I’m lucky to work with incredible organizations across the USA. As a Business Growth Specialist, it’s my job to dig into your business backend and ensure it’s capable of reaching your biggest business goals while offering support and guidance along the way. After connecting with Lisa Merritt virtually, she and her partners brought me on for business consulting to help them build a successful foundation to grow their business.
Recently, Lisa and I sat down to chat about her growing business and what it was like working with me. This business features a coaching partnership between three coaches all with a unique set of skills to help their clients. Though you might not be in a partnership, I’m sure you’ll find some similarities between Trilogy Coaching’s story and your own.
Read more about their story below. While some responses were edited for clarity, I kept most of her answers as she shared them.
Trilogy Coaching
Business Growth Consulting with Trilogy Coaching
1) Can you share about your business and who you serve?
I’m Lisa Merritt – I’m here representing one part of Trilogy Coaching which is 3 coaches. We work with clients in 1:1 sessions, group coaching communities, and live classes. We have different areas of individual coaching, but we all kind of overlap coaching the Gen X and Elder Millennial age groups. Between the three of us, we are Xennial to Elder Gen X and so that’s who we focus on.
Lisa Merritt, Change & Transition Coach
As I said, I’m a Change and Transition Coach. I specialize in working with adult children helping aging parents as they make decisions about the future. Whether they’re just beginning to discuss what that future might look like or navigating more immediate health or memory issues, my goal is that they find the right outcome for everyone involved without damaging their relationships in the process.
Sam Spears - Health and Wellness Coach
Sam is a certified health coach and personal trainer who specializes in working with people who have struggled with fitness in the past, people traditionally underserved in the fitness community. She specializes in working with women beginning to navigate the hormonal and physical changes that accompany perimenopause – how to make it through the process without losing your mind and be ready to embrace yourself on the other side. She’s amazing!
Chad McFadon, Transformational Coach
Chad is a Transformational Life Coach with 20 years of experience. He specializes in supporting gay men as they confront issues around aging, such as personal identity, community, and body acceptance. Through this process, he helps them create new possibilities, rewrite their personal stories, and face the future with confidence. He’s remarkable!
How They Support Clients
As individual coaches, we have different styles and clients. But what we found when we created Trilogy is that those different styles come together in a way that is really unique. Combining career, transitional, health and wellness, and transformational coaching allows us to create programming that is impactful in a way that an individual topic or approach simply can’t match.
Group coaching and classes, in particular, create a community where clients coach and support each other on common challenges.
2) What's the mission and vision of your business?
Our mission is to help people take intention and move forward into actual change. A lot of people have an idea they want to make changes but don’t know how to get started or want to get started but don’t know what that change is and you get stuck.
I’ve always described it as wearing a jacket that’s half a size small. You can put it on and get through your day, but you’re miserable every moment of every day because every move you make reminds you that you’re being restricted. You’re not in a place where you should be.
That moment in your life when you feel that way whether it’s a relationship or job or a place and something keeps poking at you, that something isn’t right for you and it’s time to move on. You may be afraid to start because you don’t know what the result is or you don't know how to figure out how to start. That’s what we do as a group and we want to bring that to as many people as possible.
3) How did working with Lighthouse Advisory impact your success this year?
As a group, we all agree that signing with Joanna was the best money we spent on anything. She was really amazing. We don't have a business or financial background. I think there’s a sense that you should know more, but you don’t. So for us we knew enough to recognize that we don’t know what we don't know. We don’t know the questions to ask and how to walk through those conversations. We needed someone to walk us through. I found Joanna in a Facebook group for female entrepreneurs. That’s how we connected and immediately from our first conversation I felt at ease. She created such a judgment-free space to have these conversations about money. It’s just so important that the person you are relying on to help make decisions about money doesn’t shame you about money.
4) What's a specific "win" you achieved after working with Lighthouse Advisory?
After starting with Joanna we developed a confidence about ourselves as business owners that we didn’t have before. It really enabled us to have really clear focused conversations about decisions we needed to make about money. The three of us are really close friends and have been for about a decade and when we went into business together we wanted to make sure that the business didn’t negatively impact our friendship. In order to do that, you have to have everything planned out really clearly in advance so when these emotional issues come up we’ve already walked through the problem before emotions were involved. So Joanna really helped us do that and having the structure already in place meant that we can go forward in conversations about the business without having someone getting upset because we’ve already worked out anything that could go wrong. For us that was our biggest win.
We went into our first big meeting with Joanna with our list of questions and the one question I wanted all of us to answer was, what is the thing that worries you most around money issues. It was things like what if one person was bringing in more business than others, how do we address that so other people don’t get resentful. Joanna really helped us have these conversations. She helped us set up our QuickBooks accounts and introduced us to Profit First and she walked me through it in a way that didn’t make me feel stupid for not knowing how to do it.
When I was growing up parents didn’t engage with kids around money like they do today. I grew up with no sense of dealing with money. I never developed a sense of dealing with money or engaging with money in a healthy way or knowing anything about how it worked other than I need money coming in to pay these obligations going out. So having her walk me through these things step-by-step without making me feel stupid for not knowing them is one of the best things about her. It’s a differentiator. There are people who deliberately use jargon to distance you and make themselves feel stronger and more important and there’s just none of that from her. She’s so welcoming and we love her.
5) What's your biggest business lesson learned?
Try to look for any way for things to go badly and have a plan for that in the beginning. Have that conversation when there aren’t emotions attached to it because later if that does come up you can’t have that conversation as easily because emotions have come up. People get irrational, people get upset and they just can’t have the same conversation because now you’re emotional. Now it means something. But having it as a hypothetical conversation about a possible problem you can have that conversation without anyone getting upset.
We had a coach who was working with us when we first started. She asked us why we were doing this? Coaching by its nature is not a group event. You can coach clients by yourself so why go to the trouble and expense of bringing yourselves together. It was a ground-shaking moment for us. The reason we said we wanted to do it originally was that it’s less scary doing it with a partner. But the conversation about why, why do this, allowed us to see what our strengths are, which allowed us to come together, which is the classes and programming we do that none of us can do by ourselves.
Talk to someone at the very beginning who is going to ask you the most challenging questions because they are going to challenge you to come up with answers that you don’t know that you know.
6) How can readers support you?
The best way to support us is by connecting with us. We’d love to invite you to follow us on social media and subscribe to our mailing list.
We have three different holiday group coaching programs to serve our To learn more about our group coaching programs, visit the website here.
