Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Starting a Business, Building Relationships and Finding Best Fit Clients
Updated: Apr 29, 2022
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Elaine Taylor-Klaus is the co-founder and CEO of ImpactParents.com, an online resource with coaching and training for parents with complex kids, serving parents in six continents and more than one hundred countries.
Impact Parents offers great resources for those interested in parent coaching. Some of which include a parent training video with key parent coaching methods and strategies.
Elaine is also the author of two books (including the recent #1 New Release, The Essential Guide to Raising Complex Kids with ADHD, Anxiety, and More) -- a typical parenting book for kids who are not so typical.
How did Elaine find her niche?
Sometimes, finding the career path that you are confident in pursuing comes from personal experiences.
Two decades ago, Elaine described herself as an overwhelmed, anxious stay-at-home mom with three complex kids. A fierce
advocate, she discovered there was plenty of support "out there" for her kids, but virtually nothing in the way of support for her.
As her own learning and attention challenges were diagnosed after age 40, she realized that helping her family needed to start with her. She trained as a coach to provide support for parents like her. Now, ten years later, Elaine is the co-founder and CEO of ImpactParents.com, the largest and most innovative online support resource for parents of complex kids in the world!
"You're never going to look back and say I wish I spent more time in the office, but you are going to look back and assess how did my kids do and how did I do in relation to them"
We can sometimes get caught up in the world of business or our day-to-day tasks and not put enough effort into the relationships around us. Elaine focuses on and encourages others to build lifelong relationships with their kids.
Where did Elaine find clients?
"If its not the right fit, you are not being the best service to your client. It was as important for me to say no, as it was to say yes to a client"
Figuring out how to get clients can be a tough part of growing your business. Knowing who you want to serve and who you don't want to serve is the first step.
Elaine knew exactly who she wanted to serve and, in addition to word of mouth, emailed everyone she knew, explaining what she had to offer and how she could help. Elaine likes to keep her resources simple. She uses online resources to build her business such as Ontraport which makes editing emails, newsletters, and sales pages so much easier.
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Sean McCormick 0:00 This week on Earn More Tutoring, Elaine Taylor-Klaus and I talked about the challenges of parenting kids with complex needs the crazy triple win win win of group coaching, and how she built her successful worldwide business. Elaine Taylor-Klaus 0:14 I called and I said, Well, does it have to be confer a couple hours? Could we set up the table for the whole weekend? And they said, Yes. So we did. And we got like, you know, we got a backdrop data we had T shirts made. And we kind of launched impact ADHD at the time. And so we had a couple of 100 people to start the conversation where, and between that and the guest experts, because when you invite someone else to be an expert, you then have access to them sharing your information with their community. And that's everything we do, has been built on a platform of collaboration. Sean McCormick 0:54 This is Earn More Tutoring, the ultimate crowd sourced education entrepreneurship show. This week, I speak with Elaine Taylor-Klaus, co founder of impactparents.com, which helps families around the globe support their children with complex needs. Welcome, Elaine. Elaine Taylor-Klaus 1:10 Thank you. It's great to be here. Sean McCormick 1:12 Yeah. So to start, I'd love for you to share about your different offerings and the different parts of your practice, just to acquaint the audience with what you do. Elaine Taylor-Klaus 1:19 Wow, what a cool place to start. You know, I love that. So I ran a enterprise a company, social partnership, I don't know what you call it called Impact parents.com. We are an online resource for parents of complex kids. And we provide a lot of information. And then really, it's what you do with the information that matters most. We provide coaching, training and support for parents of complex kids. All over the world. It's it's pretty cool. And so we do basic training programs or like Saturday school for parents, and we do group coaching and private coaching as well, Sean McCormick 1:56 Such an important field. And I was recently chatting with Cindy Goldrich. And we were just talking about how it's, it's such a huge need. But it's it's not such a huge industry, like there's a lot of room for growth, and people need it. And they don't always know where to look. Elaine Taylor-Klaus 2:12 And what I would say is that they may not they don't even know they need it is part of the problem. And part of you know, Cindy, and I've been we trained together long time ago. So we've known each other a long time. And part of the problem is that the general medical community often doesn't understand what is recommended as treatment for kids with these complex issues. And so they they're not necessarily guiding parents to get the support they really need. They're sending them to information. But it's again, it's sort of using the information that that's the goal. And that's that's a harder one for a lot of people to understand. Sean McCormick 2:45 Why did you choose this field or created I guess, to a certain degree. Elaine Taylor-Klaus 2:49 So for me, I'm a mom in what I call an ADHD plus plus family of five, now six, because my eldest is married. And I had a bunch of complex kids and and I was lost and overwhelmed and couldn't figure out how to support them effectively. And I was, I was doing everything the experts were telling me to do and it wasn't working. And so then I was feeling more and more like a failure because my kids weren't, were failing to thrive. And I was like reading the parenting books and do what they told me. And so then I was sure I was the worst parent in the world. And as I finally began to understand what was really going on with my kids, they had ADHD and anxiety and dyslexia and learning all kinds of learning disabilities depression, and began to understand that what really needed to happen to effectively support them was for me to change my approach. That's when everything shifted. And truth is, I was actually planning to go back to graduate school to get to become a therapist, and to support other parents because I had been so lost myself. And I actually ended up doing coaching, excuse me, kind of as a short gap measure, I thought I was gonna do it temporarily until I could find a degree that met my needs as a mom with three small kids because I needed part time on the weekends. And what ended up happening was I went to one coaching training and I called my husband in tears that afternoon and I said, I found it, this is it. And I dove in and became a certified as a coach. Within a year my husband was also certified as a coach. And I found I felt like I found a modality that was empowering and uplifting and forward looking. And it was about as I began to learn coaching, I began to shift the way I was communicating with my kids. And I began empowering them to see their own possibilities and their capabilities and to see themselves as whole instead of broken and that shifted everything...
Check out the full interview below!
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