Soulful Marketing

That was my method: learn as you go, learn from your mistakes. I’ve been ‘in business’ since 1993. I began by selling my own art (I am a painter and a potter.) This was quite a well defined business: I sold my wares at craft fairs in the summer and at Christmas. I loved those craft shows! It was actually the primary reason I wanted to do that business.

I also went to wholesale trade shows and in my off-season I filled those wholesale orders. From time to time I also worked on creating special pieces for exhibitions. I did quite well, but it is kind of a relentless and ruthless pattern, and lonely, lonely, lonely — apart from those Craft Fairs! In the end I realized the excitement and energy of the Fairs and markets didn’t compensate for the lonely and solitary months in between.

Not to mention I began to get repetitive strain injury and frequent migraine headaches which were triggered or made worse by scents. I began dreading going out and avoided stores that sold perfume, but scents were, back then, much more difficult to avoid. I saw in my future a very limited life until I discovered essential oils, which changed my world. They did not trigger my migraines and actually were making me better. I decided to study aromatherapy and energy healing.

I had a lot of things going for me in this new venture. I had capital (from a government loan), I became a distributor for a majour essential oil company and represented this company at a large aromatherapy conference where I met most of the ‘big names’ in Aromatherapy.

At home, I opened a downtown office where I offered a lot of introductory specials and deals. But the business wasn’t coming in fast enough to make it work. Why?  Probably a combination of things: I didn’t know the extent to which I needed to build a market and educate people. Alternative Health was still a fairly new concept where lived, and there were no Spas. At first I thought this was an advantage, because it meant I was there first. But it also meant that there was no one else doing the educating and creating the demand.  It was a big project I had taken on. Not only did I not realize this at first, but I didn’t have any help. So eventually I moved out of the downtown office and opened a healing centre with two friends. This provided some great opportunities, but it was still slow going and eventually I moved my practice into a room in my own home. And this worked really well. I had little or no overhead, lots of room to run classes and workshops and that’s when I began teaching classes: not only on aromatherapy but other topics as well. Finally I began to understand a little about how to work in this field.

In 2001 I took my first feng shui training course with Denise Linn and grew quite a successful business by teaching classes and workshops and doing private consultations. How it would have all continued I’ll never know because I moved to a new city…where everything was completely different.

In a much larger city, there are so many classes and courses offered here that what worked for me before no longer did. I assumed that in a larger area people wouldn’t need as much educating on the subject and area, which was true, but they did need some reason to want to work with me, rather than the 50 other fabulously gifted practitioners. So I got to play ‘new kid on the block’. And I’m learning that Business by the Seat of your Pants actually doesn’t work very well.

I was quite resistant to the idea of traditional marketing: Write a business plan? Please…I am an Artist.

But, it was time to learn some marketing techniques: How to present myself and to get an overall plan in place. And things began to converge and what I needed to learn began to flow to me in a way that was stimulating, easy and fun.

Am I expert yet? When what you are selling is services, basically you are selling YOU. So what is the ‘baggage’ that goes with being you? Where are your strengths, weaknesses and blocks. I believe marketing and promotion is a life-long learning process, and where I am today is where I am with me.

And that is why my business learning model is called ’soulful marketing’ because while I am learning techniques, I am learning how to work with me so that I can bring my best self forward in service to others.

Copyright Deborah Redfern, 2008, All rights Reserved.