Have you ever noticed that you are attracted to people who are enthusiastic and passionate about what they are doing, talking about or simply BEING about? Enthusiasm is magnetic, a lighthouse beam that pulls us to it, drawing us in like a front porch light to a bug on a warm summer night.

We can hardly help ourselves. It almost doesn’t matter what the message is, or who the person is, if they are enthusiastic, passionate and in BELIEF with what they are expressing, we are buying into to it before we have thought through whether we have needed it or not.

Projecting Enthusiasm

As a Creative Entrepreneur, you want to project an energy of enthusiasm. Enthusiasm Sells. People want to buy from people who are energetic, enthusiastic and on fire about the products and services that they are selling. But here’s the thing. True Enthusiasm is impossible to fake. Fake enthusiasm comes off as foul as a used car salesman with bad breath. You know it when you are near it, and every nerve in your body is firing with the urge to run.

So how do you generate real, genuine, authentic enthusiasm? The kind that attracts rather than repels, and brings positive energy to everyone you meet?

Ten Tips for Authentic Enthusiasm

1. Get Plenty of Sleep and Create a Habit of Excellent Self-care. You can’t keep up the high energy of enthusiasm without the restoration that good sleep provides. Can you drive a car with no gas? Absolutely not! Why do we think we can drive these precious vessels of love without the gas of sleep and self care?  It isn’t selfish to fill the tank, it’s mission critical-A plus important! DO THIS FIRST!

2. Dare to Say What If:..: Are you actually living the life you want to live? Are you building the future you want to have for yourself? It’s hard to have enthusiasm when you feel the drudge of a J.O.B. that you don’t want to do. Dare to ask yourself the big questions. What if money wasn’t an issue, if failure wasn’t an option, if judgement wasn’t an option…What if you could wave your magic wand and be, do, become anything you want to be… What would it be? Do you even dare to say it out loud? Be bold! Dare to dream. And then…What do you have to do to make it happen?

3. Believe in your Unstoppable Potential: You were uniquely created to live a life steeped with your own creative gifts, talents and potential. There is never  going to be anyone created like you ever again. You are one of a kind. And you are Unstoppable. Are you living your life with your unique unstoppable power on full force? Or are you hiding that special light under that proverbial bushel basket? Let your light Shine! Glow, baby, Glow!

4. Let Go of Can’t: Let go of excuses and hidden beliefs that hold you back and  limit your power. Can’t is the enemy of enthusiasm. Can’t is a wet blanket, the Debbie Downer of hope, the rain on a sunny day. And Can’t is a LIE. You have choices. And choices have power. You might chose to say no and that’s okay. But can’t and excuses have no power. Let go of them and watch how far you can go.

5. Don’t Invite Fear to the Party:  Can’t has a best friend and his name is Fear. He’s a sneaky little bugger and often wears the disguises of worry and Self-sabotage, but underneath his fancy costumes, he is still fear. Fear is not fun, fear twists us up in knots, kills dreams, destroys hope. If enthusiasm is your goal, fear is your enemy. Banish him. But you might want an assist from number six.

6. Identify Hidden Barriers and Set Them Free: Fear gets a big boost from the hidden rules and barriers that are lurking in your subconscious mind. These secret beliefs are guiding your thoughts- triggering fearful blocks to your success.  Pay attention to your triggers and try to identify the old  tapes that are holding you back. Once you can bring them into the light, you can set them free and create new beliefs to support the vision and goals you want to achieve.

7. Value your Gifts So That Others Can Respect What You Do: Brag a little! It’s hard to be enthusiastic about your gifts if you don’t have any faith in yourself. Do a little digging and determine what your unique gifts and superpowers are. Then polish them up and let them shine!

8. Surround Yourself with Positive Believers. Don’t be the Lone Ranger! It’s too hard to keep the sun shining all by yourself. Call in the reinforcements. Surround yourself with other enthusiastic and positive-focused people. This creates important Synergy that you will feel almost instantly. Soak up the love that other believers bring to the table!

9. Dream a Bigger Dream for a Bigger Cause: One of the quickest ways to rev up your enthusiasm is to understand your powerful WHY and to make sure that powerful WHY is bigger than then  the end of your personal bank account. Do you dream of making a difference for under-privileged kids? Feeding the starving, or leading the cause for world peace? Whatever your bigger mission, find a way to tie your business and your cause together. You will set your enthusiasm on FIRE!

10. Let Your Cup Overflow with Love: Always Choose Love. In the end, it is that simple and that hard. If faced with a decision, ask yourself, what would love do? What would I do if I truly loved this person with all my heart and soul and wanted only what was best for them? Then… put everything else aside and do that. Easier said than done? I know. But do it anyway. The rewards of abundance and miracles in your life are so powerful that before you know it, your authentic enthusiasm for simply BEING ALIVE and filled with gratitude for all of creation with pour out of you like rays of sun. Love is always the answer to every question. And the very best tip of them all.

Here in Chicagoland, we went from a freezing windy Mother’s Day weekend of thirty degree temperatures to a balmy, humid eighty degrees day on Tuesday. We went to bed with the heat on Monday night and turned on the air-conditioning by mid-day on Tuesday. Such is the crazy life we lead in the Midwest.

With frost on the ground one day, and humid heat the next, it is hard to figure out exactly when we are supposed to find time to get our spring crops in the ground. Too early and we risk killing them with frost. But stall even a little and we miss spring entirely as summer pops up out of nowhere and takes off running.

My poor little tomato plants are sitting on my window sill wondering why they aren’t outside enjoying this beautiful sunny day. Alas, I’m too busy working on my business and clients now to get them there. When I HAD the time to get them out there, it was too darn cold!

I am typing this up while drinking my coffee in the sanctuary, (my living room) overlooking my flower garden in the front yard. Tulips and little green sprouts of Hostas are poking their way out of the ground along side a few weeds that I haven’t had time to go pull. I know the drill. If I don’t make time to get out there, those weeds will race their way through the dirt at a reckless pace until they crowd out every pretty flower and turn my garden—and my sanctuary view— into a disaster.

And yet my first thought as I sat here sipping my coffee was, “When am I going to find time to get out there and plant my spring garden and my veggie garden? I’m too darn busy!!”

My inner coach had a quick response. “If you don’t take time to plant your seeds, you won’t have any gardens come summer to enjoy at all. Garden’s don’t wait for anyone! Make Time!”

Yeah, my inner coach is a bitch sometimes.

But she is also right. And it is the same thing in our business, as it is in our gardens.

These last few weeks, Deb and I have been abundantly blessed with referrals and business to the point of juggling schedules and projects and creating a waiting list. We are grateful. We are never too busy for new clients and your referrals. But it also means that we had to step it up and remind ourselves that there are some tasks that can not ever be pushed to the side.

Number one on that list is planting seeds and tilling the business garden.

Right now we are busy harvesting the fruits of the business garden we planted last autumn and in the early months of January and February.  Seeds of new relationships, networking and education that stretched our opportunities in exciting new directions. However, if we spend ALL of our time plucking these new opportunities from the ground and NONE of our time planting (investing) and returning to the ground, then come time for the next harvest, there will be nothing there. The earth will be barren. Our business will have dried up and we will not be reaping the plentiful harvest that comes from happy client referrals, networking, new education, renewal, and inspired creativity.

It is Dangerously Tempting To Focus on The Harvest.

But smart gardeners understand that the harvest is only one small part of the gardening cycle. Without the planting, the watering, the weeding, and careful tending of the crop—THERE WILL NEVER BE A HARVEST.

Focus on the Planting. Focus on the watering, the weeding, the careful tending, the walking through the garden enjoying the fresh air, the rejuvenation and joy of having the garden in the first place. Focus on learning new gardening techniques, honing your craft, combining the best of heirloom and new seed ideas, networking with other gardeners, sharing thoughts, seeds, dividing and growing your plants together, sharing community gardens…feeding the world.

The Harvest will come in response to your focus on the rest, not on your focus on the harvest itself.

How are you taking time to plant your business gardens? Please share in the comments!

Are you a creative entrepreneur who struggles with self-sabotage and self-rebellion, even when you KNOW what you need to do to meet your goals?

Help is on the way!

Watch this value-packed call as Wendi and Deb discuss how to Stop the Self Sabotage! Powerful Secrets to Banishing It for Good.

Click Here for the MP3 Only.

My first entrepreneurial partnership taught me critical lessons about business.

My business partner, Randy, was a charismatic, fearless, energetic young man, with giant ideas and the drive to achieve them.  His art of persuasion and sales techniques were perfected at an early age and as he discussed his business proposition with me, I recall being completely taken in by his mesmerizing descriptions of how wonderful this would all turn out if we put our resources and energies together.

I was all in, no questions asked.

The business plan?

Dig a hole to China, climb down the hole, get all their gold and silver, bring it back up the hole and sell it to make kamillions.

We were six years old.

An onlooker might have thought we had pooled our pennies together and hired a motivational business coach to assure our success. After all, we were doing everything right.

We had a business plan.  We had commitment. We had the proper tools. We had a clear intention. We TOOK ACTION!

We dug that hole in the hot summer sun for several  hours with my aunt’s best spoons, refusing to be deterred, even when those spoons bent from the force of rocks and debris in the hole. We had a timeline for success. Okay, perhaps an unrealistic one, as we expected to get to China in that very afternoon, but isn’t that also common of entrepreneurs, expecting success to happen instantly? As far as I can tell, at six, we still weren’t that far off the mark of the average entrepreneur. So far, so good.

We had all of the proper mindsets as well. We were not afraid of failure. In fact, FAILURE WAS NOT AN OPTION. We never considered it. Our positive-thinking, created-for-miracle minds had no concept of what failure was. It would be many years before that adult concept took root in our creative minds.

We had passion. We had persistence. We had vision, clarity and a goal. We were motivated! We were primed for success!

And yet, as you can safely guess, we never made it to China with our bent spoons and best intentions.

What could have possibly gone wrong when we followed every single step that all of the coaches tell us to do?

Ah…but we did miss one. The same one that so many entrepreneurs miss, over and over and over again, in their excitement and burst of enthusiasm when a new Creative Idea floods into their brain like a crazy-making drug.

They forget to do their research. They forget to gather the correct information.

No matter how inspired, motivated, well- intentioned or purposeful we were with that business, we were doomed to fail because of the simple truth that there was no path to China under my Aunt Margie’s garden. 

Period. Nothing,  no creative energy, magic mojo, spiritual secret, prayer or rain dance, two thousand dollar seminar or better coach was going to magically help us dig a hole to China.

And it won’t help you build your business either if you built your business idea on a faulty foundation to begin with.

Do your research.

• Do the clients that you have identified as your ideal clients even want what you are selling?  Do you know what price the market will bear for that range of services, and have you identified the value you are giving, and if it is a value to them?
• Is your path in line with your destination? As you can see, ours clearly wasn’t. We could have dug for the rest of our lives, and we were not going to hit our destination.  Does your business suffer from the same problem? It’s one thing to have a step-by-step plan. It’s another thing altogether to have done the research to check if it will get you where you plan to go.
• Is the market over saturated with this idea already? Are you really just now writing a book on Fifty Shades of How to…  If so, stop. Please stop. For the love of God come up with something new.
• Have you asked your existing clients what they want? One of the best tools you already have is the feedback from your existing clients.  If you are listening carefully, they will tell you what they need. Their new problems and challenges are where your new solutions and  programs are. Your job is to be in the business of solving their challenges. Listen, be there for them, and make the connections when your company can be the one to offer a solution.

The Balance between Research and Creativity

As a rule, creative entrepreneurs are not fond of taking the time to research and dig for facts. That doesn’t feel creative, fun, spiritual, or feed our souls.  However, if we ever want to feed our bank accounts or have food with our meals, the second step after coming up with that brilliant idea is to stop, drop and do your research, before you go flying off to tell everyone about your exciting new adventure. Only after you have built your idea and business plan on a foundation of solid research and understanding of truthful information, can you implement all of those other critically important tools.  Then—and only then, can you motivate and set your intentions toward success all the way to the bank.

******

Have you ever been a victim of “Digging a Hole to China” business mentality? Share your AHA’s in the comments below. We want to hear from you! You never know when your comments, questions and insights will be just the thing to help someone else along the way! Dare to care and share!

Stop for a second and take a look around you right now. Where are you? Are you at home in a comfortable clean environment surrounded by items that you love,with talismans that inspire you to create the world that you desire to live in? Or are you buried under clutter and chaos, dust and unattractive objects with little or negative meaning?

What does your environment sound like? Maybe you aren’t at home. Maybe you have left the clutter and have found a corner of a public coffee shop where the chatter of tables beside you keeps you distracted with their stories instead of yours. Or if you are at home, are the dogs barking, the kids talking and the phone ringing while the computer pings and dings? (Welcome to my world.)

What are you wearing? And sorry to be gross for a second, but how do you smell? Have you taken the time to shower this morning or brush your hair or teeth? Would you rather die than answer the front door? Come on, don’t pretend you’re the only one who has never done it. In the world of home-working creative entrepreneurs, anytime before 5:00 is fair game for a shower, right?

Well…maybe not.

Despite the myth of the crazy creative working artist who is half in the bottle of booze by noon, (If they are even awake) who does their best work prowling the house at midnight, smelling like yesterday’s ashtray and day-old sandwiches, the majority of us working creative entrepreneurs have functioning lives to live. We have families to take care of, food to put on the table and bills to pay.

We want to build a business, not a hobby—and we need to do it with a certain level of sanity, peace and systems.

Enter Sanctuary.

The word sanctuary comes from the Latin word, sanctuarium, which, the ending  ”arium” is used to mean a container to keep things in. “Sancti”, Latin for holy, gives us a container to keep things that are holy, or sacred.  Another way of putting that could be: a place for that which is sacred to us.

Is your creative work sacred to you? Does it bubble up from the very cells of your body and heart as the mission of your life?  Are you are here to serve the earth with your business and life in this manner?

If you can say yes to that, then your business deserves a sanctuary to be conducted in.

Here is why:

Our outer world affects our inner world.  

There is no way of getting around that truth. If you are conducting your business in chaos, your business will have a chaotic energy around it. If you are operating in clutter, it will be haphazard and fragmented and frustrating for you.  Your creative energy will be distracted and the channels fuzzy. It will be like talking on a phone with a bad connection. You may be getting the info, but who knows how much you are really missing?

Two Kinds of Sanctuary

Physical:    The first one is obvious. You need to clear away the clutter and the ugly vibes and restore your physical workspace to an environment that you can breathe in with feelings of happiness and serenity. The creative mind thrives in a physical place of order and structure, despite the old myth of the distracted starving artist. There was a reason he was starving! We don’t want that!  Place tokens, candles, pictures or inspiring poetry around you. Consider what scents and music calm and focus your mind. Personally, the sound of flowing water kicks my creativity into high gear. Water fountains in my creative sanctuary are a must for me, but experiment and find out what works for you.  While you are at it, don’t come to the sanctuary smelling like yesterday’s old socks. Would you show up to anyone else’s office like that? What kind of message are we sending to the universe when we don’t take our own business seriously enough to put forth any effort? I’m not saying that comfort clothes can’t be on the agenda, but if we don’t feel our best, we aren’t performing at our best. Period.

For those of us like me— with kids and dogs and phones and noise, what has worked for me is to establish sanctuary/work  hours. Times that they all know are sacred times. (Pretty much everyone who knows me knows that Fridays are sacred creative time. The Do Not Disturb sign is up and respected.) If you communicate clearly and are  consistent, your family, friends and clients will get the message and respect you for it.

Mental:    The second kind of sanctuary is more subtle, but even more important than the first. This is an area I discuss with clients in our coaching program, Mindset Matters. This is the area of the Mental Sanctuary. This is the place you create in your mind that is untouchable by anyone else. Your personal mental go to place where you can hit the reset button, find your center, your purpose and your important WHY.

Before beginning your work session, take a few moments to clear your mind of all the scattered thoughts, all of the negative hurried energy and take a few cleansing breaths. Focus your mind and heart on the WHY of your creative business. This is the reason you do this in the first place. Concentrate on the love and creative goodness that you are here to share with the world, and the method that you are going to use to do it. Get centered. Let that sense of purpose fill you and focus you. Become that container and vessel for that Divine Mission and watch the shift in energy flow from you.

Sending a message to the universe that our Creative Business is worthy of sacred space, both in our outer world and in our inner world is a a much different energy than the message that it is an afterthought, a message of  ”I’ll get to it when I get to it, when I can fit it in, in the midst of this chaos and clutter and day-old underwear.”

We tell the universe and our subconscious that this is an A+ Priority.  Mission Critical. Top of the Line Importance and that we would like the Universe’s support. And guess what?

Where our Focus goes, our Future goes.

The Universe pays attention to Sanctuary. Maybe we should too.

I’m in love with Phillip Phillip’s new song, Gone, Gone Gone. So much so, that when I have time to just sit for a few moments, I click it on my playlist on Spotify or You Tube  and listen to it over and over again, and then  one more time, and okay, I admit it, a few more times after that. There is just something so upbeat and fun about his tone and energy that it gets me all happy and smiling. And his video! Oh my, who doesn’t want to watch images that hearken back to simpler times, smiling faces that remind us of our childhood. And Pogo sticks! Remember Pogo sticks?!

I’m all smiles.

Even though the subject of the song is a little sad if you pay attention.

“When enemies are at your door, I’ll carry you away from war, if you need help, if you need help, your hope dangling by a string, I’ll share in your suffering to make you well.”

“And I would do it for you, Baby, I’m not moving on, I’ll love you long after you’re gone, for you, for you, you will never sleep alone, I will love you long after you go, oh long after you go, go go.”

“You’re my back bone, you’re my cornerstone. You’re my crutch when my legs stop moving. You’re my headstart, you’re my rugged heart. You’re the post that I’ve always needed. Like a drum baby don’t stop beating. Like a drum baby don’t stop beating.. Like a drum baby don’t stop beating. Like a drum my heart never stops beating…”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now I am certain that Phillip never meant for the song to be about creative projects, creative businesses or in my case, fictional characters from our fiction series, who live inside my head,  but around the hundredth time I listened to the song, I started thinking about the book series that Deb Dorchak and I have written, Bonds of Blood and Spirit. Two of the books are published and the other two are in the editing stages and on their way to publication.  Suddenly, I realized that the way he sung about this mystery person who needed his help to survive, who needed his help to breathe hope into her life, needed his faith and support to pull through the difficulties and sufferings, was the same way we felt about the relationship we had about this project, and the characters we had fallen in love with inside our books.

Oh hell yes, I have felt exactly like that writing these books, knowing these characters, holding their hands, breathing them to life. And I will love them with all of my heart, long after they are gone, gone, gone.

And yes, I have slept with them at night, shared my deepest dreams with them, and like a drum they have been beating in every heart beat I have taken, been in my every thought, shaped my creative breathe and been the cornerstone of my creative dreams. The books we always knew we were meant to write.

And yes… there were many times it would have been easy to quit when the going got hard, when the words wouldn’t come, when it would have been easier to move on to an easier project that wouldn’t take five years. Something that could give us instant gratification and perhaps….instant cash as well.

Wouldn’t that be nice?

But love takes commitment.  True creative investment takes time. Process. Love of the journey.  Digging in deep and being willing to stick with it for the hard parts and the sickness and the darkness and the fear, the enemies of doubt, the whispers that tell us we don’t have what it takes, we aren’t the real thing. We are frauds.

And like a beating drum, baby, don’t stop beating, like a drum, baby, don’t stop beating…”

You can never stop beating if you want to see success. Creative art….and creative business isn’t for the ones who are in for the short game. It is an ALL IN proposition. It is a commitment, a marriage to your art, and to your business.

Like a drum, baby, never stop beating.

Don’t worry Phillip, we won’t.

Why do people become entrepreneurs in the first place? There are many reasons, but get a group of entrepreneurs together in one place and the number one answer you will hear is FREEDOM. But what does freedom look like to creative entrepreneurs? Well that might surprise you. After all, not all freedoms were created alike. For your viewing pleasure, we’ve created the 7  Entrepreneurial Freedoms. Do these match your idea of freedom? Do you have a different one? Please share, we want to know what inspires you!

“The problem is not that there are problems. The problem is expecting otherwise and thinking that having problems is a problem.”

~Theodore Isaac Rubin

Imagine this:
You have been sitting in paradise now for forty days and forty nights. The weather has been perfect, the food divine, in just the right amounts and your weight has miraculously snapped into its perfect number, leaving you fit, lean and healthy.

Money is not an issue. It is flowing abundantly just yonder in that river of gold.

You have no need to strive toward goals, because the moment you have a thought, wish or desire, it is instantly manifested.

Soak it all in for a second. Really take in what life would be like if it stretched on and on like this, endless days and nights with instant satisfaction, instant success, instant desires met at every turn. No finger-lifting required.

Bored out of your skull yet?

I want you to be really honest. How many of you would have found some arbitrary thing to worry about from the past, just for the heck of it, picked a fight with your loved one, or wandered off to shake off that bothersome feeling of unrest that was making your skin crawl?

The truth is that creative people weren’t created to sit in paradise and sip an endless amount of fruity umbrella drinks while time stretched out to eternity.

A week or two…maybe. Forty days and forty nights? Get the straight-jacket because we’re heading for the loony bin.

We were born to create from the well of wonder and brilliance.  And in the absence of doing that, we will create something else. Usually trouble. We can obsess in the negative pit of mental hell, manifesting worry, stress, clutter- in it’s many forms- thinking up all sorts of ways to sidetrack ourselves from our purpose here.

Life is a series of problem solving and creation. Let’s face it. Everything is a problem looking for a solution.  That book you are writing? It is filled with landmines, twists and turns that need to be solved and worked out. But because your ego is taking that problem personally, its easier to go obsess over some other problem. That glorious artwork you are worried won’t turn out just quite right? Easier to shove in a drawer and bicker with a mate over a perceived grievance.

Your creative enterprise, the one you want to so badly to be successful? The one you are procrastinating on doing the few things that would make all the difference in the world? ( Deep down, you know what they are…) Those are the good problems to have. But instead, you are spending your time on somebody else’s problem. Because that one is emotionally easier for you to handle.

Let’s go back to that paradise for a moment, shall we?

Remember the scenario in paradise, I said that everything we desired would be instantly there.

Which would have meant there would have been nothing standing in our way to keep us from creating exactly what our hearts desired to create.

The lack of paint,  pens, supplies,  time,  and distractions—like worries over money, or relationships or any of the other excuses we tell ourselves would have been an illusion.

Exactly like they are now. They are illusions we are using to deflect us from the problems we need to be focusing on. The creative problems  we are uniquely designed to solve in the first place.

So the next time you find yourself stirring up trouble, worry, anxiety, feelings of loss, frustration or blame…

Ask yourself this:

What problem am I supposed to be solving right now? What creative purpose and problem was I designed to work on and solve?

Go do that. 

Leave that other stuff to some other trouble-maker. You have God-given work to do.

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Did you like this post? If so, then please share with your friends and subscribe to Creative Clarity Coaching!   Now it’s your turn. What is your Creative Problem you were put here to work on? Do you ever find yourself deflecting from your life’s purpose and getting distracted with trivial problems? Do you have any tips to share for getting back on track? Please share your thoughts and tips in the comments below.  Be the inspiration for someone else, who knows who you might be making a difference for today!

“If you don’t have a spiritual practice in place when times are good, you can’t expect to suddenly develop one during a moment of crisis.”
~Doug Coupland

The quote above is one I found on the website The Daily Love, a site that is delivered to my email every morning and is part of my morning ritual of spiritual reading, journaling and meditation.

I found the quote to be interesting  for the people who come to me when their lives are in crisis or shambles and want to know how to fix things. As a business coach, this  happens often. But the truth of the matter is this. When your head and heart aren’t working, your business doesn’t stand a chance either.

Sometimes the first few months of creative business coaching doesn’t address business at all. We are too busy addressing the hidden beliefs, mind clutter, physical clutter, distractions, and confusions that are standing between clarity, branding, systems and structure to even go there. But once we do get going…they take off like a rocket, because they have nothing standing in their way anymore.

What does any of this have to do with a spiritual practice?  

Creativity is spiritual.  It is, at it’s very core an inspired gift…meaning coming from Spirit. It is up to each artist to determine for themselves the conduit in which Spirit speaks to them, but I don’t know one artist worth their salt—or paint brush, or pen, who honestly believes in their heart and soul that all of their art came completely from their small little mind.

We know on some level there is a source of creativity that is larger than we could ever be.

It humbles us. It awes us. It stretches us to reach out, to try to bring it closer, to interpret, in some tiny way, the message that is singing in our souls.
When we lose that spiritual connection, as artists, we are as blind men, stumbling lost in the darkness.

Can you even begin to imagine running a creative business from this place of blindness?

As a creative coach, one whose job it is to help you find a place of clarity, a place to begin, a place where it makes sense to start…I will share this.

It starts at the heart. At Spirit.

It isn’t my place to tell you which way to connect, or to interpret the path you travel to find Spirit.

But I will tell you this. If you aren’t starting there, you are making your journey a lot more difficult than it needs to be.

Ideal Client, A+ Client, VIP Client… they go by  different names, but their value in your business remains the same.

They are the Number One key to your success and if you ignore them, you are missing out on the most valuable asset your business has.

And yet sadly, when asked, many clients struggle with the concept of  A+ Clients.

I had one client, only half joking, once tell me, “An A+ Client is anyone who pays me!”

It’s easy to feel that way when a new business owner wants food with their meals, but it doesn’t help to create priorities or know how to spend valuable resources and time.

How to Identify an A+ Client

• They fit a list of predetermined ideal criteria that meet your business goals. (Ideal Client)
• The have depth of character and good values.
• They respect your time, value and services and willingly and gratefully pay for your services.
• They advocate for you and support your business in their sphere of influence. They are your best cheerleaders.
• They refer other  like-minded clients like themselves to your business.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Let’s take an extra look at that last one. They refer like-minded clients like themselves to you. This is critical. One of my first coaches said it best: If you get referrals from a jackass, chances are you will have a business full of jackasses.  Don’t feed the jackasses! Feed the ones you love and who love you back! Your A+ clients!

How Do You Get A+ Clients?

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just put an ad in the paper?

“Wanted,  A+ Clients that will refer other excellent clients to our business. We promise to take excellent care of you!” 

Unfortunately, in the real world, it just doesn’t work that way.  Getting the type of clients who love you, advocate for you, return to you over and over again, and refer other wonderful people to you don’t grow on trees and can’t be bought with a coupon. They are created by a willingness to take time, energy, and loving care to cultivate a deep and lasting relationship with them.

Here is a warning.

There are no shortcuts to building A+ clients. There is no instant pudding recipe, no “How to get great clients Quick” tricks. Like any worthwhile relationship, it takes time and commitment to build.  If you are in a hurry, if you are motivated by extracting dollars out of them, if you are focused on what you can get rather than what you can give, you will struggle. Plain and simple.

Building Relationships with Clients

Do you take the time to get to know your clients? Do you know what is important to them? Outside of the specific project that they have hired you for, do you take time to listen to their hopes, dreams, stories? Do you ask questions, (and really care about the answers?)  The best clients tend to be givers. Don’t make the mistake of being a Taker!  Be that special person that gives back to the giver.

How do you do that?

Give back by listening, caring, acknowledging how valuable and important they are  to your business and your life. Some people never tell their clients how important they are to them because it makes them feel vulnerable. Be vulnerable! Be honest! If they are important to you, tell them! Appreciate them! Thank them. Often.

Set up special programs and surprises just for your VIP and A+ clients. And let them know!

“This is just because we love you! Because you are so important to us!”

The bottom line is this: Honor your best clients. Treat them like the gold that they are. If you love working with them, let them know it.

Your business will grow in direct proportion to the depth of the relationships you have with your clients. They are the most important resource you have.