How to Create An Offer that’s in Alignment

Welcome back, I'm super stoked that you're tuning into this week's episode. And I cannot wait to dive into today's topic.

Because if you tuned in last week, you heard me share the biggest mistakes that I made when I opened both of my businesses, my brick and mortar, and my online business. And that is making decisions from a misaligned place ultimately making decisions that aren't in integrity to what it is that I ultimately am trying to achieve, or what I want, or what's in alignment with my values. And if I'm being honest, I think this is the biggest mistake that most entrepreneurs make, is not really taking the time to really think about what it is that they want, and how they want to achieve it. But more importantly, what is that thing that they're actually trying to achieve? And for most entrepreneurs, it's freedom, it's freedom to be able to do what you want, when you want how you want it.

Yes, money is in there, we desire to make money, because we're a business, we need to make money if we want to have a business. But freedom ultimately, if you if we did a poll, I would bet my house that most entrepreneurs want freedom, they want the freedom to do what they want when they want how they want it. But they also want to be able to wake up every day knowing they're doing work they're passionate about, or that has some type of meaning. And ultimately, that is why I went into entrepreneurship, right? I not only wanted to do meaningful work within my business and serve in the capacity that I do. I also wanted to enjoy my life outside of my business, I wanted to be able to travel, I wanted to be able to take extended weekends off, I wanted to be able to maybe not work on a Monday if I didn't feel like it. And I didn't want anybody to answer to. And yet I created businesses that did not afford me those things, right, I opened a brick and mortar that was in my opinion, restrictive in some capacity, because we had retail hours, we worked evenings, that was weekends, we didn't really take holidays for the four years that we ran it. I mean, we fit holidays in there, but not in comparison to corporate. I mean, I had five weeks paid vacation and corporate.

And I took you know one or two weeks when I had my brick and mortar. And so it didn't afford me the thing that I actually really wanted, which was the balance between work and life and having that freedom to do what I want when I want it. And that all starts with your offer and business model, which again, I don't think people stop long enough to start to see whether or not the model and the offer that they're putting together is actually in alignment with who they are. And their core values or even their energetic blueprint, right is whether they have the capacity to offer what they're offering in that way. And this is even more specifically beneficial to understand if you're doing a service of any sorts of you're a massage therapist or you're an energetics coach, or you're a coach in any capacity online, right, if you're offering a service that requires an energetic exchange, that can also impact you depending on who you are and how you're designed. And so I want to dive in today, to help you sort of take an assessment, let's just say of whether or not you're in alignment with the offer that you're putting out there. And this is beneficial for people that are maybe even just in the idea stage getting ready to launch. Or if you're in your business right now. And you're feeling like things are a bit stagnant, or they're not really operating as effortless as they could be. And there's this inner sort of nudge within you going Hmm, something doesn't necessarily feel 100%, right, I just can't put my finger on it. Or I feel like it could be easier than this, like trying to sell what I'm selling feels hard, you know, showing up every day feels hard, then this is going to be of particular interest for you. Because my guess is there is one of three things that are out of alignment for you. And we're going to talk about those over the next three episodes.

And we're going to talk about the first one today, which is all around your offer and the business model the way in which you deliver what you're delivering. The second one is your messaging and the way you're showing up to express yourself. And the third one is the strategies you're using to express yourself to share what you're doing and in each episode, I'm going to help you identify where you're at and where there might be some kinks in your alignment that are wreaking havoc. Pick on your business because if you're out of alignment in those three areas, selling what you sell is going to feel extremely hard for a variety of different reasons. And when it comes to the offer, if the offer is out of alignment, meaning you're selling something that you maybe don't fully embody, you're selling something that maybe you don't fully believe in, that you don't have the conviction for. Maybe you've created an offer that kind of emulates somebody else. And you're again, you would have done it differently or you would have shared it differently with the world.

Or you did what we did. And we created a product that required a lot of manual labor. So the more we sold, the more manual labor was required, which is time and effort either on our part, or we hire staff. Now we did the best we could to streamline and to automate some of the stuff. But a lot of the work behind the scenes in the production area was manual. Another example would be a florist, right? If you were putting bouquets together, you know, if you want to scale ready to go from 10 bouquets to 100 a day, that's going to either take more time and effort on your part as the florist, or you hire somebody to support you. But again, that's resources going out from a cost perspective. So you've got to be making enough money in your business to be able to hire somebody to do that.

So the first place you want to start when it comes to identify Ng, whether or not the offer, and the delivery or business model of it is in alignment to you and what you ultimately want starts with your core values, but also starts with the thing you ultimately desire. And is that freedom is that money is that you know, doing meaningful, impactful work, whatever that is, you want to start there, because of the delivery of it. And the packaging or the way in which you're going to sell it is going to hinder impact, whether or not you're in alignment with that ultimate goal. And for me, freedom being the thing that I desired the most as an entrepreneur, that actually added less freedom to my life, because in the first two years of business, I was the one predominantly doing that work. And so I was in the store 1516 hour days, I had my spouse in there, I had my brother and sister-in-law in there sometimes.

And so I did have support for sure. However, the more you sell, the more work it's going to be. And that hindered freedom, right. And so the more we sold, the more I could see this little window and glimmer of freedom going away in a way. Now, you've also got a business model, which is the brick-and-mortar. So there is retail hours that we were set up to be open for and that required, again, somebody to be there, we had staff that supported us. I wasn't there every single day in the first year or two. Yes, I was. But after that we hired staff. And so it's a question of whether or not you want to put the time in upfront, to get to a point where you could maybe potentially see the freedom in five or 10 years or however long it takes you to get there. So that's the other question, right? Is brick and mortar isn't necessarily out for all people that want freedom, it's just a matter of how you find the balance there.

And what are you willing to do to get to that ultimate goal? Is it something you want in the next year? Or is it something you want in the next 10 years? Again? These are all things that I can't answer for you, these are things you need to answer for yourself. And they're not things that somebody can say, well, it's this is the right way to do it. And this is how you need to do it if you want to experience that, because I've talked to lots of entrepreneurs who have created agencies, or they've created brick and mortars, and they've, you know, have multiple locations. And they feel like they have freedom. So freedom also is perspective. So what feels like freedom to me, might feel like something totally different to somebody else. So me saying Oh, brick and mortar is not going to give you the freedom. That to me is just my own perspective and experience being projected onto you. And I don't really think that that's fair. And that's what a lot of us entrepreneurs can tend to do. Sometimes we share our perspective, in a way that's like, this is the way to do it. And if you want to achieve this, you've got to build your business this way, which I think has created a lot of misalignment amongst entrepreneurs, because they're listening, we listen to that message and we go, Oh, I've got to do it this way. And then we go down the path and realize it's not for us. And so I don't want to sit here and say that brick and mortar is not going to give you freedom. Because for you actually my freedom, the way in which you look at freedom might be something totally different.

And so you just have to ask yourself, whether or not you what you're offering and the way in which you're offering it is going to give you the thing that you want and it starts with you taking the time to figure out first and foremost what it is that you actually want. And if your answer is why just want a business I would ask you to step one level higher. Just get to that big picture and really truly ask yourself okay, so you want that business why do you want it what is it that you want? What do you think it's going to give you? Because, again, I think sometimes it gets skewed. Sometimes it's like I want the business. I just want to be an entrepreneur and I want to make a lot of money. And then you get into it and you think your business is going to give you all this money and then when it doesn't do that in the timeframe that you thought it should. You can get disgruntled and frustrated and angry about that and If you quit, or like in my case, you list your business and you sell it, because it isn't what you expected or ultimately what you desire. Now, both of those options are options. Neither one of them was an easy option, it was not easy for us to list that business for sale, even though I had gotten to a point where it was the best decision for me. And that is often what happens. Most entrepreneurs, we work our butts off to build our business grow our businesses, and we get to these points of a breaking point, right.

And when we're at the point of breaking, we're making the decision to either quit, or to sell. And what I want to help you do is to avoid those breaking points. And this is what the next two episodes and this episode here is all about, is to really help you avoid the breaking point in your business. And for me, it all boils down to misalignment to making misaligned or poor decisions, however you want to cloak it. And having this Havoc being wrecked in your life and in your business as a result of that. And it all starts with your offer the idea that you have to bring to the world, whether that's a product or a service, and then the way in which you're going to deliver it. So the business model, right? Is it brick and mortar? Is it online? And is that delivery of it going to help me get to what I ultimately want. And if it's freedom, then you've got to really ask yourself, if the brick and mortar space is the place for you to be if if I sell 10? Can I sustain that capacity? Now, if I sell 100? Can I sustain that capacity? Or what does that look like? Do I need to hire somebody? How much money do I need to be making to hire somebody, again, these are things we don't stop long enough to ask ourselves. And before we know it, we're in the fire trying to put out the fire around us like I can't sustain it. I can't sustain making these many batches of wine on my own, I need to hire somebody. But I'm not making enough yet in my business to hire somebody.

Because in a brick-and-mortar winemaking world, there's a lot of capital that goes into it right? So we could be selling a lot. But we've got capital that needs to be paid down equipment, we've got rent that has to be paid, we've got a ton of overhead. And so it might take two or three or five years to get to a point where you can have a full staff of people, these are all things you want to be thinking about. And these are all things you want to be asking yourself. And if you're in this pressure moment, right now, where you're like, Well, I just gotta get going and just got to sell and I just got to start doing things, I'd ask you to pause because that, for me is a sign of, of an escape pattern coming out, which is something I'm very used to right, I had got to a breaking point in corporate and I needed out and I needed out now. And I made the decision to go into the brick and mortar, and that I needed out of the brick and mortar. Because I was done. I had just I was so fed up. And now I need to get into the online world. And I made the same decisions there out of misalignment because I was I felt the pressure to have to make things work, or I felt the pressure to have to like, make a change right away. And so what I'm wanting to help you and encourage you to do is to not get to those breaking points of frustration, or just I can't take it anymore, or complete burnout in your business where you're making decisions in a very reactive state instead of sort of this calm and peaceful state. So I really hope that that has helped you start to ask yourself questions about your offer and the delivery of it.

But ultimately, what is the thing that you're wanting to achieve? And what do you ultimately desire to achieve? And how do you want to feel in your business? Right? How do you want that to be for yourself? Do you want to be able to wake up at, you know, 10am and start your day at noon? Do you want to only work three hours a day? Do you want to only work three days a week? These are all questions you want to ask yourself before you start to package and position and sell your offer. And when you can get in full alignment there. Then you can start to think about okay now who do I want to connect with? Like who's my audience? And how do I want to communicate with them? And what is it that I want to communicate? Because you'll start to see over the next episodes where people get into difficulty in their business because they're out of alignment with their offer and then they go to try and sell it and then they're out of alignment. They don't know how to communicate it. They don't know how to really share are with people and then they're employing strategies that don't really tie back into who they are and what they're about what they stand for.

And there's all of this, I say static and people's frequencies right there, like, it just things are not working like they should. It's not a well-oiled machine. And it feels like a lot of effort and feels like, you have to be pushing hard all the time to see results. And these next three episodes hopefully will help you realize that you get to do how do things how you ultimately want to do it, that I'm not here to tell you that in order to get into alignment, you need to do this, this and this, right, you need to look at these three pillars, but you get to structure them and design them the way that you want to design them. And that is how I work with all of my clients in my mentorship program. That is exactly what we do is we start with the offer and really help my clients get into alignment within their offer.

And it's kind of a blank canvas, right? I'm not, they're saying you've got to structure your business this way. And the beauty of my experiences, I feel like I've tried so many things now. And I've worked with so many entrepreneurs that have tried so many things that I have the perspective of knowing, you know, the pros and the cons, and I don't look at things as in, like, as an absolute of like, you know, like I said, if you want freedom, you shouldn't start a brick and mortar because your perspective of freedom could be very different than mine. And that is to me what good coaching in a lot of ways is is to really help you identify what is in alignment with you and what you hear or hear to ultimately do and how you want to do it. And there are a plethora of different ways to do that. And you can carve your own bloody path if you want to completely carve your own path, if you want to. And that to me is what's going to give you the thriving and sustainable business that you ultimately want.

That's going to give you the thing that you ultimately want, whether it's freedom or money, or some other thing that you're you're looking for. But it all starts with your offer and the delivery of it. And if you're you've created an offer and a delivery mode or business model that does not even remotely line you up to the thing that you want, it's going to be a struggle. So with that on next week's episode, I'm going to be diving into messaging alignment and sort of poking some holes in some of the ways in which we're taught how to communicate what we do and how we do it to our people, our customers and our clients. And why again, you get to do it your way. And the minute you start to ditch this cookie cutter, one size fits all approach is the minute you're going to really sink into your own way of being which is for me, what creates the ease and flow and the simplicity in your life and in business.

When you get to do what you want when you want and how you want to do it. Then you start to really feel that ease and flow and that simplicity and all the things that you do so with that, please subscribe to this show so you don't miss when next week's episode drops.

Cheers