BY TJ Walker
I always ask budding gurus, do you want to do this (becoming a guru) the easy way or the hard way?
The hard way is trying to market your self directly to consumers as an author or motivational speaker who talks at large public-admission events. The people who do well in these fields, i.e. Anthony Robbins, Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra, tend to do really, really well. However, the people who don’t make it big in this field often don’t make it anywhere. If you are forced to sell thousands of books or tickets at $19.95 a month just to earn a living, it can become impossible to ever gain the necessary traction to make it work.
So setting out to be a general motivational, spiritual healer, archery coach can be incredibly difficult. I don’t want to dissuade you if that is your passion, but just realize that this is the harder way to go because you will constantly be faced with a chicken and egg scenario. You won’t be able to make a living unless you can reach the masses and you won’t be able to interest the masses if you aren’t already famous to the masses. And without hundreds of millions of dollars it can be hard to market yourself to the masses in order to become well known.
All of these problems can be short-circuited if you decode to take the easy way. By the easy way, I mean selecting and targeting a niche that appeals to large corporations that have large training and couns7ulting budgets. If you can come up with a program, service, training, software, or some other deliverable product or service that corporation ALREADY spend money on, then you can focus your efforts on the top 1000 largest corporations. Now instead of having to market yourself to hundreds of millions or billions of people around the world, you only have to market yourself to a few thousand-decision makers at the top corporations. This is a comparatively easier and less expensive task. The next big advantage for dealing with corporations is that it can be comparatively easier to charge them more for a block of your time or expertise. For example, when I was starting gout, I could have focused on teaching high school students how to speak more effectively when in college admissions interviews. But I would have had to spend tons of time marketing myself to students, parents and guidance counselors and they would have wanted to hire me by the hour. Even at say, $300 an hour, it would have been hard to get parents to shell out for more than an hour at a time. So If I got 6 new clients I a month, I could have run myself ragged running around chasing clients, setting up and rescheduling 6 different training sessions, sending out 6 invoices and trying to get paid from 6 people. And all I would have gotten was a measly $1800. On the other hand, by marketing myself to major corporations for a relatively high rate of $3500 a day for a public speaking training workshop, I only have to sell one per month and I am making twice what I would if I went after the high school market. And if I sell 2 days a month, I am already making more money than the average family of four makes in the US. By going after the corporate market everything become much, much easier.
At first blush, there might not be obvious connection between what you do and what corporations pay money for. Look again. Look deeper. You might be a mountain climbing guru. Perhaps you put together a one-day corporate team-building seminar that uses mountain climbing to foster communication between employees. An dif you can get two days a month booked doing this with major corporations you may have enough money to fun all of your research development, travel, marketing and CD production for all of your outer mountain climbing activates.
You can do this the hard way or the easy way. My advice is make sure you’ve exhausted every possible angle for doing it the easy, corporate, way before you focus exclusively on doing it the hard way.
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