My Back To Business Strategy

By Taz Thornton, award-winning coach and trainer, best selling author, & business speaker. Taz works with business owners and leaders on personal brand, visibility and message, as well as confidence, business growth and ambitions, and individuals on confidence, empowerment, self belief and direction.

Summarise how Covid-19 has affected you? 

At first, a handful of my business coaching clients panicked and knee-jerked their way to cancelling future sessions. All but one have since come back. 

The biggest issue was my retreats, which really need to be in person. My three-day speaker training retreat was due to take place a few weeks into lockdown, so that had to be postponed – thank goodness I left that postponement clause in the contract! 

We lost one person, who broke contract (I thought about pursuing, but decided it really wasn’t worth the effort in this climate and, anyway, the woman in question was worrying enough already), but managed to find a set of dates everyone else could manage in November. The surrendered place was quickly snapped up by someone else, which just goes to show things are rarely as dire as we fear!

My weekend retreats for my 13-month and three-year spiritual empowerment programmes have also been hit, but the delegates have so far been brilliantly understanding and accommodating.

The biggest issue in terms of cash flow is that I’ve now lost the opportunity to run my second speaker retreat of the year which would have been in, you guessed it, November! Essentially, my spring Heart Of Speaking has replaced the winter event, so I’m quids down there. 

Aside from physical retreats, my business coaching services have all moved online, I’ve been able to offer group coaching/training mastermind sessions online as well and some of my shorter physical events, such as the monthly meditation/circle coaching sessions I run in my local community, have also been transformed, thanks to the wonders of Zoom.

What has been your plan to continue?  

At first, when those initial cancellations happened, and I had to postpone The Heart Of Speaking, panic hit. 

How on earth would I continue my business? How would I keep a roof over our heads? Surely, we were about to plunge into recession. Holy Coronavirus, Batman!

However, I wouldn’t be a very good coach and influencer if I wasn’t able to walk my own talk! So, using some of the mindset tools I carry, I quickly pulled myself back to centre (got my ‘chief’ energy back in place, as I’d say to my clients) and began to form a plan.

I started to do an audit: what emotions were people experiencing? What was waking them up in the middle of the night? What did they need? What was actually happening? What was the gap between fear and reality? What could I do to help?

From there, I created a free Zoom training/coaching event, teaching people how to lead, stay visible and unleash their awesome in a crisis. I expected to get, maybe, 25-35 people. We closed out at 126!

I promised I wouldn’t be selling, and spent two whole hours just GIVING.  

‘Serve first, sell later’ is one of my phrases… I genuinely believe that if we stop trying to sell and, instead, put our efforts into serving, we actually sell MORE.

After that event, two people stayed on the call, asked for coaching and, essentially, said: “Taz, please take my money!”

From that event, I invited people to a free Facebook group, where I could continue to add value.

Each year, I offer six subsidised coaching places on a budget programme – minimum of four, maximum of eight, sessions at £99 each. They’re designed for startups and smaller businesses, where the cashflow doesn’t quite allow for full priced coaching. I realised more people needed this than ever, so I raised the barrier, got rid of the numbers cap, and opened it to all who needed it. 

Next, I realised there was a massive gulf between my subsidised programme and my full-priced coaching options, so I created a new 2020 Vision programme to bridge that gap; a mid-priced coaching choice for those not quite ready to leap into my Tracker or Success Seeker coaching programmes, and a stepping stone for those who’d been through the Budget programme.

I also created a new programme for people who wanted to focus heavily on personal brand and visibility – those who knew they’d been coasting and wanted to start showing up power-fully (hyphen deliberate: there’s a difference between wanting to have power ‘over’ others – to be ‘powerful’ – and those who want to be filled with power/energy to achieve their aims in a balanced way – ‘power-full’. It’s the latter camp I’m interested in working with).

Outside of that, I recognised that some people might need more than Budget or 2020Vision but, because of the Corona ‘slap’, they might not have the financial bandwidth to dive in. So, I opened up a ‘make me an offer’ scheme, where people could check out my deeper programmes and get in touch to negotiate; I said I was open to partial deferments, exchanges or even discounts for up front payments.

Of course, there’s no point creating business options if nobody knows about them, so I hit social media and used everything I knew to help me spread the word. As a result, I ended up with some chunks of cash up-front and a flood of new clients on monthly payment programmes.

How has business changed for you over the last few months? 

Everything’s gone online and, I’ve reluctantly swallowed a pill I’ve been avoiding for years and accepted that I need to do more group work.

I’ve always enjoyed speaking in front of huge audiences through my work, and I love my training sessions, but something has always stopped me from doing group coaching online. I think I was worried I might not be able to read the energy in the ‘room’ quite as well, or be able to respond as quickly and intuitively.

However, if the demand created by those initial options I put out taught me anything, it’s that I cannot possibly serve everyone I’d like to be able to help, and who wants to work with me, if I’m only offering physical groups or 1-1 work.

So, I launched the first in a series of mini mastermind sessions – via Zoom – a mix of coaching, training, mentoring and masterminding. 

What surprised me most were the people contacting me after the event and asking if they could pay for the recording, so that created another revenue stream. I opened up bookings for a further two weeks, providing the recording, additional advice, links to the apps and groups I use to attract eyeballs and business, in a closed group I’ve promised to keep open for three months, where people can ask questions, get access to me and bounce ideas around. 

I’ve kept the live sessions and the ‘aftershow’ access low cost – a one off £45 all in, and that still provides a good enough return to make it all worthwhile. 

The biggest change to my business has been corporate speaking gigs. We can’t have large, live gatherings, so these haven’t been happening, though I have been doing a lot of talks online to keep myself fresh and out there and, of course, to keep those testimonials rolling in – all great marketing for the post-lockdown world.

As lockdown eases what measures have you put in place to get back to business? 

For me, business hasn’t stopped – it’s changed. If anything, I’ve been busier than usual, but my working days have changed – and that IS something I’ve had to address.

When I was travelling between appointments, or even meeting clients in coffee shops, the physicality of moving between spaces created natural downtime or, at least, a brain pause, or switch, between clients – a bit like taking a sip of water between whiskies on one of those tasting tours.

What I discovered in taking everything online was that my diary was handled differently – I was squeezing as many as I could into all those gaps, trying to help, support, inspire and motivate as many as possible – and that meant the natural downtime disappeared.

Also, because I was so in the mindset of helping as many as I could, together with buying into that initial panic about recessions and work drying up, I started adding evening appointments as well.

At first, the result of this was an *almost* burnout and, because of all the budget clients I took on, working longer hours for less cash – or, at least, driving myself into the ground in an attempt to make up anything I feared we might lose.

So, really, my prep has already started – it began after my not-Greek-vacation; in those two weeks, I recalibrated and made the changes I needed in order to better manage my diary.

Now, I do admin and online networking in the mornings, alongside some ‘me’ time, which might include exercise, reading, meditation, and a morning cuppa in the garden, with my wife, while we throw the ball for our three dogs and calm them down for the day. 

I don’t intend changing this once we settle in to a ‘new’ normal – whatever that means – and I’ll be keeping as many of my clients online as possible. 

I’m really hoping we’ll recognise the beauty and possibility this terrible situation has afforded us – we know we don’t need to hit the roads so much, we’re benefiting from lower pollution and that morning birdsong, and a more vibrant wildlife, is something I sincerely hope we’ll work towards keeping, and enhancing, instead of pouring more attention in to tarmac, cement, office blocks and plastic.

What has been the most challenging aspect of all of this? 

At first, balancing my diary, as mentioned before, and trying to rearrange the events that still needed to be live. Outside of that, I haven’t really found it much of a challenge. I’m naturally quite the introvert so, if anything, that side of me has found a real comfort in the enforced lockdown – in fact, if I gave my introvert too much rope, she’d be building a moat around our house, complete with sharks, alligators and man-eating piranhas! Oh, and a massive drawbridge… and possibly ye olde medieval hot oil barrels on the roof, just in case someone managed to skip, Crocodile Dundee-stylee, across the gators! 

Joking aside, my biggest challenge right now is the thought of everything going back to the way things were. Our world, before, wasn’t working – we were breaking the very environment that sustains us – I have real concerns about the left-brained suits focusing on profit over quality of life; we need to stop putting ourselves at the top of the food chain and asserting dominion over the world at large when, very clearly, we’ve been shown that we need to be working in partnership with the environment instead. 

What has been the most positive aspect? 

The natural world aside, I’ve loved seeing people moving from fearful to flourishing, when they’ve realised how to turn their products and services into virtual options. That’s been wonderful.

Something else I found really positive was the feedback I received from another of my lockdown projects. 

Just before Covid-19 hit, I’d been in talks with a few celebrities about creating a new ‘chat show’ talking about mental health and how to stay positive in the modern world. Of course, one of the huge issues created by lockdown was isolation, not to mention plenty of other factors that contributed to mental health spiralling for so many.

Rather than wait, I just converted and took the show online, doing all those interviews over Zoom. TazTalks Mental Health was born!

We kicked off with Caprice, then went onto Tanni Grey-Thompson, Chris Packham, Heather Peace, Catherine Russell and many others. 

These amazing people gave their time so freely and opened up about their own mental health struggles so readily, in an attempt to help people feel not quite so alone.

The feedback was amazing and some of the clips were featured on BBC Radio as well. That’s something that will definitely be continuing, in some format, after lockdown, I’m sure.

Has it made you consider how you feel about other businesses/suppliers/customers/clients for good or otherwise? 

Yes. I think, now my time has been stretched so thinly, I will be far more discerning. The clients I work with are amazing – I’m their biggest cheerleader and I really want to see them succeed. 

For a while before lockdown, I’d created a situation where I was able to choose my clients, ie: part of my criteria is that I will only work with people who are inspiring or have inspiring dreams/goals/intentions – some force for good they want to create in the world. I’m not interested in working with people who are all out for personal gain only, or who value gold above goodness. That has only strengthened since lockdown.

I remember, right at the beginning, scrolling through apps on my phone and wondering which I might be able to do without – a fiver here, a tenner there – but then something flicked in my mind, and I realised there was a business at the end of every one of those apps; if we all cancelled our payments, those businesses would crash.

I didn’t ditch any of those apps.

I didn’t stop paying anyone.

I didn’t pause my rent payments for the studio I couldn’t access.

I didn’t turn down my VA services – in fact, when she ended up in hospital with Covid, I sent an extra bonus payment; it wasn’t much, but it was something I could manage to do.

If we could continue to fulfil our promises, we should. If we were struggling, we should communicate and negotiate. In no case should we ever just turn everything off and bury our heads in the sand.

One of my clients, who had initially booked a higher-end ticket for my speaker training retreat, asked if she could downgrade to a basic ticket, without the hotel room and meal. I said ‘no’, but that I was more than happy for her to stretch out her instalments. 

She couldn’t understand why I was being difficult at first, so I explained my thinking…

That extra cash was largely going to the hotel – the same hotel whose staff had been so accommodating for us when we had to postpone, who had gone over and above to ensure our event could still take place later in the year. In no way was I prepared to take money away from the leisure sector needlessly, especially when they’d been so sorely hit.

In the end, she understood what I was talking about and agreed. 

The pandemic was not a scenario for locking down the hatches. In no way was coronavirus ever an ‘I’m alright, Jack’ situation. This was – and is – about us all coming together and doing what’s possible to support our industries, our professions, our small business owners, our communities, our world.

It takes a village.

How important is this phrase to you – ‘buy local, supply local’? 

I think, for me, more than locality, the buzzword is loyalty. I work with many small business owners and, because of the nature of the beast, they’re not all on my doorstep. Yes, of course I’ll support local businesses where I can, but I’m even more committed to supporting the small business owners I have pre-existing relationships with and doing my all to maintain the agreements we have. 

That, I think, is one of the wonders of the internet – it’s allowed the business community to support one another, wherever we may be. 

As for supplying local, well, the nature of my business means I can – and do - support clients all over the world. My furthest client has been in New Zealand, but I also work with plenty of business owners, and individuals, who need my coaching support, and live on my doorstep

What are your top tips at this time?  

1) I know it’s an overused phrase right now, but be brave enough to pivot. Get the paper and coloured pens out, like I did – write down all your skillsets, all you know – what do you have in your toolkit that might be of use to others right now? If you’re in need, is it something you could monetise and take to market quickly? Could you turn that idea into an online programme, or a Zoom seminar, or 1-1 sessions? 

2) Stay visible! Too many business owners have disappeared from the public eye, stopped showing up on LinkedIn, or in relevant Facebook groups. Now is NOT the time to go to ground. Mental health has to come first, for sure, but if you feel able to do so, and if you want to have a business at the end of this, you need to ditch that invisibility cloak and stay front of mind.

3) If it’s tough for you right now, be honest. Ask for help if you need to. Don’t feel you have to play the Fakebook and Instaglam game and plaster on a fake smile for the camera. Many, many businesses are struggling through this, and there’s no shame in that. In fact, when it comes to social media, you may find an awful lot of support if you just show up and tell the world where you’re at, what you’re planning and what you need help with. Authenticity goes a long way. 

Your parting thought? 

I have a tattoo on my left forearm; it reads: “Doubt behind me. Courage before me. Love all around me.” On the tough days, I glance down and give myself a reminder.

Those words reinforce my deep belief that we can find reason, learning and growth in everything – even in the difficult times. I don’t believe in regrets – I genuinely do not carry any – so I stride forwards knowing that I will make the most of any situation.

Have faith. Keep going. This, too, shall pass.

For more information www.TazThornton.com