An adventure in meeting and understanding my ideal client avatar
Everyone, I’d like you to meet Alice.
Alice is in her early thirties, has done the expected path in life: go to college, find a partner, have a kid, settle down in a 9-5. And she fucking hates it. It no longer lights her up.
She spends her spare evenings and weekends reading cards for friends, family and neighbors, many of whom have referred her more reading clients and she begins to wonder if she couldn’t do tarot readings full time.
Curious, she begins to spend her lunchtime doing a bit of research and budgeting and realizes that, yeah… she could make it work. She could easily replace her current income, potentially work fewer hours, and have more time with her family.
Suddenly, her lunch breaks become business building hours. She grabs a domain name, sets up her email and starts building her website. Because that’s what you do when you first start a business: you build your website.
When trying to analyze who your ideal client is, consider this: who do you want to work with? Who do you want referring you? Be specific. Be utterly specific.
– Patty Ryan Lee, The Fiery Well
Then, she starts working on this website in the evening hours because she’s also figured out she needs to blog and do social media. But then the evenings she was spending doing readings, she’s now doing admin work, and that extra income every week is slowly dissipating.
Being the number proficient that she is, she realizes she is spending 5 hours a week just building her website and piecing things together and emailing back and forth with clients to get them scheduled. She’s not actually eating her lunch, and she’s not getting enough sleep at night.
This makes her realize she needs to focus on her clients in her spare evening hours and so she starts to wake up in the wee hours of the morning to work on her website and start building her brand.
She’s redesigned her website no less than two times in a month because she can’t land on an aesthetic and she starts to wonder why she even had this idea in the first place. She’s not spending more time with her family with this idea: she’s spending less. And losing side income.
Frustrated, she starts looking for a web designer but isn’t at the point she can toss out $3000.00 without proving this is going to work. She’s not even sure what would go on the website. Now pissed and demoralized that it’s taken her this long to realize that, she tosses the website idea out the window and focuses on getting her clients built up again.
But again, she’s in email and DM land trying to get everyone scheduled, and everyone wants a different kind of reading but she’s exhausted with having so many options and ways of getting “booked.” Realizing there has to be a better way, she finds a calendar scheduling system like Acuity and is utterly flabbergasted it took her that long to find it and how to set it up. She’s gotten back hours of her time every week. She realizes she didn’t need just a website, she needed a system in place to send clients through. She begins to wonder what else she’s missing. She begins to wonder if she could be as solid in her boundaries with her offers as she is now with her time.
Now she has time to blog! But again, she finds herself just replacing one menial task (scheduling) with another (content creation for the sake of content creation.) What should she write about? How often should she post? She can’t keep up with this idea of posting every single day. And keep up with clients? And her many offers? She begins to wonder how everyone else handles this aspect of business and if there are any focused groups out there that could help. It took her this long to get one system in place, how much quicker could she get back to work with more?
She sees that she needs systems. She needs support.
She needs The Fiery Well.
Sound or feel familiar?
That’s because I’m talking to you now, Alice, at this stage in your journey. When I started The Fiery Well, Alice was not so fleshed out. When I started The Fiery Well and Get Online, Witch! Alice was very much this wide eyed innocent trying to navigate a strange new world she found herself in, and I thought I knew what she needed. And I did, I just was talking to Alice at the wrong time in her life.
Little did I know, over the year since launching Get Online, Witch! and The Fiery Well, Alice would drag me through Wonderland with her and we would both be better off for it.
Stay tuned for Part 2.
Getting to know your ICA, or Ideal Client Avatar, is so much more than just trying to figure out a person by their demographics. Unless you are Nike or Coke, knowing whether they live in zip code 90210 or 72764 is not necessarily going to help you.
Whether Alice makes $10,000 or $100,000 per year is none of my business! What matters to me is her relationship with money. When trying to analyze who your ideal client is, consider this: who do you want to work with? Who do you want referring you? Be specific. Be utterly specific.
Need help? Inside The Fiery Well Clarity Framework I have an ICA questionnaire that will set your brain on fire and ask questions you probably never even considered about your ideal client. Join today.
