Wendy McCallum (01:58)
Hello there, welcome back to The Coaching Edge. I'm your host, Wendy McCallum. I'm fresh off a vacation where I also got a cold. So my voice is a little hoarse today, although I am feeling much, much better. This episode today is for you. If you are a coach or a consultant and you have ever felt like the marketing that you are doing feels awkward, manipulative, or...
frankly just slightly gross. I certainly have felt this way at times over the years and I'm gonna talk about some of the times when I felt like my marketing was really misaligned for me. But I also hear this all the time inside the BBB from my coaches and inside the other programs that I have for newer coaches where they just feel like certain platforms or certain strategies feel really icky to them. So.
If that's you, if you've ever felt that way or if you're currently feeling that way about marketing or if you're avoiding marketing because it always feels that way, this episode is for you. Please keep listening. It's not because you're bad at marketing. I want to get that out right away. This is not a you problem. Like you're bad at sales, you're bad at marketing. It is almost...
Always the problem is that the marketing and the sales approach that you're taking is actually just out of alignment with your values. It does not match your personal and or business values. There's probably an overlap between those two things. But your marketing, your sales, the conversations that you're having, whatever that looks like, the platforms that you're on, it is not in alignment with who you are and what makes you tick as a human.
and that's why it feels so gross. It does not have to feel that way. So today we're gonna talk about, I'm gonna use me as an example here, we're gonna talk about what it looks like to create and run a small business based on values-based marketing. So I'm gonna walk you through today like 10 things that I do not do in my business and why. Now some of these things I maybe did try for a while or,
tried once and learned my lesson from that, but these are things that I do not do consistently. I just stay away from these things because not doing these things feels a whole lot more aligned for me. And I'm gonna tell you how that actually pays off for me as a business owner. So we're gonna talk today about a whole lot of different ways that coaches end up showing up in their business that...
does not feel aligned for them. And I want to be really clear before we get started here. This conversation today is not about me telling you what the right thing is to do when it comes to marketing and sales, because values, if you're a coach, you probably already know this. If you do any values coaching with your clients, values are very individual and very personal. So I am not here to judge anybody else's decisions about how they choose to do marketing and sales. But I am here to really encourage you to start thinking about the places in your
current business model where it feels like there's a lot of friction and resistance for you so that you can really start thinking about whether the friction and resistance is due to the fact that that is just not an alignment for you personally and professionally in terms of your values so that you can start making tweaks and changes. I'm here to give you permission to change the model. I keep saying that on this podcast. You get to change your mind. This is a great place to change your mind because it's really going to benefit you.
When you create a business model that is in alignment with your values, you create a really frictionless, much more effortless, and much more joyful and fun business model, which is really what I'm here for. So I'm not here to judge, I'm just here to talk about the things that don't feel good to me based on my personal values, which may not be your personal values or your professional values, to be super clear. I wanna start with just an example of the one time I did like this is.
I was trying to think before I did this episode, what's an example of the most icky thing I've ever done? Like the thing that felt the grossest to me when I was doing it, the most uncomfortable, the most obvious example of something that was out of alignment for me. And I'm going to tell you this little story before I get started, because I think it's quite funny now reflecting on it. only once in my life did I do what I would call like a typical sales webinar. So maybe like...
I don't know, this is probably about seven or eight years ago, sales webinars were like the rage. Everybody was doing them, everyone was talking about them. Russell Brunson had his program exploding where he's teaching people how to do these salesy webinars where there's a very specific structure to them. You would start with...
conversation about this and a hook and you would bring people in and there was a time, certain time in the webinar when you started talking about your offer and then there was like a really hard sales pitch that happened at the end of the webinar and then that would lead to conversions on the webinar and conversions after the webinar. I didn't do the Russell Brunson thing because I have never felt aligned with him but I did hire a business coach at one point who I loved. She was amazing and we worked through a strategy for launching and selling a new program, a new offer that I had.
⁓ it was going to be an online group program. And part of that strategy was this sales webinar. And we worked really hard on creating a really valuable webinar because that was really important to me. And as we go forward in this episode, that'll make sense to you. I'm very much focused on over delivering in value and pricing using value-based pricing. for me, if people were going to show up for this webinar, it was really important that they got great value out of it.
but we also worked really hard on the sales part of it which was the last 15 minutes. Now I went into this thing it was live we were recording it I was going to send the replay out to everybody who couldn't attend live. I did the first let's say 40 minutes of this webinar and it was awesome I felt so good about it I just like knocked it out of the park because I was talking about stuff that mattered to me and that I felt really confident around and I could tell that people were really engaged and were getting great value out of it and then I got to the sales part which was the last like 15 or 20 minutes
I had been dreading it. I could feel my anxiety and my cortisol rising as I got closer and closer to the time on the clock when I was supposed to start doing that. And I got into that part of it and it was the most awkward and uncomfortable 15 minutes I think of my professional life. I have never felt so icky and out of alignment, even though it wasn't even what I would consider sort of aggressive sales. But I just hated every minute of it. So much so.
that when the webinar was over, I cried. And I then went and when I, before sending the replay out, I actually removed the last portion that was the sales portion from the replay that I sent out. I re-recorded it in a much calmer way. was still, you know, it still covered off what the intended sort of focus and language of the sales portion was supposed to be. But I re-recorded it because I just felt like it had been so awkward the way I had delivered it.
and sort of like edited, spliced the two things together and sent that out as the replay. But I also said to my coach after that, I'm never doing one of those again. What I learned from that experience is that is not in alignment for me. That did not feel good. I do not like that. No matter how many times I practice doing that, that's never gonna feel good to me. I trusted my gut and my intuition on that. That is an example of, for me, with my values, personal and professional values,
something that was just really out of alignment. And I knew it. And you've got to trust your, literally your gut when you're feeling it in your body. You need to trust that. So that was the best example I could come up with, but there have been so many others. I mean, one of them is this whole many chat decision that I made that I've shared here on the podcast before many chat is the automated platform that allows you to send automatic responses to people who comment on posts and Instagram, for example.
and it's like a basically a robot that's sending messages that you pre-script. And I used that for a while, but I recently made the decision to cancel the many chat and to just let people know that it might take me longer to respond to the comments on their posts. And I still wanted to hear from them in the DMS, but that I promised it would be me that was responding to them personally. And because many chat was just did not feel aligned to me anymore. And that was, that really felt like a relief to me.
So, okay, those are just a couple of examples of when marketing starts to feel gross. And again, those are my examples. If you use many chat and you love it, great. But for me, it just didn't feel aligned anymore. So what is values-based marketing? That's really what we're talking about today. It's making business decisions based on what matters to you, not what's trending, what's scaling, or what's working for somebody else, like what somebody else is saying they're doing.
When you engage in values-based marketing, it affects all the parts of your business. It affects your niche. It affects the platforms that you decide to show up on. It affects your pricing, how you choose to price, how you choose to deliver programming, your boundaries. It affects your voice. And it affects the speed at which you grow as a business. When your values and your marketing or your sales process match,
Business gets a whole lot simpler. Decisions get cleaner. Selling gets way easier, guys. I promise you, it gets so much easier. And you stop sort of resenting your own strategy. You stop having that feeling that I had before that webinar of like, this is something that I actually dread. I don't want any of you dreading any parts of your business. Yeah, there are going to be pieces of being a small business owner that are, you know,
less fun than others, but I don't want you feeling that feeling of dread. I actually left my old job as a lawyer because of that feeling. I had it every single morning when I walked in the doors in the lobby of this huge, huge building that I worked in. And I never wanted to feel that way again. And I don't want you to feel that way about your small business. You're building, get to build a business that is really aligned with your values and that actually feels really good to you.
where you get to enjoy yourself and look forward to sitting down at your desk every day. Okay, here are the 10 things I don't do in my coaching business. Before we get into them, I guess maybe some of my values. And again, there's often an overlap between a person's personal values and when they run a small business, the values of that business. For me, these are some of my values, both personal and professional, and they kind of cross over. Authenticity for sure. You get what you see, you see what you get. That's always the way I've been. I show up everywhere the same way.
⁓ Transparency is really important to me. I do not BS people. If someone asks me a question, I will answer it. If I get an inquiry about pricing, even though my pricing isn't on my website, for example, I will reach back out and say, here are my prices. That's really important to me. Connection and community have always been very important. I am someone who doesn't do well without human connection, which I think is actually a universal thing.
But those are, I think, really embedded values for me and definitely in my business, very important. Value, providing value, really, really key to me. I don't feel good when I'm not providing tremendous value. I tend to over deliver and under price, if anything. I'm very practical. I am direct, but also very kind. So I will deliver very helpful, direct, practical feedback, but always in a very kind way.
I really value accessibility, which is one of the reasons why I set my business up and my programs up the way that I do. We'll talk about that in a second. And also just generally fairness. It's really very, very important to me. So as I go through here and talk about these various pieces of this, the 10 things that I don't do, I think it's gonna make sense to you based on what I just told you some of my values are. Okay, so here's one of the things I don't do. I don't coach in areas that I haven't lived.
So if I don't have lived experience in an area, I don't coach in it. Again, this isn't to say that you can't coach in an area that you don't have any experience in personally. Absolutely can. But for me personally, that just doesn't ever feel aligned. I started off coaching around food and wellness. I had a natural nutrition certification from a college. I went to school for a year after I was a lawyer to learn everything I could learn about food.
I had gone through a real transition when my kids were born, where I had learned how to cook myself, I had become vegetarian, I had learned how to cook vegetarian food, in particular, healthy vegetarian food with real food ingredients. So I had lived that. And that led to the basis and foundation for the first niche that I coached in as a personal coach. And over the years, my niche always was reflective of things that I had gone through personally. It became really focused.
focalized, I know where that came from. I'm gonna blame my cold for that. Focused, coach around burnout and stress and overwhelm because I had gone through my own professional burnout in my previous career as a lawyer and had felt like I had recovered from it at that point and also developed a real skillset around burnout recovery and supporting women professionally through a burnout and burnout recovery and some of the big
Transition career decisions that go along with that. I stopped drinking eight years ago that led to me getting a certification around alcohol coaching because I wanted to be able to support the women that I was already working with who were burnt out stressed and overwhelmed a lot of whom were using alcohol as a way of coping but until I got Alcohol-free and a bit alcohol-free for a few years. I did not feel confident coaching in that sphere. It just didn't feel good to me I wanted to have that lived experience
Same thing goes with the business coaching and everything I talk about on here. Obviously I have 15 years of lived experience building a successful small business. And until I felt like I was there and had been consistently doing that for a number of years, I was not supporting coaches around business development and building. So I don't coach in areas I haven't lived. That's just one of my things. I think that that...
for me feels an integrity and that helps to build trust with the clients that I work with because lived experience for me is really important in the transformational work that I do with clients. It's important for me to be able to share story. It's important when it comes to building that trust and feeling of safety for my clients for them to know that I know how they feel and I've been there. The second thing I don't ever do is I don't manufacture urgency. Now this is one that I will admit I have tried.
because I have been coached by other people to do this. This whole like, clock is running out. $500 off, but only if you sign up in the next five minutes. I've never done anything that extreme. I have been on webinars and other calls where that has been absolutely been done. And I know how it makes me feel. I absolutely hate it. It's one of the ickiest things to me in sales.
And so I do not manufacture urgency. I don't create false scarcity. If there's a bonus and there's a deadline on the bonus, the deadline is the deadline. ⁓ it's never, what I don't do is say you have to register within the next four hours or by the end of today. I usually give like, you for example, if you come to an open house and there's an open house bonus for the BBB, it's five days. It's a five day window. And you can still join the BBB after that. You just don't get the bonus, right? So.
I really am careful about doing that. I don't like the way any of that feels. I hate those like fake countdown timers. The thing I hate the most is when people come back with an email and they say, you know what, my bad. know, my dog ate the newsletter that was supposed to go out. So a lot of you didn't get the chance. So I'm actually gonna be extending the bonus or the early bird bonus. I don't like that at all. To me, that is so, it's so.
obvious to me what's happening there, which is that there was never scarcity in the first place. They didn't get enough people signed up and now they're extending that. So I hate all of that stuff and I do not do that. I do not believe in pressure sales. I don't think they work. I want people joining my programs, whether it's the BBB or it's the CCSI, which is the Confident Coaching Skills Intensive that's starting in probably a couple of weeks from the time of this podcast episode. I'll put the link in the show notes.
I don't want people joining those programs unless they feel like it's the right fit for them. I never want them to be feeling like under duress or pressure to join. And sometimes I have conversations with coaches, you know, three, four months before they join the BBB. And that's totally fine with me. Okay, the third thing I don't do is I don't overprice just because I can. And it's funny, there was an example of this came up this morning. I had a discovery call with a ⁓ potential one-on-one client for the professional burnout sphere.
and she had indicated that she wanted to talk about pricing, of course, ⁓ in her applications. We got on the discovery call and I was very transparent with pricing, which I always am. was like, look, let's just talk about the pricing. I know you have questions about it. Here's how this works. And I told her the pricing for the package and what was included in the package because I have some online programming that goes with some of my burnout stuff.
And she said, I said, do you have any questions on that? And she said, well, to be just to clarify is the price for the, for per session. And I thought I had this moment where I thought, oh my gosh, it might actually be possible for some coaches that that price that I quoted her is the price per session as opposed to for the six sessions, which is what it was. There's no thought in my mind at that moment that I could somehow increase the price or say, yeah, oh, actually it is per session. Like she was.
potentially prepared to pay that. But there was no way I was doing that. I just laughed out loud and I said, no, absolutely not. That's for the six sessions and the online course, right? I price in a transparent way. I price very thoughtfully. I always want to over deliver. Now this is not to say that I don't price based on value or I under price myself or undercut myself. I don't do that.
but I'm very careful about pricing. I really wanna make sure that the programs that I deliver are accessible for people. I need to obviously make money, I'm in business, but it's as important to me that the person who's purchasing the program and participating in the program feels like they are getting amazing value for their money. And that's how I fill programs, frankly. There's a lot of word of mouth that happens in my programming because coaches come.
work with me and say, that was the best money I ever spent. I got so much out of that. That's how I want people to feel. And that is how I want to feel about what I do. also, you know, I want people to be able to take my programs. And if I overprice, especially given the niche that I work with in the business world, which the business building world, it just coaches in the first, you know, five years of business.
It's a big deal to be investing in yourself and your business when you're not yet making a lot of profit. I get that. So I want to make sure I'm pricing things in an accessible way. I also am really focused on keeping my rooms intentionally small. So the programs that I run are small. In the BBB, we have two coaching calls a week for office hours that you can choose from because I don't ever want people to feel like they can't get my time and they can't get their questions answered. So.
Those rooms are small. We sometimes have just a few people on a coaching call for office hours, depends on the day and the week. But the maximum we would have would be like maybe 10 people, eight to 10 people on a coaching call. And if it ever gets to a point where we have more people in the BBB than what we currently have, we tend to stay somewhere between like 20 and 30 people in terms of membership in there.
there's more people than that, well then I'll just open up another coaching call during the week so that I can continue to offer that small group size. That's really important to me. Again, the coaching skills intensive that starts in a couple weeks is an intensive. There are 12 people max that are gonna be in that room with me. That allows me to be the head coach, that allows me to interact and support people in a really meaningful, ⁓ fulsome way. So all of that is not accidental, that's alignment for me. And it feels really good.
The fourth thing I don't do is I don't automate intimacy. And this really comes back to that whole mini chat example that I was talking about earlier. Mini chat worked. It's easy, it's inexpensive, it was converting. And we had a bunch of different mini chats set up for podcasts, know, the podcast episodes and for a lot of the freebies and lead magnets that I had, but it just didn't feel good to me.
As AI progressed and I started to see AI everywhere and it started to become really obvious to me that I was talking to robots all over the place and that the emails that I was getting were generated by a robot and not a real human, I started to feel ickier and ickier about the use of ManyChat. Also though, not coincidentally, my giving up of ManyChat coincided with me feeling like I really wanted to get into more meaningful conversation with people more often and so,
ditching the many chat allows me to respond personally to DMs in places like Instagram. And I usually do that with a voice note. I just had a long chat. It's probably still going. I'm guessing she's left me a response since the last message I left her this morning with ⁓ a coach outside of Philadelphia who just found me on Instagram and started following me. And I just reached out to her and asked her to tell me a little bit about herself and introduce myself. And we've been having a back and forth.
So that's really cool. If I hadn't had that conversation with her and I'd automated it, I wouldn't have learned that, you know, she found out about me at a women's wellness conference that she was at in Philadelphia where there was a woman that was there who, you I don't know if she listens to my podcast or if she's on my mailing list, shout out to you, Leslie. But that is how this person met or came, you know, came into my world. I wouldn't have learned that if I'd just used an automated robot to start that conversation. So I don't automate that intimacy anymore.
I have real conversations with people. I've done other podcast episodes on this, the importance of conversations. I will send loom videos to people who reach out to me by email. Instead of responding with an email, I'll send them a little personalized video where I answer their question. And I love getting on calls with people, just getting to know them. if you're somebody who's interested, for example, in learning more about what I do, or you're curious about whether the BBB might be a good fit for you, yeah, you can come to an open house.
with a small group of people and me or you can get on a private one-on-one call with me. I'm always happy to connect with people. So it's slower, it's less efficient, but it is more personal and it feels a whole lot more aligned to me. The other thing I don't do is I don't chase every platform and this is something we talk about a lot inside the BBB. I love what I call old school marketing, which is frankly what this podcast is all about really because everything I do
that I would consider to be old school marketing is really aligned with my values. And I think that's why I love old school marketing so much. If you don't know what I'm talking about with old school marketing, it's really like the way we used to do it before AI, before these social media platforms took over, before webinars and all the other stuff, the way that coaches used to go and get clients is the way I did it in the very beginning. I still use so many of these tools and I teach them and use them with my coach clients that I support.
If you are interested in that, really encourage you to go and get the 10 ways to get clients now masterclass, which is completely free. It's a really high value little workshop that I put together that goes through 10 ways that you can get clients right now without relying on social media. Most of the coaches that I work with either hate social media or have no idea how to use it and build it and are just at the very beginning of it. In either case,
this little workshop is perfect for you. It's going to give you all kinds of old school marketing ways to start networking and building referral sources and get paying clients in the door now. Okay, I don't show up everywhere, first of all, so I'm really selective about what platforms I use and where I show up and what feels good to me. And I'm also very careful about how often I show up. I get the fact that there's evidence out there.
to show that the more often I show up, the more likely I am to more quickly build my following. And the more crazy reels I do with this particular music in the background, the more likely the algorithm is to pick that up. I am not a dummy. I understand all of that. I just don't want to do it. It is not aligned for me. I have full transparency, have somebody who helps me with social media. name's Cassidy. I've talked about her before in here. She's an amazing copywriter.
She writes the content herself. It is not AI generated. She does it based on a meeting we have every month where we talk about my goals, what I'm working on, what I want to communicate, what's important to me, what I'm hearing from other coaches. And she helps to create that content for social media. Most of it is clips from this podcast, honestly. And she uploads it and does all the things with it on there. I do not like social media. I love communicating with people in the DMs, as I've talked about, but the actual...
Platforms of social media not really my thing. I have dropped off of Facebook altogether. Technically I have a presence there because that was where I originally built my business So have a big following on social on Facebook But I I don't do any original posting on Facebook book. If you see a post on there, it's a cross post from Instagram I choose where I want to spend my energy. The place I want to spend my time is this podcast I love this format for marketing for me. It is very aligned because it's long form conversation I'm putting that in quotes because I know you guys are
on the other end of this and can't really say anything. But it does lead to conversation in that people send me emails all the time about an episode and what resonated and tell me a little bit about themselves and then we get into a back and forth. This is the place that I wanna spend my time. I do this, I have a blog on the website where I share the podcast episodes. That's my primary platform and it's going to be, it's going to continue to be because it feels really aligned for me. I have a client business one-on-one.
coach client that I'm working with right now. do some one-on-one business coaching as well. And she is really struggling right now with the social media thing, as I said, as our many coaches. For her, it's not just like, ugh, I'm not getting anywhere with it. It feels like the algorithm doesn't favor me or it takes up so much of my time and energy. It's also an ethical thing for her. we just had a recent, yesterday I think it was, had a really good conversation about the ethical side of it and some of her ethical concerns with Metta. And then I just...
said to her, what are your other options? And she's currently brainstorming a podcast and she's just started posting on Substack. so we talked about like, what does she actually need to do? Where does she want to show up? What feels aligned for her? And what would happen if she just let go of some of these platforms that she's actually feeling really misaligned with right now? You don't owe any platform your presence, you get to choose.
And you don't have to use these like typical social media things that everyone tells you you have to use and build. They're not even working for us right now anyway. So again, go and watch the 10 ways to get clients now masterclass. I'll put it in the show notes. It's a really great starting place for you. Okay, the sixth thing I don't do is I don't outsource my voice. Now, again, I just told you about Cassidy. Cassidy helps me with this, but that is my voice. Cassidy has nailed me, my voice in that we have had.
hours and hours and hours of conversations. She knows me very very well in my business and everything she does I edit. So I go back through it and there are lots of times or certainly there there were in the beginning where I would send her a note and say I would never say this this is so outside of alignment for me. I'm going to remove this here's what I would say and so over over the last couple of years she's really gotten to know me very very well. I do not like copy and paste chat GPT
into newsletters or posts. I don't like that. These podcasts are, I usually use ChatGPT to help me organize the structure of the podcast and I have ⁓ some bullet point notes in front of me, but I am, as you can probably tell, not scripted and just talking as I go through the bullet points and basically.
you know, what you get here is not often what I thought I was going to talk about when I started the podcast episode. But that feels really aligned for me. So I'm not I am not a hyper polished person. Obviously, I don't try to copy anyone else's tone. And I don't try to be something that I'm not on here. I'm very authentic and open about the struggles and challenges that I faced as a business owner and that I currently face. I'm not here telling you I'm making millions of dollars a year.
and have tapped into the perfect system for me and have the exact answer to scaling your business because that's all BS and not me at all. I am here for real talk. I am here to be direct, to be practical without any hype. And hopefully that is what attracts you to me and why you keep listening to this podcast.
The seventh thing I don't do is I do not promise unrealistic timelines. This is a big one for me. There are a lot of business coaches out there who do this and it drives me crazy. People who are promising like I can get you to six figures in 90 days or you can replace your current corporate income in the first three months, that is complete bullshit. It never happens. I have been working now with coaches for over five years and that is just not the way this goes.
unless you have either like a golden horseshoe up your butt, or you happen to have like a pre-existing, extremely well-fitted, well-suited network or audience for the coaching service that you're offering, and you're just really well positioned to sell that at a high price right out of the gate, that is not how this goes. And so I do not do that. And that's because I value a couple of things. So two of my values show up in this. Sustainability is really important to me. I'm not here to help you like, you know,
grind away for three months to sell the hell out of an offer, only to collapse right after that. I am a burnout coach at heart, and I always have been. And so one of the things that's really important to me on the business coaching side is helping you build a business that is actually sustainable, that you can rely on, that works with your real life so that you don't burn out, so that you can take vacations, so that you can set up a schedule that actually works with whatever your other priorities, obligations, and goals are in life.
So because of that, I do not promise unrealistic timelines. I only promise things that feel really true. So I do promise that if you come into the BBB and you do the work and you watch the videos and you show up for office hours and you do the work in your business between office hours calls, you're gonna grow your business so much faster than you would without that support. But what I don't do is promise a specific financial
output. I do not build really big rooms, like rooms that are so big that I disappear. I'm never going to scale that way. I'm not interested in it. It's not in alignment with who I am. I believe in, as I said earlier, in smaller rooms. I believe in people being able to access me. That's what people pay for is my expertise and coaching. I believe in like that head coach presence idea. I am the only coach in the BBB.
I do not have other coaches there. bring in guest experts, obviously, for master classes sometimes. And if I'm on vacation, I might have one of my senior coaches just sub in and do an office hours call for me. But generally speaking, if there are 10 calls a month, I am the coach coaching those 10 calls. And that's really, really important to me. In all the other programs I run, it's the same. don't bring coaches into coach. Now, there's nothing wrong with that model for scaling. It's a great model for some people, but for me, it's not. It's just not aligned.
And, you know, that's just important to me. That allows me to really create, I think, the trust with people and the intimacy that feels good to me and allows me to honor that value that I have around really meaningful connection and support and value. I also, this is number nine, I do not shame people into change. This is one of the things that has been bothering me the most lately is seeing other business coaches out there
really with this very clear messaging that if you're not succeeding, it's your fault as a coach. Like you're playing small or you're sabotaging yourself. I don't have any time for that. And I don't do that in the business coaching. don't do it in burnout coaching. I don't do it in alcohol coaching or any other coaching that I do. I have never believed that that is a helpful. And second of all, just, I'm incapable of doing that. It's just so out of alignment for me that I do not do that.
I start from the premise, and this is one of the modalities that I was trained in as a coach through the Coaches Training Institute. I believe my clients are naturally resourceful, creative, and whole. So they already have all of the things. They're not broken. They're not big screw ups. They actually have all of the resources. They are already really powerful, successful people. And so the whole idea of shaming people and pointing out all of the ways that
that it's their fault that they are where they are is just not helpful to me. Instead, what I do is I ask curious questions, I help people reflect, I help guide people, and then I let them choose. And this shows up in all of the places in my coaching. It shows up in coaching sessions. It also shows up in sales and marketing and in conversations that I have with people. It shows up in both my coaching philosophy and in my marketing. And it's really important for me.
I also don't build a business and this is the biggest one I guess and all of these kind of contribute to this a business that I would not want to be a client in myself. Think about that. Are you building a business and a model that you would love to be a participant in as a client? This is really like the umbrella value for me. The questions that I ask sometimes out loud sometimes just I think they sort of subconsciously guide me are
Am I creating something that's gonna make people feel heard, gonna make them feel respected? Are they gonna feel pressured? Because I don't want that. Would I trust this? Is this something I would trust? Is this the way I would like to be sold to? That's another question I ask myself a lot. Would I feel seen in this particular program, structure, offer? And if the answer is no, I don't build it that way.
So I am really, really deliberate about all of this. And now let's talk about why this feels so good and how this pays off for you as a business owner, just to wrap all this up. When we zoom out here and we talk about how you wanna be operating from your values, which is really what I do now. And again, this took me a while to get here, guys. I made lots of mistakes. I did some things outside of alignment of my values. That's how you learn. mean, oftentimes the biggest clue to a value is when...
you find yourself in a situation that doesn't feel good. And that's usually a sign that one of your core key values is being trampled all over or is not available to you in that moment. So we learn oftentimes from these times when we do things that are not in alignment, what our actual values are. And I've done plenty of learning in that regard. But now I operate from a place of values pretty consistently in my business. And that does a lot of things for me.
boundaries get a whole lot easier. It is so much more obvious to me when something's out of alignment. I'm like, nope, not gonna do that. I mean, one of the things I didn't talk about today is sponsorships, but I have over the years, you I get bombarded with people asking me, wanna represent this product or talk about this thing or, know, what, and I'm just, I've always just felt like, you know, tried it with a couple of products that felt aligned to me at the time in different capacities, but it never ended up feeling very good. And so I just made a decision and made a.
kind of firm boundary on that. I'm not gonna have advertisements on podcasts and I'm not gonna represent products. It's just not something I wanna do. My pricing also gets really clear. It's a whole lot easier to, know, that conversation I was talking about that I had with the client this morning to just laugh when the suggestion is that maybe your pricing is a lot higher than it actually is. I'm really clear on that. It's really easy for me to set pricing on things because I have these values that help guide me when I'm doing that.
I think it helps with niching decisions too. Those feel a lot more grounded. Like for example, if we're talking about only coaching people in an area that you've had personal experience, that can really be helpful with niching. Not that that's for everybody, but for me, that's a big one. Platform choices also start to feel a lot more intentional, where you decide to show up and how much you show up there. And you also stop.
comparing yourself to other people in terms of growth. And that's something I'm really passionate about inside the BBB. We don't do comparisons between coaches and coaching businesses. Everyone's business is unique. Everyone's goals are unique. Everyone's life, real life is unique. And there is no one size fits all business model for building a coaching business. So comparing yourself to someone else is just never really gonna be helpful. Just a reminder, this value space marketing, it's not about being moral.
That's not what we're talking about. It's about being congruent or being aligned personally because everybody's values are different and values and morals are completely different things. I could talk about that for a half an hour. I'm not going to. We're talking here about your personal values, which are very often also your professional values as a small business person and having those align with your marketing.
and just the way that you build your coaching business. Okay, I'm gonna leave you with something I want you to take away on this episode, because I realize I'm getting close to 40 minutes and that's my usual cough on these things. So I want you to go away and do a little audit. There's just five little steps on this. This is a values audit for your business. I want you to list your top five personal values, the things that make you you that are really important to you. I want you to list your top five business values. Again, there might be a lot of overlap between those two things. There often is.
Highlight the overlap, that's number three. And then I want you to ask yourself where your current marketing is misaligned. Where, and just think about places where you feel icky on the regular. Those are probably places where your marketing is misaligned with your values. And then I want you to make one values-based decision this month, just one. I want you to change one thing in your business model, in your marketing, in your offer suite, whatever it is, that is based on a value. And then see how that feels.
go forward. So that might be like you might decide to leave a platform or just take a break from a platform for a while and see what happens. It might mean you stop using a particular sales tactic you've been using and experiment with how that feels. It might be that you clarify boundary. It might be that you broaden your niche or narrow your niche. It might be that you adjust your pricing or you change your messaging. mean, there's so many different ways that this could show up for you. You don't need to build
biggest coaching business. And if you've been a listener of this podcast for a while, you know that that's not what this podcast is all about and that's not what the BBB is about. But you do need to build a business that feels good to you, one that you respect, one that feels aligned, one that feels like clean for lack of a better word. Not dirty or icky. One that feels like you because when your business matches your values, marketing stops feeling like
It stops feeling really salesy and pushy and it starts to just feel really aligned. It starts to feel like more like leadership. And that is my goal for all of you because I know that when you get to that place, all of this starts to feel so much easier. So I hope you found that helpful today. I would love to hear from you.
What you thought of this episode and what it brought up for you and whether there are some places where you're feeling misaligned with your values You can always send me an email at wendy at wendymcallum.com or reach out in the DMs on Instagram I'm at wendymcallumcoach and just one last reminder that the CCSI if you're listening to this podcast episode in early March the CCSI is starting mid-march, March 11th It is a 10-week program with 90-minute intensive sessions 12 participants maximum You can check and see if there's still space in it
That is a program designed to help you build your confidence and your skills in session with clients. As with all of my programming, I'm the only coach in there and it's a very small, intimate group and it will be a place where you will only get built up. I don't want anyone to be afraid to join this program because they're worried about getting critiqued during their coaching. This is all about helping you really identify the strengths that you already have as a coach and build on those skills so that you can feel more confident.
more flexible, more responsive as a coach, build more programming as a result, and also sell easier because you really believe in your value. So again, you can check that out through the link in the show notes. Thanks for listening. Have a wonderful rest of your week, and I'll see you again next week.
