Leverage is a powerful principle that you can use to increase your success in both your business and personal life.
In this first post of two, we’ll look at some ways you can use the principle of leverage in your business or career. In part two, we’ll explore ways in which you can use this to enhance ypur personal success as well. Be sure to subscribe in the box to your right, or in a feed reader, to ensure you dont miss any new posts.
A great example of the use of leverage in business is to examine what success guru, Tony Robbins, did when he was first starting to brand himself as an Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) expert back in the late 1980’s.
There are thousands of other people trained in NLP but the name that has been most associated with it, other than Richard Bandler and John Grinder, is Tony Robbins .
Back in the late 1980’s and early 90’s when Tony was first starting out, your average NLP practitioner was marketing one-on-one to attract individual clients, as it is with your typical practitioner today.
Tony, on the other hand, using the principle of leverage, was reaching thousands of people at the same time. By “packaging” his information and speaking to larger and larget audiences, he was able to multiply the number of people impacted by his message and, as a result, built a personal development empire.
He further leveraged his message by going on the radio and speaking about eliminating phobia’s in minutes, not years. This made him quite controversial and an in-demand guest. Fortunately, for Tony, he was able to support his claims with results.
NLP and similar therapies like EFT Emotional Freedom Technique and others can produce results in a very short period of time and often succeed where more traditional modalities have not been effective.
How you can use the principle of leverage in your business?
Let’s supposing you’re a health coach who wants to grow your business. You have great ideas, instincts, and insights about health and you know you can help a lot of people . . . if only they knew about you.
Unfortunately, since you are a solo practitioner, you have a limited Amount of money to invest in marketing and advertising.
You could, like many health coaches, market your services in traditional ways, using one-on-one and direct marketing, online and offline advertising, social media, etc., or you could use the principle of leverage.
How can you use the principle of leverage in your coaching practice?
Some of the many ways leverage can be applied to your health (or any coaching) coaching business would be to explore ways you can reach larger numbers of people in less time, with less effort.
Articles, blogs, books & ebooks, webinars, video’s, and more are just a few that come to mind. These are what I refer to as perpetual products. Typically the information in your book, for example, will be as relevant in five or ten years as it is today. The work you do today, as in the case of a book for example, will be producing for you for years to come, in both publicity and revenue.
An informative blog post written today will still be bringing you search engine traffic for years to come. I regularly have people signing up for my Jim’s Jems newsletter (see sidebar to your right) from articles I wrote years ago. The topics are evergreen and remain something people search for very day. Unless your posts are time sensitive, they’ll be working for you for a long time.
Leverage the power of your business relationships
For example, you might ask your health club owner if they’d be interested in sponsoring and promoting your talk to their membership. This would enable you to reach many people at one time with your message while giving them “added value” for their members. Once again, everyone wins.
Offer to speak at meetings and events, even at no charge. There are numerous local service and business groups who regularly need speakers for their meetings and events. Lions and Rotary clubs, business networking groups, and meetups are just some of the possible partners for you to think about. Who do you know in these organizations?
Partner with a larger company
Is there someone in your network whose company would benefit from an alliance with you? For example, back in 1998 Comcast was in the cellular telephone business and wanted to connect with small business customers in order to promote their small business cellular services.
Realizing they’d attract few people to a talk about Cellular telephones, they hired me to deliver my Small Business Marketing seminar at a series of public events.
The seminar content, which at the time included how to best utilize the opportunities being afforded by the emerging Internet technologies, being of great interest to the small business owner, attracted good sized audiences to the three separate events we held in the area.
Comcast, having the leverage to reach thousands of people through their advertising as well as their customer database, was able to handle all the marketing and promotion.
They ran ads, arranged the venues, handled registration, and all the details of putting on a terrific event. They even took care of the cookies and coffee for after the event.
As a result, Comcast had access to hundreds of prospective customers while providing them with useful information, thus creating a lot of good will in the community.
The small business owners in attendance received valuable information that was important to them.
I had the privilege of delivering my seminar and further promoting my services. It was a win-win-win all around.
What types of companies might you partner with for your health coaching business?
Key question to ask
The most important question you need to ask yourself is, “What types of companies would benefit from being partnered with you?
Some possibilities to consider may include vitamin companies, raw foods companies, hospitals, health insurance companies, just to name a few.
You might offer to speak to “55 Plus” community residents about healthy aging, for example. Many of these communities hold monthly educational meetings for their resideents and are only too happy to have people who are willing to come in and speak about topics of interest to their residents. In some cases you may even receive an “Honorarium” sum for your efforts.
To narrow down your prospects and increase your chance of success in attracting a sponsor, go back to your network and see who you know who may be at one of those comapanies, preferably in a marketing position.
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Your Action steps
Your Action steps- Brainstorm a list of all the companies who may be a good fit for your services.
- Opposite this list, brainstorm everyone you know in business.
- Now, look for where people you know cross-over onto the other list.
These are your best prospective partners since you already have a relationship with someone in the organization.