National Invisible Chronic Illness Awareness Week

Building a Business Vision While
Honoring and Accommodating Your Health

Trish Robichaud, Maximum Life Coach
TeleClass Leader, Motivational Speaker,
Facilitator & Disability Awareness Coach

As a coach, my passion in life is to motivate and empower people to unleash their full potential. My goal is to help them define and achieve their maximum life in spite of a chronic health condition that challenges them on a daily basis. My instinctive ability to see assets in people and reflect those assets back to them, enables my clients to see themselves in a more positive light. As a person with multiple sclerosis myself, I bring a personal commitment to the work I do. I have learned how to keep the MS at bay, for the most part, through profound lifestyle changes and by minimizing stress and its effects on my life.

Visit her web site | Hear her audio "commercial"

Building a Business Vision While
Honoring and Accommodating Your Health

Mary_Shep: Welcome to the National Invisible Chronic Illness Awareness Week seminar. My name is Mary Welcome to the National Invisible Chronic Illness Awareness Week seminar. My name is Mary (a.k.a. "Shep" to many of you), and I'll be your host for this hour. We will open in prayer; then our guest will present the topic, after which there will be a question and answer period, then we will close in prayer.

Trish Robichaud, is a Maximum Life & Business Coach, TeleClass Leader, Motivational Speaker, and a Facilitator & Disability Awareness Coach. As a coach, her passion in life is to motivate and empower people to unleash their full potential. Her goal is to help others define and achieve their maximum life in spite of a chronic health condition that challenges them on a daily basis.

Her instinctive ability to see assets in people and reflect those assets back to them, enables her clients to see themselves in a more positive light. As a person with multiple sclerosis herself, she brings a personal commitment to the work she does. She has learned how to keep her MS at bay, for the most part, through profound lifestyle changes and by minimizing stress and its effects on her life.

Her topic for today is: "Building a Business Vision While Honoring and Accommodating Your Health".

But before we begin, let's ask the Lord's blessing upon our time and our speaker.

Father, we thank you for being a loving and caring Father. WE trust that today is the day that the Lord has made and we will rejoice and be glad in it! We pray for those who are hurting today Lord, those who hurt physically, emotionally and spiritually. Comfort them as they come to hear words of encouragement and love.

Host_Mary_Shep: Bless our speaker; guide the words that are spoken so that when we are done here, we will know that we have been in Your Presence. In Jesus precious name we pray, Amen.

Now, it is my pleasure to introduce Trish Robichaud! Trish, welcome and may the Lord bless you as you share with us today!

Trish-TheCoach: Thanks Mary! Good day everyone! As Mary said my name is Trish Robichaud and I'm here to share with you about my Jump Start to Independence program.

This program is about the business beyond chronic illness. It's a 12-Step program that uncovers the empowering process of developing a business
while honoring and accommodating your health. I developed this program as a result of my own experience living with chronic illness and starting my own business.

Five years ago, I was in that dark place, feeling like I no longer had anything valuable to contribute to the world or my family. I was convinced that this was all there was to look forward to in my life, more illness, more doctors' appointments, and more disability. Then I discovered the empowerment of proactive living! Initially, I had to make some tough choices with regards to the treatment of my illness and my unhealthy lifestyle. That definitely took me out of my comfort zone; it wasn't easy but I took my first leap of faith and took action. I quit smoking, started working out, adopted water as a vital part of my day, started eating healthier than I ever had before and learned to manifest balance in my life.

I was rewarded with enough energy to begin dreaming about returning to work but I knew that I couldn't return to working for someone else. After having lost my job and my career due to my illness, I never again wanted to feel guilty for being too sick to work. I decided that I had to work for myself, this way I could control my hours and my days off to accommodate my health.

The 12-steps of my www.JumpStartToIndependence.com program will uncover the process of developing a business while honoring and accommodating your health.

I'm going to cover each of the 12 steps briefly today

Step # 1 - Define and Package your Services
Remember when you were a kid and you stepped into the living room on Christmas morning and found these beautifully wrapped packages all prettied up with snazzy paper and fancy bows? You got excited, waiting to dive in and start opening them, right?

Trish-TheCoach: It's vital that we evoke emotion in people whenever we want to provoke a response from them to take action. If we're trying to sell a service, we need to connect with that emotion in our prospect that will urge them to buy our service. Whether they buy to gain a positive feeling or buy to get rid of a negative feeling, it doesn't matter. Either way, they need to feel their need for our service, not just hear us tell them about it.

Defining and packaging our service is a 4 step process that involves:

1. Giving the Service a Name
2. Creating a Visual, Emotional Description
3. Defining Your Target Market
4. Describing the Benefits

Does anyone have any questions so far?

drawthepaw: What is the best way to let clients know about your illness, without using it as an excuse, but to explain how you work and how your schedule is effected?

Trish-TheCoach: The first thing you have to do is get really clear about your own comfort level around disclosure. You can practice that with family and friends or even a coach. When you're confident and clear about your own boundaries and conveying those to others, you will put out to prospective clients that you respect your set schedule and your health. They will follow suit and honor your conviction to take care of your self.
Does that seem understandable? I'm going to move on now.

Step # 2 - Developing Your Branding
Branding is a process by which you present your company and your
service in a manner that not only appeals to your prospective client but also makes
you memorable to them.

Components of branding are, very simply, your:

1. Company Name
2. Logo and Colours
3. Tagline (and perhaps your mission statement)
4. Elevator Speech

All of these components are meant to blend together to evoke emotion in
your prospective client. The objective is for them to feel that they need to hire
you. These components will be used again and again in all of your marketing
materials from your business cards and brochures to your website.

I know that when you're getting started, this process can seem overwhelming. The good new is that once it's done, you won't have to worry about tackling this for a long time again, if ever. There's also support available to build your branding. That's where I come in as a business coach LOL! I'd love to work with you1
So far, the business vision development process is the same for people with chronic illness as it would be for people with out health challenges

Any questions about branding?

heal: What is an elevator speech?

Trish-TheCoach: An elevator speech is a short paragraph that you write
to get you comfortable talking about what you do, for who, how you do it and how it will benefit your client. It's called an "elevator speech" because the idea is to be able to convey that info in the time it takes for an elevator ride.

Marketing gurus have a sense of humor obviously, eh? LOL

Clarisse: How do you choose what colors to pick?

Trish-TheCoach: The colours you pick should be a reflection of the "feel" of your business. When I first got started, I was so concerned about my credibility that I felt the need to make my colors convey professionalism. For others, they may choose colors that calm or excite or comfort.

disabledanddone: I live in a rural area and most little businesses fail within the first year to two years. Do you have any ideas for something that might actually stay? I live in the south.

Trish-TheCoach: The success rate for small businesses is relatively the same everywhere, don't let that scare you. If you live in an area where there doesn't seem to be many people to market to, then I would coach you on how to take your product or service to a global market. The internet has made global marketing a reality and achievable for even the smallest businesses.

Let's move on to step 3

Step # 3 - Creating a Healthy Home Office Environment
A healthy home office includes a number of very specific things that you need to set-up an effective environment conducive to optimal health and business success.

That healthy home office includes:

1. A Desk or Work Station
2. Comfortable, Ergonomic Seating
3. A Computer
4. A Telephone (perhaps even a head-set)
5. Appropriate Lighting
6. Privacy

This is where your chronic illness begins to be incorporated into your business development.

There's so much more to cover on this topic but we're limited for time and I've got 9 more steps to cover. I'm going to try to zip through the rest because our time is 1/2 over already.
Step # 4 - Keeping Track & Keeping it Simple
There are a number of different systems that you have to establish for your business.

The essential tracking and organizational systems include:
1. Communications
2. Documentation
3. Financial
4. Scheduling

Step # 5 - Creating a Web Presence
The fifth step in setting up your business is to create a web presence. Surprisingly, and contrary to what many people will tell you, this can be done quite easily and without spending an arm and a leg.

The 5-step process that I recommend for developing a web presence is as follows:
1. Register Your Domain
2. Source a Hosting Company
3. Create an Outline for Your Website
4. Craft your Website Content
5. Upload Your Content and "Go live"!

In this day and age a web presence is essential to any business owner. Some of the items covered in section #2 "Developing Your Branding" will come into play here.

Step # 6 - Marketing on a Budget
There are as many ways to market your service as there are potential services for you to market. I recommend that when you have a chronic health condition you look at the various possible strategies for marketing and figure out which ones work best for you and your health.

Some of those marketing tools and/or strategies can include (but are not limited to):

1. Business Cards
2. Brochures
3. Advertising
4. Trade Shows
5. Newsletters
6. Articles
7. Speaking Engagements
8. In-Person Networking
9. Online Networking

The key is to decide which marketing strategies most effectively accommodate your health while capitalizing on your strengths and abilities. Try all of them (and others) at least once to see what feels right for you and works for your health. Once you find the ones that work best for you, maintaining a consistent presence is the key.

Step # 7 - Filling the Funnel
What's the funnel all about, you wonder? Well, it's actually a marketing funnel. Obviously, the top of the funnel is the largest opening and the bottom of the funnel is the smallest opening. One of the most exciting things about the funnel for me is developing sources of "passive income".

Generating Passive Income
One of the most valuable aspects of this funnel concept for people living with chronic illness, is that you can develop products or services anywhere in your funnel that provide you with passive income while you sleep. Passive income is money that you make without investing your time for someone's dollars. Information products are one of the best examples of passive income. Once you've initially taken the time to develop a program, book or teleclass, like I'm providing to you now, you can market and remarket the same product over and over without spending much more of your time on it.
For example, this business start-up program that I'm delivering to you right now will later be sold on my website for downloading. There will be people out there buying this program and listening to the recordings of our conference calls in their own homes while I'm sleeping. And that my friend is a VERY powerful way to make money when you live with chronic illness, because God knows we need our rest!

I'm going to pause for a moment here to address something that I know many of you are thinking... What information or knowledge do I possibly have that others would pay for? Guess what? For everyone of us who's lived life with challenges and adversities, there are many more people out there who are just beginning the journey that we've been on for years. They all need support, just as we did - maybe we got support, maybe we didn't, but our learned experience is priceless to others who have no support.

p.j: I am not wanting to start my own business, but I can see how this could help me start a fibro/ chronic illness support group which is what has been laid on my heart. I just needed a jump start with idea's of how etc. - things to take the fear out of The "OH, I CAN'T, I AM TOO SICK MODE"- so this can apply as well, yes? Would you suggest going to hospital near by, though small, with arranged ideas and lay it out to hospital [whoever is in charge]?

Trish-TheCoach: I'm going to take this question from pj because it's right on point. The thing that holds all of us back is fear, for me it was the regular fears but also the fear of not doing "it" just right. My refrain now is "just do it", trust in God to guide me and let things play out as their supposed to. I'd suggest starting with a flyer pj and go from there.

At the end here I'm going to provide everyone with an opportunity to connect with me one-on-one to bounce ideas off of. For now I'm going to move on.

Step # 8 - Follow-Up, Follow-Up, Follow-Up
Marketing gurus say that it takes five to nine contacts with any prospect before they feel like they "know you, like you and trust you" and become willing to purchase your services. So, you have to have a reason to stay in touch with them. You can do this through sequential emails.

BUT, we all hate spam, which is unsolicited e-mail so when they enter your funnel at the top, you have to get their permission (through your subscription form) to keep in touch with them.

There are a number of different reasons to stay in contact with your prospects.

You may follow-up with prospects about:

1. Their Inquiry About Your Service
2. Their Subscription To Your Newsletter
3. Asking for Feedback
4. Introductions and Promotions
5. Rewarding Their Loyalty
6. Courtesy Reminders

One of the most important things to consider for yourself is how much time you're able to spend on follow-up. This aspect of the business is absolutely vital to developing relationships with people and allowing them to get to "know you, like you and trust you". Since you can't neglect follow-up and still expect your business to grow, at some point you'll have to consider using an "autoresponder service". This will maximize the energy you have to devote to your business

Step # 9 - Balance All the Way
The importance of balance can't be understated. If you don't learn how to maintain balance between your life and your business right from the start, you won't have a business down the road, nor a quality of life worth living. Your health must come first and must be taken into account while developing every aspect of your business.

Most healthy people know in the back of their minds that balance is important to maintaining a healthy lifestyle. But when your health isn't a major concern, it's really easy to let balance fall off the radar and slide to the back burner. At that point unfortunately, for some people, slipping into workaholic mode is an automatic reaction.

Those of us with chronic illness can't afford that mistake. Workaholism is as potentially self-destructive to us as a drug addiction. We need to remain clear at all times that balance is critical to maintaining our optimal health, even as vital to our life as air and water. The key is to build the business to accommodate your health right from the start.

In order to achieve and maintain balance there are a number of strategies that we can be mindful of and utilize.

Some of these strategies for keeping life in balance are:

1. Tracking Your Work Hours
2. Tracking Your Leisure Hours
3. Keep An Exercise Routine
4. Eating Well
5. Get A Proper Amount of Rest
6. Minimize and Manage Stress

Step # 10 - Building a Network
There are many different types of partners that you can pursue to build your network. Some are obvious types and others are ones that most people don't even consider as a possibility. Building a network of people in your life who support you and your business; who support your efforts, who are cheerleaders, confidents, people you can use as sounding boards, is critical to your long-term success. Even if you're perfectly healthy, you just can't do it all. No one is skilled at all aspects of business development and operation.

Trish-TheCoach: Here are just a few examples of potential participants in your network:

1. Business Partner
2. Family Members
3. Friends
4. Colleagues
5. Consultants
6. Health Care Professional(s)

So, your network will be a collection of people who support your business success in many different ways. They could even include somebody that you hire to look after the kids a couple hours a day so that you can work on your business uninterrupted or someone who comes in once a week or once a month to do some house cleaning so that you can spend leisure time with your family when you're not working.

The bottom line is that when you're a solopreneur living with chronic illness, having a support network is not only critical to the success of your business but also to the maintenance of your optimal health.

Step # 11 - Evolving As You Go
The business owners that stay successful for the long term are those who are willing and able to evolve their business over time. Whatever service or product that you provide straight out of the gate may have nothing to do with what product or service you will be offering 5 or 10 years from now.

There are a number of different reasons that a business may need to evolve. Let's look at some of them.

1. Growth of Your Business, Knowledge And Confidence
2. Changing Needs of Your Clients or Customers
3. Change in Technology
4. Change in Your Health

So, it's important for you not to be too emotionally invested in just that one product or service that you start out with. Be open to listening to your clients and learn what their needs are. Find out what they like about your product or service and what they don't like about it. Be willing to evolve that particular service into something different or something new, or something "new and improved".

Remember that you're going to learn as you go and will develop your knowledge base over time. While that need for evolution might be intimidating right now, let me assure you that as your business grows, so will your confidence and your ability to evolve if you keep an open mind. Nothing that stays the same… stays.

Step # 12 - Accepting Your Success
I decided it was important to include this aspect in the program as many of us prior to chronic illness were over-achievers, go-getters, workaholics, people who were always burning the candle at both ends. Many of us had a very limited perception of what success looks like. Very often it was connected to a dollar amount that we earned or a specific number or level of achievements that we had accomplished. Some thought that their success was symbolized by the expensive car they drove or the enormous house they lived in.
Then when chronic illness robbed them of the ability to afford such things, they judged themselves and began to lose confidence that they'd ever feel successful again. Well, my take on this is that the concept of success can be represented in a multitude of ways, most of which have nothing to do with financial ability, acquired material possessions or even a certain level of education achieved.

My theory to accepting success involves 6 parts:

1. Redefining Success
2. Multiple Symbols of Success
3. Facing Fear of Success
4. Success in Business
5. Success in Health
6. Success in Life

Success is a very relative term. It's important for each one of us to define what success is for ourselves. My mammoth symbol of success is my dream car, a gold convertible. I have no doubt in my mind that I will get there but that does not mean that I consider myself any less than successful now, while I can't yet afford it.

My daily concept of success is to provide value to people's lives as a coach, to bring joy, comfort and compassion to my clients and my loved ones and to support my own needs physically, emotionally and spiritually while I grow in my business and in my life.

Here's to your success! You deserve all the happiness and joy that will come your way as a result of your pursuing the business beyond your chronic illness!

Thanks for your patience while I limped my way through the copy & past process folks! Now I'm going to take questions.

Trish-TheCoach: if you send me an email at lifecoach@changingpaces.com after this session, i'll send you a raffle ticket to complete and send back

Host_Mary_Shep: Our hour is over; but I am sure we would all love another hour of this helpful information! Remember transcripts will be available in 2-3 weeks. Thank you so much for your valuable session, Trish... Let's close in a prayer that we all are familiar with!

Host_Mary_Shep:

Host_Mary_Shep: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.

Host_Mary_Shep: Living one day at a time; Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right if I surrender to His Will;

Host_Mary_Shep: That I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with Him
Forever in the next.
Amen.

Host_Mary_Shep: Trish will be ahppy to stay and answer a few more questions -- for those who need to leave now, Next Speaker: Lynn C. Royster, Ph.D., "Going Back to School When You Have a Chronic Illness" beginning at 4pm Eastern.

Host_Mary_Shep: Trish, back to you for a few more questions, perhaps 10 minutes or so as we will need to use the room for other training when you are done!

Trish-TheCoach: thanks shep

disabledanddone: how do you get financial backing if you don't have a lot of money?
Trish-TheCoach: i didn't have a dime when i started

Trish-TheCoach: i bartered my coaching services for other services i needed

disabledanddone: i was thinking along the lines of helping people who just found out they have rsd about all that i know and wish someone had told me, how could i get paid for something like that?
Trish-TheCoach: absolutely! do you write at all? How about writing a guidebook to accepting and adjusting to life with Rsd?

Host_Mary_Shep: On a day when you just don't feel 'up to doing anything' are you then able to just 'take the day off' or do you need to push yourself to do it anyhow? How do you handle those day?
Trish-TheCoach: YES! because my clients know i have a chronic illness, plus most of them do as well, they're more than supportive if i have to cancel and rebook

Trish-TheCoach: who says they can do more than you! I'll be there's some part of your experience as a consultant that makes you unique - you need to tap into that uniqueness and market that - I can help you with that LRae!

Host_Mary_Shep: That is all of the questions I can forward now, Trish will finish up this those she has in queue -- she will let you know when she is finish! Thank you all for coming and please, stay and see the rest of the questions if you wish!

Laura_Beth: You did great Trish! No limping evidence to be seen
Trish-TheCoach: Thanks LauraBeth! Can I brag about you?

disabledanddone: thank you for coming here and answering our questings, i believe God sent me here today just to hear you. i needed this.
Trish-TheCoach: Excellent - that's great because I know He sent me hear to meet all of you - my experience with chronic illness is a gift that He's provided me for the purpose of inspiring others to follow my path

MrsOWL: dont you have to have a bisness licence to have or sell any thing from your Home etc.?
Trish-TheCoach: not to start but you'll want to register your business for tax purposes, when you're registered you can deduct so many home expenses from your income
al: Wow where where you when I needed you - I tried to run my own business and finally was defeated by the lack of energy and demand it took on me - should I try again?
Trish-TheCoach: if you feel that there's something missing in your life and you're confident that it's what He want's you to do then I'd say go for it

Trish-TheCoach: most entrepreneurs have had multiple businesses over the course of their lives

Trish-TheCoach: My current business Changing Paces is probably my 6th attempt at self-employment

Trish-TheCoach: i guess I finally got it right! LOL

heybeth: Thank YOU, Trish, very useful information, with good reminders to those of us who were over-achievers prior to chronic illness (how not to fall into that trap again)! But also reminding us we are still useful!
Trish-TheCoach: in some ways we have more direction for our usefullness now

Trish-TheCoach: it's just like when you have to fine tune your target market

Trish-TheCoach: at first you want to market to everyone and anyone, you feel that if you pick a target market you'll be losing out on sales

Trish-TheCoach: but the most amazing thing is that the more clear you can get about who your target market is, the better odds of you finding them and marketing directly to them - they will respond to your messages because those messages will be written specifically for them

Trish-TheCoach: before we wrap up here i want to share one of my success stories

Trish-TheCoach: Laura_Beth who is in the room right now attended a presentation that I did last year for the NICIAW

Trish-TheCoach: after my chat last year, Laura_Beth connected with me and hired me as her coach
Trish-TheCoach: at the time, she'd been dreaming about starting her own business for over 6 years, she's been sitting on a wealth of phenominal ideas

Trish-TheCoach: after only one coaching session, she bit the bullet and "just did it" - she registered her company name, bought her domain name for the web and took action to turn her dream into reality!

Trish-TheCoach: Now, after a year of coaching, she's actively marketing her inspirational products, she does motivational speaking and is loving every minute of it
Trish-TheCoach: in fact, she's a guest speaker for this week's lineup of chat workshops!

Trish-TheCoach: Let me introduce Laura_Beth Young, Inspirational Poet, Speaker, etcc...

Trish-TheCoach: say hi Laura!

Host_Mary_Shep: Thank you again for such a wonderful talk Trish; God Bless You! --Remember to go to Trish's website to enter the raffle! Transcripts will be available in 2-3 weeks!

Trish-TheCoach: thanks for having me shep, and thanks to everyone for attending today!