Our Success Center

Your Success is Our Success

The Overview

So you’ve transitioned from student to graduate—Congratulations! You’ve worked hard to get to this point by investing hundreds of hours in yourself to hone your skills and discover your gifts and graces and it’s time to be rewarded.

How will you be rewarded? By bringing to life part of the Southwest Institute of Healing Arts’ mission statement to share your talents with the world in a loving and profitable way! There are a few ways to bring these dreams to life to turn your talents into a career including seeking employment with an already-established practice (have you checked out our job postings?) or purchasing a business, but we’re going to focus on starting a business from scratch.

Between Our Success Center and the know-how you already have with your education, we’re going to create a formidable set of tools for you to tackle starting your own business head on!

First and foremost, you need to think about where you are as a person and what you want your business to be about.

Your purpose doesn’t need to be narrowed down to anything super specific just yet, but a general idea of what you want to market to your clients and your ability to provide it is a good place to start. Think about what you really enjoy doing and what your gifts and graces are to help refine your business from “massage” to “massage for pregnant women” or “massage for relieving the stress of office workers” or from “life coaching” to “life coaching for victims of domestic abuse”. You can be as broad or as narrw as you want to be at this point–don’t get too wrapped up in the details right now.

Secondly, you’ll need to sit down and think about the practical side of your business.

Are you at a point in your life that it makes sense to run your own business? What kind of business do you want to have: home-based, brick and mortar or mobile? Will your business be something you do part-time while keeping another job or do you have the things necessary to devote yourself fully to it? For most people, the best way to get their business started is as a side-job, and it makes sense! You maintain your primary form of income while getting the ball rolling on your new venture, so don’t quit your day job just yet.

Next, it’s time to make a very brief, one-page business plan.

Don’t panic–it’s easier than it sounds. The most important things when you are first starting your business are to get yourself out there and to start in on your marketing immediately, so this business plan isn’t going to be the end-all be-all to your success. A business plan is an excellent guide incorporating your vision, goals, a timeline and and can be critical to larger enterprises and may need to be refined for your business further down the line, but for now it isn’t something that should occupy the bulk of your time getting started. Head here to see more about what you’ll need to put into your business plan and a template to get you started. Be sure to post your business plan and goals somewhere that they’re visible to you to help visualize your path to greatness!

Finally, you need to develop a plan of attack for networking and marketing.

This attack will ultimately be the most time-consuming step of your business, but also the most important and rewarding. When you’re starting up, the most important tool you’ll have in your repertoire when it comes to marketing your brand new business is going to be your network. Your network is the collection of people you already know personally and professionally–people that are much more likely to be interested in your products and services because they already know YOU! Developing your plan of attack means sitting down and thinking about how you’re going to widen your net and keep engaged with them: Which social media platforms will you use? Will you send out an email newsletter once you’ve gathered a following? What sort of content are you going to offer that will be of value to your followers?

There’s a lot to do, we know, but worry not… As soon as you get started, the other pieces will start to fall into place and you’ll be able to develop your strategies over time into the successful business you’ve always dreamed of!

Are you ready? Head on over to Taking Where You Are and Turning It into An Idea to kick it in gear!