Writing this post feels a bit scary. Does my eyeshadow look okay?

Mostly because it’s about something that hasn’t happened yet. And because it’s about me, and because I’m still in progress.

I’ve drawn my ideal house with a mechanical pencil, but all of my shoes and breakfast things are in my current house. And my roommates are wondering what’s going on.

Of course, I want the house to be amazing. But maybe it won’t be. I don’t know. My future-predicting power tools are in the mail. And, if the good things I want to happen don’t happen, knowing this blog post is out there, spreading its SEO viruses all over the internet, might keep me up at night. Everyone will remember The Person who wrote That Blog Post this one time about What She Was Going to Do, and then didn’t do it.

But that’s okay. I’m telling my makeover story anyway.

This year I got the flu four times, finally hired a cook after living off burritos for months, allowed my dog to forget the way Lake Merritt smells in the afternoon, made mountains of new project planning spreadsheets, each intended to become The Ideal-Project-Planning-Mother-of-All-Hourly-Calculations-Spreadsheet-That-Will-Reveal-All-Availability-Possibilities-Forever, and, all the while, I kept getting this nagging feeling my business was running me. 

Then, I realized no spreadsheet, software, list, or system would cure me. And I turned to a novel strategy: turning down work. That was fun, until it wasn’t. At last, I turned to business coaches for advice. One for monthly support. And another for a six-hour Ultimate Business Makeover.

Linda Brown at UpLevel Strategies became my regular coach in May, and UpLevel Strategies Founder Kelly O’Neil gave me my business makeover in October (which, by the way, was a hundred times more fun than the ones you get at the Laura Mercier counter at Macy’s).

This is the story of my business makeover with Kelly.

How to take advice from a stranger.

The thing with advice is, anyone can give it to you. And you could follow it and do pretty well for yourself. But if they don’t understand your business or your market, you could end up sandwiched between two space aliens at the Second Life Virtual World Health Marketing Conference sponsored by Coca Cola.

The more advice I got and read, the more I told myself it couldn’t possibly apply to my business. And I kept my pores clogged with un-acted-upon advice. No, I wasn’t ready for my close-up yet.

Linda was the deep-cleansing facial to Kelly’s makeover.

Linda got me ready for a makeover, helping me define my ideal clients, helped me discover what I was really best at, and kept me accountable as I redesigned and rewrote my website. She also helped me through countless sticky situations.

I decided to work with Kelly for one good reason. There’s no one like her. And I got the crazy feeling she could help me. She demonstrated a bottomless zeal for my business and its potential. I learned I had good bone structure. She also had a knack for understanding not only my business and my market, but also how my personality and values shape the possibilities for my business.

As her website home page proclaims, “I actually fall in love with what’s possible for my clients.” I definitely felt the love. Which is why I’m writing this blog post.

Anyone can give you a list of tactics to implement. But Kelly helped me envision my ideal outcome, and then she created a plan full of tactics and strategies that worked for me. Tactics she was confident I could actually achieve. I’m complicated, and that’s okay. No templates here.

Here’s what I got:

1. A five-hour strategy session, in person.
2. A big, fat marketing plan from A to Z, from the very high-level stuff to down-and-dirty creative tactics I’d never even thought of, and specific changes to my business model itself.
3. Also, she threw in some phone calls where she coached me through challenges that came up as I was implementing the plan. And I got a free pair of pants! (Okay, no, but I did get a carne asada burrito.)

Best of all, my plan was all tailored to me, pushing me just slightly WAY past my comfort zone.
But only in the best of ways. Like a Jillian-Michaels’-30-Day-Shred kind of way.

I found myself committing to doing things I never thought I would do. It didn’t seem crazy because I knew this stuff worked. Kelly had already done it (and is doing it) herself. She’s wasn’t just telling me what to do — she was actually walking the walk. Some advice-givers have no shoes. Kelly’s got shoes.

It’s only been a couple of months since my makeover. But I’ve already done quite a bit. For example, in just these first two months, I have:

• Raised my rates. (Well hello there, prospective clients! So glad you stopped by.) I guess I could have raised my rates without Kelly’s help, but I wouldn’t have because I didn’t know whether it was the right thing for me to do.
• Looked for 2 copywriters to add to my team so I can scale. And actually ended up adding 10 copywriter-collaborators to my team. Again, I guess I could have thought to do this on my own. But I never would have. She held me accountable and didn’t let me make dumb excuses for why it might not work. Instead, she challenged me to imagine it actually working.
• Switched from hourly retainers to project-based retainers. Yes, could have done it on my own, but it would have taken me a long time to realize I should.

These are just a couple of examples. There are more things in the plan, but they’re secret.

Total return on investment:

It’s too soon to say. But I promise to report back.

There’s still a lot of hard work to do.

But what’s great about working with Kelly is even though our makeover is over, I still get to work with Coach Linda. She’s not going to let me get away with any of my usual mind tricks.

Changing my business model means I don’t get to do the Four-Hour-Workweek just yet. But the time I invest now takes on special powers.

Have you ever worked with a business coach? What’s been your experience?