[00:00:00] _{Alina Trigubenko}: Thank you so much for joining us from beautiful Italy. Thank you for choosing to join this webinar over spending a beautiful afternoon in Italy. Please share a couple of sentences about yourself and, what your impact, which is tremendous. 

[00:00:18] ^{York Zucchi}: Well, it's a real pleasure to be here, and then I'm really looking forward to this, fireside chat in the sense that I'd like today to really chat and converse and, and have as much an interactive session as possible, rather than a one-sided monologue.

[00:00:34] ^{York Zucchi}: And, as a way of background, we offer, I'm Swiss by background. Worked in 11 countries. For the last 36 years. I started many businesses, some employed thousand hundred people, so became quite sable. My passion and current project, is an initiative that we started. 10 years ago, 11 years ago. And we support cities in supporting, in startups, entrepreneurs.

[00:01:03] ^{York Zucchi}: So we do this in over 83 countries. And through that work, we've learned an incredible amount about what works and what doesn't. And today's fireside check is really about the insights that we gain from the work that we do around the world. And specifically the six things that we promised in the title, are the six things that we feel are most relevant to coaches.

[00:01:30] ^{York Zucchi:} We have a lot of insights and outcomes, but, so yeah, it's gonna be fun and I hope you get value. And please feel free to ask a lot of questions and throw as much as you can in the, in the chat function. Yeah. Beautiful. Thank 

[00:01:46] _{Alina Trigubenko}: you so much. So we are, apparently both anti slides in Ansl camp, so there's not gonna be any slides.

[00:01:54] _{Alina Trigubenko:} It's just gonna be a live conversation. So please chip in and ask as many questions, ideas, thoughts. If something, let's say kind of, you know, got your attention, please do share it in a chat. Let's make it as, conversational as possible. My name is Alina. I am honored enough to be running and building profi and serving our community of coaching, consulting, training businesses.

[00:02:21] _{Alina Trigubenko:} We do serve around the world, a community around the world, and they build different kind of businesses. We have, we do have, business consulting communities. We do have training, sales training, sales and marketing training. We do have growth coaching businesses that we serve, executive coaching and a lot more.

[00:02:42] _{Alina Trigubenko:} And very, very lucky to be serving this community because it's all about impact. At Profi, we are an end-to-end or one-stop shop or all-in-one operating platform for professional services firms, businesses where we optimize and app, streamline operations from booking, scheduling, multiprovider, workflow support, service delivery process, one-on-one group sessions, prerecorded content forms, secure messaging, community reporting, billing, and everything in between.

[00:03:16] _{Alina Trigubenko}: Our goal is to be the source of truth. The one portal where you as a professional or scaling professional services firm, need to log in and track everything related to your business. And the same for your clients. Because at the end of the day, all of us care about the end customer, about about the end user, which is a client, and they also want their all in one portal for them.

[00:03:38] _{Alina Trigubenko}: So that's what we're busy doing here at Profi, with an incredible team 

[00:03:44] ^{York Zucchi}: I, and I can access to your software. You guys have really built something amazing. So if you're not already using Profi, go ahead and try it. That's really amazing. 

[00:03:52] _{Alina Trigubenko}: Thank you. Profi is a child of love so that you can feel that, definitely everyone who's working at profit, loves democratizing access and scaling the impact of pros.

[00:04:04] _{Alina Trigubenko}: That's our mission. Imagine if, this world had better access to the right for them. Coaching as well as, you know, coaches would help twice or 10 x more people as well as health and wellness providers, and that's why we built profit. So let's get at it. So how did you start this journey? 

[00:04:24] ^{York Zucchi}: Well, so if I may, Alina, we can talk about exactly my background and what we did, but I first wanted to get to know a little bit of who's on the call today.

[00:04:35] ^{York Zucchi}: So I'd love if those who are participating just for me to get a sense whether, what are you, are you a trainer, you are a business consultant. Are you a a life coach? Are you a therapist? What is your background? If we can just write in the chat the one or one or two words that define you in this current stage of your offering.

[00:04:57] ^{York Zucchi}: Just for me to get a sense, a little bit of who's on the show today. 

[00:05:03] _{Alina Trigubenko}: I see some of our clients that I can speak for. So we do have business consulting community here. Hey Michael. Hey James. We do have health and wellness coaches here, sales trainers, and we do have marketing consultants.

[00:05:21] ^{York Zucchi}: Mm-hmm. Tell me, just with a number, write down if you are a solo, coach or are you working in a partnership? Are you two or three people in your offering or are you part of a large organization? Can we just write how many people are in, let's say your team loosely defined. This is not an absolute science, so is it one if you're on your own?

[00:05:45] ^{York Zucchi}: If it's two people, it's five. Two partners plus 20 associates. Lang team James, sorry. And the others I'd love to understand a little bit. Great. Thanks. Michael. 15 business coaches. Daniel Solar business Growth consultant. Wonderful. And for life and leadership coach. Fantastic. Three. Wonderful. Okay, so that gives me a sense.

[00:06:10] ^{York Zucchi}: What kind of examples to use today? Obviously you are gonna have to fish out what is most relevant to you and I'm really happy and I'm sure Aena doesn't mind that we please free. We go with what sits on your heart. Now as a background, so we work with 411 cities in 27 countries. We run the online education for entrepreneurship development for 411 cities.

[00:06:42] ^{York Zucchi}: Some cities are small villages, some cities are four, 4.5 million residents. So we are pretty large in terms of impact, but quite unknown because we operate the scene behind the scenes because when a city launches the online programs, they launch it in the city's name. Now, reason I'm mentioning this is that we engage a lot with professions, lawyers, accountants, coaches, entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs, people who've been retrenched, but have a certain skill and don't know exactly what practical steps to take to monetizing commercialize skill.

[00:07:20] ^{York Zucchi}: And through that work, interview, surveys, research, understanding what what is needed. We discovered a lot about what works and what doesn't. And this is what we're gonna cover today. And I, I think we're gonna do it in three chunks. We're gonna talk about the growth chunk with one point. We are gonna talk about systems and processes, two points and the rest is how to find clients.

[00:07:47] ^{York Zucchi}: Hi ki I'm driving from South Africa. Oh, how nice. I was in South Africa recently. We actually launched the city of Cape Town in South Africa. So really we're gonna focus perhaps a shorter amount of time on the first two, and then the big bulk on the how do you grow your business and if you are in business where, where, what is really important?

[00:08:16] ^{York Zucchi}: Coming from our research, and I really would love invite you to do this as an exercise with me, but with us, and I right now is to define what growth means to you. The title of today's is really How to Grow Your Coaching Business. So I would love you to just write, growth for me means is it to have more turnover that are margins?

[00:08:41] ^{York Zucchi}: Is it to work less but have more passive income? Is it to grow my business from two to 15 or 15 to 40 people? Is it to expand in new countries? Not holding accountable, but just right, please, in the tax. What does growth mean to you? And then I'll unpack why that is so relevant in the discussion. So I'd love you to just write, what does growth mean for you?

[00:09:07] ^{York Zucchi}: What are your ambitions? And by the way, there's no right and wrong. If you want to be a solopreneur as a single coach, you love the lifestyle, you enjoy the connection with your clients. It's wonderful. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. 

[00:09:23] _{Alina Trigubenko}: Yeah. So that's actually something that we noticed right away as we initially we started kind of using in our marketing language, you know, will help you scale.

[00:09:31] _{Alina Trigubenko}: And then we actually talked to a lot of our customers and we realized that it's not, you know, a kind of a default intention for a lot of the professional services firms. So which is quite different from SaaS mindset, a software mindset. But that's definitely prevailing because I think the mental model here is often that they wanna preserve and amplify their impact.

[00:09:54] _{Alina Trigubenko}: Yeah, that they have. And again, there's hyper personalized care. While we we're gathering the answers, what is your answer? How do you define growth? What is growth to York? 

[00:10:06] ^{York Zucchi}: Okay. I love what I do. So I'm not in a rush to grow, to have to achieve certain metrics. I truly enjoy. I say no to a lot of things because I also enjoy the lifestyle, which is travel to places, meet people, being able to go to a place like in Italy, we're launching with 220 cities now.

[00:10:28] ^{York Zucchi}: It'll probably be later this year, but then I can spend longer in Italy because I'm not under pressure to go and close the next deal in another country. So for me, it's about measuring the impact and they'll resell the cities if it's one happy person who starts a business that makes me happy, and so for me it's quality of life.

[00:10:51] ^{York Zucchi}: It's a balancing act of doing good. But you know, I spent 16 years in the corporate banking sector working for the likes of Goldman Sachs around the world. So I know what a workaholic does for a living, and, and that's why, as you can see, most of my hair is gone. 

[00:11:09] _{Alina Trigubenko}: Now you're optimizing for impact. I can definitely 

[00:11:12] ^{York Zucchi}: Relate to that. Yeah. But, but unfortunately the hair is not growing back again. By the way, for those who don't know, I'm originally from Switzerland and very few people know that in Switzerland when you're born, they surgically remove your sense of humor. So now at least, you know, if my jokes fall particularly flat, you have a bit of context.

[00:11:31] _{Alina Trigubenko}: You can see you traveled in that case a lot. 

[00:11:35] ^{York Zucchi}: Okay. So I'm just looking at some of the answers. So growth will be to increase our turnover next to five years while maintaining our margins. Okay. Kara, thank you. James says, scale up in terms of size of team of coaches and geographically change role.

[00:11:52] ^{York Zucchi}: From my personal delivery. Okay, good. And Alan, to scale our new executive coaching business next five years, to then provide access strategy option, I'm guessing exit strategy option, you mean to sell the business presumably of some sort. Okay. So there, there, there seems to be a, in the, in the small sampling a gut feeling that there is ambitious blood flowing here.

[00:12:18] ^{York Zucchi}: James, nice growth means development in the next level of person development. I like that. I like it. Thank you. And so the reason why this, the definition and whatever the definition for you is why it's so important. One of the studies we undertook was around the fact that if you don't know where you wanna go, it's a bit like undertaking a trip.

[00:12:45] ^{York Zucchi}: And you say, great, I I, I need to get from this point and I want to go down here. If you don't know where you're going, how big the car must be, or how much fuel you need to carry, or what kind of staff you need on board or, or is it a rock terrain? Is it a mountainous? Do you need four by four? Do you need more?

[00:13:05] ^{York Zucchi}: Bus carries passengers. If you don't know the destination, you gonna be all over the show. You're gonna start pursuing this tool, that strategy. You're gonna have lot of conversations and. Consume a lot of material that is actually gonna pollute your focus. And that's something that's very interesting that we saw you.

[00:13:30] ^{York Zucchi}: You see it often in the startup community that says, I need to get an investor and I need to go as fast as possible. And, and I were just chatting before we started today, how you malin actually this, this is a wonderful example you started on without real funding, and only once you got enough traction did you say, oh my God, we're sitting on something good.

[00:13:54] ^{York Zucchi}: I want to scale it now. Yeah, 

[00:13:58] _{Alina Trigubenko}: definitely honored. Actually, some of early [00:14:00] customers are on this call that helped us bring this vision to fruition through the partnership. Mm-hmm. So, thank you. Mm-hmm. I'll use this opportunity to say thank you for jumping in early in the partnership. Yeah. 

[00:14:11] ^{York Zucchi}: And that is so, so crucial, and I'm not gonna touch too much on the various points, but in terms of product to market fit, in terms of really developing something your customers want, and I think all of us on the call today or in the webinar are, are aware of that.

[00:14:29] ^{York Zucchi}: An idea is not necessarily something that a customer necessarily wants. It's something you say, okay, I think people are interested in this. Let me launch a prototype and then get slapped around and get a lot of nos. And what is this nonsense? And I don't understand the value. Okay, let me go back to the drawing board.

[00:14:48] ^{York Zucchi}: A very painful experience, but it is incredibly crucial. And so going back to the conversation, one of the major causes of failure in [00:15:00] micro-businesses and was the, yes we want to grow, but not having defined specifically what that cross looks like. And once you define it, you can change at a later stage, but now you are much more focused.

[00:15:16] ^{York Zucchi}: I'll give you a very practical example. If you say, I want to do my life coaching on my own, I really enjoy this. I love the connection. What we say at the beginning, well then. Maybe you need a CRM system, maybe you need Profi, maybe you need tools that are relevant to you, easy to use. They don't have to be a Salesforce, nothing against Salesforce, but they don't have to be a very ishly complex tool because you don't have the ambition or the plan yet to go down that route.

[00:15:51] ^{York Zucchi}: So you don't necessarily need to plan for that. You don't need to put business processes and systems into place that allow you to onboard another 30 people because that's not where you want to go. So there is incredible value in keeping it simple in your, in your journey, but you've got to be very clear of where you're going.

[00:16:14] ^{York Zucchi}: Which brings us to the second point. What there's, if you are, and this is a bit challenging, I'm gonna try to balance it for both who are. Coaches, individual coaches or small teams versus those who are growing 15, 20, 30 people amongst you. There are two ways you can grow a coaching business. You can't really, you don't have more hours You can sell, even if you bring an additional person, maybe you administrative burden can be a portion over more people, but in sort a contribution to the fixed overheads becomes better.

[00:16:56] ^{York Zucchi}: But either you lower your administrative costs or you add additional services. And one of the, and, and, and, and it brings a two, two points around systems and processes that most of us who start a business and coaching is a business are should be firing ourselves. From the administrative side of running our business.

[00:17:28] ^{York Zucchi}: Now, that doesn't mean that there is a solution out there that does everything perfectly, but I would love to hear from you. How much time do you spend a week, chasing invoices, payments, organizing diaries, summarizing notes, creating all the little tasks that require the back office to run your business.

[00:17:54] ^{York Zucchi}: So if you can write, I don't know if you, we, we did a survey, so I'll tell you what the answers to the survey is, but if you can write down, do you spend, is it three hours a week? Is it six hours a week? Like 45 minutes a day calling, following up chasing leads? So just write a number roughly of how much time you spend on the admin side of your.

[00:18:20] ^{York Zucchi}: Coaching business. Obviously if you've got a bigger operation with 15 people, you probably have a dedicated team that does it, but that is also time spent on, on running the business. James, you're six to eight hours a week. Thank you. That by the way is not to steal the thunder of whatever other answer comes afterwards, Michael.

[00:18:42] ^{York Zucchi}: Seven hours. Curious, way too much pause as much as 30% of my time, much of it is writing proposals as well. Yes, so that's a very interesting point. Very much in line with our findings. Ellen, you have two hours a week. Okay? It's very good, but you have a dedicated person, so there is an actual cost to that administrative burden and so there's only two ways you can grow your business in the, in beginning stages, it's to lower time, it's to free yourself up to have hours.

[00:19:17] ^{York Zucchi}: But you can sell your time. Now, I know there are services you probably are thinking of or brought to market, but we touch about later that might allow you to do one to many coachings, workshops, webinars, and seminars and the likes. But for now, if we're talking about one-on-one coaching, one-on-one touchpoint, you cannot sell this your your same hours.

[00:19:43] ^{York Zucchi}: It's the hours that you have. So if the easiest way to really to really grow your business, at least in the beginning phase, is to lower your administrative burden. And technology there is incredibly useful for Beth. And I mean, I don't want, forgive me, I'm plugging a little bit a, because I really like the platform, but aena, you, you at the essence are actually delivering a tool.

[00:20:16] ^{York Zucchi}: That removes the administrative burden from most coaches. 

[00:20:21] _{Alina Trigubenko}: Thank you. Yeah, that's, that's what we, again that's why we exist because imagine all those two hours a week 30% of your time seven hours a week, six to eight hours a week, you can dedicate, I can't, you know, promise completely that you will not do anything.

[00:20:38] _{Alina Trigubenko}: You'll still have to dedicate some time, even if you are orchestrating a bunch of ai, you'll still have to supervise them, thank God, at least, for a while. But definitely we exist in order to help multiply your impact and to minimize the time that you spend on not client helping activities or revenue generating activities.

[00:21:00] _{Alina Trigubenko}: Your clients need more of, more help and more clients need help. 

[00:21:04] ^{York Zucchi}: Absolutely. And, and, and on that, I'd like to add that one of the things I always advise us, imagine somebody gave you, I'm just saying a number, $10,000 a month. To hire three new people for your team. Depends on the city and the country you're in, how far $10,000 gets you, but whatever the currency is.

[00:21:27] ^{York Zucchi}: And these are people who don't have a lot of business experience or administrative experience. So you can't, there's not, these are not people who will replace you in delivering the service that you give to your clients. So the question to you is, what would you give, what roles would you give these three people?

[00:21:49] ^{York Zucchi}: And if you were now on a piece of paper, I'm not inviting to do it now, but really as an invitation for the next couple of days, it's to break apart the components of what you do in the administrative side of your business into tasks. Now, not everything can be automated. Technology is an enabler. It's not the answer for everything.

[00:22:11] ^{York Zucchi}: But there are components of a technology that you can use to reduce the, the friction that that administration causes in your business. And there's, yeah. No, 

[00:22:28] _{Alina Trigubenko}: no, I was just, yeah, definitely. It, it's interesting that there's definitely a correlation between client experience and the amount of people and steps it takes to get to the actual session, to the actual engagement with pros, with coaches, with consultants, and the lower the barrier to entry, the lower the friction, obviously the happier your client is.

[00:22:52] _{Alina Trigubenko}: Absolutely. And that's, I'm actually writing an ebook right now on the service delivery intelligence where we are gonna publish, years and years of research and you know we have such a pretty diverse team that focuses on different aspects of researching client experience, researching user journeys, researching, you know, everything.

[00:23:13] _{Alina Trigubenko}: Because we we're a software company. That's what we normally do. And that's something that there is a lot of insights and there's a lot of goal that we'll be sharing. But definitely I feel that the. Client experience and the client journey is something that has not been understood well by the professional services firms, but that's kind of the cherry on top.

[00:23:35] _{Alina Trigubenko}: That's why, you know, that's number one value or number two value for professionals. You know, what's my client experience like and what, what, what do clients get? So we'll be releasing a lot more insights on this topic, but definitely they more streamlined their experiences to get to the right service for them, to get the most out of your service.

[00:23:57] _{Alina Trigubenko}: And the better the engagement, retention, expansion and, you know, all of the other metrics. 

[00:24:04] ^{York Zucchi:} Mm-hmm. No, absolutely. And, and we're gonna actually talk about this in, in the, in the third part on the access to market, but really, so we talked about the one part of systems and processes is bring, introduce welcome technology.

[00:24:23] _{York Zucchi}: Once you've audited your different roles, even the roles that you may be doing, you don't understand that you're doing accounting, invoicing, proposal writing. Well, maybe if there's a tool that allows you to standardize your proposal, send them, see and track them, then there's this tool. Then there's this tool.

[00:24:42] ^{York Zucchi}: I'm not suggesting all the tools might be valuable to you, but it's really to map out all the steps that you're taking in your business because that leads you also to start understanding, okay, which one can I use technology to assist me? And which one still require personal touch? Because you can't just send an email and hope somebody makes a commitment of 30 hours for the next six months, and that's the one side.

[00:25:10] ^{York Zucchi}: And the second side, if you grow your business, is around providing a add services. Now, I don't know your individual businesses. Pat Alina did mention something, which I think is crucially important. It's this onboarding journey, this customer onboarding journey, the community that you can create around specific needs.

[00:25:38] ^{York Zucchi}: It's the top of mind awareness, whether it's daily or biweekly perspective that you share via voice note in a telegram group or WhatsApp group. I'm not suggesting one or the other. I'm just giving you ideas where that, in our research, that being top of mind is when you have a lot of touchpoints with your clients.

[00:26:07] ^{York Zucchi}: That is the single biggest driver for referrals because you are top of mind with the client. You are in constant touch with them. And so your name comes first. Now, I don't know if Profi has a feature inside, but my point here is figure out if there are tools, offerings. Go look at other businesses unrelated to coaching, steal from them.

[00:26:36] ^{York Zucchi}: Have a look what you can offer in your arsenal to increase the revenue. Now I'm telling you this because we did an experiment with one coach who started offering additional tools. For example, they started offering a di a personal diary tool that every day ask the person to record a 32nd video of how they feel.

[00:27:00] ^{York Zucchi}: Now the coach put a referral code in the pool and so is earning a few cents. Really, we're not gonna get the retire on that money. And they only started four months ago, so it's gonna take time. But my point here, there are many ways, creative ways for you, for you to start introducing what is out there to keep the clients closed, and start building a little bit of an income stream that is not only related to real time, but yourself.

[00:27:31] ^{York Zucchi}: Yeah, 

[00:27:32] _{Alina Trigubenko}: there is actually a lot. Um, I'm, I get super excited when I get to talk about productization of services because professional services industry can definitely benefit a lot from having the same or similar mindset as software companies. So it's all about building the habits, right? That's the nature of coaching businesses in general and training as well too.

[00:27:54] _{Alina Trigubenko}: And that's what software companies are designing for as well. So there is a lot research. There is a lot of research. There's a lot of kind of thinking of different kind of mi minds from different kind of fields. Yeah. Have been invested into kind of synthesizing and producing products that build habits.

[00:28:12] _{Alina Trigubenko}: So there is a lot of the things that software professional services companies can implement re relatively easy from the software companies. And that's also in, actually in the book that I'm writing. But one of the things that I see some of the most innovative kind of pioneers, pioneer type personas of in our customer base are executing on is those notifications, those nudges or we call 'em also kind of tracker.

[00:28:37] _{Alina Trigubenko}: So send something on a weekly basis. It can be just even, let's say a personalized set of reminders or personalized set of, I know inspirational quotes or Yeah. You know, prompts, you were doing good, whatever throughout between the engagements. That definitely increases based on our research. That definitely increases customer satisfaction and customer engagement, which are the key pillars of overall kind of satisfaction was engagement.

[00:29:04] _{Alina Trigubenko}: Yeah. As well as something interesting that we see picking up and we are actually designing for it right now is subscription-based async access. So basically ability to chat. To have access to you on a subscription basis to, in order to, let's say, async asynchronously, answer some questions or get personalized, let's say read on your, whatever, something that you ate today, you know, how does it relates to overall our health coaching plan outside of just the, let's say, webinars or group sessions or anything else.

[00:29:42] _{Alina Trigubenko}: So those kind of little upsells that make it super beautiful, easy for clients to engage because it, it's actually from the client's psychology, from the client's standpoint, they have to experience such a big pain or desire to resolve something or to, to get from something or to get to something in order to engage in the one-on-one session.

[00:30:02] _{Alina Trigubenko}: From everything that we've tested, it takes a lot of. You know, it's actually very kind of capacity. It's a big burden on the capacity to engage with someone in a one-on-one session. But there's so many things that we can implement that will lead more organically the clients to having a bigger engagement, such as one-on-one sessions or group sessions.

[00:30:23] _{Alina Trigubenko}: There's a ton of things that we've discovered and experimented on that I'll be sharing, but I love that, you know, the, the key takeaways. Yeah. This kind of bite size learning that the whole ed tech or education industry have been talking a lot. We can also apply it to the professional services market as well.

[00:30:41] _{Alina Trigubenko}: It doesn't have to be prerecorded content, but it can be, still can bite size methodology of bite size support. So think I love it. Think about, yeah, think about if you have any ideas about what you, what kind of service you would love to experiment with or you envision that would work [00:31:00] or you'd actually wanna roll out, but you haven't had enablement to roll out to your customers, please do send me an email or reach out or send or send something in chat.

[00:31:09] _{Alina Trigubenko}: This is what I loved and nerded about with our customers and with, with our community. So please do share your 

[00:31:16] ^{York Zucchi}: ideas. I love it. And, and that's such an interesting point. Now we're gonna move into the, the how to grow your business, which I equate in a way how to find clients. We talked about the administrative side of the business, the systems and processes as an enabler to, to, to reduce also on a personal level, the stress and the exhaustion that you go through in having to manage your business.

[00:31:41] ^{York Zucchi}: You want to be able to do what you do because you're passionate about coaching, you're passionate about consulting, training, and whatever the case may be. That's what you're doing. You didn't start a business, so you have to spend all the time on admin. Having said that, what I'm inviting you for the, for this section, which is my personal favorite is we're gonna talk about access to markets, which is a fancy way of saying, finding clients, generating these, finding prospects and converting them.

[00:32:13] ^{York Zucchi}: We're not gonna talk about how to win a client over, so I'm not, this is not gonna be a section on, okay, I've got to lead. How do I persuade them? That is very, very individual to you. But I wonder, while I'm about to introduce it, I'm inviting you to do a little exercise in the chat function. To write exactly what do you solve for clients, so to say, no, I'm a life coach too, too high level, or I'm a trainer.

[00:32:43] ^{York Zucchi}: No, I'm a business consultant. No. Tell me specifically what you do. Let me give you a practical example. I could tell you I'm a software developer or I'm a website developer, and you would probably yawn the hell out of me if I told you. However, I help small shop owners to make more money from online sales.

[00:33:05] ^{York Zucchi}: Now, I just told you what I solve, what problem I solve. I told you who my clients are and I told you what I'm doing. I just happened to use website designing. To, to achieve that for small shop owners. So give it a shot at writing the check function. Exactly what you do. And by the way, we're a family.

[00:33:27] ^{York Zucchi}: It's okay if you're not sure. So Michael says, helping business owners make a transition from steady growth to scaling. Michael, I would love to understand what you mean by, is there a particular factor? Is it manufacturing services? Is it solopreneurs to the next stage? I wonder if you can just unpack that a little bit more and then that was a wonderful attempt.

[00:33:51] ^{York Zucchi}: Feel free to try, write down exactly what you help with James. We teach couples how to communicate clearly and respectfully through the differences rather than align the difference to control their communication. That's so beautiful. I think we can shorten that, James. I love it. And I'm going to, while the others are either writing or, or considering.

[00:34:14] ^{York Zucchi}: To write like carrots, to implement fair labor practice and create healthy work environments. Okay, all three of you, I'm inviting you to rephrase exactly what you wrote as a question. So instead of saying, for example, with each couple, how would you change that? Are you struggling to communicate with your, with your life partner?

[00:34:39] ^{York Zucchi}: Do you wish you could communicate better with your life partner? Do you feel that there's a lot of tension when you communicate? Michael, how do I grow my business using the same resources? Nice, good first attempt. And by the way, the others, if you see one and you have the better idea, please feel free to comment.

[00:34:58] ^{York Zucchi}: Because we are a family as entrepreneurs, and so sometimes somebody says, Ooh, actually no. Do something different, sir, I help teams unlock their potential. How would you phrase it as a question? Do you feel your team. Could achieve that much more in the business. I'm just, I'm volunteering an idea. And Alina, you're most welcome to jump in as well.

[00:35:20] ^{York Zucchi}: I'm really inviting everybody to comment on everybody else. Curious, do your employees experience bullying or harassment in the workplace? Love it on the spot. Do you manage to find it difficult to manage discipline? It's a bit of a sentence in my view, but I get it and I love it. This is experimentation.

[00:35:37] ^{York Zucchi}: Okay, we help simplify business success. Alan, gut feeling wise? First reaction. It's too wishy washy. Be more specific. Think of a client that you recently helped and what you did with them. Sir, are you seeing an artificial ceiling on your business and team that you can get passed? I like it. It's a bit long.

[00:35:57] ^{York Zucchi}: I know we can shorten it and make it punchy. The reason we're doing this is an astronomically high number. Of people who struggled to get clients who get more traction. When we unpack the reason, now we did it a scientifically as possible, but of course there is a bit of an arc and there is a bit of a, because we are interviewing humans, we're getting a bit of a subjective, 40% was the inability of customers to understand what you were offering.

[00:36:31] ^{York Zucchi}: And so when we make it incredibly clear what it is that we help and we frame it as a question with a call to action, we increase the ability. So is that what you do? Remember what I said about your, the website developer? He's not a website developer because that's everybody. York helps small shop owners to go to generate more revenue online.

[00:36:59] ^{York Zucchi}: Now, if you're small shop owners, which is huge market. Well then, you know, I am the person you want to speak to. I 

[00:37:07] _{Alina Trigubenko}: would also add, again, one of the main metrics that we track for our customers is their client activation. Because there's so much, again, it's like a waterfall effect, right? There's so much that's dependent on customer, actually on the client actually activating with the engagement that they sign up for with our customer.

[00:37:27] _{Alina Trigubenko}: And a lot of the times that we noticed in our research that clients are having a hard time navigating engagement. They're having, if there is a, if they're being sent, let's say, a bunch of different tools, a bunch of different accesses, access points, a bunch of different kind of materials, it's just hard for them to navigate.

[00:37:44] _{Alina Trigubenko:} And we always have this, I always have this kind of guiding quote in my head, don't make me think. So, the clients don't actually wanna think extra because we are so used to everything digitally native, everything's optimized. You know, your Instagram is one click away, your Uber is one click away.

[00:38:00] _{Alina Trigubenko}: Everything is one click away. And everything is, that's built by software companies being, is being optimized for an optimal engagement and activation rate. If you're being, yeah, if you're being just bombarded by different information on how to get the most, it's just not gonna, you know, fly. Because clients habits and customer habits and user habits in general way different right now.

[00:38:22] _{Alina Trigubenko}: So we notice that there is a significant increase in the activation rate of clients. Yeah. When it's super easy for them to navigate. And that also speaks to another actually point. A lot of the professionals, I would say probably majority, I'll be blunt here, don't wanna feel salesy. That's one of the biggest fears that if they propose another service or if they offer another service, they will come off as kind of salesy.

[00:38:48] _{Alina Trigubenko}: They don't wanna overmarket their clients. So that's what systems that you use should be optimized for, to kind of sell for you so you don't have to think and experience this anxiety and stress. Yeah. And your clients also have a full visibility of, of what actually you offer, what actually is available to them.

[00:39:04] _{Alina Trigubenko}: The entire menu of services. Because more often that we realize as coaches, clients do wanna keep engaging with us even after, let's say the main engagement. They do wanna keep kind of being in the zone and in the know and be kind of benefiting from your care. We're just not often equipped to provide such care continuously.

[00:39:28] ^{York Zucchi}: Absolutely. And by the way, I'm absolutely loving the chat, so thank you also for cross helping each other. I love, love, love that. And the reason why we do this and to going back to the, creating a very clear message of who should approach you. And, and I'm gonna tackle just now if you have multiple services, but if you provide one service, you know that you don't care about York.

[00:39:59] ^{York Zucchi}: You don't care about Alina, you care about the person. Are you struggling in your relationship, communicate clearly with each other in a non, in a nonconfrontational way? Do you find yourself confronting? It's incredibly crucial exactly to Alina's point to say, Hey, this is what I do. Are you struggling with this question mark?

[00:40:20] ^{York Zucchi}: Because a question mark makes everybody's brain engaged then. I can help you have a look at this and you want to have a call to action. You want them, the people to go to a specific place where you can now convert them and then we'll talk about it in a second. But I wanna show you something. Who wants to volunteer the LinkedIn profile, not you, Alina.

[00:40:47] ^{York Zucchi}: Is there anybody else that in the chat can put a LinkedIn url? I wanna show you one of us. This is more a personal advice. I always joke to entrepreneurs and professionals, I say, how would you like five or six employees who will work for you 24 7 for free? And it's fascinating, fascinating. When we look actually, even look at your emails, you know the emails that you sent, if you go to the sent items, look at your email signature.

[00:41:19] ^{York Zucchi}: I will bet you 99%, especially if it's an email sent from the phone. It's either say, sent from iPhone, sent from Samsung, sent from Outlook. Or maybe if you are a bit more fancy, you wrote CEO of Profi, a telephone number, this number, company registration, whatever. Some stuff like that. Okay, Kieth, here we go.

[00:41:45] ^{York Zucchi}: Okay. Whoop, I'll be gentle. Okay, so if we look at your banner, but all your, anything, your email signature, your banner on Facebook, your banner, LinkedIn, your profile picture, that is real estate that I'm inviting you to use to drive up engagement rates. Now, it depends on you. No, don't take what I say as the Bible.

[00:42:13] ^{York Zucchi}: Feel free to adapt it to what makes you comfortable, what works with your customers. But you know, one of my jokes is on average we send anything between 50 and 200 emails a week out. I mean, emails. Hi, I'll be five minutes late. Do you have time for a meeting tomorrow? Here's a PDF that I wanted to send you.

[00:42:35] ^{York Zucchi}: Every email is an opportunity to remind somebody about what to call you for. So the exercise we did just now in the chat where you wrote, are you struggling with this? Do you feel your team is not achieving its full by full potential? Maybe I can help click here. Who doesn't click there? If anybody so much has, has str, has a, a team that has any challenges in be in achieving all there should be, I bet you that we're gonna click there.

[00:43:13] ^{York Zucchi}: You know, you change your email signature once. That's it. Every time you send an email, you, you're creating one opportunity to generate leads. Plus, you know, from advertising world, when you see on posters, the same matches message over and over and over again, repetition works, but it's got to be incredibly clear.

[00:43:40] ^{York Zucchi}: I, Alina, are you struggling with this? I think I can help you or find out what I did. Here's five tips to help you to solve that. Now the important thing is what happens next? One of the challenges with access to markets is actually an access to network's challenge. So we're just gonna step back for a second and exercise, which I'll, we're gonna do exercise and then I show you why it's so powerful and this is based on extreme intense research.

[00:44:18] ^{York Zucchi}: So I want you in the chat, including Alina, I want you to write what you are working on right now. Now, I know Alina, for example, is doing ai deep, deep dive into like a, a startup within a startup. I want you to tell me to pick one thing. I know you probably had been doing many things. Maybe you're working with a client, maybe you're working with a couple around the relationship, which was on the verge of divorcing and maybe you are currently building.

[00:44:51] ^{York Zucchi}: Well, whatever you are working on in play, imagine you're explaining it without fancy word. You're not trying to impress anybody right in the chat function, what you're currently working on. Okay, so what do I see there? A key carrier and currently building material to put on social media to focus on our training offering.

[00:45:10] ^{York Zucchi}: Okay, sorry. Okay, that's very good. And actually I like it. I'm gonna keep it there. China Self-coaching platform, LM ft. N. Psychology. I have no idea what l that acronym means. Forgive me sir. Working on RFP for large prospect company and designing an AI layer natively into the operations of professional services firm and so forth.

[00:45:32] ^{York Zucchi}: I love it. Now I want to tell you something about, let me put it this way. If you wanna generate leads, you need to be top of mind and have a foot in a lot of doors. As a coach or a small business with a couple of professionals, you do not have the manpower or woman power. You do not have the resources to have a full-time person.

[00:45:59] ^{York Zucchi}: So what probably happens is you go occasionally and put a post out there or can create a nice little banner or, or something, or attend a webinar and support. And these are nice, they're useful, but they're not overly effective. I'm gonna give you a little hack. The hack is share what you're working on, share what you're looking for, and share what you're struggling with.

[00:46:29] ^{York Zucchi}: Those three are the three most engagement generating. Activities you can do on social media. Now I say social media loosely because you gotta tell, you gotta decide where your clients are sitting. If you are, if your client's on LinkedIn, then LinkedIn then pursue a LinkedIn format if they're a Facebook or TikTok community or whatever the case may be.

[00:46:54] ^{York Zucchi}: So you decide what social media means for you? I kind of sit on LinkedIn most, I'd actually dropped most of the other social platforms. But that's just because it works for me. Cause we deal with mayors. When you share what you're working on, you are subliminally doing a number of things. One, you are telling people you're busy.

[00:47:15] ^{York Zucchi}: I'm working on, or I just finished the project, that whatever the case may be, subliminally, you're telling them. Oh, this is not somebody who's sitting there waiting for clients. This is somebody who know, who has a track record, who people pay. Sometimes it might be doing a freebie, but people don't need to know that.

[00:47:35] ^{York Zucchi}: But you are busy. So secondly, by sharing what you are working on, it gives a taste to somebody what you do. Now, you may be working on many things, so it might be today you are with this company tomorrow with that company, but it's after a while, you'll start seeing the people go, okay, that, oh, is that what you do actually need to call you?

[00:48:07] ^{York Zucchi}: Hold on. Is that what you, I actually seem to remember you wrote something about that. But people love, that's why Facebook grows so popular. Cause what is Facebook? I'm, I'm sharing what I'm doing on a personal level. Here's a photo of the lunch or, or 300 photos of the same plate, which I never understood.

[00:48:26] ^{York Zucchi}: So learn to share what you're working on. Obviously without breaching anybody's confidentiality, you gotta find the balance. But it could be something I recently did or I'm trying to come up an example in the context. Let me just grab one of your chat. Working on an rfp, request for proposal, I guess for large prospect corporation.

[00:48:49] ^{York Zucchi}: It's a bit vague, so, but I'm gonna try my best to take that. So I would do something like this. I would take a picture of me with my team or me sitting at a, with a piece of paper, paper pen, stage it, but don't stage it unnaturally, you know, stages, like you're really working. And then, you know, I was recently working.

[00:49:14] ^{York Zucchi}: On an r request for proposal by a large company in the whatever sector that needed to solve a challenge that they had with, and I have no idea what the challenge is. Here's the three things that we did to submit that proposal. 1, 2, 3, or, I recently worked with a, with a couple who was really on the edge of their marriage.

[00:49:42] ^{York Zucchi}: They've been fighting a lot, and, and when we met, we analyzed the communication pattern and realized that is actually two simple things they can do. One, two. And so you are sharing what you're working on, plus two practical tips. You will be amazed how people start engaging with that. Cause you are now giving away knowledge without breaching confidentiality.

[00:50:12] ^{York Zucchi}: You are creating a track record. You're giving practical examples of what you do. And most importantly, you are sharing wisdom and knowledge. And people love. Look at the LinkedIn feed. I mean it's spammy almost. And probably half is written by chat g p, but look at how much knowledge I give. And then they go spamy hardcore by saying com, right?

[00:50:40] ^{York Zucchi}: Light or comment below. Absolutely document your journey. And by the way, rule of thumb, but you decide what you're comfortable with. One post every three days is more than enough. Maybe two posts a week if you want. I personally do one post a week, but sometimes I'm in a mood and I do three posts in a day.

[00:51:01] ^{York Zucchi}: But it's really fine, the balance, I think what 

[00:51:05] _{Alina Trigubenko}: CT solved for, which is tremendous, that blank page problem because a lot of us who has, who have an urge to, to rate, we've been stuck on this white page. You know, where do I start? How do I go about it? And so c g PT makes it easy, lowers the barrier to entry to any kind of writing.

[00:51:24] _{Alina Trigubenko}: And also I think why it could be valuable actually have, while while you were sharing this incredibly valuable piece of advice, I was thinking why it would work given the nature of as coaches and consultants, because our clients actually, they're looking for this chemistry signals. That's where we saw the highest conversion rates.

[00:51:47] _{Alina Trigubenko}: Once the clients kind of got a taste of what your experience is like, what are you actually focused on? Because everyone, again, needs this hyper personalized care and hyper personalized service. So once they get a glimpse of how you think, it's easier for them to feel if there is a chemistry match or not even before engaging in, again, very burdensome, one-on-one session or, you know, actual face-to-face conversation.

[00:52:12] _{Alina Trigubenko}: So that actually is something that could be helpful too, based on, I'm just speaking based on our research. And also fellow coaches too. There is a lot that we can unlock through the power, as you said, networks, right? Power of collaboration within the networks. And our instinct as coaches and trainers and people of helping professions is to help people, is to help others.

[00:52:33] _{Alina Trigubenko:} Yeah. So based knowing what you are working on, I might have a client that needs exactly this business advice and be like, Hey, I might, you know, I can help you with your executive coaching executive, for example, leadership skills that you came to me for. But I noticed that York has been very consistent about posting about this business advice, a business consulting kind of angle.

[00:52:57] _{Alina Trigubenko}: So you might wanna talk to him, that is a second use case, why it might work. And the third one, actually, I think our brains, you know, being bit deep right now in studying how AI machine learning works and you know, things alike. I now understand that it's all about labeling, right? In order to produce and synthesize any kind of data we need to label, and that's what we do subconsciously, when we see something, any kinda signal from you on any kind of social media, we start labeling.

[00:53:22] _{Alina Trigubenko}: Even if we don't realize, we start labeling you with something that you post about, right? And if we see consistency in you posting about business consulting and from your perspective, unique angle, that's when we label. And then, you know, when the situation arises or the right time comes, that's what I can make the match in my head and say like, Hey, absolutely I might wanna talk or you as my client or my, you know, prospects, might wanna talk to York.

[00:53:50] _{Alina Trigubenko}: So I think it's great advice all around. And 

[00:53:53] ^{York Zucchi}: anymore, I really wanna add something to the posting, please. And this advice now don't, I'm not following my own advice, but. This is a very particular for your areas of expertise. Don't post stuff that's not relevant to what you do or that doesn't endorse you in some shape or form.

[00:54:14] ^{York Zucchi}: By endorse, I don't mean compliment you, but it isn't related. So I'm sure you have a view on a matter here on, on Taiwan, China, on, on the markets or in interest rate or the latest chat GDP stick to what you post because the moment you start going all over the place, you dilute people's perception of you and you are a brand and you're your brand manager.

[00:54:40] ^{York Zucchi}: Stick to the brand message. It's like McDonald's starting to post about smart cities. It's like, I, what? I don't What does the two two do together? You, oh, healthy eating. Yeah, that can right there. You just got our views about McDonald's. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I 

[00:55:04] _{Alina Trigubenko}: think in other words, I would put it help others label you in a way that will produce right for you later.

[00:55:10] ^{York Zucchi}: Right. And the labeling, I know we, we've, you know, it's, it's, there's a lovely graffiti outside Zurich train station in Switzerland. It says it's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice. And I'm twisting it now to say it's nice to be important, but it's more important to be clear. So you wanna be labeled, that's why we did it.

[00:55:30] ^{York Zucchi}: Access about exercise, about what you do. You, I know it's not nice to be put into a box, but if you want to grow your business, that's how it brains work. Absolutely. You want a box. Cause a box. People say, I remember Alina does this. That's what she's good at. When I think Alina, or when I think miracle or communication challenges, I think Alina.

[00:55:55] ^{York Zucchi}: And so you really want people who have you. Now, you can offer multiple services. Now, let me show you something. My signature. Now that works for me, doesn't mean you must copy this by any stretch of imagination, but in my case, I'm interested in speaking to mayors of cities and towns. Okay? That's my target market.

[00:56:19] ^{York Zucchi}: Cause we give them a white labeled academy, which a town then uses to support all its citizens. So what do I do in the wording? I talk about unemployment, which every mayor, by the way, there's over 10 million town around the world, in case you haven't wanted to know. And over 4,673 that have more than 150,000 residents.

[00:56:44] ^{York Zucchi}: Interesting stats, if you're ever interested in that. But because I'm talking to mayors, I'm saying I know words like creating jobs and creating businesses, tackling unemployment are hugely important to you. Then you can see a link later if you want, click on the link and the reason why I have that link, that's a landing page designed to convert a visitor to a WhatsApp message, can't tell you how important it is to, to use the advantage that you have as a small business.

[00:57:21] ^{York Zucchi}: Do not go all digital convert Alina when she goes, oh, is that what York does? Let me click on it. This sounds interesting. You will see on my webpage, it's not a webpage, it's a landing page that I have three statements. And then click here to get in touch. It goes through a monitor. I have a team member who answers the WhatsApp.

[00:57:46] ^{York Zucchi}: They look at the WhatsApp because WhatsApp identifies with true caller, the name of a person. My team looks at who it is on LinkedIn. If they are the person I we want to speak to, they give me the WhatsApp message, I will then message WhatsApp. That person, Eleena. Thanks very much. Listen, why don't we have a quick zoom chat.

[00:58:09] ^{York Zucchi}: I know you are my customer. You don't even know it yet. If you are not my customer, I mean sometimes you get it wrong. Of course. Then we send you a link. Thanks so much Eleena for the message. Yeah, we help entrepreneurship. If you are an entrepreneur, here's a link where you can get all the free courses so that we, we, you, you are away from us.

[00:58:29] ^{York Zucchi}: So my point here is you wanna drive, remember what I said before about your banner, about your email signature. Are you struggling with this question mark? Click here to see how I can help you. Maybe it lands on a page where, for your best specific client segment you have, here's three tips, how you can solve communication challenges at home.

[00:58:54] ^{York Zucchi}: If you'd like to book a non-committal, I think even Profi has a way you can integrate bookings like a 15 minute, yeah. Embed calls and all that thing. So I'm really inviting you to hook, this is me in a box. I'm sharing what I'm working on, what I'm looking for. Hey, does anybody have any suggestions of, or what I'm struggling with?

[00:59:18] ^{York Zucchi}: I'm really struggling with solving a challenge around a specific issue that a client has. Those calls make people engage with your content. If I can give you a LinkedIn trick, the moment somebody. Comments on your post, reply to that comment and reply intelligently what LinkedIn does. If York makes a post and Alina comments and I reply to that comment, this is a bit of a cheat sheet.

[00:59:49] ^{York Zucchi}: What LinkedIn does, it takes my post on my timeline and shows it to all alina's network. So where before it only showed the LinkedIn comment that she made. Now it actually says, Ooh, there's a reaction, there's a conversation going between Alina and New York, a public conversation. Therefore, let's show it to Alina's network.

[01:00:14] ^{York Zucchi}: So I'm getting, I'm literally going and putting my company poster on Alina's door house. So that's a little trick, if any, if any, of there was a trick or a heck on LinkedIn. And so that's why you want question mark. Make them land somewhere. And on that page I gave you my wis, my website, I have five different products or services.

[01:00:39] ^{York Zucchi}: So depending on the post, I will put the link that's related to that. So if I send an email to a specific type of organization, they have a different email signature. This is 

[01:00:52] _{Alina Trigubenko}: great. This is actually something I haven't, I haven't seen much, much been used before. This is, this is genius. I think always be converting and also ease of just kind of going through the stages and getting to you if you are the right per, you know, if it's a match.

[01:01:08] _{Alina Trigubenko}: Yeah, that, that definitely is a 

[01:01:10] ^{York Zucchi}: great idea. Don't, don't make it and add your name to a mailing list or add your name. Surname, company, guys, girls, you are small for now except for, I forgot who's who had 15 consultants, but even there. I, I guarantee you, we operate with 411 cities in 27 countries. Our WhatsApp messages are very manageable.

[01:01:35] ^{York Zucchi}: Trust me, you're not gonna be swamped by 11 million people. And if you are well done to you, that means you're getting somehow a lot of traction. So I'm really inviting you to take away all the friction and make it personal. In business, you're not doing business with a company, you're doing business with a human being sitting in that company.

[01:02:01] ^{York Zucchi}: So make it as quickly as possible that you can pick up a phone, create a relationship, and then it's very difficult to say no to you. 

[01:02:12] _{Alina Trigubenko}: Yeah, in SaaS we have this saying that every company is a consumer company. Even if, even though you think you are a corporate vendor, if you think that you are, you know, servicing anyone, you're always servicing humans.

[01:02:26] ^{Alina Trigubenko}: So, 

[01:02:28] ^{York Zucchi}: absolutely. So that's, I mean, we have a lot of insights, but that to me, were the most prevalent one for sort of a coaching type of business. And I'm really happy if we want to talk about other things. The first questions, if anybody would like to contribute to the discussion and any shape or form, share their experiences, but even in your business as a, as a, as a, as a, as a coach, as a consultant, please start sharing, make yourself vulnerable.

[01:03:00] ^{York Zucchi}: And if I can give you one tip when you, you know, writing is an art form. And yeah, you can use chatt. If I were you. Take your phone and film yourself on LinkedIn. It's under 10 minutes, but usually remember that post where I said, Hey, I was recently working. Hi everybody. I'm walking to my next meeting and I wanted to share something that I just did a session I just did with a couple.

[01:03:30] ^{York Zucchi}: And this is how we address it. I'm sharing in the hope that it helps you as well in your own marriage or in your own relationship. So I'll walk even so I don't need to walk just to make it look less like it's premeditated. We lo we, we are pretty brilliant at course design and when we started our course designs, we had a studio with lights, fancy equipment, cameras and everything.

[01:03:59] ^{York Zucchi}: And then we did an AB testing. You know what AB testing is right? So you, you, you tried with a fancy studio and then we tried it with exactly this phone, exactly this phone, but a very good microphone. We recorded the same course. 18,000 people versus 1000, I forgot the exact number. 1,200. Tremendous. That's how many people reacted to the handheld phone because people wanna know it's real.

[01:04:31] ^{York Zucchi}: They don't like polished things. So even if you go, if something is funny or you forgot a word and you're going, oh, or laugh halfway do it, they want to connect with human being. So don't be afraid of it. And also takes much less time to record a two, three minute thing than it takes to write text. 

[01:04:52] _{Alina Trigubenko}: Again, that's fixed to the chemistry, right?

[01:04:54] _{Alina Trigubenko}: Because this way people will get to experience, you know, what's your personality like, what actually you can help them with. And that will make it easier to engage with you, but also in this professional services businesses, you are the product, right? So make it as easy, it's our job to make it as easy as possible to get access to this product to so people can get help through all the social media, all the channels, everything.

[01:05:23] ^{York Zucchi}: I wanna actually show you something quite, I don't know if you know it, there's actually a cool function you can do if you go to my LinkedIn profile. Depends, assuming you're not on a phone. When my LinkedIn page opens up, you'll see my photo turns into a video. So you'll see the first few seconds of me animatedly talking.

[01:05:43] ^{York Zucchi}: You won't hear some. Yeah. So just on your own profile. Click edit and then you can upload a 32nd. And by the way, they're strict on 30 seconds. 30 seconds actually doesn't work. 29 seconds. I had to rerecord that video like 20 times to get 29 seconds. But it's a wonderful way for people to get an intro. Hi, I'm Alina, and I started Profi because I wanted to help more people spend less time on administration and more on actual coaching.

[01:06:13] ^{York Zucchi}: And then whatever. It's so wonderful. 29 second little video where you introduce who, what you do, and who's it for, which by the way is also very nice for your signatures, for your, if you use Instagram or whatever tool you are currently using. 

[01:06:29] _{Alina Trigubenko}: Oh, this is brilliant. This is really brilliant. I'm actually just texting the product team.

[01:06:33] _{Alina Trigubenko}: I'm like, maybe this is something we should add to our lending pages and the profile pages, because again, that speaks to that chemistry, that speaks to the ease of kind of accessibility and just overall you being open and easy to engage with. I love it. And I wanna personality, I wanna 

[01:06:48] ^{York Zucchi}: show you another trick.

[01:06:49] ^{York Zucchi}: If I, I dunno if these tricks I'll used. I'm happy if you want, or how do I go to, so I don't know if you see this. Let's see if you can. Now, how many of you use company pages in LinkedIn? Okay, this is my personal experience of company pages. Please decide what works for you. Okay. To go. You can go for it later.

[01:07:20] ^{York Zucchi}: I went away from a company page to a community page. So it's the same structure. Nothing changes. But what I said is I want to use my company page to build up a community around the content that we do. So I share interesting things for entrepreneurs, but we share it with an opinion. So if I see an interesting blog, my team or me will share it as an, here's a really interesting blog on why spending time trying to raise funding for a startup is a waste of time, or things like that.

[01:07:55] ^{York Zucchi}: And it grew. I only started the LinkedIn page a few months ago. I had it, but it was dead, and it grew to whatever the number is, eight, 900 people in less than four months. And it's generated quite a lot of engagement messages for me. I'm not saying my approach is right, I'm just inviting you. Instead of a boring LinkedIn page that puts people to sleep.

[01:08:19] ^{York Zucchi}: Maybe turn it into something that reinforces your expertise. And speaking 

[01:08:27] _{Alina Trigubenko}: from the professional services firm's experience, I think that's also speaks to, I, I build, I strongly believe that nowadays in order to build sustainable professional services businesses, we have to be building communities because again, that represents us, nurturing clients, making it e easy for them to understand our services, engage with our services, understand the full variety of services, as well as build the habits, maintain the habits, and maybe, you know, have some business development opportunities with other members or additional growth opportunities.

[01:09:02] _{Alina Trigubenko}: By learning this from other members, peer-to-peer learning is big and it actually drives a lot of good results. Yeah, and community driven everything. I see. I think nowadays it's 

[01:09:14] ^{York Zucchi}: it's really,  I love, and I just wanna pick up on the community, if you are worried about technology, you know, all the talk about AI and all that.

[01:09:23] ^{York Zucchi}: Community is your defense wall? People in an engaged community, not a big mess thing full of people who don't do anything. A community has a way of interacting, engaging, talking, discussing, sharing, helping, supporting a hugely powerful no tool will steal your community because those are real relationships and you don't need to make it big.

[01:09:52] ^{York Zucchi}: I started I mean, you can decide, but I'm actually starting community pages in LinkedIn specifically to my areas of expertise. So I'm starting one for mayors where you need to be approved to join. It's called world-Class Cities where mayors can, and I share, or actually not me, but my team shares resources like here's 10 ways to tackle unemployment.

[01:10:20] ^{York Zucchi}: Use unemployment. Here's eight ways to how to communicate with your citizens. Here's a cool thing you can do to, to lower your electricity bill of public lightning in the street. And so that community is gold because it's a defector. So if you are relationship counseling and you have different types of buckets of relationships, maybe you don't put them all in one bucket because they might not be interested in the topic that you share.

[01:10:55] ^{York Zucchi}: Put them around needs. Now it's a bit challenging. If it's very personal, you know, you don't want. Erect dysfunction community group. Cause nobody will join that group. So I told you bad, bad humor. So I'm just saying you might want do it from,

[01:11:14] _{Alina Trigubenko}: can't relate to that, but,

[01:11:19] _{Alina Trigubenko}: Yeah. Community is everything. That's our competitive mode. That's our sensibility, that's our testing ground too. Something that I speak a lot too is having a product mindset and having and productizing services in product and software companies. We test everything. That's our default behavior. You know, we don't assume things we say.

[01:11:41] _{Alina Trigubenko}: It's my hypothesis that you know, for example, coaches need this or clients of coaches need this and they will, for example, benefit from us designing for this. Specific behavior. And then we measure. So we always measure, we always measure by asking and then by testing, and then by rolling out and seeing how it affects the baseline that we agreed on.

[01:12:02] _{Alina Trigubenko}: And I think this is something that professional services businesses should benefit from a lot too. This kind of measurement and not assuming, but kind of running with hypothesis and measuring against them. Because even if you ask, if you measure clients, Progress. That's only you know, that's an organic client engagement experience, but there's so many more things that you can measure.

[01:12:30] _{Alina Trigubenko}: And by having access to pull your pool of clients, your community of clients, you can get so much more data on how you can improve. For example, you know, the way, was it easy to get access to you? Was it easy to navigate your services? Was it easy to engage with you? Was it anything? You know, clients like to be asked.

[01:12:50] _{Alina Trigubenko}: Everyone likes to experience this feeling that my opinion matters. And I think that coaches underutilized this tool a [01:13:00] lot. Just ask your clients a lot more and engage your community. Everyone wants to be a part of community now that we're so spread out, but we're, a lot of us are gathering our own values and I believe that coaching communities and coaching engagements are those kind of You know, the community of leaders really, that can, that optimize for the value and can gather beautiful communities around themselves.

[01:13:26] ^{York Zucchi}: Totally, totally, totally. And I just wanna show you something where the, the, don't forget when you engage with the client, there's two ways to do it. Now I am a big fan of sitting down with a client for a cup of coffee and soliciting feedback to send a questionnaire. I always find it's a little bit, unless you're doing things at scale, it's cold.

[01:13:49] ^{York Zucchi}: People don't, the questions are boring, polished, you don't get the nuances, you can't go down rabbit holes. 

[01:13:59] _{Alina Trigubenko}: There is actually a term for that. We call it quantitative and qualitative, right? Absolutely. You can still get both. There is beauty in both, but definitely nothing can change and nothing can be more important this than this connection.

[01:14:13] ^{York Zucchi}: And then here that I just showed you a little trick we use at the startup tribe. Now, don't use what we do. I'm, I'm just giving you how we do it. We know that a lot of users, so users are people who wanna start a business now. They're not our clients, they're users of our learning offering. We don't charge anything because it's technology.

[01:14:38] ^{York Zucchi}: It doesn't need to. But what we do, we send them a link where it's a tool that on their phone, they reply to a question which appears on their screen, they press record and it films them. And if they're happy with the answer they submitted, we ask him four question. Only one of them is about how did the courses help you?

[01:15:00] ^{York Zucchi}: The other three, about tell us what you, what advice you would give to yourself before starting a business. What makes you happy in life? Tell us a little bit about your, well, whatever. I forgot the questions. When you post that, assuming the client gave you of your, okay. Again, you can't ask confidential questions.

[01:15:20] ^{York Zucchi}: Remember what I told you about cheating the system foot in the door? If I'm posting, let's say I sent this to Alina and Alina say answers the four videos. I share this on social media saying, here's a look at what Alina, you know recently, blah, blah. Well, whatever, however you introduce it, it's actually taps into Alina's selfishness because she gets publicity because I posted, but at the same time, she's gonna share it in her network.

[01:15:52] ^{York Zucchi}: So suddenly plus those 

[01:15:54] _{Alina Trigubenko}: loops on LinkedIn. Yeah. 

[01:15:56] ^{York Zucchi}: So I'm just, that's how we use it and you'll be surprised by the quality of stuff that comes out. We've had, I think, 7,000 videos submitted to us. Maybe 200, 200 or shit like unusable. The rest people care and people, you know, they know Instagram and TikTok, so it's not like it's not foreign, 

[01:16:19] _{Alina Trigubenko}: right?

[01:16:20] _{Alina Trigubenko}: Plus the clients will feel heard and that their opinion matters. So actually, I was just texting to the team. I, when I look away, that means that I'm taking, I'm taking notes of great ideas and I've have this running list of what I wanna do after this conversation. I got inspired a lot and I was thinking that we couldn't potentially use this as a templated feedback form, of course, with all of the reference to you.

[01:16:45] _{Alina Trigubenko}: But imagine if it's just 

[01:16:46] ^{York Zucchi}: so easy to reference. Please, by the way, what I've showed you, I'm a cheap scape, so all the tools that I use are free. Now, I obviously, when it's free, if they is branded by or powered by, but it doesn't matter guys. Don't be too fast in your business about whether it has to be absolutely perfect.

[01:17:06] ^{York Zucchi}: Don't go for perfection in this, this big, crazy world that we live in. This 

[01:17:10] _{Alina Trigubenko}: has been extremely, extremely insightful. I, myself wrote a lot of interesting things that I need to think about and develop and yes. Um, we also didn't lose anyone except someone who said it was a bit too late. Sure, sure, sure.

[01:17:26] _{Alina Trigubenko}: So, but that's really good news. Thank you so much for continuing and sticking with us. So, what suggestions can you offer to convert users to consumers from 

[01:17:39] ^{York Zucchi}: James Ja James, you are, what kind of business are you in? Remind me before or, or otherwise I have to scroll up all the way. 

[01:17:46] _{Alina Trigubenko}: Relationship counseling

[01:17:48] ^{York Zucchi}: Right. You know, I think you are in the best business ever because you can counsel people before shit happens, before it goes sour when they're getting married. Always wanted to give, not sure what to give to the couple that is getting married. Why not give them a pre-marriage council and not pre-marriage counseling, but a happy marriage session where the happy couple learns the fundamentals of building a wonderful relationship.

[01:18:21] ^{York Zucchi}: So, you know, you can partner with resellers or, or wedding gifts. I mean, I'm coming up with the crazy ideas, but, you know, instead of an Amazon voucher, it's a relationship voucher, relationship strengthening voucher and or, but then hang out in groups where, where with trauma, look at people who work too much.

[01:18:45] ^{York Zucchi}: And I can guarantee you if I need your help, you, you know, I, you are in the, in a wonderful business. And I say wonderful business. That is a highly emotional thing. And so if you can tap into the emotional. Like instead of saying, I do couples counseling or therapy, whatever the right description is to give me say, do you wish your marriage would be better?

[01:19:10] ^{York Zucchi}: I'm wrong wording. Think you know it better, more elegantly. But something that taps into the longing of happiness of a love there. There was once. And those messages are beautiful. I mean, so easy for you to do. By the way, who was somebody posted? It was Alan. I looked at your LinkedIn profile, by the way.

[01:19:33] ^{York Zucchi}: I like it, but I would change it a little bit less salesman. Lee, unless it's really working for you. If it's really working for you, ignore everything that I say. But what I would do there is maybe make it a bit more, always wanted to have a business that generates a real income. Always wanted to start to, to prepare yourself for pension, to go on an early pension.

[01:19:58] ^{York Zucchi:} So rather than sell what you sell, sell what what you do allows a person, which means having passive income, I guess, which means being you know, safe retirement, safe haven whatever it is, sell the emotional side to what you offer. Just, just a suggestion, but I generally like it. You're obviously well versed into the, into the lead conversion, click through methodology.

[01:20:27] _{Alina Trigubenko}: Thank you so much, team. Thank you so much. York, it has been you know, every conversation with you is extremely insightful, intelligent, inspiring. Thank you so much for all of the wonderful questions and inspiration. I'm looking forward to our next fireside chats or anything else, please. 

[01:20:46] ^{York Zucchi}: Perfect.

[01:20:47] ^{York Zucchi}: And just one guys and girls, I invite you Actually, can I give you a trick, please? And as a thank you to to Alina, you know, we, we take these webinars for granted cause there's a lot of them, and we attend them, then we leave. But here I want to give you a final farewell trick, a parting trick if you really want to get permanent exposure.

[01:21:09] ^{York Zucchi}: Now Alina, how many connections do you have on LinkedIn? I'm not judging you, I'm just very roughly 

[01:21:16] _{Alina Trigubenko}: one that I can remember. So I need to look it up. 

[01:21:19] ^{York Zucchi}: Okay, so let's say it's 5,000. It really goes, I it's not a judgment. It don't, don't ever go for numbers. Go for quality. If you go to Alina at, on, on her LinkedIn profile, okay, can you see my, my LinkedIn?

[01:21:34] ^{York Zucchi}: So here's Alina's profile and can you see more? And then recommend, okay. If I click recommend, it'll ask me what's my relationship? We work together with a client of mine, mentor, doesn't matter study. And my point, the reason why this is important, I'm inviting all of us to thank Alina for the time she did in setting up and hosting, but also, and Alina, close your ears.

[01:22:05] ^{York Zucchi}: If you wanna steal Alina's real estate space on LinkedIn, write a recommendation. Go write saying, I attended. I recently attended. I absolutely loved what Alina shared about this, and I really love what she's doing for coaches everywhere. Now, why is that important? I've never met somebody who doesn't accept a recommendation when they accepted your name with what you wrote is now on Alina's profile at the bottom.

[01:22:38] ^{York Zucchi}: Now, not everybody's cross to the bottom, but it's like putting the flag with your company's sticker. On outside Alina's office. It's an unbelievably powerful way to make people feel good and get a bit of attention for your business. So that's my little hack, my goodnight hack. Or good morning, depending on the time zone you're in, and I'm really inviting all of us today on the call to go to Alina and write a few kind words about her as a thank you, but also endorsing a little trophy and stealing a little bit of her real estate.

[01:23:14] ^{York Zucchi}: Thank you so much. 

[01:23:14] _{Alina Trigubenko}: I think it goes without saying that it, this is definitely an invitation to do the same to York's profile. Yeah, please do still his real estate space and do indoors for all the invaluable insights that he shared with us today. Thank you so much Yorkie. I'm a fan. You are such a power thinker.

[01:23:32] _{Alina Trigubenko}: You just hack your way and then you optimize everything and you get the most out of all of the simple tools, apparently there is so much more potential that than we projected in all of the simple tools. Thank you so much. This has been extremely interesting. I'm very inspired and thank you everyone who attended.

[01:23:51] _{Alina Trigubenko}: So till next time, thank you.

[01:23:51] ^{York Zucchi}:Thank you. And reach out if you need help.