What does an ADHD business coach do to help entrepreneurs?

Hey, new listener, thanks so much for checking us out. And there's a good chance you have adhd, so I quickly wanted to ask you to please follow this podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whichever app you're listening to this on. Don't leave it until later because you will forget. Thank you. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. In this episode, I'm going to explain to you exactly what an ADHD business coach like myself actually does. Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach, and welcome to the weeniecast. Sometimes I get this question, what does an ADHD business coach do? And it's a fair question because there's not a lot of us out there. Also, you know, business coaching is kind of a new thing. Before, if you wanted to start a business, you kind of had to figure it out on your own. You had to get a mentor, maybe go to business school.

And.

And thanks to the Internet and thanks to how the world works these days, that's no longer necessary to start a successful business. However, it's a lot easier if you have someone who's guiding you, teaching you what you don't know that you don't know, answering questions that you didn't know that you needed to ask, and shining light on common pitfalls that you wouldn't know were there if you didn't have the right support. So basically, an ADHD business coach, the short of it, is someone who helps you start your business and scale it to a point that you feel it's successful. They do this in a way that works with your ADHD and isn't trying to force you into the quote unquote, neurotypical way of doing things. Now, before we jump into what I do that's different, let's talk about the different supports that are out there that do not work for ADHD business owners and why they don't work. The typical business programs that are out there, that are by people who started a business, they did a certain sequence of steps and then they turned around, turned their process into a program and started showing people exactly what they did. These programs don't work for us. The one size fits all business plan is a bad match for people with ADHD for numerous reasons. First and foremost, just because it worked for someone else, we're not going to believe inherently that it's going to work for us. Whereas neurotypicals are going to have a lot of trust that this whole process, well, if it worked for them, it'll work for me too, because that's how their whole life has gone for us things working for someone else doesn't mean, you know, if you think back to different goals that you've had throughout your life, like maybe a diet, you know, maybe you're trying to lose £20 and you followed a diet that worked for someone else. Well, it didn't work for you because, you know, sometimes you needed dopamine snacks and you fell off the wagon and you completely lost trust in yourself. You know how neurotypical people have learned how to budget from their world? Like, we don't understand how that works. It does not work for us when we want need to make an impulse buy because we need that dopamine hit. All budgets go out the window, right? And of course, this is different for every single ADHD person. So even a plan that's specific to ADHD people around any of these things that makes allowances may not work for every single ADHD person. Oftentimes in these programs, the instructions are way too long. We can't sit still and absorb every single detail the way a neurotypical person can. It's not even that we can't do it. It's that we have too much trauma from school where we screwed it up. So as we're going through these really detailed instructions for this business building program, we're going to start assuming that we're missing a piece. It's this fear that bubbles up underneath everything where you start doubting that this is going to work for you because, oh my God, like, I wasn't able to follow the instructions on that project in bio. I wasn't able to follow the instructions at that one job I had in college. What's going to be different here? You know, there must be something that I'm missing. And one of the reasons that this is so hard for us is that we don't work linearly. We bounce around. And most of these programs are designed linearly. There's also this factor of when a person with ADHD goes to start a business and they sign up for one of these programs. And I speak from experience here because I signed up for pretty much all of them. You, you know, you get to a certain point in lesson three where you're like, this doesn't fit my personality. That's not my strength. This is not what I want to be spending my time on. And as we all know, when we decide something's not the right fit, when we decide that something isn't something that we want to do, we are masters at avoiding doing it, which sucks. If it is a foundational building block of that program and then it feeds into this story that we have on ourselves that we just don't finish stuff, that we sign up for things and we can't see them through, and that we screw things up and that there's, for some reason, things just don't work for us the way that they work for other people. So we have a ton of doubt. We have things that we don't want to do in here. We have moments where we've tuned out for the last 20 minutes of this 47 minute long video. And then we got frustrated that we have to rewind because we weren't sure which part was useful. By the way, this is one of the reasons why the videos that I have in all of my programs are really short, sweet, to the point, okay? Because you don't need to hear about my grandma and what she taught me about clipping roses and what that has to do with you doing market research, okay? It doesn't. When I create a video for any of my programs, I'm telling you, here's what you need to do, here's how you need to do it, and if you're not sold on that, then here's why it's so important for your business. And then I give you very clear instructions about how you go and do it. And then your job is to go and do it, not to watch the next video. In addition to all of this, when we get frustrated with something, when it doesn't feel like the right fit, or maybe the person who's in these videos who's running the program says something that doesn't hit us correctly, we then get what I call frustration, defiance. And this is where our ADHD temper kind of comes out, right? Because when we get frustrated with something, our fuse gets very short. You know, I want you to think of the last time, you know, you woke up late. The hot water heater had turned off in the middle of the night, so you had to take a cold shower. Things started just going wrong from the beginning of the day. And think about the point where you blew up at someone. It's happened to all of us. And unfortunately for people with adhd, when things start going wrong, or we fart, we fart. When we start feeling really frustrated, we kind of snap. And whoever is in the vicinity then becomes the enemy. Not forever in most cases, but when we're in a scenario where we're trying to do something, we spent a lot of money on it. And the thing that we're trying to do becomes really frustrating. We then aim that frustration at the person who created it. And when we start getting angry at them, when we start getting upset with what they set up for us, that makes us feel like a failure. It doesn't matter if the rest of the things that they tell us are super helpful, if they fit our personality, if they fit our strengths, because we've changed our mind about liking this person or this organization, we don't want to do any of it. It's like back in high school when you had that one teacher who you absolutely hated and so you refused to do homework for their class. It didn't hurt the teacher, it hurt you. But you'd be damned if you're going to do anything that made their life easier. I'm Talking to you, Ms. Whitmore. No, just kidding. Which, by the way, in junior year of high school, she literally asked the whole class what she was doing wrong, that we weren't doing our homework and all this stuff. And I thought she was being literal. So I told her the seven things that she was doing that were bad teaching methods in the middle of the class. It was the only time in my high school career where I got sent to the principal's office. The way she had asked it, I thought she was being genuine, that she was asking for feedback. She was not. It was a rhetorical question. And what was funny is I called a conference with my guidance counselor, the principal, my parents and her to see if I could get out of the class. Unfortunately, we were in the third quarter of the year and they didn't let me. Back to the point. The one size fits all business building program model does not work for the ADHD brain. And I have tested this. I have bought almost all of them and tried to do all of them. And I usually fall flat in lesson two or lesson three. I don't even get halfway through. And I know this isn't just me. I have a whole group of people that I talk to who are all like, B school dropouts. And if you're not familiar with what B school is, it's the whole business building program that Marie Forleo has designed and promoted over the last decade. The other issue with a lot of these programs is that there's no quick wins in the beginning. And that's something that is really critical to an ADHD business owner. You know, when we're working really hard at something, when we're putting ourselves out there and being vulnerable to and being brave and doing something we've never done before we need pretty immediate feedback that it's going well. And the majority of these programs don't offer any way for that to happen. So what's different between those programs that are one size fits all and designed for neurotypical people and working with an ADHD business coach? Well, I can't speak for other ADHD business coaches because I don't know their programs, but I can speak for what I do with my clients. And it's pretty much a four prong approach. And I say four prong and not four steps because it's not linear. You know, for each and every client, it's going to be different where we start from because they need a strategy and a plan that works for their strengths, that helps them overcome their unique challenges, and that feels aligned to what their bigger vision is for this business prong. One, we're talking training, you know, because starting a business, there are a lot of skills that you need to have that you are never trained on in high school, college, and probably in most of your jobs. I come from a background in sales and marketing, and the sales and marketing that I learned in those jobs were completely different to what I need to do in my business, where I am selling my own service. So when a client works with me, there's some basic business skills that I train them on. So how to sell on a phone call, how to put together a proposal, how to create content for social media. And this is going to be different for each and every client because their ideal clients are going to be buying from different platforms. So it may be TikTok, it may be Facebook, it may be LinkedIn, it may be Instagram. So we're coming up with a strategy that spins specific to their business and their ideal clients. We're also identifying what their and I hate this term, and please do not gag what their unique thought leadership is going to be. And I'm not saying that they're going to go out and be like, hey, everyone, I'm a thought leader. You should listen to me. I'm talking about the different angles. They're going to talk about what their expertise is. So, for instance, you know, in my mind, there are three types of thought leader. There's the expert. The expert is only interesting to people who are interested in that topic. Right? So Anthony Fauci, who led us all through the COVID 19 pandemic, most of the time, no one gives a crap about what he has to say because what he's talking about, pandemics and endemics that aren't relevant to us, no one's interested in hearing his take on it unless you're interested in the specific disease that he is talking about. Everyone was very interested in COVID 19 because it impacted all of us. So when you're being an expert in your thought leadership, you want to be careful not to alienate people who aren't interested in your topic. There's also the pointer. Thought leader Oprah Winfrey is a great example of this. She got famous basically having people on her show and pointing to them and saying they have something worth talking about. A lot of the books in her book club had to do with personal transformation. So she got associated with personal transformation. She's not an expert on personal transformation. She just points to other experts. And in addition to that, the believer, the believer thought leader Brene Brown is actually a great example of the believer who is also an expert hybrid. She takes the data that she gets in her research and she comes up with this belief system around how we live wholehearted lives. You know, what does it mean to overcome the fear of being vulnerable? And she tells stories in a way that gets us on board with what she believes. You can kind of see how this is going to be different for each and every client. I also train them on how they can create offers that their ideal clients would jump at buying, how to do market research so that they can determine what their profitable niche is going to be, how to work on their relationship with money so that they're not afraid of asking top dollar for their work, and some technical stuff like how do you set up your billing system, how do you set up an email marketing campaign, how do you launch a webinar, how do you get people to actually register for the webinar? And really for an ADHD business owner, there's no linear way that I'm training this. We are bouncing around from different topics constantly because we have to go where their interest is, where their hyper focus is in that moment. If I tried to take one of my ADHD business owner clients through a linear training program that goes this point and this point and this point, I would lose them with one small exception. One of the things that I do with all of my clients who are just starting their business is I have them do market research interviews that they can really figure out not only what their profitable niche is, but exactly what they need to say in their marketing to get them to sign up, what they need to include in their offer that will make their offer a no brainer for those ideal clients. Now what my clients don't realize and maybe I shouldn't even be sharing this on the podcast. Ooh, what am I going to say next? Well, you'll have to keep listening to find out. But first, Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. One of the biggest challenges I hear from new business owners is how hard it is to figure out what to post on social media and to stick to consistent schedule with it. Because it's hard. And so in the month of May, I'm actually launching a challenge to help you build that muscle of posting every single day. Each participant will get their own customizable content plan for the month of May. An extensive list of content prompts so you have an endless bank of ideas of things you can post that work with your content plan. Every Monday through Friday we will have a 45 minute Zoom call at 9am Eastern where you will create your content and one lucky person per day will be able to volunteer for the coaching hot seat where I will help you fine tune your messaging so that your content can help you attract high paying clients. If you can prove that you posted every single day for the 31 days you you will win a 30 minute one on one coaching call with me. Normally I charge $497 for this, but for the whole challenge, for your content plan, for the content prompts for those 23 daily calls that you're gonna get throughout the month, it's only $197. This is my birthday gift to you this year and I'm so excited to hold your feet to the fire and make you post every day about your business and get more clients. If you're down for a challenge and you want to join us, then go to weaningcast.com challenge. I can't wait to see you there. Now what my clients don't realize and maybe I shouldn't even be sharing this on the podcast. It's kind of a Mr. Miyagi move, right? Because very early on when you're starting a business you need wins. You need little wins that you can celebrate to see that you're on the right track. When I send my clients out to do market research interviews, I give them all the instructions. They know exactly what questions they need to ask, how they get people booked in for those interviews, all that stuff. And I give them a goal. They have to interview 55,0 people. Now this is incredible for their programs for whatever offer they are designing because they are going to market test it before they even go out and market it. So if they're going and interviewing people and the problem that they think they're going to solve actually isn't a problem to their ideal clients. Great. That's not what their offer is going to be. We're going to redesign it really quick so that they can start making money as fast as possible. So it helps them feel like they are on the right path and get that immediate feedback. In addition to that, they get really comfortable asking people to get on the phone with them, which they're gonna need to get good at if they want people to book sales calls in the future. They're also going to get really good at running those interview calls, at being the person who's in charge of the timeline, which again, when they get to the point where they're doing sales calls with their potential clients, they're gonna have to have some skill at. In addition to this, they're gonna start getting those dopamine drips because they're going to successfully very early on book people for these interview calls. Those little wins are enough dopamine to keep them working in their business for the amount of time that it takes till they get their first paying client. For the most part, we bounce around through all the skills training. But that is the thing that I have most of my clients do absolutely first because I want them to get that immediate dopamine drip. I want them to market test their idea, I want to make their marketing easy to do and designing their offer super simple. But everything else is completely haphazard depending on what they want. And this is true for my one on one clients, but it's also true for my group program. You know, if you are a member of the BYOB program, you'll know that our group calls are all over the place and that's okay. Every question that gets asked in those group calls is useful to everyone in the group call. And because the majority of us all have adhd, we can jump really easily from one topic to another to another, even if they're completely different. And it keeps it interesting for everyone as we all know what it's like when we're in a lecture that's about one thing for a whole hour. Yeah, it doesn't go so well. So I find this model of supporting my clients is so helpful for them to stay engaged, not only in the program, but in their businesses, so that they can actually start getting clients and build some momentum. So that's. Prong number one is training. Prong number two is mindset coaching. Again, this is going to be so different for everyone. Some of my clients come to me and they have really bad mindset beliefs around their relationship with money. Others have a more general scarcity mindset where they're afraid there are no clients out there in the world and we kind of have to bust that myth for them. Others have doubts about what they can achieve. You know, the smorgasbord of bad mindsets that we have to work through to have a successful business is vast and never ending. But we have to work through these different mindset blocks before you're going to be able to have a successful business. This is one of the reasons why I never guarantee that my clients are going to get a client or make a certain amount of money at a certain point throughout our program. Because I've had clients who for the whole, like six, nine, 12 months, we were working together. We were mainly working on moving them through these mindset blocks with some moments of training, with some moments of designing their offer with them doing market research. But mainly, like the sessions we're doing together are, oh my God, I don't believe I can do this. And I can't tell you how many of those clients, after we've completed, have messaged me, oh my God, I just got two clients this week. Oh my God, I just got another three clients in the last two weeks. I had one client message me recently that she just got so many clients she's gonna have to raise her rates in the new year. You know, how exciting. But they wouldn't get there if we didn't do that mindset work. It's so important. So that's prong two of my approach. Prong three is their personal ADHD struggles. Now, of course, people with ADHD generally have similar struggles, but for some, time management is harder than for others. Other clients have impulse control that they have to work on, especially when it comes to spending on their businesses. For a lot of my clients, it's focusing on the thing that they don't want to do in their business, but they have to because it's just a part of running a business. And for 99.9% of all my clients, we have to work through shiny object syndrome. Shiny object syndrome shows up in how they want to market their work. They make it this wild hair idea that they should be on Instagram and then invest $2,000 a month on an Instagram specialist and then realize four months and that's not where they should be. They may get an idea of a new program they want to launch, even though they just launched one program and one the month before and one the month before, you know, Another ADHD struggle that most business owners encounter at some point, and I count myself among them, is rejection sensitivity disorder. And there's so much potential rejection when you're starting a business. It's not just rejection when you invite someone to be a client. It's rejection when you post something and no one likes it. It's rejection when you host a webinar and only three people sign up for it and only one attends. It's rejection when you submit your name to speak at an event and you never hear back from them. There's perceived rejection when you're out with a bunch of friends and no one asks you how your new business is going and you assume that they think it's stupid and that you shouldn't be doing it and you've made a massive mistake even though they've just had too many drinks and didn't remember to ask. There's a different way for each person to work through each one of these struggles. Time management. There are strategies that work really well for me that will not work for another ADHD person. Shiny object syndrome is another one. There are things that will keep you on track that won't work for another one of my clients. And that's okay. Let's find what works for you. So we have to work on keeping them on the single road that leads to Rome. Right. That one offer so they don't confuse their audience and a whole other smorgasbord of shiny objects syndrome. Things that that pop up in our day to day. And then finally, the fourth prong of my approach is I customize a plan that works for each individual client. I do this with my one on one clients and I do this with my clients in my group programs. Because here's what those one size fits all programs don't do. They don't teach you how to identify what your big vision is for this business and how to reverse engineer it into what you need to be doing today and tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that. They don't break down that if you want to make a certain amount of money in three years, here's what you need to be charging today to be able to reach that. They don't break down if you want to work a certain amount of hours per week. So for instance, I don't want to work more than 30 hours a week. My strategy is going to be totally different from someone who wants to work 10 hours a week or 40 hours a week. When I work with my clients, we're taking into account what their big goal is, all these other factors of how much money they want to make, how much time they want to spend their business, how much time they want to spend with their family and on vacation, what they want to spend their time on while they're working in the business. And we're taking that. And so many other factors, like their strengths, their weaknesses, the things that they would rather get their eyes chewed out by an alligator than do. Which, as you can imagine, it wouldn't just be your eyes getting chewed out. Alligators have big mouths is what I'm saying. And your eyes are very, very small. I know I don't have to explain this, but it's kind of fun. I feel like Dr. Evil right now, like, I want sharks with laser beams. I want alligators that can chew out eyeballs. What was my point again? Oh, yeah, that's right. There's stuff in your business that you really, really do not want to do. If you were to follow a one size fits all business plan, that business plan might make you do that thing over and over and over again. I don't do that with my clients. If it's something that you feel completely miserable doing, what we're figuring out is how you can outsource it best. An element that runs throughout most of these prongs is what's going on in your personal life. As humans, we like saying that we're good at compartmentalizing, and that's bullshit. We're not like, it's One of the most magical things about humans is how we do one thing is generally how we do everything else. I can't tell you how many times I've had a client tell me after we work on their relationship with money and get them a lot more comfortable asking for the money that they want that they kind of embarrassingly mentioned to me at the end of our sessions, like, hey, something I'm noticing is that sex is getting a lot better because they're learning to ask for what they want in their money. It's not just staying there. They're getting better at asking for what they want in all other areas of their life. We suck at compartmentalizing, okay? It does not work for us. And it's especially true for people with adhd. So if you're struggling with something in your personal life, it's going to impact you in your business. They are interrelated. If you had a fight with your spouse, it's going to impact your whole day. If your water heater went out and you have to buy a new one and it's super expensive. That's going to cause stress in your business. It's so funny. When clients first start with me, in the first few sessions, the first few group sessions, they very nervously usually ask, like, am I allowed to talk about a personal thing? And my answer is always, of course. Because everything that's going on in your personal life is going to impact your business. And we're not designing a business that needs a robot of a human to be run. We're designing a business that can withstand a human who has emotions, who occasionally get sick, who occasionally has a bad day, who occasionally is in executive dysfunction and knows all the things that they need to do, but can't seem to get themselves to do it. If we don't design your business to be able to withstand you running it, your business is not going to last long because you, my friend, are not a robot. Some of the results that I'm most proud of that my clients have achieved. My client, Lauren Lefkowitz, who started with me In January of 2021, she was able to leave her job five months after starting. She hit six figures in her first year, which is not typical. Like, if you're thinking you're going to hit six figures in your first year, I would caution you to be a little more conservative. Don't plan on it. But because we customized a strategy that would work specifically to her and her available time. In the beginning, when she was working her full time job and designed a program that she felt really proud of selling, that worked for her and her ideal clients, she was able to accomplish that. My other client, Adam Kimmel, is another story that I'm really proud of. When he started with me, he was making two or three thousand dollars a month in his copywriting business. In about seven months, we were able to up that to $9,000 a month. We were also able to increase his revenue for that year by about 50,000, give or take. And the following year he made $150,000, plus or minus some dollars from his copywriting business. His big goal with all this was to be able to retire his wife from the job that she hated. And he did all of this while also working a full time job. His goal was never to leave the full time job. So we were able to create a strategy that worked for him to build this business up to $150,000 a year while only working about 10 hours a week in his business, including doing client work. I have clients who work 40 hours a week and make six figures. I have clients who work half that and make six figures as well.

But I certainly never had a coach like Katie before who was able to add value on so many different prongs of my business. Katie's versatility is, I think, the difference maker that sets her apart from other coaches that are out there. There are people who can train you on sales. There are people who can help you with your mindset. There are people who can help you price a service or a product. There are people who can help you with market research and can teach you about social media. And there are people who can help you with ADHD and can help you turn some of the typical challenges of ADHD and superpowers. But I don't think there's anyone who can do all of those things at the same time.

When you're designing a business, you have to be very specific about what kind of life you want to have when it's full time. Because I can tell you there are a gazillion different ways to start a business and there are gazillion different ways to make that business super financially successful. However, if you're not intentional about the life you're going to have as you're building it, guess what? You're not going to have that life. You're not going to trip and fall and land into your perfect schedule that optimizes your strengths and outsources the things that are super challenging to you. If you want to have your ideal business, you have to have a custom strategy that will help you get there. And to wrap this up, that's the long story of what an ADHD business coach does. So to answer the original question, that is what I, an ADHD business coach, do for my clients. If you're starting a business and you're looking for support, you need to look for someone who can be dynamic in helping you overcome each one of these unique ADHD struggles. And because we have so many episodes on all of these topics that I've just touched on, we are including a list of links in the show notes of this episode so you can go check out those episodes. And I want to remind you, if you're starting a business, if you're in the process of growing your business and you're feeling frustrated because the resources you've been turning to don't feel like a fit or they frustrate you or you've just given up on them completely to figure it out on your own and you're ready to get support that fits you, then I invite you to book a generate income strategy call with me and to do so just go to ww.weeniecast.com forward/strategy call. And that link is also in the show notes.

I've had calls on Katie where all of those things are happening. Where Katie is is providing value on just firing on all cylinders. Where we go from my relationship with my kids to something triggering a traumatic experience to a sales call, helping me with pricing an offer, helping me with getting more leads on social media to talking about my operations and then, you know, back to me for getting the coffee on top of my car and driving off all in one session, all in one hour. Slot Squirrel.

Squirrel.

Squirrel.

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