Day 13 – WorkStep Six: The Story of You(r business)

This one is interesting – how do I leverage my story, or Brett’s story for the new BCLA studio? How do you leverage your story for your business?

Planning this step is about planning a story for the niche community that you are building. BodyChance is in the business of educating teachers, so the community I intend to build is an Alexander Technique community. My story works well for that community.

My story does not work well for the consumer business. Not yet. I need a new story. However, without the correct immigration status, the new business in LA is not grown around me. So this puts me in a unique position, not quite analogous with the situation of most Alexander Technique teachers and trainees reading this blog.

The person who needs a story is Brett, and any of the teachers we enlist to teach at the new studio. Brett needs to start telling a story to his niche – is that Tango dancers? Young beautiful people? Trustafarians? What stories does Brett have to illustrate that? What is the niche to start? I can see my Self shooting an email off to Brett after this blog. And how about you the reader: what will you do next?

However, I can start working now on BodyChance’s back-end business – Teacher Education. My guess is that there is a product gap in the LA market. Alexander Technique has been in LA for, what – 30 years? I need to educate me on that point. My guess is that there are many people with a daytime job and aspirations who are time-challenged (or money-challenged) and the BodyChance’s training “Product” will be received well.

So that’s my story. In Tokyo, after I started rolling out my new ProCourse model, we experienced a dramatic upsurge of enrolments. Many students told us: “I always had an interest in Alexander Technique, and I was really interested in training, but I just couldn’t commit to full-time Education."

I am guessing many teachers are interested in that story too? I have memories of long hours spent with my note books, imagining ways to split an Alexander Technique education. The biggest question that plagued my mind: “How do you separate unity?” Of course I realize now, we are all experts at doing that! 

When I couldn’t think of how to split it, I looked at the martial arts model and asked: “What are steps that a person moves through while being educated?” Again the question produced no ready answer… 

I mean – was I going to ask them to lift their leg over a chair, and give them a black belt when they could? (This was a favourite trick of Alexander’s.) Think as I could, I could not find any steps to qualify people through this kind of grading system. Then one day I finally I got it! I realized what I needed to do…

And that will be a story for BCLA.

Interested? Join my personal list in the box on this blog page, and I will let you know when I start.

TOMORROW: WorkStep 6 – Selling the Story of You: what will you sell first?

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