MassageFreek

Bizjam Principal Sponsorship

Wednesday, April 11th, 2007 | Business Insights, Featured, Massage, Seattle Events, stress

Since I made the choice and took the action to sponsor the Bizjam… my little world and mind has been a bit shaken up.
I’m not sure if it’s just timing of other things and the coincidence factor, but it would seem, like all things in my life, that this is part of my healing process.

And here I was just looking to have a big banner and be let off of doing “too much work” at the conference. It’s kind of funny because it seems to have created more work for me.

Regardless of weather or not it was intended, my sponsorship choice has pushed and expanded my imagination, goals and business into new realms to explore - which is great.
All this inner growth! I embrace it!

The flip side of this whole scenario is the same with any healing process; there are issues to face and smaller ideas of self/business that I have had to struggle with and allow to fall away.
In short - I’m going through growing pains.

A healer like me, a massage therapist, is not often too keen on the limelight. It is not common for healers, in general, to step up and deliver at this level. Which is funny because I know that “this level” is laughably small to other businesses and entrepreneurs.

Think about it though… Massage and most healing modalities (especially alternative modalities) are small cottage industry sized businesses. Most of my fellow LMPs may take years to get a website up and most of them build their business completely by word of mouth. Most of the marketing tools used by LMP’s are for informational purposes rather than promotion.

So why did I sponsor? Because I felt strongly pulled to do so. I saw it as a tithe.
Believe me, I have already heard my esteemed fellow entrepreneurs say “Why, Sierra? It’s a super-small convention and you’re advertising to people you already know and do you really think you are going to get a great return on your investment?”

I know. I talk to Dominic. He says ads are useless. The money spent on them is not nearly worth the return in clients/money/business.

So here’s what I have to say about all this: a little known fact about me is that I anchor EVRYTHING in my life by the means of spiritual practice.
To me, this world of business, society, social graces and diplomacy is all really very much transient; the unstable, the never constant.

At my core is a faith, not in humanity or anything as limited as a government or a planet, but a Grace. I have my faith in, and my dependence on an absolute and infinite intelligence that is the power of life and creation and the created itself. Call it God (I like to use that word but it’s really charged for most people) but that is just a word to describe… everything that is. The absolute, the all; the good we can all agree on; the life that lives us all.

I could go on about this but it can sound preachy.
So, in the attempt to make a long story short… I give back to the source of my good.

And Biznik has been a source of my good.
I am sure that Massage Freek would not be nearly as popular without Biznik. I have benefited so deeply and profoundly off Dan and Lara’s dream to create networking that doesn’t suck that I was just itching to give them lots of cash.
I could barely sleep the night after they presented the Bizjam at one of the members-only events at the spitfire a few weeks ago. I knew there’s was no getting out of it. I had to do it.

I figured Dominic - my marketing guru would chastise me and tell me it was too much for a business as small as mine. But he was cool with it and told me I needed to present at the jam… well, there goes my ideas of slacking at the conference. Ah well. I’m a little scared of speaking in front of groups.

And like I said before, this has totally been a healing process. I have hired Karrieand I’m cleaning up my act on the admin level. I’m strengthening my online presence just in time and feeling the “be small” issues come up and give me grief and a lot of reasons to cry and give up.

It’s all for the good, though. People have said all through my life that I am meant for great things. I figure this sponsorship is a bit of leap, for me, to go from cottage-sized, to something a bit bigger; something to grow into and eventually grow out of, only to take another step up and “play with the big boys” in the future.

I want to change the world, after all, so I might as well start somewhere. This way I show up to my community as a bit more and that’s pretty cool. I wonder what I will do next to up the ante, so to speak.

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