In 2009 I began teaching my first yoga class, a sliding scale class on Thursday nights in the community space above a neighborhood coffee shop. I loved teaching this class, and I really wanted to find a way to make a living as a yoga teacher. I had done odd jobs since I was a teenager, baby-sitting, painting faces, giving haircuts alongside my service industry jobs. But this was my first time taking a side hustle seriously enough as a business endeavor that I was trying to market myself.
My first foray into marketing were printed flyers, cut-and-paste specimens with an artsy-punk aesthetic. (This was a decade ago. Pre-Instagram, pre-online marketing as we know it. Some of you remember.) I xeroxed said flyers at the library and biked around town to stick them up on every coffeehouse bulletin board that would let me. One side listed my classes; the other, a calendar of all the low-cost classes around town.
Without having taken a single marketing course, I intuitively understood that passersby (my “target audience,” you could say) didn’t care about me or my teaching, and in fact, had something of a distaste for self-promotion, but that some of them (maybe my “ideal clients”) did care about low-cost self-care options, and would be much more likely to pick up a flyer that was a useful resource for them (“content marketing,” perhaps?) I did not know those business terms for a long time to come, but I was enacting marketing principles by gut instinct, and I was right. Those flyers were on refrigerators all over town. Thus was my entree into being self-employed.
In the decade that’s followed, I have continued to follow my gut more times than not, though I have also gotten some formal training in marketing, sales and business. Both have helped, the former to teach me to trust myself and my own intuition; the latter to remind me that having the language to speak of intuitive concepts makes business (and everything else) run much more efficiently. I celebrated ten years in business this November (though I quit teaching yoga last year. Read more about that over here.)
Here are ten things I’ve learned from my decade of business, for you, my fellow visionary business leader. May our futures be expansive and fruitful and fun.
Everything is an experiment. Want to offer an online course? Do it and let it be imperfect. Thinking of trying out sliding scale pricing models? Implement it for three months and see what happens. The fact that sometimes experiments fail doesn’t mean that experiments are a waste of time. Sometimes a failure is based on an error that I’ve made, but more often it’s some combination of circumstances beyond my control that causes things to go awry. Allow yourself to make mistakes. We’re all just grappling through anyway. The experiment of being in business is ongoing.
Consistency is everything. You know the sinking feeling of showing up for a fitness class and not having your favorite teacher be there, or the disappointment of making the effort to get there and finding the door locked with a note taped to it? Yeah, you want your clients to avoid that feeling. For the first three years I taught yoga, I hardly ever left town, because I knew how important it was to not cancel class or have a sub. This consistency built trust with my students, so they knew they could count on me to do what I said I’d do.
Similarly, when I first started writing this newsletter, I committed to sending it weekly, and like clockwork, I sent them out. My readers looked forward to Thursday morning when they knew they’d find me in their inbox. When I travelled for six weeks, I found substitute teachers for my classes, but I also arranged substitute writers for my newsletter, so even though I wasn’t there, there was a continuity of experience for my people. Over time, I knew I could count on my students to show up to practice because of our reciprocity, just like I know I can count on y’all opening these missives.
People make the difference. If I like who my clients are, my work expands me, thrills me, and energizes me. If I struggle with the people I’m working with, it’s exhausting. Get clear about who you want to work with and then find. those. people. It will fill your heart to work with the right people. When you’re first starting out, you’ll need to work with lots of folks to see who is truly the right fit for what you offer. For me, there’s no one demographic I prefer, but all my ideal clients have in common that they’re working hard to keep their hearts open in this world in collapse. I’m on the same page as those folks at a fundamental level, and it makes the work light and connected in a way I can’t quite explain.
The way to attract the right people is to be unabashedly yourself. Professionalism is a bullshit concept anyway, and it’s based in patriarchal and white supremacist ideas about how we have to show up in the world in order to be taken seriously. So just be yourself. Write like yourself. Show up on social media like yourself. Show up for your clients like yourself. Some people won’t like you and they won’t stick around. That’s better for you anyway. Don’t take their unsubscribes personally. See number 3.
But share from the scar, not the wound. That doesn’t mean that everything that happens to you has to become fodder for your marketing. Give yourself time and space and PRIVACY to process the things that are happening to you. You can share vulnerably and authentically without having to broadcast your whole life. Some things can remain unsaid. Have boundaries with what you share. Let some healing happen quietly and behind closed doors.
You don’t have to replicate corporate culture. Let me let you in on a secret: you don’t have to follow the rules. (And there are a lot of rules.) You can do things according to your own values and integrity and pleasure. In fact, you should always do things this way. To me, that’s one of the main perks of working for myself. Your work day doesn’t have to start at 8 am. You don’t have to time-track. Of course, if those things are genuinely exciting to you, by all means do them! But if they’re not, let them go and don’t feel guilty about it. If I wanted to follow corporate rules, I’d get a corporate job. At least then I’d have benefits!! If some rule or suggestion from a marketing expert makes you feel gross? STOP doing that thing. There are other ways to be in business. (See number 7.)
Make space for imagination! We can get stuck in wanting to find the “proven 6-step formula” and just rubber stamp our way to success, but I didn’t become self-employed to be like everyone else. Did you? I didn’t think so. Take advantage of all the shit you don’t have to adhere to because you’ve opted out. There are a million right ways to do any single aspect of your business. While you don’t need to always reinvent the wheel, I do suggest finding ways to sidestep. Look at the places where there’s friction of doing business in a way that’s out of alignment with your values. Imagine a future not based on systems of oppression. How would your business shift in that future? What would your client contracts look like then? How would your marketing be different? How would your workday be structured? Envision better futures. This is perhaps a slower path but it is a more generative one.
Iteration is key. It can feel so disheartening to put imperfect offerings into the world that don’t quite meet your own exacting standards. The things you make will get better over time. I promise. Just keep iterating. I learned this principle from Ira Glass, who talks about this in relation to artists and creatives, but I would argue that running a business is a type of creative practice, and regardless, his advice certainly applies to us. He says, “All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good....But your taste is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you....The most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.”
Relationships are everything. Send the follow up email. Write that person you admire and tell them so. Reach out to former clients to see how they are. Sure, any of those might lead to a sale, but don’t let that be the primary motivation. Do it because you’re invested in the relationship. Care. Offer help anytime you can. Ask for help anytime you need. This will come back to you tenfold, both the offering and the asking. Don’t try to go it alone. Build interdependence into your business.
Take your work seriously, because it has the power to change the culture. You can change how you relate to yourself as both boss and worker. Your workday can involve dance breaks and midday naps and copious snacks and no pants and inspired midnight visioning sessions. You can change how you relate to money. You can donate your proceeds to causes you care about and never make six-figures and not put profit first. You can change how you relate to your clients. You have the power to have equitable, interconnected relationships with your clients and customers. You can reject the norm of extractive, transactional client relationships. Your business can choose to never replicate any oppressive bullshit. You can build a new world through your business. You can give yourself and your clients an experience of something visionary, something paradigm shifting. You don’t have to replicate the status quo, so don’t. Your business is a little universe. You make the rules. What kind of world do you want it to be?
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