Success Story for Saturday

From Thomas Foster, Founder and Director,

A few months ago I sat down to do a business coaching and consultancy session with an a highly accomplished young man who was three years into running his own business. Highly successful, he was struggling with work satisfaction – especially odd since he had such a sunny and positive outlook on life in general.

Our initial discussion led me to understand that as much as he enjoyed his work for its own sake he was also highly money motivated, having student debt to clear and certain extended family obligations he prided himself on meeting. And yet even that couldn’t be a complete explanation for his lack of satisfaction in his new business because he was making decent money – covering those costs, living a decent life, and still putting money aside.

A key concept is coaching is ‘congruence’ – the extent to which the different aspects of our life are aligned, for example our actions being aligned with our values and our interests. This is a really powerful concept for getting people to the very top level of personal success and satisfaction, and its relevance to the consultancy side of my work comes out very strongly in what came next.

The client’s business was mostly selling chunks of his own time, to individuals or groups, across a range of interventions that he was highly skilled at delivering. I asked the client to write down all the different products he offered (keeping in mind that all the products, one way or another, came down to his time and personal presence) and what profit margin he got from each of them. Then, alongside that, how much he enjoyed each of them, and how easy it was to get that kind of work.

The result: a couple of products that were hard to sell, but both enjoyable and profitable. Some that were neither enjoyable nor profitable, but easy to sell so good for making up gaps in his diary. And some that weren’t especially profitable but were enjoyable, and some the reverse – profitable but not especially enjoyable.

This gave us two things. One, which I’ll talk about in a moment, was a road map forwards. The second though was an immediate burst of congruence – and therefore satisfaction - because he could see clearly where he was right in that moment.

He had got into the habit of bemoaning the products he didn’t enjoy delivering, forgetting that they were where he made a lot of his money. And he bemoaned the ones he did enjoy for not being profitable enough. And then the few he both enjoyed and made a lot of money from, well those he bemoaned for being rare. And the ones that just made-up time in his diary he bemoaned for being boring to deliver and not very profitable, even though they kept him busy (and brought in *some* net profit) when he would otherwise have been idle.

So his first positive outcome was to flip this on its head. I told him, in one of my favourite phrases, ‘either value it or drop it’. Seen through this exercise, he realized he did value everything his did, one way or another. By focusing on what he valued out of each type of session he could immediately approach his work with a more positive attitude.

And it gave him a road map for the future – given that we now knew exactly what work was both profitable and enjoyable to him, albeit hard to find, he had a new goal for the next level of his specialization. We worked out what his barriers to that were – the work was harder to get, so why?, and revisited those from first principles of online marketing and client building.

In the short term he found renewed satisfaction in all of his work, and in the medium term he was able to re-orient his business towards those aspects he most enjoyed.

And best of all, that only took three coaching sessions (though he was good enough to stay in touch afterwards, and keep me up to date with his success!)

If you’re interested in what our business coaching and consultancy services can do for you, why not drop me a line directly on thomasfoster@trinityfairmount.co.uk