 Here is a simple framework to think about how to grow an authentic business. This is something that I've been teaching my clients for a while and figured I'd finally share a summary of it here as a free video. So I call it the ART framework, ART framework. So it has a nice acronym and ART stands for alignment, reach and trust. I want you to imagine three levers that you can increase in your business. The more that you increase each lever, the more that your business grows. And when I say grows, I mean you have a more bigger and more loyal audience. You have products and services that are selling better and better and that your marketing can simply be very authentic and low stress as the years go on because you have great trust with your audience. So that's what these three levers are. And the thing about these three levers is that you could actually increase any of the three greatly and it will grow your business or you can increase each of them more or less evenly. So let me go ahead and describe these three. This is, I think, a very powerful way to think about business growth, very simple way. And it's also a way to kind of diagnose if your business is not growing, if you're not getting enough clients, if people aren't responding to your content and offers, well, this is a simple framework to diagnose what's going on. Why aren't you getting enough clients or enough business? Okay, so let me explain and then I have a few notes here I'm going to look at. So let's start with, well, let's start from the beginning. Alignment, A for alignment. So this means that your content and your offerings are aligned with your audience's wants. Now I always say wants and not needs because when you start to think, ah, I'm going to produce what the audience needs, you're probably in your own head because you are more advanced in thinking about your topic than your audience and what you think they need, they usually don't want. Have you noticed that? Or not usually, sometimes. But all we can do is try to understand the audience's wants and then try to meet those wants as well as delivering what they need. So that's why I always say we meet the audience where they're at by understanding their wants. We deliver, we create products and services or curate product and services to meet their wants, hopefully also delivering on what we believe they need because if you only say, oh, I believe you need this, you're probably ahead of your thinking on that topic compared to them, they don't realize they need it yet. They don't have the right context and education to understand that we need it, but they know what they want. So the reason why alignment is important is because so many entrepreneurs, they launch their products and services based on their own interests, based on their own peak experiences, their own passions, and they haven't done the market research to understand what their audience wants. And they get surprised and greatly discouraged when their product or service doesn't sell. People don't want to buy it. People don't want to buy it. They might be, your friends and your family and your colleagues and your audience might be really nice to you. They may, oh, that looks really nice. Oh, I hope it does well. They might say nice things to you, but they don't actually buy it because it's not what they want. There's no alignment there. It's from your own passion, your own interest, your own peak experience, but your own peak experience, they didn't have that experience. You haven't set enough context. You haven't understood what they want and matched your peak experience and your interest and passion in the language and in the framing of what they want. So I'll give you an example. Let's say I was a relationship coach. I'm not as sophisticated in relationship coaching as the real ones are, but let's just say I know a little bit. So let's say I'm a relationship coach and I am trying to sell, I'm trying to get clients to like teach them how to listen better to their partners because I know that's what they need. People need to practice better listening skills so that they can make their partners feel loved and in return their partners will naturally respond with more love and more caring and attention, etc. But what people think they want, what people think they need, what people want is I want my partner to listen to me better. I want my partner to love me more. I want my partner to give me more attention or something like that. And so if you're trying to sell a service or program, this is learn to listen better to your partner. People are like, I don't want that. I want my partner to listen better to me. I don't need to listen. I'm already a great listener. And so you have to sell a program that says get your partner to listen to you. So you give them what they want, but the way you do it is actually teaching them how to listen and attend better to their partner and be more loving to their partner. And then as a result, of course, the partner naturally will open up and blossom. So this is an example. Again, I'm not a relationship expert, but there's probably something there. But that's an example. So what about in your field? You're welcome to comment below. What is the difference between what you think your audience needs and what they actually want and how can you address what they want while also delivering on what they need? Right? Because in that example, I'll say, come to this program, come to my service, hire me to get your partner to listen to you, to attend to you, to love you more. Great. Okay. Now they signed up and worked with me. All right. One of the first things we need to learn, and then I will educate them about, okay, the way we get our partners to listen better is to practice these skills. Practice it and you'll watch what happens, you know, kind of thing. And then nobody, oh my God, it really works. I didn't know I need to do this. Now, of course, over time, ideally, you use your content to educate your audience about the context of what they want versus what you think they need. You educate them on the context and the philosophy of it, the why, you know, not so much the how. In my free content, I don't teach, for example, of our relationship. In my free content, I don't teach listening skills. I teach the why listening skills are important. So that's an example. So back to this framework, alignment here. To work on alignment, to really align with what your audience wants, they're going to spend money with you. Why would they spend money with you? Because you're offering them what they want. How do you find that out? You talk to them because here's the thing, if you just try to journal about it, if you just try to figure it out on your own, you're probably in your own head, because you are quite a bit farther along about your topic, about your audience's problems, you're quite a bit farther along than they are. Like in the example I just gave you, I already know that I need to practice better listening skills to get my partner to open up, but my audience doesn't. My audience thinks they just need to somehow get their partner to listen to them. So it's like, I'm already quite farther along. So that means I got to talk to my audience and I go, what's going on in your relationship? What do you wish for? I want my partner to listen better to me. Oh, that's interesting. If I talk to them, then I understand that's what you want. Let me take notes. Let me name that as my next offering, get your partner to listen. So you do market research conversation and you also do online polling. So you put, when I say online polling, let's keep it real simple. You could do it simply like, for example, on the Facebook profile, because some of your friends are your ideal clients. Maybe, right? I think some of your friends are, or at least some of your friends have the mindset and the heart set, the stage of the journey similar to your ideal clients or some of your friends know your ideal clients. So even if you just have 50 Facebook friends, that's all you have. You have no social media audience, none whatsoever. All you have is 50 Facebook friends. You can still post to your 50 Facebook friends, hey folks, do you know somebody who is going through these issues or whatever? And what do you think about these topics and just pull them? If you know someone like that, what would they say? And if it's you, don't say it to you, keep it anonymous. Just say, based on that, what you described, I think what people want is this, something like that, right? Another way is to do net caring with niche mates, people who are in the similar niche as you, similar industry as you, similar solving similar problems or helping people achieve similar experiences as you. And you can get together with them and talk with them on this question of what do you think our audience wants? Let's talk about that versus what they need. So that's the question. All right, so that's the alignment. Let's go to reach next. So remember the overall framework, how to diagnose your business growth problems, alignment, reach and trust. The more alignment you have, the easier it is to sell anything because you are selling what people want rather than what you think they need. So the second one is reach. Alignment, reach and trust. So second one is reach. Well, reach, hopefully it's relatively clear, the more people you can reach, the more people you can present with your product or your service, and therefore you're more likely to get more clients. I mean, a very simple example, even if you have really poor alignment. So back to my original example, let's say I'm trying to sell a coaching service on how to develop better listening skills for your partner. My audience probably, if I were a relationship coach, my audience doesn't want that. They need it. How do you think they need it? But if I can reach 100,000 people with that offer, some 100,000 people, maybe 10 people out of those 100,000 will still go, even though you haven't educated me on the context, I understand it myself and I will still want to buy it. So in other words, even if your alignment is low, if you have a higher reach, you'll probably still get some people buying. Of course, if your alignment is high, your reach doesn't have to be as high to get. So in other words, if my alignment is low, but my reach is high, I'll get a little bit of people buying it, right? Maybe 10 people out of 100,000 people, something like that. What's the percentage of 100,000, 10,000, like 0.1% might sign up for it, right? But if my alignment is high and my reach is low, which I think probably a lot of you have low reach, a lot of you, from what I can tell, what you tell me is that you think you have a small audience. George, I only have 100 Facebook friends and I have 50 people following me on Instagram. I have 15 YouTube subscribers. I have 75 people on my email list, whatever. Your reach is low, but that means your alignment, you can work on your alignment because right now, if your alignment is low, you might get 0.1% sign up rate, but if your alignment is high, you might get 10% sign up rate or 15, 20% sign up rate. So even if you just have 100 audience members combining your Facebook, Instagram, email list or whatever you have, you have only 100. So high alignment, 10%, maybe 10 of them will sign up, you see? So these three levers are really interesting because you can just greatly increase any of these levers and it will grow your business. So alignment, reach, and let me just quickly rattle off my seven favorite reach methods. This is not meant to be a course. If you want to learn more about this stuff, I have a course that goes way more in-depth on this ART stuff and more in-depth on the reach methods, but that's called BizPlan, B-I-Z, P-L-A-N. BizPlan, you can sign up rate if you want to. But anyway, let me just quickly rattle off my seven favorite reach methods. Again, I can't go in-depth here, but just for the sake of time, I got to end this pretty soon. Facebook ads, Instagram ads, the simplest way. I mean, if you never tried it, I know some of you think it's unethical or it doesn't have to be. Facebook and Instagram ads has saved. Some of you think Mark Zuckerberg, social media is bad, politically bad. But listen, the other side of it is social media or I should say Facebook, Instagram ads has saved so many small businesses like mine, like many of my clients who could not have gotten more reach without something like Facebook and Instagram ads. It is so much easier for them. You spend $10 on Facebook, Instagram ads, you reach a thousand targeted people. There is no cheaper, as of this recording, there's no cheaper and more targeted way to reach ideal clients than Facebook, Instagram ads. No cheaper or more targeted way. Now, the dark side of that is, well, it's because Facebook, Instagram knows so much about everybody. That's why they are able to target the ads so perfectly to people. That's the dark side of it. But again, like I said, it has saved millions of small businesses like myself to be able to reach people without going door to door knocking. What are we going to do? So here, let me continue. Facebook ads, Instagram ads, stage two content is another reach method. If you don't know what stage two content is, Google the three stages of content creation. Again, you can Google this, the three stages of content creation. I've written an article and you'll learn what stage two content means there. So stage two content, okay, that's number four, gentle launches or authentic outreach. Whenever you launch, whenever you gently launch something, you'll grow your reach a little bit because some of your friends and colleagues will share or at least tell others about your offer, your service. Gentle launches. I have a course about gentle launches. It's now called authentic outreach if you're interested in looking that up on my website. Collabs is the fifth way. So collabs are getting together with other people in your industry or related industry and mutually supporting each other to grow your audiences. For example, doing cross interviews. You interview each other on video, on Instagram live, on Facebook live, on YouTube, etc., on podcasts, etc., okay. Number six, LinkedIn ads. Yes. So if you think Facebook and Instagram ads are unethical, you could try LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn ads is five to 10 times more expensive than Facebook, Instagram ads, but it can still target pretty well. And I still, I use it myself. I still prefer Facebook Instagram ads, but LinkedIn ads is also a good alternative. And then number seven is authentic SEO search engine optimization. I have a whole course on that as well. So I just wanted to kind of rattle off these seven strategies. If you want more on this, you can take my biz plan course or study these on your own. And I hope this is helpful. So let me keep going here. This is going a bit longer than I expected. Finally, trust the third category of, you know, alignment, reach and trust, the third lever, I should say. Basically, the greater trust someone has in you, right? Someone who like says, oh, I, I love, I trust your recommendations for me because you've always shown up being trustworthy to me. Then the more they trust you, the more you can simply whisper your offer or your, you know, your product or your service and they'll buy, right? I mean, for example, if you have a good friend who trusts you a lot and you say, Hey, I want to go see this movie. And your friend's like, I don't know what the movie is about, but I trust you. If you think I'm going to enjoy it, let's go. You see what I mean? So that's, but so your audience can develop that kind of trust in you over time as you create more authentic content. This is why I always talk about authentic, consistent content creates trust, grow, nurtures that trust from your audience to you because you show up consistently. Consistency is a representative of trustworthiness, of reliability, stability. You become like a presence in their life because you, because they watch your videos consistently or they read your posts, things like that, they trust you more and more as you show up consistently with authentic content. Now, the other thing is your marketing should be, should be authentic as well. I see so many, I have, I did a whole other video about this, which you can look up spiritual teachers, right? Being completely unspiritual in their marketing. Why is that? Cause they trust the marketers and say, well, you got to do it this way, then you'll get students and clients and then you can be all spiritual with them. And so the, the marketing is so unspiritual, so manipulative, so, you know, fear missing out and manipulative and hyped up and all that stuff. Because I think they have to do marketing that way, but ironically, they're completely destroying the trust from their audience by doing unspiritual marketing, inauthentic marketing. And so that's why so many spiritual teachers are like, I don't know why my marketing is not working. Well, it's because you're listening to marketers who make you do manipulative stuff. That's why you don't have any trust for your audience. That's why you don't have a sustainable, loyal buying audience. They don't trust you. The way you market yourself is not trustworthy. And so I try to model more trustworthy marketing, more authentic, like I said, you know, so anyway, I so say so much about authentic marketing, you can watch my other videos about that. So trust is the third lever. So we've got alignment, we've got reach, and you've got trust. I hope that you gradually increase these three levers over time, because all three are effective. Technically, you could just increase any one lever and get some clients that way. But you might as well work on all three at the same time and just do a little bit of each one. And then it'll grow your audience more and more over the months and the years. So I hope that this is interesting. That is helpful. I look forward to your comments below if you want to share examples that you've seen. This is actually something I would really like to see. What examples have you seen out there of trust, someone who knows how to build trust with their audience? Someone who knows how to do reach, who's doing a good job of doing reach. What are the reach strategies do you like that people have been affected by reaching you? And of course, alignment, we said that earlier. Comment below about what you believe your audience wants versus what you think they need. So I look forward to seeing your comments below. Hopefully it'll be educational for everyone who is seeing this. Thank you so much for your trust. The fact that you watched until this moment means there's some trust that I have with you and I'm super, super grateful and I don't take that for granted. That's why I keep showing up consistently. Even though to be honest today, I am still on the mend with an illness and I did not feel like I'm a little bit groggy today actually and that's why you might notice especially towards the beginning of the video, I was kind of like not really my usual self. My voice, you can tell, is not my usual self. So I'm still groggy. I took an extra nap today and my schedule was very much just trying to rest a lot today but I still show up for this stuff because I understand the importance of consistency for my own creativity fitness and for serving my audience and thereby of course as a natural byproduct nurturing trust. So I hope this helps and I look forward to seeing any comments that you want to add below. Thank you so much.