Who do you Serve?

5 Steps to Clarity, Part 4

Step 4: Who are you going to serve with your business?  What is their biggest challenge or frustration? What problem do you solve for them with your business? How do you want to make them feel? Download the freebie: BRANDING CHEAT SHEET.

Getting clarity who I want to serve is a pretty special story. I set up my business to serve entrepreneurs who are making a difference in the world, women who are passionate about who THEY serve. And what first came to mind for me, are those who are in the health and wellness space.

About 3 years ago, I was deep in a health journey that started with me discovering my autoimmune disease--Hashimoto's Thyroiditis. The shock and frustration of the fact that this disease was present in my body for over 10 years before any doctor bothered to tell me that I had it was intense. I had been treated for an under-active thyroid for a decade while I was continuing to torture myself day by eating the kind of foods that caused a war to rage in my body.

But as far as my general practitioner was concerned, I was receiving the treatment that they prescribed for that, and I should be “fine”. But I wasn’t fine. It took me about 6 months of self discovery to figure out what foods were okay for me to consume and after following my gut and taking in as much information on health as I could through listening to audiobooks by functional health doctors and podcasts by health coaches, I finally found my way out of the destruction. And along the way I had been introduced to a whole new world of influencers in health and wellness, a world I hadn’t even known existed! I started to develop a huge passion for what I was doing--changing my health, changing my body, I felt so alive!!!

At that point, I realized I wanted to do more, I started to think about how I could follow this passion with my career somehow. I knew deep down that I had to be in this community, I wanted so badly to have conversations with these people I had been listening to. I wanted to do what they were doing! What if I could become a health coach myself?!?! I really liked the idea, but there was this resistance in me, reminding me that I had years and years of training in something that I loved, how could I give that all up and completely change careers? I wanted to, but I also didn’t want to.

I remember feeling so confused. I prayed about it a lot, why was God giving me these strong desires in one direction while I was feeling so much resistance to giving up something that I’ve been cultivating in myself since I was a kid? I was called to be an artist when I was a child, it didn’t make sense that I should give up my career.

Then one day, I was visiting with my friend Amy, who was in a program to become a Health Coach, and we were sharing our obsessions for heath, nutrition, fitness, and lifestyle. She was building her website with a designer and was having a hard time communicating exactly what she wanted for her logo to the designer. She was telling me about it and I was like, oh yeah, I totally know what you are talking about. So I told her to ask him for the file and I would edit it to get it right for her. She was so excited, we worked on her logo and colors together, then we started on her website, she explained more about what she wanted and all these ideas and sparks were flying, we had so much fun together and she gained so much clarity that day.

AND SO DID I! What if my purpose wasn’t to be the health coach, but to help health coaches with their branding and designs?! As I let this thought sink in, it started to grow stronger and I became more and more excited about it. All of a sudden, I knew who my audience was, and that clarity poured into me as I set out to put my business together. 

I thought about what her struggles are; she’s a mom, she’s passionate about feeding her family healthy food and giving her kids the best start in life. She also wants to help her friends, and their friends, and their friends, everyone!  She wants to connect to others online in an authentic way, she wants to stay true to who she is deep down. But she can’t do it all by herself. She feels overwhelmed by everything she has to think about to create her brand and do it right, and she’s not willing to sacrifice time with her family or the time she is giving to her clients. She knows she needs help, but she wants to make sure she works with someone who can ask her the right questions that will help her get that vision she has in her head into a tangible form.

I can tell this story now because it’s become very clear to me and I’ve spent time reflecting on these questions and journaling about who I serve and why. Carrie Green says in her book, She Means Business, “Journaling gives me the time I need to tune in to myself in order to make the best decisions.” And that is SO true for me too. I’ve created my freebie as a journal prompt PDF with space to write out your answers too. Download the Branding Cheat Sheet I created for you that is available here!