Henriette Danel is a Multi-Award Winning Strategic Business Coach working with Female Business Owners in the service-based industry to help them Attract More High-Paying Clients Continuously. She's also the host of The Entrepreneurial Success Podcast and a Public Speaker.
Henriette Danel, Business Coach
Introduce yourself. Please tell us a bit about yourself and your business.
I always joke and say I was ‘plucked from the bush.’ Coming from the Bushveld in South Africa, I’ve always known I’d start my own business one day. After working for 15 years in the Interior Design Industry in the UK, I realised that it was a sign for me to start my own business. I naturally leaned toward Business Coaching, and while still fully employed, I started my online Coaching Business and ran this for two years. One December, I decided to go into my business full-time, and that first week back in the office, I handed over my notice to my employer. Five years later, I couldn’t be happier with my decision and feel so fortunate to be on this fantastic journey. I'm also the host of The Entrepreneurial Success Podcast, which has now been running for four years, and I’m a Public Speaker. My speciality lies in my unique ability to take anything complicated, dissect it, and put it back together in an easy-to-understand and implementable way. And because of this, my clients gain clarity and receive outstanding results in the shortest amount of time. On my journey to create and grow HenrietteDanel Coaching, my biggest frustration was signing up clients. I saw other coaches sign up clients like it was the easiest thing in the world. I was determined to figure it out. One Friday afternoon, I poured myself a glass of wine, and with my notebook in hand, I sat on my sofa. On a blank page, I wrote down all the things I have possibly done and still could do to attract clients. It was only when I saw the list, about three pages long in the end, that I realised the overwhelm I was creating for myself. I needed order, and I needed a strategy. To my surprise, I found out that I wasn’t alone. I quickly discovered that many business owners also need to do everything to attract more clients. This seemed a significant struggle for female entrepreneurs, setting them on a desperate mission to get clients. Let me explain it this way:
Have you ever walked into your kitchen and decided: “Today I'm going to bake a cake, put a chicken in the oven, make some pancakes, oh and a big pot of curry. You know what? I’ll also make an apple pie while I'm at it...” Now, my guess is that you wouldn't do this in your kitchen, right? Just think of all the ingredients you'll need and the mess it creates. Not to mention the overwhelm and the fact that everything would need to turn out edible simultaneously. So no, you wouldn't do this in your kitchen, but why do you do this in your business? We feel that we need to do everything to become more visible and attract more clients. If you want to be successful, it's about finding out what's aligned with you that’ll give you results. Once you know what this recipe is, you can focus on it and use it repeatedly. This is exactly what helped me create success in my own business. It's about finding what is right for you and only focusing on what brings you results, and it won't be everything, that I promise. My clients are located nationally and internationally. I've worked with incredible entrepreneurs from the USA, Canada, the UK, Europe, South Africa and Dubai.
What is it that you’re doing to help your clients?
Considering my success in continuously attracting more clients, I put everything together and formulated Your Client Attraction Program. Your Client Attraction Program is for those who are high-achieving & committed women who want to move fast now and get immediate clients. This program is for six months, where we'll have personal sessions every two weeks to move through everything to provide you with the clarity and strategy that's aligned with you. Your Client Attraction Program is based on my 4 Business Strategies:
Your Visibility Strategy
Your Attraction Strategy
Your Relationship Strategy
Your Transformation Strategy
My clients love this program, and as a recurring client strategy, I invite them for follow-ups after the program to determine what individual help is required to accomplish their additional goals, providing additional support and coaching.
Tell us about your most significant achievements so far.
I woke up one morning in April 2021 with fantastic news I never expected. I opened my email and saw that I got featured in Yahoo Finance alongside Marie Forleo as one of the Top 10 Business Coaches That Inspire. I was utterly gobsmacked and numb as I was reading the email. This feature meant so much to me and has increased my visibility, which is why I’m a great advocate for being featured and using PR opportunities aligned with you. In addition, I was chosen as one of 100 female entrepreneurs in the UK for the F: Entrepreneur campaign and received a special invitation for an afternoon tea at the House of Lords in Westminster, London. It was a special occasion to meet the other incredible women in business who got selected alongside me. This was a moment I will never forget. In 2022 I also received my first award from Prestige Awards for Business Coach of the Year ‒ London & The South East. A few months later, I won a silver award for Best Coach at the Best Business Women Awards. It was indeed a spectacular year.
What would you like to achieve for yourself and your business in the future? I've just launched my Coaching App to ensure this is something that my current clients can use, and new leads are being brought directly to me from the App.
The idea with the Coaching App is to form the first part of my funnel. This will guide the audience to free workshops and content on the App and the option to take the next step.
My current clients can access Your Client Attraction Program via the App, outside our coaching sessions, which makes access more convenient for them.
Instead of using a platform such as Facebook Groups (which my clients don't like anymore), the App allows me to create and build my community right there in their hands.
I have yet to come across any other business coaches in the UK using Apps. And this trend is about to take off. Using technology to your advantage and having it fit with your strategy will put you at the forefront and make you stand out from your competitors.
The future plan is to licence Your Client Attraction Program and have other coaches worldwide trained, giving them the option to sell and coach accordingly. By licensing the program to other coaches, they have no restriction on regions and can market to any client that's aligned with them. The plan is to roll out the Licensing in 2024.
If you could change one thing about your industry, what would it be and why? I’m a huge fan of collaborating with other entrepreneurs. I feel that many business owners are still stuck with the principle of competition.
Collaborations between independent entrepreneurs are increasingly popular across every area of business. Naturally, people who work together and share expertise with others in their field benefit from these relationships. In the past, a sense of competition between business owners has stymied collaboration: the fear was that working with ‘the competition’ meant risking your best-kept business secrets being revealed to your competitors. That fear is giving way to the increasingly popular idea that every business has its unique value and that collaborating allows us to learn from each other rather than just compete.
If we spend too much time comparing our business to others – which social media certainly encourages – it’s difficult not to feel awed by others’ achievements but all too easy to take an overly critical view of our own, even if we are just launching and those around us are well established. These thoughts and feelings can be so insidious that we barely notice our own negative self-talk. At these times, fear of competition is high, and collaboration feels like a fantasy.
So I want to encourage business owners to think more about collaborations and how they can use them for growth, support and building communities together.
Conclusion
Attracting more clients doesn’t have to be difficult. Just find out what’s aligned with you and stick to it. If you want more ideas to see what could work for you, then download my 30 Free Resources on How To Attract More Clients here.
