5 ways Volunteering can Help you Grow your Business
This week is National Volunteering Week, so I thought it was a great time to talk about how volunteering can help you grow your business.
You’ve probably heard before that volunteering can help you in a traditional career. But can it really help you if you’re self-employed? You betcha.
Here are 5 ways that volunteering can give your business a boost.
Learn new skills
If you volunteer in an area related to the work you do, you might be able to learn valuable new skills that you can then turn around and use in your own business. It can be a way to get free training.
For example: a guitar teacher volunteers at a sound recording studio where he learns how to mix and record music. After a year, he has learned enough to add sound recording as one of the services that he offers.
So, you may be investing your time for free, but if you choose what you volunteer for carefully, you can get valuable free training in return, training that can help you in your business.
Maintain Life Balance
For those who work from home, it can be too easy to keep working after 5:00 just to get that little bit of extra work done, or to spend Saturday working so you can get your business moving a little bit faster.
Volunteering is a great way to help with life balance because it forces you to get out of the house (or at least to interact with a different group of people, if you are working virtually). It usually also comes with a schedule, which means you can’t put it off—and that means a break from work is built into your work week.
Make new Connections
If the work you volunteer to do is related to your own business, it can be a great way to network and meet new people in your field. There is another benefit: the organization you are volunteering for gets to know you (and how great you are at what you do!) That means a few things:
If they come across someone who needs the services you offer, they might refer you
If they have paid work in the future, they might consider you
You will be able to get people in that organization to provide a testimonial for you.
Combat loneliness
It’s a common thread I hear from my clients: working by themselves at home all day can be isolating.
You don’t have the daily chance to interact with people the way you would if you held a traditional job. And that lack of daily socializing can lead to feelings of loneliness.
Volunteering is a great way to help combat this. It gives you the regular interaction that you may be missing by being self-employed.
Free advertising
Rather than volunteering as in individual, you could have your business host a volunteering event. You can do this even if you are a business of one. Get some friends and relatives to help you out and do something for a worthy cause.
For example, if you run a bicycle shop, you could hold a bike marathon, with each participant getting sponsored per kilometer. And you might give all funds raised to a cycling-related cause such as an organization that provides bicycles to disadvantaged children. At the same time, you are making more people aware of your business, all that is free advertising.
How volunteering helped one of my clients get hundreds of leads
Here’s how volunteering helped one of the members in my Free Agent Collective find new clients.
David is a research and development consultant who helps engineering firms get their products onto the market.
He usually attends a large conference every year at which he makes new contacts. Last year, however, due to covid, the conference was held virtually. That meant he had no access to the networking opportunities that normally occur at the in-person version: no lunches, no meet-and-greets, no mingling after a talk.
So how was David going to make new connections?
He decided to bring the issue to the Free Agent Collective, where we advised and supported him over several months as he developed and implemented a strategy to network virtually. Here’s what he did.
He contacted the conference organizers to see if there were any volunteer opportunities. As he talked to them, he learned that ticket sales were way down, and the organizers were trying to come up with ways to boost sales.
So David volunteered to help reach out to people and try to get them to sign up for the virtual conference. He went to work researching engineering companies and spent a few hours every week over several months contacting them, letting them know about the conference.
In the end, he was successfully able to get many more people to attend the conference. More importantly for David, each of those people was a new contact. In fact, he was able to make over 500 new, high quality relevant contacts. Wow! Now that’s leveraging volunteering to grow your business!
Your volunteering strategy
I do want to caution you: Don’t give away your skills for free.
What I mean by that is, make sure you have a clear business rationale. Choose something to volunteer for that will pay off in one of the ways listed above. You don’t get paid in money when you volunteer, but you can still get benefits in the form of new skills, social interaction, or free advertising.
Regards,
Tim
Helping you engineer the business of you