160 - How to Build a Facilitation Business with Mireille Beumer

Facilitation is a lot of things: we’d all agree on and understand it as a verb. Many of us would identify it as a profession. But how many of us understand it as a business?

Mireille Beumer wasn’t always in the business of facilitation. Yes, she was a freelancer offering facilitation services, but it took a little while longer for her to step into entrepreneurship and create her facilitation business.

It might seem like pedantic semantics, but it’s a crucial difference.

Learn what it means to create a facilitation business, rather than being a solo facilitator in this episode... and learn how Mireille did it herself!

Find out about:

• Mireille's journey of turning facilitation from a verb to a profession to a business
• The building blocks for creating a facilitation business
• Why asking for help brings success, but uncritically accepting advice doesn’t
• How a freelance facilitator operates differently to a facilitation business
• Why it is a folly to try and sell your 'human' services to businesses
• What Mireille recommends if you aren’t sure where to start with entrepreneurship

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Questions and Answers

Part one

[01:46] What has happened since you were last on the show, late in 2019, and how have you navigated the pandemic?

[05:05] How did you come to build your facilitation business? What comes next?

[06:56] Would you consider LinkedIn as the main source of your work?

[11:36] Who are the clients you attract? And how did this shift in the pandemic?

[17:05] How did you first get started as a facilitation business owner? It can seem so huge and impossible to begin, from the outside.

[21:44] Did you purposefully create your personal brand and niche, or did it emerge naturally over time?

[26:41] Staying consistent and coherent with your branding.

[28:20] The need for education, innovation, and evolution rather than revolution.

Links

Episode 30 - featuring Mireille!

Mireille’s website

Connect to Mireille:

On LinkedIn

On Instagram
 

Any thoughts? Share them with us!

Support the show

👉 What happens when being “professional” gets in the way of being human? My new podcast Unprofessionalism explores the rules we’re taught to follow at work, and what happens when we break them. Listen here: https://unprofessionalism.buzzsprout.com/  👈