of wheres and is our why.

Why do we want to scale? Is it just for the money? Money in the bank? We need to pay the mortgage. We need to pay off our degree. If that is your only why, then you’re gonna struggle with that because we need to have that why in there of wanting to help people, wanting to scale to help more people wanting to.

So that more people know about natural therapies and how we collaborate and how we are there as complementary to the allopathic medicine and why we’re here and what we do.

We all went into this, we’ve paid, you know, you’ve all paid lots of money for your education. And so. We’ve got to scale. We have to pay that back, but we have to have the reason why we’re doing that.

So have we got the reason why in our pocket, and are we working towards that why? And if you need my help, um, book a focus call.

Conclusion:

So the link is on the website, www.geraldineheadley.com, and of course, it’s in the show notes, to book that focus call with me. If you’ve made it to the end, please, first hour review.

I’d love one. And you know that to scale your business, you’re going to have to ask for reviews from your clients as well.

So I look forward to hearing from you. Please do email me. I love it. I always reply to every email that I get. Not necessarily instantaneously, but I always reply.

So do make sure that you ask your questions. Lots of questions become podcast episodes. They certainly become my lives in Strictly Education and Support, the Facebook group.

So I look forward to hearing from you. Really soon. Have a good one. Thanks so much for joining me today. Don’t forget to rate, review, and subscribe to the podcast for the weekly episodes.

If you’d like even more support and learning, then the Academy is for you. Here you’ll find part two of the herbal discussions, more clinical learning, and case studies to support your clients in practice. Bye for now.

271. Thinking of Collaboration

16 October 2023

Ever thought about teaming up with others to boost your natural therapy practice?

Join Geraldine as she delves into the world of collaboration, highlighting its importance in natural therapy. Learn about the different ways you can work with others to enhance your practice, from teaming up with peers to partnering with local businesses.

Work with Geraldine:

mentoringwithgeraldine.com/contact/

Get a Taste for What’s Coming Up:

Really think about it. Collaboration is really important, working with other people in a collaborative way so everybody gains from the relationship is what’s important. So do think about that and how you can incorporate it into your business. It might be you don’t want to collaborate. It might be that you’re happy as you are.

And that is cool too, but do keep an open mind when people approach you about collaboration. What can you get out of this? What more can be achieved through this? And how will it help both parties, not just the one party?

Mentoring with Geraldine is a bite sized piece of advice. Practitioner Podcast for Naturopaths, Nutritionists, Herbalists, Coaches and Practitioners.

Podcast Introduction:

Now let’s get started.

Embracing Collaboration – A European Insight

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Mentoring with Geraldine and the Bite-Size Podcast. How the devil are you? So, here I am, still in Europe, the race is coming up very soon for my husband, who’s running in the Amsterdam Marathon. I am not running in the Amsterdam Marathon. I’m not running anywhere. I walk quite quickly and I walk long distances, but I don’t run. The nuns told us when I was growing up not to run, that we shouldn’t run. They were like, stop running. I think, actually I’m pretty sure, they were saying don’t run in the corridor, but I’ve taken it as a life mantra to not run anywhere. So we can just blame the nuns.

But today I have been, as you know, last time I was talking about going out and looking at different shops and what I’ve noticed here is there are a lot of collaborations. There’s a lot of collaborative. Um, workshops and artisans working together and they’re collaborating. And I think it’s really important that we broach collaboration again, that we think about our collaboration and how we can collaborate with others to enhance what we do, who we are and our space. All right.

So I’m seeing it everywhere here in Europe and I’m loving it. I’m really enjoying the vibe of the collaboration. I have the Monday clinical group and we all collaborate together. We support each other. Everybody gets time in the conversation when you arrive on the Monday. Everybody gets to speak. We all get to collaborate in supporting each other in the answers.

Crafting Collaborative Relationships

And here, I mean, I’m talking about shops here, I’m talking about studios, I’m talking about artisans, but in a way that is still us. As practitioners, we are artisans because without our intuition and prior knowledge, we wouldn’t be able to support our clients as well as we do. And we also, without friends and groups in which we can collaborate and ask for support and ask for answers, we would feel really alone. But what I mean about this collaboration this time is going that next step.

So you can join me in one of my groups, absolutely love to have you, or What about looking at what you do and looking at the things you don’t like doing? So maybe you’re a naturopath and you don’t like writing meal plans, recipes, but if you go and put it in one of the social media groups, like strictly educational, strictly practitioners, you might put in there, Hey, I’m a naturopath who hates writing these things.

Is there a nutritionist out there who loves doing that, who would like to collaborate with me? And then you can create that collaboration with that individual. You’re creating a group. You’ll have lots of people reply. Yes, I love that. You’ll have other naturopaths reply. Yes, I love doing that. But you might want to specifically pick a nutritionist because that’s not your focus.

Maybe you don’t use any nutritional supplements. Maybe you’re a herbalist at heart and so that side of things you want to leave to someone else. So you could collaborate in care with your clients with someone else. Collaboration is reaching out to me because you think that you’ve got something to offer in a podcast. I have lots of people reaching out to me who want to be in the podcast, but maybe that’s you. Maybe you’ve got something, you’ve written a book, you’ve done something, or you are doing something that you want to share with others. And so you reach out, that’s collaboration.

The Art of Collaboration – Nurturing Growth

So collaboration has many, many forms. And I want you to think about who can I collaborate with? In what way can I collaborate with them? What is it that I need in my business that I’m currently not doing? That I’m perhaps avoiding. I mean, a simple collaboration is getting someone else to do your website, isn’t it? You’re collaborating with them, but then that job is done. It’s finished. But it might be that person also creates blogs and then you’re collaborating with them because you’re giving them the information for the blog, they’re writing your blog, but meanwhile, perhaps they’re giving you clients as well.

So when we collaborate. Collaboration can take many, many forms. Like the artisans I’m seeing here in the shops. I went into one of the shops who does a glass blower. So there was all this glass blowing in the shop. Everything you could buy in the way of glass. But he had lots of other artisans working there as well. So although he was there, Um, working on glass, making small ornaments, that’s what they’re called, small ornaments.

He had pottery in the store and he had some silk screen printing as well, so it was beautiful. And so he’s collaborated with those artists, he said, put your stuff in here. Obviously he takes a cut of that. Now chances are, do not have a shop or a shop front, but you might have, if you’re seeing people one to one, there might be other things you can sell.

Exploring Collaborative Business Models

So it’s all very well if you have an office space and you can sell things in there, but you don’t have a lot of passing traffic or you’re only there maybe one or two days a week. There’s not much point selling food because it’s going to go off. My massage therapist sells those flip flops, the ones that have the, called Archies, that’s right. She’s diversified. What she’s doing. She’s not necessarily collaborating, but she’s taken in, I mean, that’s a big company, but she’s taken in a product to sell to others. So maybe you can think about something that won’t go off quickly or can be returned after a certain length of time. So maybe you could work with someone who creates teas. And so you become their naturopathic advisor to their tea company, but they’re the ones selling the tea. And of course, then you have a few that you sell in your office. What collaborations can you do? Who can you collaborate with? What is it that you can see a need for?

If you can see a need for something, then maybe others do too. You’ll have to do some market research. We’ll have to see, is there truly a need for this? If I bring teas into my office, are any of my clients actually going to buy them, or am I going to end up giving them away? If I collaborate with a tea company, can I then sell them at markets, or will they expect me to be at markets selling them?

The Art of Strategic Collaboration

So when we collaborate, we have to think, how does this help me, but how does it help them too? What do I get out of this, but what do they get out of this? For a tea company, having a naturopath who advises them, that’s probably kudos for them. So that’s a good thing for them, but then they may already have a naturopath, so they don’t need you. So they might need a nutritionist because they do other teas that have, or they, they do, you know, protein powders or something. So, how is it going to help both sides, that collaboration?

Artisan, one of the artisans, he said that, well there was a woman in there, and, and I was like, this is really nice, and she said, oh yes, they work on a Thursday if you want to see them working. I’m like, no, I’m not here on Thursday. Leaving tomorrow. There’s a collaboration in that they were in the shop front certain days of the week. Each artisan then covered the shop. So to sell the products. So they’re saving on wages because the artisan is working in the shop doing their artistic endeavors as well as selling everybody else’s content.

Exploring Collaborative Spaces

But what collaboration can you do? What collaboration is out there for you? The local library. They often have a space and they like people to give talks in there because libraries need to be relevant. People aren’t reading paper books. So lots of other things are happening in local libraries. So what can you bring to the local community that, you know, you’re collaborating with the local community. It’s, yes, there’s collaborations with a different modality. There’s also collaborations with different centers and different spaces. There is. How are you improving your business through that collaboration and how will they improve theirs? Where can you see yourself with your superpowers supporting what you do, right?

So I’m a talker, not a writer. So someone said to me, can you write a blog for me? I actually get somebody else to write it, or I speak it, now, I can speak it of course, and then get AI to write it for me if I wanted to, but chances are I’d actually send it to a blog writer to do it, here’s all the ideas, here’s what I’ve got to say, please put this into a written format. Because it’s not my thing, and I know that if someone asked me for a blog, I’m never going to get it out, it’s never going to get done. So, we’ve really got to think, how can I? Support someone else whilst they support me. And what’s even in this relationship? It does have to be an even collaboration. It might be that you have to pay them for the collaboration because it’s not even, like the blog writer.

The Symphony of Collaboration

She’s not getting anything out of that. I’m saying it’s my blog. So I’m going to pay her for that. But there are lots of collaborations where it can be free. It’s our time. It might be that you collaborate with people from college to have a session once a month where you go through clients, you talk about what’s going on in your business. You’ve got a group of people you can almost let rip to and tell them how you’re going and, and they tell you how they’re going. So collaboration comes in many, many forms and you just need to list out. All of the things you don’t like doing, all of the things you love doing, who you’d like to collaborate with.

I mean, you might want to collaborate with, I don’t know, Brené Brown. Probably won’t happen. However, it might, if that’s on your vision board, that’s where you’re going, and you’re working towards that in a very specific and strategic way, PR company. But when we collaborate, there are so many opportunities. It’s thinking, what do I need? Who do I find that with? Can I collaborate with them? Or is it just a purchase opportunity? How can I collaborate with them so they’re promoting me while I promote them? So the local library, you’re promoting the local library because you’re giving a talk in there and they’re promoting you and you’re giving the talk. They will perhaps earn the money from the talk if it’s a paid talk and you won’t earn anything or they might give you a small stipend or something. But that’s fine if you’ve got 60 people sitting there, hopefully you’re going to convert some of those people to come and see you as clients. So that’s a collaboration.

Closing Thoughts on Collaboration and Growth

So really think about it. Collaboration is really important. Working with other people in a collaborative way so everybody gains from the relationship. is what’s important. So do think about that and how you can incorporate it into your business. It might be you don’t want to collaborate. It might be that you’re happy as you are, and that is cool too. But do keep an open mind when people approach you about collaboration. What can you get out of this? What more can be achieved through this and how will it help both parties, not just the one party. So I’m going to leave it there today. Nice short one, quick one, because I’m going to get back out to the shops. So I hope you have an absolutely brilliant rest of day and I look forward to catching up with you on the next cast. Thanks so much for joining me today. Don’t forget to rate, review, and subscribe to the podcast for the weekly episodes. If you’d like even more support and learning, then the Academy is for you. Here you’ll find part two of the herbal discussions, more clinical learning, and case studies to support your clients in practice. Bye for now.

270. Maximise Your Online Presence

9 October 2023

In this episode, Geraldine delves into the intricacies of maximising your online presence in today’s digital landscape. She shares valuable insights on adapting to different geographical online search behaviours, emphasising the need for a strong digital presence. Geraldine also provides practical strategies for creating, scheduling, and automating content across various platforms, all while building trust with potential clients through the 20+ touch points rule.

Work with Geraldine:

mentoringwithgeraldine.com/contact/