What does your ideal business model look like?
The reason I’m talking about this is because I’ve been thinking about it since last week, especially after I spent the week with a whole bunch of extraordinary women doing amazing things in the world. People who are creating new ways for us to experience an entire city, people who are creating platforms for people to learn how to do TED talks and how to dive and dig deep on what’s actually your true ‘why,’ people who are setting up global listening organisations and how we’re implementing and changing the world. And also, of course, my mentor Jonathan Fields who’s written an amazing book called The Good Life Project.
What if we didn’t start a business with the idea of how to make more money?
What if we started a business with the idea of ‘how can I live a good life?’
Asking a different question gives you a different answer, right?
When I first started on the #natupreneur mission instead of asking, “How can I make money?” I was asking two questions. One was, ‘How can I best serve?’
You know one of my big words is “service.” One of my big things was how can I serve more people? How can I serve on a bigger scale?
And my other one was how can I live the life that I would love to live?
If you take some time to dive into your why or your words, you’ll start to notice where it comes up in different areas of your life.
When I talk to new nuts, nats, herbies and praccies who are just fresh from qualifications, it’s very rare that they’re asking the question ‘how can I live a good life?’. They’re often asking the question, ‘how can I get more clients?’ or ‘how can I get more money?’
Those two questions give you really different perspectives on what you’re building in your business.
When you are coming at it from the money perspective it becomes a real mission for the next person or the next thing or the next sale and that can be exhausting. But if you are creating a life and a business model around how you want to live a good life, then you’re coming at it from a different angle, so the things you achieve are towards your life that you want to live.
I’m saying this because I got some interesting feedback from sharing my journey this past couple of weeks on Instagram. Someone said, “Oh, I really I wish I had your life.”
What an interesting thing to say, because we’ve all been given this extraordinary life, right? If you take the time, take a little moment to really hone in on what you genuinely want from your life, you start to come up with a different answer.
So I did this a couple of years ago with my hubby, in particular. We went to an amazing conference and really honed in on what a good life looked like for us.
One of my highest values is travel. So when I asked myself what a good life would look like, I decided that having one trip a year – particularly an overseas trip a year for my family would be amazing. And then a couples trip every year so that I can connect with my hubby.
I also wanted a work trip where I could connect with my tribe, so I decided to run retreats. I chose four retreats per year that I wanted to run and then thought about what it would look like for me to go to an event that created growth in my life every year.
So that ended up being about seven trips a year that would be my ideal life. I would love to do that! And I would love to be able to have a business that could support me while I did that.
Which is a really different perspective from helping a thousand people in a clinic and not being able to leave that clinic because the whole thing will collapse if I’m not there.
That’s very different from coming at it from the stock, standard, old school way of thinking of having to run a clinic, and seeing X amount of people for my life to be a good one as a practitioner.
What should your business model look like to support your good life?
My good life is travel and so to support that, I’ve created my business and my business model around helping people online and around being able to travel.
What does your ideal business model look like to support your ideal life?
Questions to ask yourself:
- What does your ideal life look like?
- What do your ideal day, ideal month, and ideal year look like?
- How can you create a business in alignment with that? (rather than creating a business that only lets you live your ideal life for a few weeks of the year)
The first years of my business, I opened my doors and worked all Christmas and New Year. Even though people didn’t actually come and see us then, I thought I had to make money, I had to see people.
It doesn’t have to be like that.
I’m inviting you to NOT work practitioner, clinician-style hours, in a practitioner, clinician-style way, if you want to live a good life.
What would your good life look like for you?
I said mine is travel, but you might be interested in horses or animals. You may be interested in other things. How can that be part of your work, as well?
How can you create a life that you can live in, a business that you can live in, rather than it being business, business, business for a while to finally get a life that you want to live? How could you create that?
Some of the examples that I have of this are:
- Me! I run all of my things online so that I can travel. Yes, I’ve got commitments. Even while we’re here, the kids know that I’ve got three very specific commitments I have to make every week – one here in the Hub, one in the Club, and one with our mastermind peeps.
- Other things I’ve seen are running courses online. Having a passive income stream. This week, we’ve had another 15 people sign up for the Natupreneur Experience. We’re going to teach you the ins and outs of creating a business and a life you love that’s in alignment with you rather than work, work, work, or trying to get the next client and not actually still living your life in the meantime. (By the way, if you are seeing this right now, you’ve only got three more days before early bird finishes, so I highly suggest you go and get those tickets! Otherwise, you’ll pay another nearly $300!).
- Passive income streams – how you can package up the knowledge you have in your brain so it can help somebody else while you’re not there? We’ve got a great a e-course workshop at the Natupreneur Experience in February. I sold an e-course while I was here, and it’s not like I was really working. I’m here on holidays at Puzzle World. I rode 25 kilometers yesterday on a mountain bike with our whole family everybody did – it was beautiful and wonderful and challenging and really cool at the same time.
- Memberships – how could you possibly create a membership? Everybody talks about wanting to be healthy and well, but they also need accountability. Creating a membership platform where you get paid every week or month and you create opportunities for people to connect with you or your message or the information that you have, could be a membership model.
- You could create a different business model – things like a mobile clinic. Many of you have thought about going mobile or you might want to travel Australia with your family. How could you do that? How can you create a business model that supports that?
So again, my invitation to you is to identify what your ideal life looks like – your ideal week and your ideal month. When you work on that rather than where to get the next client, when you work on what your schedule would ideally look like, what it will be filled with then see how you can help people and create a business model that will support that life rather than the other way around.
It’s such a relief to realise that it doesn’t have to be one way or another.
It’s an amazing thing to realise that healing comes in all sorts of forms and business comes in also lots of forms.
As practitioners, one of the biggest things that we have is our capacity to have a conversation. That was one of my biggest lessons, that it’s not just all about the supplements or the herbs. It’s not just all about the remedies. Some of the biggest transformational healing can come from having a conversation and interestingly enough, we can now have those conversations online. We can have them over the phone, or through the medium of mobile clinics. We can have them through rural clinics or overseas health checks.
Some of the most transformational stuff comes from knowledge and we know that there are so many people out there that don’t have the knowledge we have. Sharing it through online, offline, through radio, through all sorts of mediums, through emails, auto-responder sequences – there are so many different ways of getting the message out there of health and well-being.
So my invitation today after all of that is to take a moment over the next week to sit down with a nice clean sheet of paper and really connect in with what your ideal life looks like.
What do you truly value?
What are your particular values around? Do you want to do knitting or crafting? Do you want to do horse riding? Do you want to spend more time at the beach? How can you really get a vision for what your ideal day, week, and month looks like based on your values and your strengths?
How could you get online? How could you run an event? How could you do these things that allow you to create a space for your ideal life?
Take a moment to check in with your ideal life, what it looks like based on your values and your strengths, and then start scoping out different parts of your business. It’s not a ‘this’ or ‘that.’ It’s a spectrum and a scope of what you haven’t really explored yet. It doesn’t have to just be the clinician style work – maybe a couple of days a week you might want to do Skype consultations. Maybe it’s Friday so then you can go on long weekends with your family or something like that. Maybe you particularly like horse riding on Monday and instead you could do an evening version or you might want to take the time to create an eCourse.
My challenge to you
- Find out what your ideal life looks like
- Scope out different business models and different ways to provide information healing and transformation, how to get your message out there so your business can support your life and your life can be supporting your business so it’s not one or the other, but they each support each other.
I want to be a grey nomad in a helicopter and that’s part of my vision. My ideal next five years is things like paying off our mortgage so that we can travel around and not have to worry about those things. Setting up systems and processes and foundations in a business so that it does essentially run itself until I turn the tap on for a launch or a product or making sure people know what’s out there and available for me to help them in a way that I can without me actually being there.
Again, we’ve got a launch expert, we’ve got an e-course expert, we’ve got a money mindset expert, we’ve got some extraordinary workshops specifically for living your ideal life and what it looks like to do things differently at the Natupreneur Experience. I would love to see you there because we’ve got so much hands-on, cool stuff happening. It’s in alignment with the things I love – I love having fun, I love having totally different experiences, I love creating different experiences for people, and I love creating memorable moments. That’s what all our events are about, all my family life is about, and it’s exactly what it’s going to be like at the Natupreneur Experience. So just a little plug there to make sure no one misses out!
My little insight for this week: Take the time to think about your ideal life and your ideal business model to support it!
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