Monday, February 8, 2010

Welcome Author Christy Strauch!

I'd like to welcome author Christy Strauch to the Reiki Awakening blog this week! Christy is on a blog book tour, and is seriously impressive in her ability to explain clearly how to start and grow a business. She wrote an article for my blog for you friends who wish to know how to develop your energy healing practice into a viable business. She has some really great practical advice! Get ready to be inspired!

Christy Strauch is the author of Passion, Plan, Profit: 12 Simple Steps to Convert Your Passion into a Solid Business. In addition she is president of Clarity To Business and has worked with over 300 small business owners, from artists to real estate agents, helping them do what they are passionate about – and make a profit. Her book is available at Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/Passion-Plan-Profit-Simple-Business/dp/0984055703. I encourage you to get her book and work through the process to plan and execute the growth of your business. I am grateful for her wisdom and glad to share it with you. Now, here's Christy!


How Energy Healers Can Grow Their Businesses
by Christy Strauch

The first step in helping your business grow, no matter what it is (after you make sure you’re doing a great job at the products and services you provide), is to understand, at a deep level, who your perfect clients are, and what they want and need from you.

You went into this work to help people. Even though you might want to help everyone, you have to be specific about who it is you want to, and are most effective at, helping the most. Be ruthless about this. Who are you drawn to? Elders? Athletic boys between the ages of 12-18? Pre-menopausal women? Who are your perfect clients? Healers are lucky; to be an effective healer you intuitively know many things about your clients already. Take that knowledge you already have and talk to your clients to gather the rest. You need both the demographic information about them (things like their age, where they live, level of education) and psychographic information (what they like to do for fun, their attitudes about healing and medicine, what they read, who else they go to for help, and lots of other questions).

The second step in building your practice is to understand how to draw more people to you. Healing professions rely on trust. Although you could run an ad in a local newspaper, or show up to a networking event and hand out your cards, or even cold-call prospective clients (kidding, this is a bad idea); people go to healers because they trust them. And the best way for someone to trust you as a healer, is if someone else your client trusts, recommends you.

Now that you know your clients deeply, ask yourself: who else do they work with? Other healers such as acupuncturists, massage therapists, chiropractors, or? Where do they shop? Do they exercise at a specific place, or buy their food at a certain store? The most effective way to build your practice is to work with other people who also work with your perfect clients.
Visit the people your clients also work with and see if they would be willing to refer their clients to you (and vice versa: you would also refer clients to them). Use your intuition here also; you will only want to refer your precious clients to people you trust implicitly; the same is true for other practitioners and businesses. They will only want to refer their clients to people they trust.

The best referral relationships are ones based on deep mutual trust. These relationships need nurturing and communication to thrive, just like any other relationship that’s important to you.

Get deeply acquainted with your clients, and enter into meaningful referral relationships with other businesses. These are the two primary keys to success in the healing professions.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

GREAT blog post Christy Strauch and thank you Alice for putting her on here! I will check out her book for SURE!!!

Alice Langholt said...

Thanks Krystal!

Always happy to have your comments and I know you'd love this book! It's so helpful with a concrete process for developing a business.

xo,
Alice

Christy Strauch said...

Thanks, Krystal and Alice. In about a week, I am going to post a questionnaire on my website that will help practitioners really understand their customers. As soon as it's up, I'll come back and re-comment. I'd love to get feedback on it.

I really support healers doing the work they love and earning a good living at it. It sounds a little goofy, but I think when healers are able to create solid businesses doing their work, it contributes to world peace.

I'll be back next week with the link. ROCK ON, Reiki practitioners!

Alice Langholt said...

Thank you Christy! I truly appreciate your post and your comment. It is challenging to have a viable business in the energy healing practices, and your advice helps people make solid decisions towards making it possible. I look forward to seeing your questionnaire and filling it out!

Towards world peace,
Alice

Nadya said...

That really is the basic, isn't it - trust!
When I began doing healing work, my mentor shared a newspaper clipping on the importance of 'word of mouth' networking, & that if someone was SATISFIED with your work, they'd share it with a few folks, but if they were UNhappy, they'd share their experience with lots more!
So that good old 'customer is always right' - & do what's in your power to make their experience with you & your service plesant!!

Alice Langholt said...

Dia,

Thank you for your comment - great point and excellent reminder about word of mouth and how important it is in networking - for better or worse! Here's wishing us all the good side of the referrals!

Gratitude,
Alice

Darreck said...

I think most of the reiki practitioners are working from home, or at local new age centre. it is kinda difficult to entirely depends the business on one income source, what i usually do is combine reiki healing with essential oils.

1. a good therapeutic grade essential oils have healing properties in it, while working with reiki healing it help to work on different and deeper layers of ehteric body.

2. at the same time i am also cross selling my essential oils if client like it, so there's always additional income there.

3. essential oils with reiki create a sacred space and atsmosphere for healing and also calming the mind.