Only 4 months ago, Roosmarijn Haring was losing passion for her business “Geodomein”, a business consultancy company, and was determined to sell it and start all over again. Today, she is more passionate about her company than ever before, having completely revamped her product structure, team, and customer base. So what did she do to achieve success in such a short time? 

GET CLEAR ON YOUR ‘WHY’

Looking for guidance with selling her company, Roosmarijn came to the Fast Forward Summit in London, the world’s largest entrepreneur event. Here she met Roger Hamilton, a social entrepreneur and futurist. Roosmarijn could never have anticipated the outcome of their meeting. 

‘’My company was in a niche sector - geo-information, and all my clients were data management professionals. Everything was going well, but I was bored; I wanted to be creative. I told Roger:  ‘I don’t want to do this anymore, I want to do something new. Nothing to do with the Geodomain is going to work for me, however, it works well as a business.”

But Roger challenged Roosmarijn, telling her that she didn’t have to sell the company but instead, begin with focusing on why she had set it up in the first place.

Roger remembers ‘‘She told a story about how as a young girl she was on a train and was fascinated by what made the contours of the landscape, how it was formed. That led to her becoming interested in geography and location. Then we looked at and identified the biggest problem she was solving for her clients - helping teams to become aligned with company culture. By combining these ideas, her company now focuses on ‘mapping your future’.” 

Roosmarijn was also keen to attract a different type of client: global entrepreneurs with established businesses that don’t have time to focus on coaching their teams. Previously, most of the teams she coached were coming from governmental sectors in Holland’s geo-information industry. Naturally, she assumed that her business name was limiting her client base.   

“To that, Roger replied that I should see both landscape and geo-information as metaphors to allow me to open up to a different type of client. That's how my mission statement was born: “We live in a world where so many people are searching, while we have the opportunity to determine just about everyone's location with a mobile phone. In the world today, it is perhaps the most important thing to understand what your place in the world is. We help you and your team to find the route that makes a positive impact on the world."

MOVE AWAY FROM TRADING TIME FOR MONEY

By redefining her ‘why’, Roosmarijn reignited her passion. By then she had also become a member of Roger’s Crystal Circle (a high-level mentoring group for entrepreneurs) and was ready to move onto working out a new structure for her products and business overall. 

“The way my business worked until that point wasn’t sustainable: whenever a company would approach me for consulting, I’d assess the organisation and tell them what they needed, which could amount to 7 workshops. I’d create and lead those workshops afresh for each company, which was incredibly time-consuming and expensive.”

With three companies a year, this model had to change. Working with Roger, Roosmarijn devised a new format: she would create a set of three stock workshops, and adapt to each client, which would allow her to have a greater number of clients with much less labour.

“I now run only three workshops; ‘Map your team’, ‘Map your vision’ and ‘Map your future’. There’s a clear customer pathway, and they can choose whether they want one or all three.  I love it because the structure allows me to tune into the individual, and that enhances my programmes. I also incorporated Talent  Dynamics (Roger’s team  profiling test that tells you exactly what strategy you should follow to build teams) into my work, and in the last two months I’ve conducted 40 one-to-one debrief.

Roosmarijn hasn’t changed her pricing per workshop (4,500 euros) but whereas previously, she’d be trading time for money (spending 4.5 days to create and run a workshop), she now spends only a few hours adapting her existing content for each new client

With aims to give six workshops a month and increase the number of clients tenfold, from 3 to 30, Roosmarijn sees profits going from €100k euros annually to €360k euros annually in 2018. 

BUILD YOUR TEAM

With a new company structure, Roosmarijn is ready and able to claim her time, and she sees the Talent Dynamics test as her key tool in doing so:

“Talent Dynamics is a magical tool for me, for building my team, and the teams of my clients, it’s truly life-changing. When I discovered the profiling test, I realised why I couldn’t work with my previous team members. According to the profile test, we were both creators with dynamo  energy, so we would brainstorm for days with no result. I had to start building my team from scratch.  Now I have a full-time trader trainee, a weekly meeting with my accumulator accountability partner, and in May I will bring on board a supporter profile. I am still looking for a PA, which is proving to be difficult, but I also have four people with different profiles that can lead workshops, allowing me to expand further in the future.”

Roosmarijn credits her success to Roger helping her create a clear framework for the company and its operations.

“I transformed my company 180 degrees and it’s working brilliantly. I can’t believe that I was on the brink of selling my company, and now I am loving it! I have a blueprint which keeps me on my path, and with this in place, I can be creative. The greatest shift came from having a consistent and fixed program, within which I can be more creative and in-tune with a client’s team more than ever before. I realise that I deliver more value now. Besides, my customers know that I deliver what I promise, because I'm not constantly creating new plans.”

How clear are you on your ‘why’, and how could define it to reshape your business? How would you change your business model to move away from trading time for money?