The Secret to Sustainable Service-Based Business
“Life-Giving /ˈlīfˌɡiviNG/ – self-sustaining, opposite of destructive.”
The business of selling high-value, high-touch services is unlike any other endeavor. It calls you forward. It requires a commitment to professional growth, but it’s also quite personal.
Because unlike other careers, high-touch transformational service is a pursuit where who you are and what you sell are intricately intertwined on the level of your values. And your success rests in your ability to translate said values into business processes in a meaningful, profitable way.
Those of us who step into this arena do so with the intention of creating a life-giving enterprise that serves.
Let’s explore the nuance of meeting this intention.
Through a strictly professional lens, a service-based business is not as simple as delivering impeccable service. You are also required to understand smart packaging, positioning, how to stay relevant in a changing market, cultivate meaningful relationships, communicate your value, and maintain a steady lifeline by enrolling clients that support progressive evolution of your business (and not deplete it, as it sometimes happens when we have a leak in any of the above processes).
From personal experience of being a high-value, high-touch professional for 7+ years – and from having the privilege of being in a supporting role to others like myself during that time – the biggest challenge revealed itself as true sustainability. In other words, the kind of sustainability that’s a bit more nuanced than balancing numbers on a sheet.
True sustainability, for our unique purposes, means your business is intentionally designed to:
1) Serve you, the professional and the person
2) Serve your market, and ultimately, your client
3) Serve the evolution of your business.
This may come across as obvious. Yet when we look under the hood, a lot of service-based businesses are running at a deficit to at least one piece of this 3-part puzzle.
And most of the time, that deficit is carried by you, the professional.
This deficit begins to look like depletion, burn-out, and diminishing returns.
This deficit is enrolling clients that drain resources, albeit unintentionally. It’s spreading yourself thin among all the various hats you wear, without clearly constructed processes to support you. It’s swimming upstream and playing catch up. It’s short-term gains instead of long-term appreciation of assets. It’s survival mode.
This deficit, unintentionally, creates a burden: where you alone become the lifeblood of your business.
It’s here where you invest all of your energy, time, and resources – only to build a shaky foundation that simply cannot sustain itself.
When you find yourself in the deficit, the hardest part is identifying the culprit and engine that drives this downward spiral.
Many of us look to marketing and sales for the holy grail answer. But because we are looking for the culprit through the same lens that created it… we end up further scattering our energy and attention without being able to create a meaningful shift, and rise above water.
When I first learned about Ethical Sales as a process, what truly struck me was its wholeness.
Wholeness, meaning that instead of looking at sales (or marketing) as a separate process with one goal in mind, you begin to understand your sales philosophy as either the foundation that supports truly sustainable growth, or a basis that creates a leaky, fragile environment.
It becomes imperative to understand that what’s underneath the shaky foundation is not any single business process, but rather the entire ecosystem and the principles that drive its function.
We can look at it like this:
- Principles inform Function.
- Function informs Behavior/Process.
- Process creates Desired Outcome (in our case, sustainable, meaningful, life-giving growth).
In the world of Ethical Sales, one core principle that flips the entire perspective on sales as a life-giving business process is the one that teaches us Humans Over Transactions.
Under the principle of Humans Over Transactions:
- Sales become about building trust and relationship over closing the sale
- All humans involved, including you, are placed above the end result of making the sale
- The desired end result shifts entirely from “making the sale” to “designing for highest outcome for all involved”
- Boundaries are upheld to serve both the professional and the client
We see that the function of the sales call shifts entirely under this human-centric principle.
We see that who you are as a professional shows up equipped with an elevated perspective of what’s most important.
We see how the human-centric principle, by design, creates an environment conducive to a whole different set of outcomes and possibilities than if we were just looking at the one-pointed outdated focus of “closing the sale.”
Finally, we see how the principle of Humans Over Transactions shapes our leadership, and holds the potential to cascade one sales conversation into something much more valuable than a single closed sale.
This is the kind of principles-first thinking and value-based approach that shapes the very fabric of a life-giving enterprise; the one many of us set out to create when we choose our path of high-value service.
Ethical Sales as a process and set of principles is perhaps the only lens that considers this, and considers you as a key aspect to the viability and longevity of a service-based business.
When you’ve played in this arena for some time, you start to see there’s truly no other way if what you want is to build a life-giving enterprise that serves all for years to come.
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Yelena Reese
yelenareese.com
