Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Alex Harvey. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alex, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. One of our favorite things to brainstorm about with friends who’ve built something entrepreneurial is what they would do differently if they were to start over today. Surely, there are things you’ve learned that would allow you to do it over faster, more efficiently. We’d love to hear how you would go about setting things up if you were starting over today, knowing everything that you already know.

You know what? There are a lot of things that DON’T matter early on in business that we distract ourselves with when all we should be doing is getting out there and offering our product or service to people who would be interested.

I remember when I very first started a coaching business, I paid $4,000 to have my branding done and get a website built before I really knew what my business was about, what exactly I was offering or who I was. I used that website and business name for about a year before throwing it in because it wasn’t my direction anymore. I also spent about a whole year working on all this backend stuff that just didn’t matter, like setting up a blog and SEO – rather than getting clients! And no wonder I didn’t get any clients while I did that.

You don’t need a fancy website (or even need a website!), you don’t need professional branding and you don’t need any bells and whistles. I would have gotten to where I am today so much faster if I just spent all my time and energy on talking to people, offering value and offering my products and services. If I were to do it again I would go to as many events as possible, tell everyone what I did, run free events, individually connect with people, offer to share value on other people’s podcasts and just keep making offers for my product/ service.

Alex, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m an intuitive business and empowerment coach but I didn’t start out my career that way – I started out my career as an environmental engineer!

After finishing university and starting my first full-time job I instantly knew I needed to find a way out of this, I knew that working in some massive corporation was not the life for me and after a couple of years in the job I felt like my soul was dying. By this time I had already started to experiment with passions and discovered that there was this thing called ‘business’ which might allow me to do something I was passionate about for a living.

Since I started working I had started saving to quit my job, so once I’d built up enough experience, still not quite sure what I was going to do but with savings and a hobby business under my belt I quit my job and moved to the beautiful town of Byron Bay in Australia to discover myself, what I was really about and what my true calling was.

I very quickly started getting a few 1:1 coaching clients and diving into learning about business. I started joining high-ticket training programs and spent my money very freely… until 6 months later when it all ran out and I wasn’t even close to bringing in a full-time income coaching yet.

This was a HUGE wake-up call for me and I realised that to live a life a loved and that felt true for me, one of the most important things was how I could make it work financially for me – the thing I was taught not to care about and that didn’t matter was actually the most crucial piece in sharing my gifts and doing my purpose work.

This led me on my own journey with money, actually asking for it and earning it as a self-employed person, as well as managing it’s completely variable (ie not a set wage). This journey led me to develop one of the core products in my business that I now sell, The Abundance Planner & Tracker.

From there I continued to build my business, creating and offering courses, coaching, retreats and masterminds that help highly sensitive people who have gifts they’d love to share to develop the mindset and practical strategies to build a business and financially prosper and thrive doing so.

I help my students and clients to (finally) break free of their self-sabotage patterns, fears, doubts and insecurities and tap into their genius which leads to their natural success, being their truest, most self-expressed version of themselves.

I now offer two foundational short courses, one on transforming your relationship to money and one on tapping into your gifts and living from your potential, an intuitive business mastermind and 1:1 coaching all designed to help people prosper and thrive doing what they love.

The thing that I love most about the work I do is helping people create financial and business outcomes that they didn’t think were possible for them, especially if they’ve tried and ‘failed’ before in the past – that’s the real magic.

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

The most effective way for me to grow my audience, students going through my courses and clients in my masterminds and coaches have been partnerships. It’s actually a lot more simple than it sounds. I was given this piece of advice in a business coaching program I did and it has been a key game changer in my business. What it’s really about is getting in front of other people’s audiences. It takes a lot of work and effort to build an audience from scratch on social media but when you get in front of existing audiences of your ideal clients, trust is automatically transferred to you from the person/ company whose audience it is and you suddenly get yourself in front of 10s- 1,000’s of people you wouldn’t have otherwise! I have found this to be the best way to grow my audience and client base. For me this looks like running guest expert classes in memberships, running a class for someone else’s audience and being a guest on podcasts. I highly recommend this as part of any business’ strategy!

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

There have actually been two times that I’ve either quit or let my business fall to the ground, only to build it back up again and keep going. The first was after my first year of coaching when I didn’t hit instant success (as I believed I should from all the programs I was taking) and I felt burnt out and defeated. At this point, I quit my business entirely and tried to work out what I wanted to do next with my life. I deleted my Facebook, my website – everything. But I couldn’t stay away, because coaching is what I LOVE and I knew in my bones I had to keep going. What I really needed (and got from the process) was an ego-death from making my business about me and success, instead of staying connected to what it was really about – helping people.

The second time was when the Covid pandemic started. At that time I was running most of my business in person and in a moment it all shut down and the 1:1 clients I did had cancelled because they had lost their income. I don’t function well in fear, so while everyone was pivoting I was feeling paralysed. I decided to just give myself a break and just let the business fall to the ground while I figured out what I was going to do next with my life. I took 6 months totally off social media too! Again, once I stopped for a few months I just KNEW that this (coaching) was what I was meant to be doing. I had yet again another ego death and decided to create the offerings I’d most deeply love to share from my heart, even if my brain told me they weren’t viable. My business came back from this break stronger than ever and just keeps growing exponentially! It’s never been so good in every single way and I thank my past self for never giving up and always following that voice that said ‘keep going’, no matter how bad it looked.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://go.alexisharvey.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alexh.co/
• Other: Podcast – https://go.alexisharvey.com/podcastlinks