Effortless Expansion: Why Traditional Scaling Methods Don't Work for Creative and Spiritual Entrepreneurs

Discover how to scale your business without sacrificing your creative spirit or compromising your personal values. Ever wondered why traditional business systems seem to clash with your creative flow? Join Annie Veblen-McCarty as she unravels the secrets to maintaining balance for coaches, healers, and creative entrepreneurs who often find themselves overwhelmed by the rigid structures of conventional business methods. This episode promises to equip you with strategies to reclaim your time and energy by integrating AI tools like ChatGPT, enabling you to automate mundane tasks while preserving the unique essence of your energy.

Unleash your potential with Annie's masterclass, "Scaling Without Sacrifice," which is tailored specifically for those who thrive on creative and spiritual energy. Walk away with insights on developing scaling strategies that are harmonized with your authentic self, ensuring that your business growth aligns with your vision and values. Whether you’re looking to maintain your message or expand your impact, this episode is your gateway to effective, values-driven entrepreneurship. Tune in to discover how you can achieve seamless business expansion that respects your creative journey. For more info, please visit AVMCoaching.com!

Chapters

• 0:00 Effortlessly Productive for Creative Entrepreneurs
• 14:51 Effective Scaling for Creative Entrepreneurs

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey, this is Annie Veblen-McCarty and I'm gonna teach you how to be effortlessly productive. I've been an entrepreneur for over 20 years and I got sick and tired of experts preaching what business and life should look like and what I should be doing as a leader and to turn a profit, only to find myself wasting time, burned out, feeling inauthentic and still not making any money. On this show, we are ditching the shoulds. I'm giving you permission to do business differently. As a certified master coach, I believe that everything you need to have success and build the life and business of your dreams is already living on the inside. I'm going to empower you to lean into what you do best, help you see your path forward clearly and give you the strategy and action steps along the way to become effortlessly productive. Let's dive in Today on this episode. We are going to talk about why traditional scaling methods and traditional business systems do not work for creative and spiritual entrepreneurs. I have worked with so many entrepreneurs over the years who are implementing or want to implement scaling methods into their business, probably because we have heard that's something we should do. There are people out there who are like I don't even really know what scaling means. So let's start there. When we are talking about scaling methods or business systems, these are very broad terms, right? So basically, what we are talking about is activities that you do in your business that you can somehow automate or delegate, that you can basically scale, you can magnify the number and the energy that is going into that so that you can compound your business results. So an example of this is, let's say, that you are going to host a masterclass or a workshop, and your normal methods of having people register for that is you are posting on social media the people that respond to your post or comment or like it. That respond to your post or comment or like it. You are sending them a private message and you are inviting them to register, and you are then taking their email address manually and keeping a list of the people who have registered for the event and then maybe sending them an email, one by one or in a group email, sharing the details of it so that they have the workshop and masterclass link. As you can see, as I described that, that is a process number one, with a whole lot of steps, a lot of things for you to do and to be in there every day. If we have a post that is continuing to get comments, we need to continue to check back with that post over and over and over again to respond to those people. And then we need to be checking into our DMs to see if people responded back, if they do want to register manually, collecting those emails, sending out the email reminders ourselves. It's a lot of things right.

Speaker 1: 3:23

Think about the time and also the energy that all of that takes. Yes, time is a super important factor, but often when I find I work with specifically spiritual and creative entrepreneurs, coaches, healers, everybody that falls into any of those categories or identifies as any of those, it's really the energy that is the biggest thing for them. Maybe they are shorter on time, but it really is that energy expenditure. And I think part of the reason of that is when we are creative or healing people or doing energy work right, like we are giving a lot of energy, a lot of creative energy, a lot of healing energy, a lot of giving our soul to people and to our clients, and that takes a lot. I also find that there is a very big switch right. So we think about all of these more masculine energy tasks in our business, that is, the posting, the sharing that we are doing, the inviting people, the messaging people, the going back and forth and having these conversations, the collecting of the email addresses, the sending of the emails. Those are all very masculine tasks, whereas when we look at the work of a creative entrepreneur, of a healer, of a coach, it tends to be more of that creative flow, energy, that feminine energy. And there's that big switch there. Right, we have both energies in us all the time, but for a lot of people, one tends to be more activated than another. And so for creative and spiritual entrepreneurs and, again, healers, coaches, anybody who identifies in any of those categories, once we start talking about flipping back and forth, usually the reason that we have picked this career path is because we tend to thrive and our light comes on when we are in that more feminine energy. And again, this has nothing to do with your gender, your gender identification. None of that is coming into play. We are literally just talking about the energies in our body and we all, no matter who we are, what our gender or gender identity is we have both masculine and feminine. However, we're talking about a group of people that tends to really have that feminine energy flow come very naturally to them and often these more masculine business tasks are a little bit more taxing on us, right?

Speaker 1: 5:54

So when I talk about scaling and business systems, an example of how we could scale this process, how we can implement business systems and maybe a little bit of delegation in order to scale that process so that it's not our time and energy being expended, would be we still probably have to write the social media post ourselves, usually outsourcing content creation. You know it can work okay, but maybe you're using chat GPT to help you get started with that. That is an example of maybe not scaling, but just a way, a business system that we can use, a tool that we can utilize that is, a technology tool in order to really make that process a little bit faster, maybe a little bit easier on us. So obviously, always take what chat, gpt or any other AI turns out, put it into your own words, make tweaks there, proofread it. I never just copy and paste. There's always my energy that goes into that, right? So maybe we're using a tool to help us create that social media post. So we have a couple of different ways that we can work on scaling the comment process. We can actually use AI tools in order to anybody who comments a specific word, we can actually have the system send them a response in their DMs on Instagram or Facebook. Business. That is super powerful.

Speaker 1: 7:27

Or you can also outsource that. You can delegate that to a VA and, even though that is more of a manual task at that time, it is not your energy and your time that is going into that. You have actually magnified, you have compounded your time and energy by delegating, by outsourcing that task of responding to people. Then, rather than just collecting an email address or saying like, okay, I'm going to put you on a list that you've registered, we can actually send people a link to a form. Maybe that form is embedded in the landing page, maybe it's not. People put their name and email in themselves. Your back-end software system is collecting those registrations, keeping track of them. We can set up automations to have a welcome email sent out that gives all the details about your event, the link. Maybe you have it set up to send out reminders right before the event. This is all happening in the background and you are not having to touch it, so that way, you can literally focus your energy on that creation process, on writing those social media posts and emails, like on that creative side of things that is so powerful.

Speaker 1: 8:43

The reason that traditional scaling methods and I would go so far as to say maybe it's more of an approach the reason that those tend to not work so well for creative and spiritual entrepreneurs is because I find that the way that it is taught or the way that it is shown to people and even the way it is set up, tends to be a very low marketing, like very masculine approach to it. There are very few teachers, in my opinion, out there, especially of the more traditional realm, that are teaching creatives and spirituals and healers and coaches how to create these business systems in a way that feels aligned for them, and this is very important. If you are creative or a coach or a healer, it's really important to us to feel in alignment, right, because it's so much our identity, it's so much like ourselves is embedded in the work that we do. To then put out some like very masculine, very salesy, very in-your-face approach does not feel good, and when it doesn't feel good to us, it's not gonna feel good to our clients either. I also find that in traditional scaling methods and approaches. There's a very big copy-paste culture, right? So we're just taking what somebody has built and again, this often is built on a very masculine, in-your-face salesy approach. That is not going to work for us, right? And that's why, on the back end of those systems, if you are to implement those systems and copy-paste and use the templates that are created and given to you, oftentimes it's that disconnect for our ideal client, right? Number one our ideal client tends to be somebody who more is drawn to that creative, our unique magic. Why they're coming to work with us is because we are so unique, because we are so wild and weird and just like we have our own weird beauty and we're not a cookie cutter of everybody else out there. That's why they want to work with us. So when we are implementing these traditional business systems from a very masculine sales approach, our ideal client is not drawn to that. So that is a huge reason why these systems do not work for us.

Speaker 1: 11:14

Number two I often find that systems are built in a very isolated manner, and what I mean by that is when I sit down to build my business systems, I have a whole ritual that I go through before I start designing them, a ritual of, you know, lighting candles with a specific scent to them. I have my crystals sitting here on my desk, the right energy of wanting to build and share my message and the love that I want to spread to the world, the impact that I want to make. So I have this whole ritual that I go through. I spend some time in meditation, I spend some time visualizing my ideal client, the struggle that she is going through right now, how I am going to help her, where she wants to go, that vision of what she wants to create with her life, and when I can spend some time thinking about I'm going to get to help this person with what they want to create, with that vision, with that impact that they are going to make. And then I start creating my systems and my scaling tactics. It's from such a different energy. I am not just copying and pasting, I am not using these very masculine sales approaches. I am doing it with my energy, of a way that feels good to me. That is the energy and that is the place that we want to be creating these systems in Maybe the bones, maybe the framework looks very similar, but when we just copy paste these scaling tactics and approaches and methods that have come before us that are not in alignment with us.

Speaker 1: 12:55

That's when things don't work. What does work is when we can get ourselves into that creative flow, into that place of, I'm going to say, the right mindset whatever the right mindset is for you. When we can get into our bodies, when we can really connect virtually and connect in our mind with who it is that we are going to impact and how we are going to impact them. That is when these scaling systems, all of a sudden, our ideal client is seeing them and is like, oh my gosh, yes, this was written for me, this was meant for me, this masterclass was designed just for me. Our energy comes through there. So I hope that this episode was valuable for you today.

Speaker 1: 13:42

Definitely, take this think about scaling in a different way. It's part of why I love business systems. I love scaling so much. I am so passionate about teaching it to people, because in so many times, all that we've been taught and all we've learned is this very bro marketing approach, and if that isn't in alignment with you, it's very easy to just be like I'm gonna throw this all out, like this is not for me, scaling is not for me, and what happens is instead we fall into the pitfalls of not scaling our business. Then we are burned out, we are capped with a certain level of success and income and clients and all the things, because literally, we don't have more energy and we don't have more time to go find more people and be able to work with more people because we don't have these scaling systems to be able to compound that. So I hope that this sheds some light on why some things in the past maybe that you have tried have not worked so well and what a different way to do it is.

Speaker 1: 14:51

I have a masterclass that is called Scaling Without Sacrifice. I am super excited for you. If this jived with you, go take that masterclass so that you can dive even deeper into this and how we can create these scaling systems that are not going to sacrifice us, our message, our impact, our creative flow, and why actually the scaling systems are so important for creative and spiritual entrepreneurs, coaches and healers when they are done in a way that the approach feels better for us and works for us. So go check that out if you want to dive even deeper into all of this. I am so excited to share that with you. Have a beautiful day and I will see you on the next episode of Effortlessly Productive.