Sunday, August 31, 2008

What are you Giving Birth to This Labor Day?

Labor Day is a phenomenal opportunity to rest, rejuvenate and recommit ourselves to the labors of love we call our life's work. No matter what your calling, this is a day to commemorate all that you've put into living life on purpose and it's also a day to evaluate what it is you are now conceiving and carrying and birthing in your life.

To reach your highest potential means to connect with who you really are by serving the world in all of the ways you were sent here to serve. The first step is DISCOVERY. Key to discovering or rediscovering your calling comes in making you a priority in your own life. Many people are afraid to be alone. Make no mistake. You are NEVER alone. Wherever you go, there you are and, if you're feeling lonely, it can only mean one thing: you don't like the company you're keeping, namely you.

This Labor Day, reconnect to the you that is fabulous, loving, kind, amazing to watch, endearing to listen to and extraordinary to be around. Rediscover who that is so you can move into the next step which is RELEASE. Before deciding what direction you're going in, you have to be willing to release ALL expectations of what you "should" be doing. Everyone comes here with a multitude of gifts and talents that can lend themselves to any number of professions and callings. Once you are willing to release your hold on what you "should" be doing, you qickly learn a life altering truth: you don't choose your calling; your calling chooses you. You'll know which one to do next because it will choose you.

The third step is TRANSFORMATION. The moment you choose you and open your life up to all the possibilities of your calling, a transformation takes place. It is constant, imposing and transfiguring. All of a sudden, you are all of you; greater than you ever thought yourself to be and, yet, more connected to everyone and everything in a way that surpasses understanding. You see the beauty in everything. You learn not to sweat the small stuff. You trust your intuition and know that life is bigger than you. In this place, you bloom like a flower and your light shines for all to see. It's the beginning of a new way of seeing life that you gave birth to.

Sometimes, this process takes 9 months. Other times, 9 years. This Labor Day, decide that this is a process that will not take you a lifetime to deliver. DRT- Discovery, Release, and Transformation. Choose it now! Start by choosing you!

http://chooseyounow.blogspot.com

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Response Time is Important But Patience is Essential

Making a million dollars in your business requires that you sell a million dollar’s worth of product/services. How do you do that? By offering a million dollar’s worth of value to your customers. One of the best ways to offer a million dollar’s worth of value to your customers is by being extremely responsive, so responsive that they hear from you before they thought they would, they receive your products before the quoted mailing time and they feel, as your customer or potential customer, that you are always on their mind. Whether a customer/client is paying $1.85 for a grande coffee or $155.00/mo for an Equinox Fitness Club Membership, they want to feel like they are your number one priority and successful businesspeople understand this.

Response Time is Important.
#1) Return emails as quickly as possible. I love my Blackberry because it allows me to get emails instantaneously. I’m able to respond back to clients, even if it’s to say, “It’s going to take me some time to get back to you on this issue but I’ll email you in detail by the end of the day.” That response given back within minutes of the email being received goes a long way with a client.

#2) Keep your websites updated, especially your blogs. There’s nothing worse than jumping on to your site and seeing that you haven’t written anything in months. Even if it’s just to say “Business is changing. Stay tuned!”, keep your sites updated.

#3) Deal with customer complaints, questions and concerns IMMEDIATELY. This is not optional. Whenever there is a question about your service, a complaint about your product or an objection to overcome, handle that IMMEDIATELY. Waiting a few hours can, in some instances, kill a deal.

#4) If you’re going to communicate, have something to say and say it well. Your words are powerful. Fast response times are great when you’re using the right words but fast response times with incomplete or inappropriate responses are nothing to be proud of. You have to be at the top of your game always WHILE providing fast response turnaround times.


Response time is very important. It’s critical to respond appropriately in as little time as possible but here’s the flip side: you, as the business owner, have it as your responsibility, to respond as quickly and effectively as possible. After all, if you’re making a million dollars a year, you’re charging $500 an hour. As a customer, if I’m paying $500/hour, I expect to be responded to quickly. However, you cannot expect your customers to jump to buy or purchase from you, especially if you haven’t laid the ground work of establishing report and building relationships.

Too many entrepreneurs expect people to buy from them at astronomical rates in very little time because their products are good. That’s not the way this thing works. Successful businesspeople know that the first and last thing you do to experience sustainable maximum profitability, is BUILD RELATIONSHIPS. That’s the secret! There’s no other secret but that and building relationships takes time AND patience. So, while you’ve got very little time to get back to your clients/customers, your clients and customers can take their time getting back to you and can take their time buying and you have to have the patience and persistence to keep building the relationship even though, at the moment, it’s not reaping you immediate profitability.

That’s why it’s so important to have multiple streams of revenue. Depending on one product line or a select group of clients to provide your overall income is a disaster in the making. Pressure fills you because if you don’t close them or that deal, you don’t eat. Now, if you have money coming from all directions, as you build your relationships with these clients, you can be patient and enjoy the client building relationship process. You can flow with life in joy and ease and without the added stress of NEEDING to close the deal.

So, the bottom line is this: Your response time, as the business owner, is crucial and should be as fast and effective as possible the FIRST and LAST time but PATIENCE is required, on your part, as you build and sustain customer relationships. Sounds like a double edged sword but it’s actually a well choreographed tango.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

A New Turn in the Evolution of ROI Coaching

Last night, I did some soul searching about my coaching practice. Having spent many years corporate consulting and coaching executives, I knew that something in my business needed to shift if I was going to expand to the heights I envision. The barefoot executive (http://twitter.com/barefoot_exec) gave me some food for thought and I began to envision the expansion of ROI Coaching through the narrowing of my target market and something I'd always coached corporate clients on came back to me like a hit on the head: specialize, don't generalize.

Business Rule #1 to getting ROI is this: If you want to grow your business, become a specialist, not a generalist. Develop your niche.

Having had so many clients with so many different objectives, a part of me didn't want to specialize but now I've come to a very important decision. I'm narrowing down ROI Coaching to a specialty that I absolutely love and adore: coaching women through life transitions so they can achieve success by making themselves the priority!

I've long said that choosing you is the most unselfish thing you could ever do as a woman and my greatest and most beloved coaching work has come when I worked with women who made the remarkable choice to choose themselves, often for the very first time in all of their lives. This is my passion. This is my bliss. This, thank you very much barefoot executive, is my WHY.

So I declare, with all due respect, that my client focus has shifted and I'm only taking on clients who are women ready to experience life at full throttle. If you're a woman in the midst of a life transition, whether it be separation, divorce, a new job, relocation to a new state, having a baby, wanting to have a baby, losing a loved one, ending a relationship, whatever that life change may be and the one thing you know for sure is that you've got to choose you, I'm the coach for you. Email me at theroicoach@gmail.com and let's get you to the next level in your life!

Stop waiting! Start becoming! CHOOSE YOU!

Kassandra Vaughn, the ROI Coach

Sunday, August 10, 2008

Why Compassion is So Important

We're all born with the propensity for compassion and empathy, the ability to understand and relate to where another person's coming from, to "feel" their pain and to support them through difficult times. But, as we get older and "wiser", we move into a place where we don't always use the compassion we have. When was the last time you saw a parent in a store with a noisy child and thought "If I were his mom, I'd handle that much better than she is" or in a restaurant watching a couple fight and thought "That is so embarassing. I would never do that"? Here's an important life lesson: Never say never.

Two words that I think we should eliminate from our vocabulary is Never and Always. It doesn't apply to 99.999% of all life experiences. The moment you say "never", you invite that "never" to come into your life and prove you wrong.

Ever hear the saying "People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones?" How true that is. Judgment never helped anyone. A major reason we go through life experiences (especially the life altering ones) is to learn how to be more compassionate. If you've ever been poor, you can relate to people going through the experience of not having the basics in life. If you've ever had your heart broken, you can better relate to someone going through a devastating breakup. If you've ever had difficulty getting pregnant, you can more easily connect to other women who are trying to conceive.

When you haven't been down those roads, yes, you can empathize and yes you can be compassionate but I've learned more about compassion through my life experiences than I ever could've learned without them. It's a natural tendency to judge others but, when you go through something serious, it puts EVERYTHING in an entirely new perspective and the next time you come across someone in that situation, instead of saying "What they should've done", you now say, "How can I help?" You encourage rather than criticize. You support rather than lecture.

Compassion is a learned skill. Take every experience and grow your level of compassion!

Kassandra Vaughn, the ROI Coach