The Mainstream Approach to
Developing Your Business
May Be Taking You
in the Wrong Direction!
Whether you’ve watched business videos, taken a marketing course, or enrolled in a business coaching program, you’ve been told “this is how business is done.”
Based on my research and experience, the Mainstream Approach does not work well if you are:
A business owner who is sensitive, intuitive, and creative.
A business owner whose work depends on developing relationships with their clients that are built on trust.
A business owner who has a deep, nuanced way of working with clients as they move through significant change to create a life that is refreshing and aligns with who they are becoming.
By the way, I call these business owners Change Catalysts.
If you have never understood why you struggled to implement what you learned about developing your work and business through all those training courses and coaching programs, make yourself a cup of tea and give yourself the gift of reading this page.
If you’d like to hear more about this topic, listen to:
When Mainstream Business Strategies Don’t Work for All
Series 1 - Episode 2 of my podcast.
As you read, notice..
What elements of the following two sections resonate with your experience?
Where does your stomach clench and your breathing tighten?
Where do you feel a sense of relief when you realize your experience is not your fault?
Section 1: Three Reasons the Mainstream Approach
Is a Mismatch for Change Catalysts and Their Work
During the 12 years I’ve been trying to make sense of why the tactics and strategies of the Mainstream Approach didn’t sit well with me, I’ve come to three main conclusions.
1) Mismatch #1 - When Strategies Feel Out of Sync with Your Style, Values, and Integrity
As you learn and implement Mainstream business and marketing strategies, you may come to realize that what you are being taught feels out of sync with your values and your own personal style.
2) Mismatch #2 - When Sales Strategies Erode Trust
As a Change Catalyst, you work with clients who are in a vulnerable, tender place as they create a life they desire while navigating significant transitions – whether they expected the change or not. Because nurturing this kind of client relationship requires an inherent level of trust, you feel uncomfortable using manipulative tactics to grow your business.
3) Mismatch #3: When Using a Template Forces You to Dilute Your Work
As a Change Catalyst you are already (or you dream of) doing deep work that is fulfilling, heart-felt, and woven from your unique background and experiences. When the Mainstream Approach encourages us to shoe-horn our work into a fast and easy template, it diminishes the form and depth of our work.
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Section 2: Three Crucial Gaps in the Mainstream Approach that Often Derail Change Catalysts
When Change Catalysts are looking for guidance to create a new business, grow their existing business, or develop a new form of work with their clients, they look to courses, coaching programs, and online resources to learn what they need to do to create the business results they are striving to generate. Unfortunately, Change Catalysts who invest in these programs don’t always receive the promised return on their investment.
Before we dive into the specific dynamics of these gaps, I want to assure you that even if you have struggled to produce results within the Mainstream Approach, you are not and never were broken.
There are three systemic gaps in the Mainstream Approach that rear up when conflicting assumptions play out between Mainstream consultants and their clients who are in the process of figuring out the direction of their work. Each gap has costly ramifications for Change Catalysts.
Here’s how these gaps plays out:
1: Incompatible Assumptions
When marketing and business consultants design their programs, they assume their incoming clients already have a sense of their niche, ideal client, and their work with clients. If clients don’t have these details fully sorted out, the story goes, they will get up to speed quickly and easily during the program.
As Change Catalysts listen to free webinars and read the marketing copy for upcoming coaching programs or courses they may want to invest in, they assume that the promises of success mean that the program will help them firm up their niche, figure out their ideal client, and sort out their offer and pricing.
Emerging business owners and established business owners with emerging bodies of work or innovative, out-of-the-box work, don’t have these key pieces (their niche, ideal client, and their offer) dialed in enough…yet.
2: Premature Niching
One of the reasons Change Catalysts with emerging aspects of their business struggle with the Mainstream Approach’s first hurdle for a successful business, the almighty marketing niche, is that they truly don’t feel confident that they’ve sorted out the kind of work they want to do with their clients.
As long as you aren’t clear about your work, each course you take will have you investigating a different niche, a new ideal client avatar, and a fresh take on your offer. After multiple courses, you feel so frustrated that you’ll try anything to get out of this never-ending state of confusion you’ve found yourself in.
When you have a clear inner knowing about where you are headed with your business and you have proof your work works, then it’s time to discern the most favorable marketing niche. By then you have a deep enough experience of your emerging work to have the same innate knowledge about your work that experienced business owners have about theirs, but until you have this deep knowing, it’s too early to be claiming your marketing niche.
3: Unable to Implement Mainstream Strategies
When you don’t know enough about your business direction (your niche, ideal client, and offers), you can’t implement what you are learning in the courses you’ve invested in. This outcome leaves you feeling broken, depressed, and ashamed.
If you continue on this spin cycle, investing without seeing the results you are hoping to create, you may find yourself experiencing business burnout or business trauma.
When you can’t figure out what you need, even when you are trying so hard to get what you need in place so you can get rolling with your business, you end up on a slippery slope of feeling like a failure, contending with dwindling funds, and wondering if you are meant to be a Change Catalyst entrepreneur after all.
In this moment, please remember: you are not broken! The Mainstream Approach itself is missing some very important steps of the journey for those whose work and business are emerging.
Don’t despair.
Good News: There Is Another Approach!
I call it the Organic Way and it does include the steps you need to take to strengthen your work and your business foundation before you attempt to implement what you learned in the Mainstream courses you’ve taken.