What If Being Hard to Categorize is the Whole Point?
“My vision for my business is to earn enough for me to thrive.
I want to do this by fulfilling my desire to combine my professional, creative, and metaphysical modalities to create a unique brand that attracts and supports values-aligned communities.”
I’ve been repeating this to myself at least twice
daily as a way to keep myself optimistic and motivated. If you’re stuck or struggling,
consider trying this technique which was
offered to me by my NLP practitioner,
and coach Jessica DuFour.
A store owner in Palm Springs asked the Internet to find him someone who does Enneagram and Tarot for team retreats. My name came up first. My website came up first. He read it, called me, and now I'm building a retreat for his crew of leaders, Enneagram carpet, giant Tarot cards and all.
Not because it's flattering, although it is, but because of what it proves. I spent twenty years in corporate retail and product development wondering if the odd mix of things I care about would ever hold together as a business. I never picked one clean lane. Enneagram, Tarot, team effectiveness, the strange power of making magical with a room full of people you work with. I built a practice around all of it at once, and for a long time I worried that would just read as scattered.
It didn't. A man who owns a home goods store, who I've never met, described what he needed and landed on an accurate picture of who I am. That's not luck. That's what happens when your website tells the truth clearly enough that even a search engine can find the shape of it.
Which is where my talented friend Candice comes in. She built that site with me at Smitten Creative, and I remember how long we sat with it, how many rounds of "does this sound like me or does this sound like everyone else in this business." We didn't stop at how it looked. We talked through the actual words on the page, which phrases someone searching would type, where they needed to sit on the site to be found instead of buried. That part is its own craft, half instinct and half science, choosing language that's true to how I actually talk and also built to be findable. Neither of us knew, fussing over word choice and placement, that the payoff would show up a year later as a shop owner four hundred miles away finding exactly what he needed on the first try.
The work works. Betting on the layered, harder-to-explain version of my business instead of the tidy one, keeping Tarot in the mix even when it made me odder to categorize, saying it plainly on the page — it found the person it was built for. Or he found it. I'm grateful to Candice for helping me build something true, and grateful that being specific turned out to be the thing that made me easy to find.
