I am honored to share with my readers an article from our local newspaper highlighting successful entrepreneurs living in our remote valley while making a living in the global economy. It is a blessing indeed to have created a niche for my expertise and passion that I can implement from virtually any geographic location. Living the Crested Butte lifestyle while helping small businesses in Colorado and throughout the World is my Joy! Local entrepreneurs like me contribute to the local Crested Butte economy by bringing money into the valley generated throughout the world.
I hope you enjoy the article excerpt as much as I enjoyed the interview process and reading the final version. You can access the original article in it’s entirety at http://crestedbuttenews.com/2015/12/locals-making-waves-in-an-entrepreneurial-age-part-one-content-marketing-and-consulting/
From the Crested Butte News – written by Adam Broderick
“Editor’s Note: It’s not easy making ends meet in mountain communities that rely heavily on cooperative weather and seasonal tourism. In this winter series, reporter Adam Broderick will explore different experiences of business owners who live and work in the Gunnison Valley, yet whose work is mostly seen and sold elsewhere.
Some obstacles seem consistent for business professionals who choose to live in such a remote location, like inconvenient transportation options in and out of the area or unreliable Internet speeds. But the benefits tend to far outweigh the compromises and make it worth the extra effort in the long run. Say, when a midweek powder day hits unexpectedly or when quality time with loved ones takes priority over work.
In discussing outbound business with local professionals, some ups and downs of operating a company locally have been revealed. This week we speak with two professionals who market web content and consult others in promoting business, especially online. As with anyone featured in this series, they live here because this is where their hearts are and they’ve chosen to deal with any issues that come as part of that package deal.
Deborah Tutnauer, LLC
Deborah Tutnauer Speaking at Entrepreneur Conference
Deborah Tutnauer has been a self-employed coach and consultant for over 25 years. She began as a clinical social worker and psychotherapist but has spent the past seven years as a business coach. You may recognize her from the Social Media for Business events at Old Rock Library, but social media and online promotions only scrape the surface of Tutnauer’s work. She helps businesses in and out of the Gunnison Valley transform from the ground up, from determining core values to aligning business goals and strategies with those values and eventually creating (or recreating) products and promoting them to best represent the businesses’ overarching objectives.
Tutnauer transitioned from the mental health field to the business field after a stint of Internet marketing and online sales. She learned to be an Internet marketer and a direct response marketer (generating immediate responses from consumers) in addition to teaching herself how to build businesses.
“The learning curve was so steep, way harder than my two master’s degrees,” Tutnauer says. “After my daughter was born, I just couldn’t be a good mom and a good therapist, so the computer screen became super appealing. That was the forefront of Twitter days. I learned to write some html code, got involved with network marketing, made and lost a bunch of money, then made a lot—and I did it all through the Internet.”
Although she did well in that field, she wanted to get back into coaching people to be their best selves, as she did as a therapist. For 20 years she helped people and found that was what she liked best. She reflects on her career transition: “I made the decision to ramp back up into this helping profession, as I call it. I created a coaching business, and now here we are. I still collect income from the network marketing, just because the funnels are set up, but I don’t deal with it anymore.”
She lives in Crested Butte South when she’s not traveling for her consulting business or commercial events, as her career choice does not tie her down to a location or a time schedule. Before moving here in 1995 from Maine, every winter weekend she drove four hours each direction to ski at Sugarloaf Mountain. So she made a list of 10 things she wanted to find in a town and hit the road to explore ski towns across the West. Three requirements from her list included not having to drive to ski, a small town with a great sense of community, and a highly educated liberal population.
“Crested Butte was the first place I went and I knew I was coming back but I continued on my trip because I felt like I needed to finish what I had started. I’ve literally lived all over the world and since I got here it’s never crossed my mind to live anywhere else,” she said with a smile.
In addition to coaching people to think bigger and step outside their boxes, in 2014 Tutnauer began expanding into more public speaking roles where she trains and motivates large groups of people. One example: last spring she was the keynote speaker for a semester course called Lectures in Entrepreneurship at Westminster College in Salt Lake City. In her words, she helps frustrated entrepreneurs get real about money, marketing, and meaning. She’s also been consulting with corporations and larger businesses, helping them improve company performance and boost employee motivation and morale by bringing new ideas and even games into the workplace.
“Many who benefit from my services feel as if they are bumping up against an invisible bubble. They know that something is in their way but they are challenged to discern what it is or how to shift,” Tutnauer says. “Together we create their business foundation and framework with clarity and authenticity. Until you are clear about who you are, you will continue to operate a business that is financially unsustainable.”
Tutnauer says her diverse methods are based on a vast cornucopia of knowledge, both empirical and spiritual. She’s been called an “Architect of Magical Structure,” she says, “for indeed what I show you how to do is to take the essence of your deepest truth and align it with an organized structure for your business success.”
Her 12-session Foundation and Framework Intensive program helps determine clients’ passions, values, and areas of expertise in order to help reassess why they’re in the business and what their business does for the end user. Then she helps them determine how to better attract customers by improving marketing techniques and web presence. She also offers a three-session Micro-Coaching program in which she provides the same directional recommendations she would for the 12-session program, but instead she and the client focus on one goal from beginning to end over the course of three sessions.
In direct correlation with running a business that aligns with what one believes in, Tutnauer emphasizes that people should live a life that’s in alignment with who they are. She says a lot of people don’t do that because they’ve never really taken the time to say, “Who am I really?”
“If you take the time to do the work to understand yourself and what gifts you really bring to the world, there could be a lot of options. A lot of people won’t even step to the edge of the cliff and look down. It’s not a judgment, I just hear so many people complaining. One of my core values is freedom and independence. I worked a job for one year in 1982 that I didn’t like after the first nine months, and I quit. When I coach people, I coach them to live a life and develop a business based on their interests, values and expertise.” “
Coaching both privately and in groups, Deborah is also a speaker, author, event leader and consultant. Creator of the Foundation and Framework Intensive, Question Master and Leader of the Entrepreneur Business Success Club, Deborah has been called an “Architect of Magical Business and Soul Structure”by her clients because she has a powerful ability to perform alchemy, changing passions and dreams into money and time by design.
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First, Happy New Year, Deborah! Second, big congrats on being featured! There are so many great takeaways in that article. For example, I couldn’t agree more that the learning curve when building a business is so steep – and I have 3 law degrees from before, so I’m not new to learning.
Welcome to my blog Camilla! I appreciate your comment. It is amazing isn’t it, how the ins and out of authentic business creation takes every aspect of your smarts, creativity, fortitude and more…. Please to meet you!
Deborah Tutnauer recently posted…Men vs. Women and the Great Money Value Debate