Business strategy for coaches in motherhood — Episode 6 of Building a Coaching Business in Motherhood

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Gillian Bennett: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Building a Coaching Business in Motherhood podcast.

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Gillian Bennett: I’m Gillian, and today we are going to talk a little bit about strategy. So this episode and the following episode are kind of a little mini-series, just two little episodes that go together. And today we are going to talk about strategy, sort of the bird’s-eye view of your business, and then in the next episode, we are going to talk a little bit about focus and distraction, and what can help you

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Gillian Bennett: Perhaps reduce a little bit of your distraction so you can focus when you are working on your business and knowing what to focus on.

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Gillian Bennett: So, let’s go ahead and jump in. I wanted to talk about this because in motherhood, we don’t have the time or the shits to give a lot of the time. We have to be so much more efficient and intentional in what we are putting into our business.

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Gillian Bennett: And if we’re not clear on what the bird’s-eye view of that business is, and where we are actually headed, we don’t know the why of what we’re doing, then we end up

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Gillian Bennett: doing things, and maybe feeling productive, like, feeling like, oh, I got things done in today, but it’s not actually productive in the sense of moving us in the direction that we want to go with our businesses. So…

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Gillian Bennett: before I had a baby.

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Gillian Bennett: if I had a day of work in a week where I was just, like, posting content to post content, maybe I was, you know, wasted a couple of hours being a bit of a perfectionist about some, like, design thing in Canva, or if I, you know, went down a rabbit hole with some fun, shiny thing that wasn’t actually, like, that meaningful for my sales strategy, it was annoying, but it wasn’t actually that big of a deal, because before I had a baby.

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Gillian Bennett: My focus was my business in the course of a day, right? And now, I’m a mom, I have very limited time, I am fortunate enough to have daycare, but my business needs to be run fully during those daycare hours. And those daycare hours, we have sort of part-time daycare, goes very, very quickly.

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Gillian Bennett: Right? And you might be a mom where maybe you actually don’t have childcare, or you have even more limited childcare, so we don’t have time for that shit. We do not have time to just be doing things to do things.

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Gillian Bennett: And…

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Gillian Bennett: for me specifically, in this version of my business, in this iteration of this business that I have been running for the last 10 years, I am so crystal clear on my strategy, and how the things that I do in my day-to-day can roll up into the bigger picture of where this business is going, which means that it’s a lot easier for me to focus, it’s a lot easier for me to know what needs to be done, and I waste a lot less time just sort of, like, scrolling on social media.

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Gillian Bennett: or, you know, looking outside of myself to figure out what I should be doing.

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Gillian Bennett: And so in this episode, I’m also gonna be sharing at the end a… an audit that I put together for you that’s gonna help you really define, do I have a strategy? If so.

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Gillian Bennett: is it moving me in the direction that I want to go with my business? Because I want you to be able to tell this idea of feeling productive from actually being productive.

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Gillian Bennett: And so let’s go ahead and dive in here. I want to make a couple points. The very first point is, like, what the heck is strategy? And we hear business coaches talk about this, like, we are constantly consuming content. You might listen to multiple business coaches’ podcasts, you might get their newsletters, you might consume their content on social media.

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Gillian Bennett: And you might hear them talk about strategy all the time.

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Gillian Bennett: But I think…

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Gillian Bennett: And, well, no, I don’t think I know, because I’ve had this conversation sort of in the background with both people within mentorship and coaches that are not working with me.

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Gillian Bennett: about, kind of, like, there’s a little bit of embarrassment around, like, I don’t really know what strategy means.

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Gillian Bennett: And so, here’s how I like to think of strategy, and I like to really make this as simple as possible, because I think it can be very overcomplicated, but when I define strategy, I think of it as knowing the direction you’re headed in your business, and the pieces of your business that are going to get you there.

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Gillian Bennett: A part of this is seeing how the pieces of your business fit together to move you in that direction. And it’s really hard to define a strategy that specifically works for you as a mother in this season of your life if you are over-consuming content. And a lot of the time, that overconsumption of content happens with

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Gillian Bennett: Business coaches or business gurus that are outside of the fitness and nutrition industry, so they don’t really understand our industry that well.

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Gillian Bennett: Or, well, it could be AND, OR.

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Gillian Bennett: they’re not parents, so they don’t have the same lived experience of, like, what it actually is like to try to do this when your brain is constantly on your child. It’s like your brain is now split, and you cannot stop thinking about your child or your children.

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Gillian Bennett: And I think sometimes we pretend that constantly consuming content is helpful, but it actually gets to a point where there’s consuming content intentionally, and then there’s just, like, content coming at us from all directions.

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Gillian Bennett: And it can be really, really confusing, and it can make us kind of have this whiplash where we’re constantly seeing this new thing or this new suggestion, and being like, this should work, or like, that sounds good. And it isn’t actually a strategy that is truly tailored to our business, our capacity, our desires, the values that we have, and the direction that we want our business to go.

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Gillian Bennett: And if you started your coaching business before having children, what worked for you strategy-wise might not be what works for you in this season of life.

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Gillian Bennett: And along with that, like I said, what works for some coach on Instagram, even if they’re making, you know, 50K months or whatever, might not fit what you need or what you want with your current capacity, with your business, and with

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Gillian Bennett: Your… your identity as a mother.

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Gillian Bennett: And so, part of this whole conversation

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Gillian Bennett: is we need to be building the trust in ourselves to be able to filter out what is just a good idea, but is a good idea for someone else, versus, oh, this actually could be a positive choice for my business, but how do I apply it in a way that actually aligns with me and my needs?

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Gillian Bennett: And this season of my life.

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Gillian Bennett: And I have a really great example of this with a coach that recently signed up for mentorship.

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Gillian Bennett: she told me that she has built her business based on seeing what was working for other people, and sort of doing those things. I don’t want to use the word copy, because of course she wasn’t doing a carbon copy of what they were doing, but she would see someone be like, wait, that’s a good idea, I should try doing that.

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Gillian Bennett: And it worked, in the sense that she is bringing in money every month with her business.

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Gillian Bennett: However, she’s now a mother, she started her business before she became a mother, and…

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Gillian Bennett: now her time is so much more limited, so it is a game of, what do I focus on? What is my strategy? Because she can no longer be like, that’s a good idea, I’m gonna run with it, because

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Gillian Bennett: it’s just not… it’s not… it doesn’t fit with the capacity that she has. And so, this is what we’re working on together in mentorship, is how do we develop a strategy that aligns with her current life.

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Gillian Bennett: And also, the vision of the business that she wants to build that is sustainable now with the child that she has now, or if she wants to have more children in the future, because so many of the women that I work with are like, I don’t want to…

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Gillian Bennett: have my child, for example, in daycare constantly. I want to spend time with them, I want to be present with them, but I also want to have this business that it doesn’t feel like I’m constantly either letting my business down or letting my child down.

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Gillian Bennett: And your strategy, so the strategy that works for you in your coaching business, is where your current capacity meets the vision of your business, and what actually works business-wise. Which is confusing, because there’s so much in business that can potentially work.

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Gillian Bennett: But, we need to be able to run that through the filter of, wait, does this work for me in this season of my life? And I want to give a couple examples of coaches that I work with that are both mothers, and the sort of personal strategy, and I think this is helpful because their strategy is very different.

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Gillian Bennett: But it is working for both of them, right? And we had to really get clear on what their vision of the business was, what they liked to do in their business, what was actually working already, so we could leverage that even more.

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Gillian Bennett: So, let me share what those overarching strategies are. So, one of the coaches that I want to talk about, she is a mom of two.

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Gillian Bennett: And…

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Gillian Bennett: one of her kids is a toddler, so very much like, mom, mom, mom, mom! But her strategy is building her low-ticket

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Gillian Bennett: app.

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Gillian Bennett: She’s building the subscriber count there, because we know that that

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Gillian Bennett: app feeds into her higher-ticket one-on-one coaching. And because she’s a mom, she also has a full-time job, and so she doesn’t have a ton of time to take on, like, 20, 30, or plus one-on-one clients. And so she is earning a good amount of monthly recurring revenue from her low-ticket

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Gillian Bennett: And then she’s also learning a chunk of her revenue from her more limited, higher ticket, one-on-one coaches. So, that is her sales strategy, is bringing people into her lower ticket, because then we know we can move them into the higher ticket.

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Gillian Bennett: And then I have another coach, who this is a coach that realized, you know, also a mom, realized that, oh wait, I have so many one-on-one clients, but I can’t increase

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Gillian Bennett: my revenue, I can’t increase my income because

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Gillian Bennett: I just don’t have the capacity for this. And so, her current strategy is not necessarily bringing in a bunch of new people, but it’s how do we move current clients into a higher ticket offer so that she is increasing income without increasing client load, right? So you see two very different strategies, both

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Gillian Bennett: Work.

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Gillian Bennett: But, they have to be personal to the coach.

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Gillian Bennett: Now, another point that I want to make, because this is where I see the biggest time suck for coaches, and as mothers, we just don’t have time for this. We don’t. We don’t have time. A lot of the time, we don’t have the emotional capacity for it, or the creativity for it, especially if we’re dealing with, like, a sick kid, or a kid that’s waking up a bunch in the night. But that’s creating content.

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Gillian Bennett: Creating content often ends up being our biggest time and energy suck, but we often end up doing it without a true intention behind each piece of content, and so it can end up being, like, you’re creating all of this content, or you’re putting pressure on yourself to create all of this content, but it doesn’t actually be… it doesn’t actually end up being useful for

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Gillian Bennett: building your business or aligning with your strategy. And I want to pull back the fourth wall here and talk about my strategy. So, I do want to invest time and energy into long-form content like this podcast.

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Gillian Bennett: I know that podcasts are one of the most effective ways for me to fast-track someone getting to know me, my ideas, my coaching style, how I communicate, how I think about things, you know, how different I am from other mentors out there.

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Gillian Bennett: I know this because I know that the last at least 5 clients of mine have listened to multiple of my podcast episodes before hiring me, and I’ve had multiple

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Gillian Bennett: clients tell me I binged your podcast before they’ve jumped on a discovery call with me. So I know that that’s something I want to leverage, because I know it’s something that works in my business.

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Gillian Bennett: So, that is a huge part of my strategy. That is somewhere where I know I do need to invest more time and energy getting people to listen to my podcast, hear my voice, read my emails, where I also share a lot of, like, what’s going on in my brain and how I’m thinking about things.

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Gillian Bennett: So, my Instagram content, for the most part, yes, is, like, kind of a taste of, like, who I am and what I’m thinking, but I want to be moving people into my longer-form content.

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Gillian Bennett: And I can easily get stuck in the creating content just to quote-unquote, like, get something out there, Loop. And especially now that I am so clear on my niche, I’m so clear on the person that I am speaking to with my content, I have so many more ideas because of that clarity around my niche and around who I want to work with and who I’m good at working with.

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Gillian Bennett: And so my point is this, is that yes, you probably do, if you run an online business and your strategy is built around

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Gillian Bennett: at least somewhat, getting clients off of social media, you do need to create content, but we need to be thinking about it like a business owner. We need to be thinking about it strategically, not just, oh crap, I haven’t posted anything today, I need to get something out there.

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Gillian Bennett: And so, let’s wrap this up.

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Gillian Bennett: I put together a strategy audit for you that touches on 5 areas. It touches on intention.

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Gillian Bennett: time and capacity, your client pathway, your sales strategy, and forward thinking. And essentially, it’s going to walk you through 5 questions that help you really understand, wait.

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Gillian Bennett: Do I actually have a strategy? If so, what is it? If not, what are the areas that it might be lacking the most in?

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Gillian Bennett: And so, you’re gonna find a link in the show notes for this episode, and when you click there, you’re gonna be sent to a landing page to fill in your email, and once you confirm your email address, you will get immediate access to the audit. I’ve created it in a Google Doc, because I was not about to spend, you know, 20 hours in Canva creating something that was overly intricate, where I just need to get this information across.

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Gillian Bennett: And I need to do it in a way that fits my current capacity. And yes, again.

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Gillian Bennett: Fourth wall coming away here. This is part of my personal business strategy. This is something to build my email list, so I will have your email. Of course, you can unsubscribe anytime you want.

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Gillian Bennett: And I will only use that to give you more of an inside look at the way that I think, my, you know, my strategy, ways that you can do things differently within your business.

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Gillian Bennett: And…

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Gillian Bennett: this is important because I’ve put a lot of thought into it. I haven’t made it overly complex, I don’t have, like, a really complex funnel that’s taken me a bunch of time to create, or, you know, 47 emails that are gonna go out after the fact, but I’ve created a tool that is genuinely, I’ve gotten the feedback on this so far, that is genuinely really, really helpful.

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Gillian Bennett: to identify, wait, what is my strategy? Am I actually doing things that are moving me towards the goal that I want? If not, what are the areas that I need to work on?

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Gillian Bennett: And…

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Gillian Bennett: I think it’s so important for you as a mother, or as a coach building a business on limited time and capacity, we need to have that clarity. So, go ahead, download the strategy audit, and in the next episode, yes, we’re gonna kind of reiterate, important to have a strategy, but we’re gonna get more specific about what happens if you do have a strategy, or you do know what you need to be doing, but you can’t maintain focus, or it’s hard to

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Gillian Bennett: kind of keep your brain on the task that you need to do. So that’s coming in the next episode. If you enjoyed this one, go ahead and pass it to someone that you think might find it helpful. Make sure that you are following the Building a Coaching Business in Motherhood podcast.

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Gillian Bennett: I would love to hear what you thought of this, if this kind of opened up something in your brain, or you found it helpful. Thank you so much for being here, thank you for listening, and we will talk again very soon.