The organic stages to growing your visionary business

I’m not one for overly manicured landscaping. I tend to prefer my nature on the wilder side. It’s a good thing I’m comfortable with a little disorder because the endeavour of growing the seeds of ideas into a thriving business can be unruly. But given the right conditions, your inspired work can flourish into a splendid garden that provides an endless bounty of fruit.

Your inspired work can flourish into a splendid garden that provides an endless bounty of fruit.

You might not yet be at the stage in your inspired work journey where you are even contemplating growing a business. You might still be digging around beneath the surface, removing all the debris from your past, readying the soil to receive the seeds of your potential ideas. If you are in my realm, that’s likely why you arrived here. Both of my core offerings, the Vision Journey and the Vision Program, are designed to help you gain clarity about the nature of your inspired work. However, once the seeds of ideas have made themselves known to you, it’s no good just to carry them around in your back pocket, you will want to plant them and nurture them so that they can grow into real-world, gift-giving, abundance-generating, life-evolving work.

Whether it’s a garden or your inspired work, the process of growth is organic. Because of such, it’s challenging to manage at times. There are so many factors that influence the outcomes of your efforts that it’s difficult to predict what the seeds will become. Even though growth can be perceived as chaotic, it does still have an order. It’s not as though tropical plants suddenly start growing in arctic climates. Or that trees decide to grow root-side-up. Nor do plants fruit before they flower. There is a pattern to evolution. The same is true for your work.

The organic stages to growing your visionary business

It is both a privilege and a responsibility to grow something from nothing. To birth an idea into the world requires your attention, energy, and care at every stage of its evolutionary process. If you neglect your idea, it will wither and die. If you try to overcontrol its growth, you will also cause it to perish. Its thriving requires a delicate balance between taking inspired action and allowing your work to show you what it needs.

Every seed of an idea for your work has its own potential and will require specific resources to aid its development. It can take a lot of trial and error to get the conditions just right. While we cannot predict the outcome of its growth, we do know the stages of its evolutionary process:

Stage 1: Set the foundation

Your inspired work is an expression of who you are. For your work to be fully realized, it must be built upon the foundation of how you uniquely show up in the world and the incredible value you have to offer.

• The key factor to growth: To gain clarity about who you are and what you have to offer.

Stage 2: Conceive your seed offering

Your seed offering is the starting point of the evolution of your inspired work. From your initial idea will grow the entire future of your business.

• The key factor to growth: To be willing to experiment with your ideas.

Stage 3: Evolve your offer into paid work

Once you have developed your seed offering, the next stage of your journey is to create the platform through which you will share it with others and to set up the channels to receive payment for your work.

• The key factor to growth: To create channels for giving and receiving.

Stage 4: Decide your business model

Your business is the framework that allows for energy to flow. If you think of it as the trellis for a growing plant, it is important to have a solid structure so that your work can continue to flourish as it matures.

• The key factor to growth: To build structures that are grounded in reason, but do not limit expansion.

Stage 5: Hone your authentic messaging

Having a clear and consistent message helps enhance both visibility and credibility for you and your work. Your message needs to shift perspectives in order for your content to stand out.

• The key factor to growth: To truly understand those who your work is intended to serve.

Stage 6: Build your online presence

Your online presence is the portal through which you engage with your audience. It needs to be an expression of who you are in a way that connects heart and soul with your potential clients.

• The key factor to growth: To embrace the vulnerability of being seen.

Stage 7: Communicate with your audience

The intention behind communicating with your audience is to build a relationship with them. You want to demonstrate your trustworthiness and to establish that you can actually help them meet their dreams and desires.

• The key factor to growth: To build trust not only with your audience, but yourself.

Stage 8: Design your long-term marketing strategy

Along with active list-building and consistently delivering original content to your email list, the third pillar of your marketing strategy is to develop promotional events to highlight your offering.

• The key factor to growth: To prioritize service over sales.

Stage 9: Scale your business

Once you have mastered the initial stages of business, then it is time to accelerate your growth.

• The key factor to growth: To allow yourself to be supported.

Within each of these stages, there are several steps to master. To see each of the steps involved in growing your thriving business, download the “Online Business Development Checklist for Visionary Creators”. In your individual journey, some of the steps may happen in a different order, some of them may happen concurrently, or sometimes you might find you have to circle back to repeat steps based on what you have learned from your experience. Rather than rush through the stages, you are invited to deepen into each step and enjoy it for what it is. Then one day, when you are joyfully tending to your work, you will pause to look around and see that your original seed has grown into a splendid garden.

The bounty of your inspired work

While the amount of steps required to grow a business may seem daunting, there truly are tremendous rewards for all of your efforts. You don’t even have to wait to realize any particular outcome as the blessings happen in each and every stage of growth:

• Gain confidence in who you are and how you show up in the world
• Build trust in your own inner guidance
• Establish a rhythm of life that suits you
• Experience the thrill of manifesting ideas into reality
• Enjoy the sovereignty in having complete creative freedom
• Feel the steadiness of living a life true to yourself
• Generate the ability to receive unlimited income
• Know that you are an interrelated and essential part of something larger than just yourself
• Realize that your work has contributed to the evolution of existence itself

As your inspired work continues to develop over years, you will go through seasons of growth. Some will be prolific. Some will be less so. You can do your best to weed out any detrimental factors, however, there will always be some. While you might not be able to control all of those pesky circumstances, what you can maintain is your level of devotion to the care and nurture of your ideas.

Give your work the love it deserves so that it – and you may thrive.