Growth In Every Season

It’s finally Spring, and everyone around us is doing something New! What are you doing? I would love for you to share it with me.

Are you going for a new job?

Are you renovating your house?

Are you doing a new health regime?

If you have been following our blog, you know we have talked about doing less and aligning with the “seasons” to promote growth without taxing our bandwidth.

Can I give you our business as a case study so you can apply it to your project?  Do you want to see “doing less” in action?

Ok, so here at Dedham Acupuncture, we have been launching a series of pop-ups for intentional living, and it has been so much fun! But, to get to where we are now, we had to move through all the phases, and I’m going to share that journey with you now. 

Towards the end of last year, some things weren’t working at Dedham Acupuncture. Things that were holding us back as a business.  For instance, we had an insurance company or two that weren’t paying us and it was taking up a lot of admin time.

So, we decided to fire those insurance companies which freed up a lot of bandwidth – this is the fall phase – letting go of what is not serving you.

Then, over the holidays and early January, we didn’t make any changes to our business, we just kind of let the dust settle.  This is called the Winter phase – resting and recuperating. 

Then, towards the end of January, we as a collective, wanted to bring fun back into Dedham Acupuncture and have mini “parties”. So we developed this idea of a “pop-up” where clients buy tickets to an event and we offer a service that we don’t usually offer with discounts, refreshments, and an injection of excitement!  We started with our Galantine’s Day event.  We used that launching event to figure out what/day/times work best for our clients, what type of spa products they like to see in our office (bath bombs – no go, body oil – hard yes), and how they like the refreshments. This was Dedham Acupuncture moving into the Spring phase. 

Our Galantine’s Day event took up a LOT of planning time, but we were inspired to create something new for our clients.

We had a lot of support. It was all hands on deck. Catrell, our operations coordinator, got melamine champagne flutes, and refreshments, and got all of the signage together. Michelle figured out the online booking system and how to incorporate the pop-up into the calendar.  Cara made the promo signs for the front desk. I ordered all kinds of fun spa products

We then used what we learned from this event to launch our Chakra event that we had at the beginning of this month.  It took significantly less time to put together because we had learned what worked and what didn’t work from our first pop-up event.  We took notes and made spreadsheets. 

Going forward for 2023, we have planned a few more pop-ups (so exciting) but we are actually working less.  See, we already have the process documented so now it is almost on autopilot.  So, for the fall and winter of 2023, we will see our pop-ups grow exponentially, but we are actually not doing that much work – all of the time and energy went into the first pop-up.  We are just refining it as we go along – this is called the summer phase.  This is when things grow and grow but we are not actually doing that much work.

So, to recap:

make space for it in your life for what is important to you. (Fall)

think about how to go about accomplishing your goals and rest (Winter)

actively work on this goal and surround yourself with support (Spring)

sit back, enjoy the results of your hard work, and tend to it a little bit (Summer)

There are two active seasons – Fall and Spring.  But Spring is the most active.  So for 75% of the rest of the time, there is minimal to low-level activity.  The trick is to get clear on what you really want and only tackle one major life change or project a year.

 

Warmly,

Nicole