Something has shifted in the last few months, and if you’re running your own business right now – as a coach, a healer, a therapist, a creative, a consultant, any kind of sole trader – I suspect you’ve felt it.
The financial pressure that started biting the bigger businesses 18 months to two years ago has been making its way steadily down the line, and it’s arrived.
I’m hearing all kinds of worries and anxieties from the people I serve right now: clients who were fully committed six months ago are sending those emails, contracts are wobbling, enquiries that would have converted easily a year ago are going quiet at the proposal stage, and the gap between what they hoped this year would look like and what it currently does is not a comfortable place to sit.
Insolvency levels across the UK remain historically elevated – well above anything we saw before the pandemic – and nearly half of sole traders are reportedly at the point of seriously questioning whether to carry on altogether. I’m not going to minimise any of that, and I’m not going to tell you to visualise your way out of a real economic climate with real consequences.
What I am going to tell you is this: there is always money somewhere – and I don’t mean that glibly. I mean it as a statement of economic fact that holds up every single time, in every downturn, in every recession, in every period of collective financial panic that has ever existed. The money doesn’t disappear – it moves and concentrates, flowing towards the people and businesses that understand what’s happening and position themselves accordingly, and away from the ones who are too busy catastrophising to notice.
Every crisis creates a new set of needs and a new set of people who are frightened, confused, overwhelmed or stuck – people who will absolutely pay for the right help, right now, at the right price point, if you can reach them and make them understand that you have what they need. The question is never whether the money exists – it’s whether you’re set up to attract it.
Which means there are three things worth looking at honestly right now.
The first is who is struggling most in this moment and what they actually need – because that’s your market, not the one you built your offer for six months ago when conditions were different, but the one that exists today, with the specific fears and pressures keeping your ideal clients up at 3am. If you haven’t revisited your messaging, your offer or your positioning recently, there’s a reasonable chance you’re still talking to a version of your client that has moved on without you.
The second is whether you’re holding anything at the wrong price – and I want to be very clear that this is not an instruction to discount yourself, because discounting is a race to the bottom that attracts the wrong clients and destroys your confidence faster than an empty inbox will.
What I’m asking is whether your pricing architecture actually serves the moment. Do you have an entry point that lets someone try working with you without betting everything on it? Do you have something at a higher investment level for the people who are investing more deliberately right now, precisely because they know they can’t afford not to? The middle tends to get squeezed in a downturn – the genuinely accessible and the genuinely premium both hold.
The third is where you’re visible, and whether it’s the right place. People who are frightened and looking for help are searching harder than they were when things felt easier – reading more, watching more, asking more questions, looking for someone who seems to genuinely understand what this moment feels like from the inside. If you’ve gone quiet on your content because the climate is affecting your output, you’re disappearing from view at exactly the moment you most need to be seen.
Something to try this week.
Write down the three biggest fears your ideal client is carrying right now – not six months ago, now. Then look at everything you’re putting out into the world and ask yourself honestly whether you’re speaking to those fears, and whether you’re showing up as someone who genuinely understands what this period feels like.
The coaches, healers, therapists and experts who will come out of this period stronger than they went in are not the ones who battened down the hatches and waited for it to pass. They’re the ones who paid attention, stayed visible, adjusted their thinking and kept showing up for the people who needed them – and the money, as it always does, found its way to them.
#UnleashYourAwesome