Compass: Your Roadmap to Business Reinvention

Meet Doreen Amatelli, who is right on the verge of launching her reinvented business. Her path has been unique and it all started with a background in the corporate world. But after 15 years in Corporate America, Doreen had a wake-up call and said to herself, Okay, there’s got to be more than this!

I spoke with Doreen about her journey to reinvent her business and take it in a different direction. She started her first business as a life coach in 2004. She says, “It fit my lifestyle, it was very flexible, it allowed me to work at home and out of the corporate rat race.  So I thought that was exactly what I wanted.”

She built her small coaching business into a successful practice. “I did have a thriving practice where I was having my ideal clients come to me very focused on their career development and career aspirations, initially. But then they’d get laid off and our coaching went from being very strategic and open ended and adventure-filled, to very tactical. Clients would say ’That’s great that I have all these dreams but I really need to get a job by next week.’”

Within four years of starting her business, Doreen started to think, What’s next for me? She says, “There is a little bit more of me that I wanted to give.  I’m in my early 40s and I feel I want to say something: I want to be more informative. I want to share the tools and information I’ve learned over the years with more people. And that’s where my reinvention started.”

Because of the changing needs of her clients and her own changing needs, Doreen started to explore new possibilities. She was still 100% committed to personal development topics, but as she puts it, “It’s just the model in which I deliver the services that is changing for me.”

She knew what she didn’t want, but wasn’t sure what she did want. It was a confusing time for her and she did a lot of journaling and working with her own coach to sort through the issues. “I just felt confused and I felt kind of lost – like there was a little bit of a grieving process in there for me. Here’s that dream that I thought I finally found and basically told the world about it, and now I’m not wanting to do that dream business anymore.”

In her journey through the business reinvention phases, she came to realize that she loved when she worked with clients who were open to exploring themselves and what they wanted. Experience had taught Doreen a way to guide them through this process. She also discovered that she loved to teach most of all.  “There are tried and true practices that have worked for my clients and have worked for me, why not share that? And it worked so I wanted more of that.  I wanted a model or some type of a way that I could impart that knowledge on a regular basis and provide those guidelines and tools to people on more of a massive scale than just one on one.”

It took her six months to find clarity on the services she’d offer and her exact target audience. Now she’s positioning herself as a workshop and seminar leader, offering workshops within corporations, and to the public through associations and groups.

Is her reinvention process over? “I wouldn’t say I’m finalized, not ready to Put the Pen Down yet.  It’s still a work in progress. I’m pursuing my dream but with a lot more experience and realism behind it.  My feet are on the ground even though I can see the dream out there that I’m still committed to.”

Is she giving up life coaching? Not exactly. She’s taking everything she’s learned as a life coach and taking it up a notch. She says, “It’s almost like I gave myself a promotion.”

Learn more about Doreen at www.WayToGoal.com

Got a business reinvention story? Share it in the comments! I’d love to hear about your journey.

Claudia didn’t have a “big plan” for reinventing her business. She knew she had outgrown her old business model of working with new mothers as her target audience, and had made the decision to stop actively marketing her business. Then things happened that she couldn’t have foretold.

Recognizing It’s Time to Change

Claudia confides, “I hit a place with my target audience and I never got beyond it. I found that I always had a certain number of clients, which was fine, but it never moved beyond that number of clients. I felt that I needed to go in a different direction.”

“I was kind of banging my head against a wall,” she says. “I started to realize that I wasn’t enjoying writing my ezine anymore, I wasn’t enjoying marketing to new moms. It was hard for me to recognize: I didn’t want it to be true because I had spent so many years doing it and stopping felt like I was failing. The truth was, I wanted to want to do it.  I think that if I had been honest with myself, I would have made a switch earlier.”

Claudia recommends that when small business owners feel that something is off, they take a few days and figure out what’s not right. Admitting to yourself that your old business model isn’t working for you anymore is an important first step.

Reinvention from an Unexpected Source

Claudia had tutored teenagers for over a decade, had always had a small number of tutoring clients, and had been teaching a summer class on SAT preparation for several years. Even though she had been tutoring children for quite a while, she didn’t consider this to be a major thrust of her business previously because she wanted to be home with her own child after school hours.

But now that her child is older, and Claudia knew she was unhappy in her old business, she began to close it down and revisit the idea that tutoring could be a viable business model.

“As soon as I closed down my old business,” she says, “In one week, five new tutoring students came to me!  It was so bizarre. I suddenly had more students than I knew what to do with.  My business just took off.”

Mourning Your Old Business

When you’ve been in business a number of years, you invest a lot of yourself in it. So when you close down your old business completely, you need to be aware of the feelings that can come up.

“I actually felt sad,” says Claudia. “I wish I could say that I was really joyous and happy, but I wasn’t.  It felt like a really big loss. I think because it was a business that I put so much into and cared so much about.”

But Claudia has a great philosophy about this business cycle: “People change and I changed. Once I got my mind around that, I realized that it was a really positive thing and once I realized that it was a positive thing, letting my business go was kind of a relief.”

Pausing to Plan

When I asked Claudia, “On a scale of 1 to 10 — one being you’re just starting your tutoring business and ten being that you have a complete new business model — where would you say you are in the arch of building this new business?” she replied, “Four.”

Because Claudia had run a successful business previously, she knows that she needs to design a business model for this new business – for next month and for 10 years from now. She says, “Not only the marketing, but the planning and the organizational skills that I learned in my last business, I know need to have. Knowing everything I know is going to help me tremendously. I’m actually much better off now than I was when I was starting my life coaching business for new moms!”

So what do you do when your new business comes out of the blue? You step back and take some time to plan the foundation, even as you are conducting the new business work.