The phone rings.
Its Nadav!
Wow. I can’t believe he is calling. I’d totally given up on him. New baby and all.
“Nadav, I have a meeting today with two staff members of my start up.
I really want to implement Lean with them from the ground up. Lean is sacred to me.
I wouldn’t want to waste a minute off the Lean path.
One already used my online birth course and had a great birth and the other is using it now.
What should I do at the meeting?”
Nadav is ready with the answers. That is what I love about him, he doesn’t miss a beat.
“You need to answer four questions:
Ask them:
1. How would you DESCRIBE yourself? – Find out how they PROFILE themselves.
2. Why did you want to do this course? – What were you trying to GAIN? Is there some PAIN you want to avoid?
3. How did you find us? – Find the marketing CHANNELS that are working.
Then ask yourself:
4. How much does it cost to for me to reach them through this CHANNEL?
You’ve got to make sure your CHANNELS are scalable. Assuming you grow 20-30% a year, the way any star business should, the CHANNELS need to be set up to handle the volume.
You don’t want to get stuck because of an inadequate CHANNEL.”
“OK, I got. I’m off to the meeting. Thanks Nadav. You’re the absolute best Lean Consultant I know, bar none!
One more question – I’ll write this up for the blog. What angle should I take?
What could I write that would interest you?”
“Never do that!” Nadav says. “That’s a LEADING QUESTION! Never ask a leading question.
No one knows what will happen. I have no crystal ball.
This is the whole idea of Lean – to stop guessing and meet reality. By asking non leading questions and uncovering the objective truth.”
“Right on. OPEN QUESTIONS ONLY. No leading in any direction. Over and out!”
I pull out some POST ITS and write my ASSUMPTIONS so I can check them later against my FINDINGS.
I think the women who take the course would profile themselves as SPIRITUAL.
That they want to GROW. I think they are finding us through YOUTUBE VIDEOS and the good news is that is a FREE channel.
I drive to Ortal’s home in Gilo.
I ask Ortal and Shira what they want to get out of their jobs with me.
Ortal wants to stop teaching so much yoga, her body is all stretched out, and teach classes that involve less physical work. She wants to learn from the personal growth techniques I use and also teach what she knows.
Shira has a vision for a natural pregnancy and birth center. She wants to to transition out of administrative positions and train in doing more personal growth, one on one work. She wants to learn to use the methods I know. To develop other aspects of herself than just bookkeeping and making phone calls. As someone who got pregnant later in life naturally thanks to her own willpower, she wants help women doing fertility treatments to get pregnant.
“Ill teach yoga classes at the birth center, right?” Ortal says. “Don’t get anyone else!”
Then I ask them each how they would DESCRIBE themselves.
“I’m a BUSY, INDEPENDENT, WORKING woman. I am FEMININE and SPIRITUAL.” says Shira. “I LEARN AT MY OWN PACE. I wasn’t interested at all in the hospitals birth preparation course. I can’t be coming in every week.”
Ortal thinks for a minute.
“I am guided in life by my INNER TRUTH. I am a person that places value on doing SPIRITUAL WORK.”
“So why did you choose THIS course?”
“I wanted this pregnancy and birth to be an experience I can grow from. I wanted have an exciting experience. To uncover emotional and spiritual STRENGTH in myself as a woman that I never knew existed before. I watched videos of other birth courses as well. I could see that the tools women got there did somehow help them, but their birth wasn’t an AMAZING experience because of it. When I watched the videos of women who took your course, I could see from their faces that it really supported them in having the type of experience I was after,” said Shira.
So far so good. I am pretty much on course with my assumptions. SPIRITUAL GROWTH. YOUTUBE. But then Ortal said something I wasn’t expecting at all.
“I saw a random hand written flyer on the street”, says Ortal. “I didn’t really think it would work but I came anyway just to spread the word about my yoga classes. But the moment I walked in I knew this was what I was looking for. My previous pregnancy had been very hard. We just moved into the city from a pastoral area and I was under stress to adjust. I experienced alot of anxiety and cried every day. I know the birth also wasn’t as good as it could have been. So while I had pretty good births, I knew I needed help to really up my game. I needed something step by step that would give me the tools to make it better. I really wanted to AVOID falling back into the ANXIETY I experienced in my previous pregnancy.”
Hmmm, now this was interesting. Two assumptions were invalidated.
The profile was similar – both women identified as SPIRITUAL more or less. But not all came to GROW. Ortal had a previous BAD, ANXIOUS experience of pregnancy she wanted to AVOID this time. Shira had no previous experience. She’d worked hard to get pregnant and just wanted to have a GOOD experience. The channels were different, too. There was a hand written FLYER hastily hung up in the neighborhood before a workshop by our marketing person, and there were videos on YOUTUBE.
The Board with the POST IT NOTES had changed.
Now what does this all mean? It means, I don’t know my CLIENT until I really get to know them. It means I need the stats. How many women came to avoid repeating PREVIOUS BAD experiences and how many came just to have a GOOD birth experience? Who IS the woman who is using my online course? Suddenly that is not so interesting anymore.
Because I have a NEW CLIENT with a NEW PAIN. Women who have taken my course and want to work for me. Women who want to transition out of their current BORING, ANNOYING jobs to GAIN a PERSONALLY FULFILLING, EMPOWERING CAREER. Hmmmm. Good stuff.