Today I thought I’d share a little bit about my own experience in building a business.

If you don’t already know, I am a coach. I spend my days working with women who want to build more courage in their lives to pursue their ideas. I run a thriving monthly membership community, group coaching programmes and have a small roster of one to one clients. I freaking LOVE this work. Honestly, I do.

I didn’t set out to build a business.

I was working, happily in the charity sector for many many years and in 2016 decided to create some events for women to come together and eat really nice food and do creative things together – I was missing some creative community in my life.

I branded the events under the name Assembly, and we had these gatherings a few times a year for a couple of years. From then, I decided to do some coaching training and then began to offer out some of what I had been learning to the women already interested in Assembly.

From there I hosted some workshops, created a membership to take those workshops into a monthly accountability and learning online space and then deepened my work to include group programmes that would serve women who wanted to build on their ideas and create thriving businesses themselves. 

I would hate for anyone to look in at Assembly and think that it magically and easily appeared so I thought today I would share three things that I’ve learned about building a business that I feel don’t get talked about enough in entrepreneurship.

My three lessons for building your business

So let’s dive in:

1)     The first thing I want to say is: you gotta do the work.

If you’ve been around for a while, you’ll know that I really reject the idea of hustle culture, of having to be ON all of the time, of working yourself to exhaustion for arbitrary metrics, but what I never want to dismiss is that building a business takes effort. And more than that, there is no secret formula. If you want to build a business that allows you to thrive and do the thing you love without having to hustle all the time, it requires some leg work to get going.

All of the facebook ad’s and webinars that promise you six figure months and enormous client or customer bases in short time-frames or with some magic formula  are a fools errand. There is no silver bullet to building a thriving business without some cost to your time and energy for a period of time. What this doesn’t mean is that you should be a slave to your business and overwork yourself into the ground to the detriment of your wellbeing or the health of your relationships. What it might mean is adjusting some expectations of what it might require of you for a period of time as you build, connect and hone your offers. This is especially true if you are building a business on the side of another job or role.

Often what I see in the coaching world, particularly the online business coaching world are these headlines and clickbait that disregard the real graft that often goes into the beginning and developing stages of building a business. When it’s just you, it’s going to take some time and energy and willingness to be on a steep learning curve. To learn how to create systems, to get a little more savvy with websites and social media and mailing lists. Building my business has been one of the most fulfilling experiences of my career so far, but it has also meant that for periods of time, I have worked late, I have had to learn new skills, I have had to really listen to my community and make decisions that feel hard. To imply that building a business is as easy as a 4 step formula is actually really patronising – it doesn’t account for the real lives of the real people with all kinds of other stuff, other responsibilities going on that need to be accounted for. It takes work, but it’s worth it.

2)     Secondly, I think it’s fair to say that when you’re building a business, you won’t feel a sense of ownership with it for a while.

What I found was that for a while, it felt like I was imitating someone else (no one in particular, just a mash up of people that I admire or that I thought were doing things well). It takes time to find your own groove in building a business and to feel like you are really making it your own.

And in saying that, it’s really normal that you go poking around other people’s website and socials. It’s really human to be curious about what other people are doing and how they are doing it. It’s totally a given that you will want to see or hear about the tactics, the ways that other people in maybe a similar field to you are operating. It’s normal. But it’s also a slippery slope. Paying too close attention to what other people are doing is likely going to have you spinning your wheels about what YOU’RE doing. And the reality is that what you can actually see, is the tiny little fraction of what that person allows to be visible – none of the dilemmas, struggles or winging it. So don’t get yourself wrapped up in someone else’s story. Have a look and move on – start practicing using your own voice and doing your own thing. Even if it feels unnatural to begin with, your own style will come. Just keep going.

3)     Thirdly, There comes a time where the benefit of investing in your business is what is needed to move the needle.

Trying to build a business without support is exponentially harder. If you are doing it on your own, or think that you should be, you run the risk of thinking that you’re the only one finding things tough or overcomplicating and overthinking.

It is super overwhelming to take care of every little aspect of our businesses ourselves. To think that we should be the strategist, the marketer, the copywriter, the deliverer, the creator, the analyst, the salesperson, the social media manager and the troubleshooter all on our own is a really lonely and overwhelming idea.

Making the move to start investing in your business doesn’t have to be massive to start with.

When I say investing, that could mean hiring a Virtual Assistant for a few hours a month to help you create some more streamlined processes, or a designer to properly create branding and content for you instead of slaving over Canva, or an accountant that can make sense of your finances, or a coach who can help you unmuddle your brain and keep you accountable to a particular goal you have. Whatever it is you need to start to creating some space for your best work in your business. We all have limitations to our expertise and capacity and we need to know what part of our business is our sweetest spot – the space that needs our expertise the most.

For me, I started with hiring a virtual assistant for a few hours a month, then gradually I saw the benefits of this both in time and in how it was freeing me up to create more and in creating more I was able to show up more for my community and bring more clients in to work with.

I’ve now worked my way to being able to hire an operations coordinator to handle the behind the scenes of my business systems and processes and a community and content coach to help me connect with and create support in my membership community and doing this gradually was the best decision ever.

It means that I can spend most of my time communicating my message through creating content like this and serving my higher level coaching clients in a deeper way. I understand that spending money in your business feels scary and risky, but if you can budget for it and you are willing to experiment with what it might feel like to have more help, do it sooner than you think you need to.

With all of these things, I’ve found building a business to be super stretchy, mostly internally. The most amount of effort that I’ve had to put in is the effort of managing my own fears, insecurities and doubts. It’s really difficult to be brave and comfortable at the same time. But I know that taking action, practicing using my voice and getting some support in my business has made all the difference.

I hope me sharing some of that helps if you are in the throes of building a business or maybe you’re further down the road and relate to some of it as well. As always I love hearing from you so if you want to chat more – you can find me on IG @melwiggins or you can email me hello@melwiggins.com