Creating the World's Best Client Experience

This is part 2 of a 3 part series and in this episode Alison discusses how to balance serving clients with building an audience through consistent content, engagement, and clear ways to work with you. She covers setting aside dedicated marketing time, planning content around monthly themes, and creating different entry points through activities, collaborations, referrals, and podcasts. She also to...

Alison begins a three-week series on building an audience and keeping connections active, especially for business owners filling retreats, programs, and other offers. She discusses why audiences can seem to dry up when business gets busy. When we focus on delivering services, it is easy to pause outreach, posting, and other marketing. Once an offer ends, we may have to restart those efforts and re...

Ral West describes her 45-year business career, beginning with a tourism marketing consultancy and later helping her husband run a scheduled charter airline between Alaska and Hawaii for 25 years. As the company grew, they carried most decisions themselves, worked long hours, and faced health and relationship strain, operational confusion, and customer complaints. Ral says that studying business s...

Alison discusses how to build a business ecosystem that supports retreat bookings and revenue beyond the event, from free content and low-commitment experiences to retreats and follow-up offers. She covers inviting people who already know our work, positioning a retreat around the transformation it offers, and planning the next step before registration opens. She also shares how retreats can lead...

Alison welcomes business consultant, Todd Krause, about the role of human conversation in business, even as technology and AI expand what companies can do. Todd says customers still want human contact, especially when they need help, and that businesses should focus on solving operational problems while improving customer experience. They discuss how leadership affects turnover, complaints, and mo...

Alison introduces the first part of a two-part mini series on how retreats fit into a business. She discusses why retreats are often hard to fill and explains that the issue is not always marketing, but whether the wider business ecosystem supports the retreat. She talks about common problems such as one-off retreats with no clear next step, offers focused on deliverables instead of outcomes, and...

Alison speaks with Dr. Laura Roy about the difficulty of sorting through the large amount of health and nutrition information available online. Laura discusses her background in biochemistry, teaching, functional medicine, and clinical nutrition, and says that this training has made her more critical of misinformation and oversimplified claims. They emphasize that nutrition and health are nuanced...

Back from her Sancerre retreat, Alison shares behind the scenes of the retreat and how she and her team prepared, ran it, and what she learned from the experience. She talks about the setting, the schedule, the welcome activities, and the mix of downtime, local experiences, and closing exercises she built into the week. She also discusses the business workshops, focusing on how retreats can genera...

Alison speaks with Leslie Martin about her work as a holistic psychotherapist and coach, and how she uses retreats as a setting for healing, reflection, and recovery from difficult life experiences. They discuss how retreats differ from vacations, including the role of structure, safety, travel, and group connection. They also focus on Lesley's Morocco retreat, looking at last year’s program on bu...

In this episode, Alison talks about how her and her team prepare for an upcoming retreat and why that process includes more than logistics. She covers the self-care she prioritizes, scheduling, and daily routines she uses in the weeks before the event so she can show up rested and focused. She also discusses the systems she uses to stay organized, including packing early, keeping running lists, ba...

The conversation focuses on Holly Porter’s background and the creation of the International Retreat Association. Porter then shares that COVID affected her severely and describes a near-death experience that led to a major shift in her life and to writing a book about surrender, hope, intuition, faith, and transformation. Before her illness she had been developing Retreat R&R, a software conce...

Alison continues her discussion on business promise, program promise, and audience building by focusing on how to describe the specific result you help people get. She explains that a strong promise should be clear and testable, using concrete before-and-after change rather than vague claims like “more confident” or “more aligned.” Alison also talks about how the most effective wording often comes...

Alison talks with gym owner, David Rafuse about how the fitness industry has changed since the pandemic and how those changes affected businesses in health, wellness, and service-based fields. We discuss how many people shifted toward working out at home, while others lost routine and community and had to rebuild their habits afterward. They also talk about the broader role of in-person connection...

Alison continues her discussion about messaging, client experience, and business growth, focusing on how you clarify a program promise and communicate the result you help create. She outlines three outreach buckets for building an audience: ideal clients, partners, and referral sources. She explains how to approach outreach by leading with the promise, showing proof through before-and-after storie...

Alison welcomes her retreat client, Marsha Kucera, family physician in Calgary who also serves as a board chair for a not-for-profit organization, a site medical lead at her clinic, and director of informatics and quality improvement. Marcia explains that she entered leadership without formal training and experienced periods of burnout. She tried therapy, coaching, exercise, yoga, mindfulness, nut...

Alison continues her mini-series with part 3 on how to market retreats by focusing on selling the transformation, not the logistics. She explains that people need to feel safe before they commit, and that the real promise is what they will carry into everyday life after the retreat. She shares the self-selection effect and how a clear, specific message helps the right people recognize that the ret...

Alison speaks with business coach Cailen Ascher about building a soul-centered business and how that differs from hustle-driven business culture. Their conversation centers on creating a business from alignment rather than from constant pressure to be everywhere or offer everything. A major theme is the problem of hustle culture and the number of people calling themselves experts or coaches. Caile...

Alison continues her mini-series on 'Stop Selling the Engine' with part 2 and focuses on how to apply a clear promise and a through line across a business. She explains how the promise should be simple and specific, while the through line describes the larger transformation clients want. She explains how different offers, including coaching, memberships, digital products, group programs, and hybri...

Alison talks with Desiree Martinez, who owns the Cast Agency, about marketing in a time when AI is a major part of the field but human connection still matters. They focus on how businesses can use both digital tools and personal relationships without losing their human edge. Desiree shares her background in marketing and explains how she has seen platforms and trends change over time. They discus...

This month Alison begins a three-part mini-series focused on offer design and the importance of selling the result rather than the features. She frames the discussion around the idea of “stop selling the engine” and uses the car analogy to explain that people are really buying the experience, not the mechanics. She shares the main problem seen in business: many people describe what they do, but no...

It's mid-year check-in time and in this episode Alison goes through a mid-year business review process that can work for anyone and shares the questions she uses to assess progress beyond short-term metrics. She focuses on her long-term goals, the “through line” in her work, and how business growth connects with personal growth, identity shifts, and the opportunities that she chooses. She also loo...

This week's guest, Jenn T. Grace, discusses how books should be used strategically within a business, not treated as a shortcut to visibility, speaking opportunities, or clients. She explains that the publishing landscape is more crowded, so authors need clear positioning, original language, and messaging tied to a specific audience and problem. She describes hybrid publishing as a middle ground b...

This interview focuses on Edna White’s work as a media host, life strategist, author, and podcast host. She explains that she mainly works with women who feel stuck, often because of experiences they have carried from the past. Her goal is to help them move forward by using journaling, storytelling, and conversation as tools for clarity and change. Edna describes writing as both a personal and pro...

This interview focuses on Jamie Dykstra’s work as a ghostwriter and book coach for business owners. The conversation opens with why books can be useful in business, especially for positioning, authority, strengthening visibility online and explaining a client’s transformation or expertise. The discussion starts by explaining what ghostwriting actually involves and Jamie explains that the client’s...

In this episode Alison speaks with Gwen Bortner, founder of Everyday Effectiveness, about accountability and how it supports business results. They discuss her background in consulting across different industries and how that experience shaped her approach to helping entrepreneurs and organizations improve effectiveness. More importantly, they explore how accountability differs from simple task ch...